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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 720 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you sell and produce an original series in this age of streamers and IP? To help us answer that question, we welcome back the co-creators of the new spy series Ponies, Persons of No Interest, Susanna Fogel and David Iserson. Great to have you back on Scriptnotes.

David Iserson: Great to be back. I listened to this show enough that it is still freaky to see you do the thing that I hear you do.

[laughter]

John: Last time you were here, it was Episode 361. This is Episode 720. It was halfway through. Every 360 episodes, it’s like a year cycle. You come back on the show.

David: This is how hard it is to get a thing made. It goes from script to production over the half-life of Scriptnotes’ journey as a podcast.

John: That was for The Spy Who Dumped Me. Now you’re back with another spy show, so spies are in your pocket.

David: We’re back with something that has some shared DNA in that we wrote it, and that it is about spies, but it’s a very different tone, very different feel. I think we learned a lot of things for making that movie that we didn’t bring into this show. It’s a different beast, but it is still things that we gravitate to. We shot them both in Budapest.

Susanna Fogel: Budapest. French stories–

David: About two women.

John: That’s true. It’s hilarious, but the tone is specific and strange. I really want to get into it because I was struck by sort of Ponies is a tone I’ve not seen on a show in a while, which is fun to say. I want to talk about that.

Susanna: Aw, thanks.

John: I want to talk about the series, but I also want to answer listener questions on trusting your judgment, how to tell if you’re talented, and differentiating character voices. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about taste. We did a little bit of this before we got on mic, but what is taste? How do you cultivate it, and should you even worry about taste? We’ll get into taste. Let’s remind listeners who weren’t here for episode 361–

David: What were you guys doing?

[laughter]

John: What were you doing? It’s okay. Answer and remind us who you are because Susanna Fogel, and the time since we saw you last, you went off and directed a whole bunch of things. Pilots for the Flight Attendant, The Wild, A Small Light. You directed the features Winter and Cat Person all in the time since we’ve seen you. You’re so busy and prolific. Congrats.

Susanna: Thank you. I go for long stretches of time where I’m not working, and I’m in my pajamas, so when things come out all at once, and it looks like that’s my regular density of work, I feel excited that that’s how it looks.

John: David, when we talked before, we talked about you working on SNL way back in the day.

David: Yes, that was my very first writing job.

John: Yes. Since then, United States of Terror, Up All Night, New Girl, Mad Men, Mr. Robot, Mozart in the Jungle, Run. Since the last time you were here, you also had young kids.

David: Yes, I had identical twin girls who, by the time this episode airs, will be two years old.

John: That’s incredible. As Craig and I often describe on the podcast, kids are the death of a career.

David: Sure, yes.

Susanna: When we started working on the show, they were negative six years old. This is how long we’ve been working on the show.

David: Working on this, I wasn’t married, I didn’t have kids, and I’m married with two kids. I brought my kids and my wife overseas to make this show. I couldn’t get them on camera, but they are a part of the show in that they were there.

John: They grew up in it. My daughter grew up in and around the Big Fish musical, the long journey of that.

David: Sure.

John: Every incarnation she was a part of and saw, so her DNA is somehow in that show as well.

David: Did she run screaming from this industry as a result of seeing us?

John: No, she loves it. She loves tech rehearsal, which is where they’re painstakingly rearranging lights, and actors will move two feet, and they’ll reset the lights. It’s the most tedious process. She was maybe six, eight years old during it. She would sit there at the table for hours watching it. I couldn’t believe it. Now she loves all production stuff.

David: That’s amazing.

Susanna: That’s so cool.

David: I remember when I started off in this industry, and you’d hear people being like, “The last thing I would ever want is for my kid to be in this industry.” I was talking to Vic Michaelis, who’s an actor on our show yesterday, about how all of our toddlers love musicals and how we would be just distraught if they just wanted to be in tech or accountants or just something. We just essentially just need them to be in showbiz because it’s the only thing we understand.

John: At Sundance Labs, I was there with this married couple. She was a writer, and he was a writer-director. For years, we’d see them up there, and they had young kids and like, “Oh, we want our kids to do other things.” Other kids are Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jake Gyllenhaal. Somehow, it does just rub off. Let’s talk about the genesis of this series. Where did this come from? It feels like it should be based on a book or something else, but it’s not. It’s just a thing.

David: It’s not based on a book. You can, as I did, take a deep dive into many, many books about spies in the ’70s, abouty the American Embassy and the British Embassy during the Cold War. There’s a lot of sources that give a window into what this world is. There was an idea that kept coming up when I became interested in, and just to predate even that, my interest in just the aesthetics of the ’70s and the Cold War. It came out of a trip I took in my 20s to Prague and Budapest and Berlin.

You just can see there’s a communism museum in Prague and the DDR museum in Berlin. The aesthetic of this time is such a weird version of what American pop culture looked like through this weird prism. I just was really captivated. If you come to my house, you will see I have a large mural on my wall about the second and third dogs in space from the USSR. I have weird old watches. I love this look and this feel. For me, I would read these books.

The idea that kept coming up again and again is that although maybe film and television, Cold War-era film and television made it seem like spy operations were happening with some success, the Americans and the British really couldn’t run a spy operation in Moscow. They just couldn’t. They tried to. They would be followed everywhere. I think that idea of it was a desperate time where they’d be willing to try anything was something that Susanna and I started talking about.

From there, the most ethereal way I sometimes think of writing is that sometimes it is just there. It is almost behind a wall. As you start naming a character and just finding details of it, it really took form. For us, we just started talking through these characters, and then everything became very clear very fast.

John: The logline of the show is set in 1977. It’s following two secretaries who are working at the American embassy in Moscow. They become spies after their husbands die in mysterious circumstances. The engine of the show, at least at the start, is them trying to figure out what actually happened to their husbands. That’s the logline. What was the actual pitch? What did you actually pitch to people? Did you write this first? Did you go in and pitch to Universal? How did this all come together?

Susanna: This was a really interesting and very singular experience of having a bunch of general meetings after Spy Who Dumped Me, where people were looking for us to do the TV version of Spy Who Dumped Me. We didn’t want to do exactly that. We didn’t want to do something quite as comedic. We didn’t want to do something broad. I had a general meeting at a network that is not Peacock.

David: That doesn’t exist anymore.

Susanna: No longer exists. That shall not be named.

David: It was Quibi.

Susanna: Exactly. The executive said, “Do you have anything that’s similar to Spy Who Dumped Me?” I said, “Not exactly, but David and I had been just batting around the idea of what if there were these two women in this era and they became spies, but it’s a friendship story, but it’s a little bit more grounded in terms of the tone, but also more action.” She said, “We’ll buy that.” She said, “We know we’re not the coolest place to sell a show.”

David: We know Quibi is not the coolest.
[laughter]

Susanna: She said, “I know on the downside, we’re not the coolest place to sell a show. On the upside, you don’t have to pitch it to anyone else. If we don’t do it, we’ll give it back to you, and we won’t be assholes about it.” After having pitch fatigue about trying to sell everything else and just the amount of time you waste or spend with maybe limited rewards, the idea of just getting a yes and being able to actually just go write the thing and not have to spend six months, it was such an appealing thing that we just said yes.

David: Absolutely.

John: Why is that such an exception? Because I never hear that story. It makes so much sense from both sides. From your side, you don’t want to pitch to every place. You just want to go to the one place that will actually maybe do it that feels right. From their side, they don’t want a bidding war. It’s the right idea. If it did go out further, they might lose it.

Susanna: I know. I really admired just her autonomy in saying that. She wasn’t the head of the network or anything. She just said, yes, we’ll buy that as opposed to needing a bidding war to tell her that it’s worth buying.

John: Exactly.

Susanna: We just took the yes, and we wrote it. We had a great experience developing. Then that network folded into a different network. We wrote backup scripts. We were many years spending waiting to see if this would go at that network. Ultimately, it didn’t. We reshopped it with multiple scripts and a Bible and a chap.

John: Multiple scripts that you’d written because you never had rooms together?

David: We just had one script. We had one script. Then we had figured out what the rest of the show would be. This was deep pandemic because I remember I was house sitting for my in-laws when we pitched this to Peacock. I think we only pitched around three places. Other people had heard the premise, and it wasn’t for them. We couldn’t–

Susanna: Mostly because it was an original period piece, and everyone says, “Don’t try to sell that.”

David: It was very scary because this is, again, what people tell you never to do right now. Period. End. Original ideas are both not things that people tell you to try to sell, and we pitched to peacock.

Susanna: Let’s dig into that a little bit more. You’re pitching the show, but the script is already written. At what point are they reading the script versus you pitching first and they’re reading afterward? Because I’m going through this with a project that’s already written as well. Were they reading the script first, and then you could answer specific questions about the show, or are you pitching broad strokes? Did you have–

Susanna: These details are so fuzzy for me because it’s been so long.

David: I’ve done both versions of this. I’ve pitched shows in the past and then handed them the script at the end of it. I’m almost positive they’ve read the script before, and then we pitched.

Susanna: I think because they were inheriting a bunch of ideas already, we shared those ideas, I think.

David: Yes. Then also because what we’re going to talk about is tone. I don’t like pitching tone. I think tone is a really– it is such a vague thing to pitch. It’s–

Susanna: Trying to describe why a joke is funny.

David: Try to describe something, and then also just having to find a comp, and then the comp might not be right. I think that we gave them all the script and we pitched the show. I think at that point, because this is just what television is now, we had many seasons of ideas. We pitched the first season in detail and then said, “Here’s where we would go with season two, and here’s where we would go with season three.” Yes. It was pretty elaborate.

John: The show is visually very distinct and interesting. Were you bringing visuals to the pitch to show them what it would look like and what it would feel like, or was it just talking?

Susanna: Oh, yes, we did. Part of the idea behind the aesthetic of the show is that, like David was saying, there was an explosion of color and pattern. When you see Cold War content, mostly it’s really dramatic, and it’s really dreary-looking. There isn’t summertime, and there aren’t flowers, and there aren’t people with lively patterns on their clothes. The reality is, looking at pictures of people in that time, there’s so much vibrancy to it, in an imitation of American pop culture in a way.

We really wanted to do a loudly colorful look.

John: Yes, [unintelligible 00:12:06].

Susanna: Yes, so it could still have the muscularity of a spy thing, but also the fun of just people wanting to watch things that pop, because it was actually how a lot of the world looked. Yes, that was what we wanted to show in the deck. We wanted to say, this isn’t a dreary, depressing thing. Not only do we not want the tone to be that on the page, but we also want you to know that this is going to be a fun show to watch with lots of a feast for the senses when you’re looking at the clothes and the design and all that.

David: I think for me and Susanna, sometimes you hear people use the word entertaining almost pejoratively. Entertaining is the kind of show that those are the shows you fold your laundry to. They’re not the serious, important shows.

John: They’re lean-back shows rather than lean-in shows, yes.

David: I don’t feel like that is true in the media that we grew up with, the movies we love, the television we love. It just is how film and television has become a little bit bifurcated now. I think we are always trying to lead with being entertaining, and part of that is trying to be visually bold, but also to try to be as significant as we hope to be. To not make it light, to not be soft, to have the emotions real, to try to work to the top of our abilities, but also to not bore an audience. I think being visually bold comes hand-in-hand with that idea.

John: You get the yes from Universal for Peacock?

David: For Peacock, and then went to Universal.

John: It’s always so complicated. Are you going to the studio, or are you going to the network?

Susanna: Yes. We didn’t have a studio on at our first buyer, and so we came to Peacock clean of that. We did bring on a producer in the interim between parting ways with this other Network and shopping it around. I brought on Pacesetter, who had produced this Gillian Flynn show that I directed a couple of episodes of Utopia for Amazon. I had a good experience working with her. I floated it to her and said, “Can you–” She was doing a lot of commercial but elevated stuff, and I thought that she’d be a good match. With her, she became our partner, and then we had her on the journey since then. UTB came on.

David: We went right to networks, and then the networks laid it off to the studios. When we pitched to Peacock, we pitched, among others, to Alex Sepiel, who is somebody who we just knew forever. You lived in a Melrose–

Susanna: He was my neighbor in a hipster, downtrodden version of Melrose Place when we were in our 20s, where we just-

John: Yes, we all have those.

Susanna: -had gross, slummy apartments and a sketchy landlord who was running from the law. He and I were on a trivia team together every Monday. I knew him really from way back. Every time I’ve pitched to him since, it’s like there’s a legitimate familiarity there of just we know too many of each other’s dirty secrets from that time. Anyway, having him as our executive has been really fun. It was fun to work with him because we just know him. He’s a peer. He’s the person who shares our sensibilities, our taste.

Susanna: You have this deal to be making it at Peacock Universal. You have a script written. You need to write backup scripts. Then, at a certain point with backup scripts, you get the order to finish writing everything and to go to a series. How does it work? Did you ever have a room? How did it all fit together?

David: If it were so simple. We sold this in deep pandemic, and it just took time. Basically, between selling it in whatever 2020, 2021, where we got what they call the cast contingent pickup, which happened on the eve of the actor strike.

Susanna: On the eve of the strike. It all took a while.

David: It all took a while. This ultimately just became years. We were paid at different points to do two more scripts. Then we also just were waiting around. We wrote two more after that, just betting on ourselves and assuming that the show would eventually get picked up.

Susanna: We got the cast contingent pickup as we were waiting for actor offer. Actually, we were waiting for an actor deal to close. We’re like, if the deal doesn’t close, it’s not picked up, but it probably will. Then they’re going to be rushing us so fast to get these scripts ready. We should–

John: Just do it.

Susanna: Even though we were grumbling about it, we were like, “We should just write these ourselves.”

David: I think at that point-

Susanna: We had Amelia.

David: -we had Amelia, and we were just making her deal. We just wrote two more scripts. Then–

John: There’s five scripts as you’re coming into–

David: Yes. We did do a writer’s room because we believe in writer’s rooms, but also because we had– This is a spy show with a lot of heavy plotting that we were just doing ourselves piecemeal over the course of many years. We just wanted some smart, interesting people to vet the plot, but also vet the characters. We wanted to build to a really satisfying ending and set up everything that we need to in hopes of a new season.

Susanna: We also felt like maybe if I was going to be directing the first couple of episodes, that we might get in a situation where they would send me over there to start working on crap, and we’d be separated. We just wanted to have as much of it buttoned up as we could before I left.

David: Fortunately, it didn’t happen. We had everything written by the time we started.

John: Eight episodes, right?

David: Eight episodes.

John: Eight episodes. It’s written before you go. Are you block shooting it? How are you figuring out the best ways to do that?

Susanna: Well, I want to say one thing, which I think we can admit now because it all worked out, which is that we definitely lied about having episodes four and five written when we–

David: Yes, and tell them.

Susanna: We had to be like, “We’re thinking it could be something like,” and we go through the whole process. I am glad we did it that way. It made us really interrogate those scripts. We had a lot secretly done.

David: We shot blocks. Yes, we shot two episodes at a time.

Susanna: I knew I wanted to do three or four, and we were trying to figure out– Normally, if it wasn’t a show that I also wrote, I would come in and do the first two or three.

As we were in the writer’s room, my thought was, I knew I wanted to do the first couple. Then there was a mid-season episode that I just was personally really connected to. I knew I wanted to do that. We were like, how can we be creative? I was going to do a middle block so I could do that.

Then, as we started breaking the finale, it sounded like it was so much fun that I called Jessica during a lunch break, and I was like, “I’m going to be really annoyed if someone else directs the finale because now I love it. Can I do it?”

She’s like, “Yes.” Anyway, I ended up basically being there the whole time more or less. It was fun having the experience of breaking the episodes and deciding there which ones. I got attached to different episodes as a director, too, which was nice.

John: Talk about your writer’s room. How did you pick writers you wanted to be in the room with you? Obviously, the two of you have a clear vision, a clear voice. Were you looking for people who complemented you in ways, things you weren’t particularly good at? What were the criteria, and how many writers did you end up ultimately bringing in?

David: It’s funny because we had this conversation a lot, and I’d been in a lot of rooms. I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned a lot of what to do and what not to do. Also, it was a thing that would keep me up at night before a room started because it’s like I’ve been in great rooms, I’ve been in not great rooms. I’m just like, “Oh God, I have so much pressure on myself of making sure that my room is one of the good rooms.”

John: It’s not just SNL, but also looking through your credits, you’ve been in some challenging rooms.

David: I’ve been in some challenging rooms, and every room I’ve been in, I’ve learned a ton, but also, yes, some were harder than others. One thing that I do feel strongly about from just witnessing it in other rooms is that I am not a huge fan of bringing in specialists. I’m not somebody who’s like, “Okay, we have comedy in the show, we have a mystery in the show. Let’s bring in a really good mystery person. Let’s bring in a really good comedy person.” Eventually, you want people to be able to write the show, and you want people to write the show fully.

Selfishly, we just wanted to bring in writers who at least had a sensibility like us. We wanted to bring in people who had different experiences and different perspectives, and a diversity of types of people. At the end of the day, we wanted people to be able to execute a script that could both have the banter that is emblematic of our show, have the emotional grounding that is emblematic of our show, and be able to speak to the twist. I read a ton of samples, and I met with great people. They met with great people that I would have hired, and I couldn’t afford.

There was a lot of shaping to find the puzzle pieces. What was really exciting putting together is that a lot of the writers just still came about being able to have a sensibility that was shared with different skill sets. We had a writer who was just really good at making a map of who knows what, when, and the board. That’s just not how my mind works. It was just really helpful to see it. Other writers who just really could hook into the emotions of the friendship, drama, and in a way that felt very personal, that we were just able to use there. We built a really nice family, a very small group of writers in a very short amount of time, and all people that we care a lot about.

John: Did the two of you ever disagree in front of the writers?

David: Yes, of course.

Susanna: Yes, probably.

David: Susanna and I have a sibling–

Susanna: We’re very like, “Shut up. I don’t want to do that.”

David: Yes. It’s also helpful to have your ideas challenged and to be able to back it up.

Susanna: The dynamic of the room is like Dave has so much more room experience than I do. At the same time, within a hierarchy of a room, it takes a while for people to know that they can challenge the showrunner’s ideas sometimes. It’s maybe like a learning curve with people knowing that it’s going to go over well if there’s a meritocracy of ideas in the room, and that’s how David is wired. Until they learn that, there’s a certain fear around pushing back on stuff, even if we want the ideas challenged.

Weirdly, although I didn’t have as much room experience as many of the writers that were under us, for a while, it was like I was the only person sometimes who would be like, “No, no,” because other people are just not sure if they can do that in a writer’s room just because of how those rooms work. We really do share tastes pretty specifically. It’s very rare that we have a disagreement about how something is executed. It’s pretty amazing, actually. I’ve worked with a lot of people, but there’s always a sense of if I have to miss a meeting or miss something, I know you’re going to make the decisions I would make, which is a relief, I think, especially if I’m off directing something. I don’t know. I know you’ll catch the thing if I miss it.

David: It was helpful in casting, too. It was just being able to see. Clearly, we had the same vision in our head of who the characters were because we would definitely be like, “Oh, of course, it is this person.”

John: I have almost no TV writing room experience, so I have all these showrunners who come through, and they tell me their stories. A thing that’s always struck me as strange is that you hire writers based on how good they are at writing. You’re reading samples, and you want really good writers. David, you were saying you want writers who can write the whole show, and yet for the weeks and weeks of the show, they’re not writing. There’s very little writing. You’re just using their brain. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t that weird that the people aren’t writing more during the course of the writer’s room?

Susanna: Especially in this room, because we had written so much. We were like, “Okay, there’s two available episodes for all of y’all to do.”

David: Yes. It is very weird. Also, when I think about other rooms that I’ve been in and rooms that I had no hiring and firing power and rooms where I was just an observer in, I think that people who are incredibly skilled at the politics of a room or just how to have a great disposition and have everybody like them or have really good ideas, all really great. If you can’t deliver a script, you’re toast. Ultimately, that is what the hard part is.

I would say that what makes you good in a room is being in a room more, but what should get you in the room is being able to write the script. A lot of the process of running a show is going back to my job’s past and where I didn’t do a good job, or where I would have done differently, or where I can see my place in it. I remember in a very, very early job, a very famous producer who I won’t name, but he has a voice like this.

John: It was Alfred Hitchcock, wasn’t it?

David: It was Alfred Hitchcock. He gave negative feedback about me that his certainty does not match with his experience at all. I took it to heart, and I really tried to internalize it. I didn’t know any other way to be in a room, but feel that I had to feel strongly about my ideas. Now, running a show, you can’t just be like, “Meh, it can be this, it can be that.” You have to be certain. It is a process of just knowing that, aha, I have the solution. Also, I am the 17th person down on the hierarchy of this room. How do I do that? It takes time.

I think now I absolutely love helping other friends with their stuff, coming up with ideas because I have no personal investment other than just wanting to do it. It’s not like if you don’t listen to my idea that it’s going to hurt my heart. I absolutely don’t care. I’ve now done so many versions of what a room is and what breaking a story is and what fixing a story is that I have all of that ammunition. I only have that because I’ve been in a lot of rooms, and I’ve only gotten those rooms because I was able to write the script.

John: Let’s talk about what is so specific and unexpected for me in your show is the tone in that, first off, it’s a period show that almost feels like it could have been shot in the time. Some of that is how Susanna you chose to direct it. You’re going for that pillar box format, so rather than widescreen, it’s square screen. Obviously, everything looks right and feels right, and Budapest stands in really well for Moscow.

The camera movements and everything else, it tells you that we’re in a ’70s place without a shot. The show shot in that time wouldn’t have looked like that. It would have looked crappy and then this looks great. That is part of the tone. Also, the comedic tone between the actors and how the world is presented and how the stakes are presented is just a little lighter than the equivalent other spy show would be. How really did you know that and how did you anchor into that?

Susanna: I think something that we’ve always been interested in is if most spy movies are on plot most of the time, if you went home with those people at the end of the day, they would still call their moms and fight with their husbands. They would still have a life where they’re not acting in character as spy. I think there is a truth to that. We just wanted to shift where the lens is sometimes to that. It naturally has the other parts of a person’s personality that come forward when they’re not on the job in a high-stakes situation are by nature, lighter if their job is high stakes. We’re interested in that.

If it feels true and grounded enough, then it doesn’t feel like the tone is confused. I think sometimes with a mixed tone and what scares people about it is people don’t want it to feel like you’re in two different shows and hopefully if it all feels grounded.

John: You feel like you’re one show, but it’s a very specific unusual show to sort of be in. The Americans is a great show where you have spies who are in their home lives. The difference is they’re incredibly competent. They see attention, even like they’re the best of their game and they’re still struggling with it. Here you have two women who are new to all this. They’re fish out of water as they’re getting started in this. That is essentially a comedic environment to be in. They’re in over their heads, which is relatable but also fun, but just that’s not a thing we see so often. We saw it in Spy Who Dumped Me, yes.

David: Both of us bring a lot to our work because I think this is just how we are as people in the world. I consider myself a funny person. I consider most people I surround myself with as funny people. If I am in a really tense situation, if I’m going into surgery, if I’m going into a funeral, if I have some sort of crisis in my life, I don’t know that part of me is still, I’m putting it away. People are still making jokes. This is another lesson I learned from actually, when I was very briefly on Mad Men was that the rule of writing comedy in a drama versus writing comedy in a comedy is that in comedy, other people in the scene are servicing your joke.

In a drama, there could be a funny person. The other person’s purpose in that scene is not to set up your joke. People are funny because this is the world that they’re in. Twila, in our show, Haley Lu Richardson’s character, is somebody who uses humor as armor in her life. That is just such a true thing for so many people who have-

Susanna: Not for me.

[laughter]

David: -had really difficult lives as she has, that is who she is going to be, and that is how she’s going to deal with crisis. B is very neurotic, not like you. [laughs]

Susanna: Not like you.

David: She’s going to spin out, and-

John: She’s going to overthink, yes.

David: -she’s going to overthink when she is in crisis. These are just true things that these people are going to do, and it is still going to be enjoyable. The fact that these are also people who have jobs in an office, and also Moscow is a really weird place, particularly in the USSR, and that is funny. We are able to try to live in a world that still feels like the world. That the stakes are high and that when there is a life or death moment, it was very important to us that the final sequence of our pilot, which I won’t spoil, but that it should really, really feel extremely dangerous, but there are still jokes before them, and there’s still awkwardness within it. Also, you better be scared.

John: I want to circle back to something you raised through, but was actually such a good point. I want to underline it. You’re talking about Mad Men and how, in a comedy, the characters are there to set up the joke for someone to spike. In a drama, that would feel really weird. There’s just an expectation about how people can be funny in a drama that’s just so different than a comedy, and so just a really smart distinction there. Thank you for that.

David: Oh, you’re very welcome.

[laughter]

John: A few last things. Looking through the script, it has ad breaks, and you feel them in the show also. Is that something that was always there? Did you ever consider taking them out? Because people were watching on a Peacock. They might have ads. They might not have ads.

David: We didn’t write them with ad breaks. We were asked to put them in.

John: Storytelling power. At what point did you know who could actually drive scenes by themselves? Because in the pilot, you established that Andrei can drive scenes by himself, which was a surprise when that happened. Talk to me about when you decided who could hold scenes by themselves.

David: Perspective-wise? Behind the curtain. We added that scene of Andrei late. That was the last scene of the entire series that we shot because we were looking at the already cut pilot. We knew how scary Andrei was because we knew. Because we wrote in the script, this is the scariest person you’ve ever seen.

Susanna: We knew what would happen in episode two.

David: We knew what would happen in episode two, but we needed to have the audience feel that when we see him at the end of the episode, that we are scared to death of his presence. We cast a fantastic but unknown actor, Artjom Gilz. If we had cast a famous movie star who was famous for being a villain, then we would already know– if Christoff Waltz walked in, then we wouldn’t have had to do that. We gave him perspective. I think we just learned more and more about our characters and what they brought, and who gets their own scenes.

Dane, Adrian Lester plays him, and he’s being Twila’s boss. He is somebody who is elusive in a lot of the shows. Part of what he brings is mystery. We don’t know what his life is really like. We don’t know what his secrets are. We have a sense that he has secrets. We really wanted to build several episodes before we could see him be vulnerable and display some of his secrets, and we get a sense of who that man behind the curtain is. For the first chunk of the season, we want to see him as this all-knowing, unknowable person that he projects to be in Twila. The audience know that that couldn’t be true because no one is like that.

John: The rules of the world you’ve established. No one is especially competent. It’s not like they’re bumblingly competent, but they have very limited power to do things. Literally, they can’t turn on the power to their own building, which is established. Let’s wrap up by talking about Budapest because I think you probably knew that this was going to be shooting in Budapest or someplace like it from the start. It’s not a show where you’re forced to go to Budapest. That’s the place where you go to shoot.

Susanna: It wasn’t Budapest for Boston.

John: Yes. That’s the place you go to do Moscow. It’s a reasonable place. Talk to us about shooting there, pros and cons, things you loved, things you learned, shooting there in 2025.

David: Just to get it out of the way, they have a bad government, and they passed some really bad laws while we were there. That did make shooting there complicated. Our studio’s lawyers were really great and helpful and supportive in just trying to make sure that everybody felt safe because they passed some anti-gay laws while we were there. It was very actually moving at the very end of our production. The Pride parade, which was a thing that they banned. The people of the city did it anyway. It was–

Susanna: It came in from other European cities. It was the biggest. It was on the cover of the New York Times.

David: Multiple and it’s larger than it had ever been. It is a blue city in a red country. Our crew, for the most part, was very progressive and lovely, but it’s complicated.

John: Are our crews in Budapest drawn from around Europe, or really, it’s a Budapest crew?

David: They’re Hungarian.

Susanna: They’re mostly Hungarian. Yes. Typically, they have a homegrown film industry of their own that is a different thing, but then they really are home to many– the huge economic part of the country is the film and TV that shoots there, mostly American and UK productions. They have an incredible brain trust and really skilled, top-of-their-game people. Actually, some expats. Our sound guy on our show, who also did Spy Who Dumped Me, did The Martian, and did all that, but he’s an American guy. He went to UT Austin and was living out in LA, and someone said come do a movie in Budapest in the ’90s. Then he just stayed in Budapest and married a Hungarian and had a family there.

There’s a lot of people there that are like– There’s expats living there. Then it’s a city that’s very used to hosting people who want to be insulated in a bubble of a film. It’s not aggressively thrusting you into the culture if you want to be staying at the Four Seasons and whatever. Not on our budget. You can. It has those amenities. I think it’s user-friendly. At the same time, if you stay there more than a couple of weeks, you just can feel the undercurrent of what’s going on in that, politically and otherwise, in the city.

David: It’s also beautiful. There is so much aesthetic that we needed from our show that we had sets, and our sets were beautifully built, and we were on a stage. I would say we were probably 60%, 70% location. A lot of those locations felt like we were in time capsules. We were in these beautiful old buildings that just looked incredible, that we just simply would not be able to accomplish in another place.

Susanna: I had shot Small Light in Prague. We looked into a couple of places like Prague and Berlin. Yes, just as things developed. I think it would have been more expensive, and we would have had a lot less production value, and we would have probably had to send a satellite crew to Budapest anyway, or a place like it. We just decided not to do that. It’s the same argument or the same debate, I guess, about shooting in a state that passes draconian laws here. You’re like, well, I want to make my thing. I want to employ the people. I don’t want to punish the crews that are living there for living there. Also, do I want to make a statement, which seems important to do? I don’t know.

It’s really challenging to figure that out. We can’t shoot everything in. I don’t even know what country to name that isn’t problematic now, so never mind. Greenland. No, just kidding. Venezuela?

John: No.

[laughter]

John: It’s a challenging time overall. Congratulations on the show. I really just dug it.

David: Thank you.

John: As this episode’s coming out, it’s just about to debut on Peacock, right? I think it’s two days later.

David: Two days later, great. Although I’m sad Craig isn’t here, I like that on this episode, as far as television shows created by people who went to high school in Frield, New Jersey, about the USSR, we’re the top one on this episode.

John: This episode. Very nice. Let’s answer some listener questions. We have one here from Richard.

Drew: “I find I can look at a scene on a particular day and think it’s the worst thing I’ve ever written, and then two days later I pick it back up and think, ‘oh, that’s actually not that bad.’ Do you guys get this too? If so, how can we ever truly trust our own judgment?”

John: I rarely do I read something and say, oh, this is absolutely awful. Honestly, the reverse happens more like, well, I absolutely loved something when I wrote it, and then I go back and it’s like, “Oh, it’s actually not so–”

David: It’s bloated and dumb and degressive. I think what I can relate to is I finish something and I think I’m happy with it. It did what I needed to do, but I do want a set of eyes on it. I think for that, you just need to have a very small brain trust of people that you really respect and trust. If you have a partner, if you have a friend, somebody who won’t lie to you if it’s bad, will also be meaningful if they tell you, this is really good. You did a really good job.

I think sometimes that is helpful. I also think that it is a trap to keep going back and reading the scene that you wrote a few days ago, because if you are somebody whose head does that, who looks at it and then hates everything, you’re really going to have a hard time writing that next scene. Just try to finish a version of it.

Susanna: Yes, I would say try to finish it. Then at whatever point you feel comfortable hearing it read out loud, that’s really useful too. We’ve had readings of scripts that we’ve written just for ourselves in Dave’s garage. It’s really incredibly informative every time.

John: The challenge, Richard, is you’re always, you’re both the creator and the critic. At the time you were writing it, you were the creator, and you had this feeling about it. Then you’re also the critic, and that critic is a separate part of your brain. Maybe your critic is an asshole. Maybe your critic is just not good. David, you were saying earlier about how you love helping out a person, helping out a writer, just contributing. Maybe your inner critic is just not actually recognizing what’s good and how to improve it. It’s just seeing all the flaws. Maybe just cultivate that critic a little bit more. Maybe talking to some other people about their work and being gracious with them will get you to be a little bit nicer to yourself.

Question from Daniel.

Drew: “I am a sophomore screenwriting student at an LA film school. I can tell my writing does get better with every script, but I’m not sure if I have that innate talent or ability you guys always speak about. Mainly because with every script where I say, I think I got it, I in fact do not have it. How did you guys realize that you have this innate talent and how long did it take?”

Susanna: Well, just to speak to the first part, I just want to offer some wisdom from a book that I didn’t write called The Work of Art that came out recently. I think it’s Michael Cunningham who talks about the fact that he doesn’t believe that there is such a thing as innate talent. It’s just having a personality that is so obsessively committed to something being good that it will just keep drilling down into something over and over and over until it becomes good. That, to him, is what makes a person skillful, not anything that they’re innately born with. I don’t know that I agree with that completely, but it did resonate with me that there’s an obsessiveness that people have, who I admire, that I think they share.

David: I think this question is very married to the previous question. First of all, definitely the stuff I wrote when I was in college, I wouldn’t share it now as a reflection of my best work, but there were moments throughout my adolescence or into college or into my early 20s where I would write a scene or a line or have an idea and it would excite me. It would be like, “Oh, that’s it. This is what I’m trying to do.” I couldn’t imagine not having any version of that and still being excited about writing.

I’ve got to assume, I’ve got to give the question, give her the benefit of the doubt that you must have had some sort of moment that excited you enough to start doing it. From there, yes, you just have to keep getting better, but you may have it. Also, a lot of very talented people worry that they don’t have that talent. That is also a very real thing that people–

John: Feeling impostor syndrome at this point in your early career is totally natural and reasonable and makes sense. You don’t know what you’re doing, and that’s true. I hope that in entering film school, you’re a sophomore now, people must have told you, “Oh, you’re a good writer,” and you’ve had some external validation that, “Oh, you really know how to do this. This is good.” There’ve been some moments where you felt yourself like, “Oh, this was a good thing I wrote. I’m actually proud of this thing I did.” That’s foundational. That’s [unintelligible 00:42:14] that gets you going to the next one.

There’s this meme I saw this week about thinking of yourself as a verb rather than a noun, thinking of you as the person who writes rather than the end product. Maybe spend this next year really focusing on writing as the verb versus generating this thing and that thing and that thing and see if you like the actual process of doing it. We talk on the show so much about how writing sucks. It’s not a fun thing to do, but you make peace with it. You come to accept that it’s part of this process of getting to work that you’re really proud of. Maybe just focus a little bit more on that rather than the quality and see if you’re digging it.

Susanna: I also think there’s a lot of noise outside the world of just you and your laptop or your notebook or however you write, and that when the noise gets really loud, it can be really hard to just focus on the actual nugget of excitement that you have. I talk to friends a lot now as people talk about how hard the industry is, and there’s a ton of negativity in the air.

Whatever you have to do to trick your brain into just being excited about a thing and sitting down and doing the work, like John was saying, that’s the most important thing you can do, is just to stay optimistic and excited about whatever it is you’re working on and not let the outside voices or your own internal critic stop you from actually just producing things. Find the spark, whatever that is. I know that sounds like a cliché, but it’s really important [unintelligible 00:43:35]

John: In finding that spark, I think it’s also reasonable to say, if you decide this is not actually a thing you like, a thing you would enjoy, it’s okay to say no. It’s okay to find something else you really do love. You only have the one life, so do the thing that actually really excites you and you enjoy it. More than talking about an innate aptitude or something like you’re born with a certain talent, maybe you have a set of interests and things that you actually want to be spending your time doing, and if this isn’t it, that’s fine, that’s good. Go searching for what the thing is that you actually do really love.

David: This is probably a bigger conversation for a whole other episode of this show, but I’ve spent a lot of time lately wrestling with what is the point of this. Not that I think it is without a point, but as I am in a position to– I’m releasing something out into the world, which is very scary. I think about when I first moved to Los Angeles, when I first wanted to work in film and television, and I had this idea in my head that I wanted to manifest of sitting in a movie theater and seeing my name up there. That does not feel like what the goal is now, though I can’t necessarily pinpoint what it is.

I do like writing. I do like making things. It is also a thing that terrifies me. I think it is a really tricky thing for me, for all of us, people who’ve been doing this for decades, to make sense of why we’re doing it. If you are on the fence in your first years, that also might be a good sign that it– Also, just know that we are also wrestling with what the point is, because it’s complicated.

John: A question here from Carlos.

Drew: “A few weeks back, I partook in a pitching workshop with a former executive from a big production company. One thing this former executive said really rubbed me the wrong way. He told us to stop writing pilots. He said that today, a lot of executives will turn down series pitches if they have a pilot attached because they want to be involved in the development stage from the beginning. We should stop writing pilots and focus on just the story development, which broke me since writing pilots is what I enjoy most from series development. Is this something that’s actually happening? I know the situation is probably different over here in Mexico than on the other side of the border, but I still wanted to get your take on this.”

David: Really makes sense why this is a former executive.

Susanna: David and I both, we produce a lot of other writers. We try to really support a lot of pitches that are not just our own pitches. As a director, I take a lot of pitches out that I’m not the writer on. Really, every project is different. We’ve sold things that have a pilot. We’ve sold things that have a pitch. We’ve been dissuaded from having a pilot for one specific type of project that I just think it’s dangerous to get mired in any one dogmatic idea about how to do anything.

If you’re enjoying writing pilots and you’re writing things that you feel really represent your passions and that you’re good at, the worst thing that can happen is you get some producer that wants to take your show out and they say, “Okay, let’s send the pilot later. Let’s develop the story.” They’re not mutually exclusive. It’s such a tactical decision that shouldn’t be your problem. It should be the problem of the person who’s doing the selling and that should be your partner and not a person who’s trying to tell you that you’re doing it wrong. That’s my opinion.

David: I also think how can you tell someone, you as a beginner writer, you are a good writer and you are worth backing and gambling on if no one is able to read what you are executing. I think that, yes, perhaps for a very experienced writer who has a long track record, sure, you can pitch. I also think pitching is a scam, but it’s a scam that we all participate in because you are sitting in a room saying, “This is what this is going to be,” but you don’t–

I think I talked about this many, many episodes ago when we were last on Scriptnotes, is that I have taken out pitches that I just also needed to write the script first just so I knew what the characters sound like and I knew what the jokes were because I don’t really know any other way to do it. You’re just saying, “Trust me, this is what it’s going to be.” If you’re a writer, you should write.

Susanna: Also, if you are a newer writer and there isn’t something produced that people can look at as a sample of how you write and you’re just like, “I have all these ideas for the story,” they’re going to ask to see a writing sample. It’s such bad advice.

John: We don’t know where Carlos is at in his career, but the good thing about writing a pilot is that you wrote a script that can be a writing sample. Maybe this series, it’s not the best way to sell this series, but it’s something someone else can read and David and Susanna can staff you on their show. It’s a thing people can read.

Susanna: They’re going to ask to read something before they pay you to write something based on an outline of ideas of a show that doesn’t have a writing sample. I think it’s bad advice no matter where you are in your career, Carlos. That person should not have a career, and they don’t.

John: Let’s do one last question from Alex here. A common note I receive from coverage services is that I need to differentiate my character voices because they often sound the same. Do you have any tips for how to subtly differentiate character voices without falling into caricature-ish dialogue?

Susanna: Oh, we talk about this a lot.

John: What conclusions do you reach as you talk about it?

Susanna: Honestly, sometimes I think about my first writing class I took when I moved out to LA at 21 at Second City, sketch comedy writing class. We talked about the game of a character. It was for comedic writing, but we talk about it all the time. Each character has to have, in your mind, what is the laugh with and what is the laugh at about that person. My description of how I am is going to be different from my friend’s secret gossip about what’s annoying about me. You have to know what someone would say behind that person’s back, I think, and then write that person–

There are ways in which we all lack self-awareness. If there’s a certain game of that person, that person says things a million different ways because they use too many words to talk, or that person is really passive-aggressive generally. If you just have an idea about a person’s flaw, it can just make their writing specific. We try to do that in our show a lot, where we don’t want anyone to show up in a scene, even a side character in The Office, and not have a specific personality or a tick or a quirk. I don’t know.

David: First of all, it’s also not the absolute worst thing in the world if you have a really strong, specific voice. Yes, sure, that might be your style. It’s okay, particularly when you’re starting out, because every character is a version of you. I think the first time I really thought about this idea was Noah Baumbach’s first movie, Kicking and Screaming, because a character in it tells the other characters, “You all talk the same.”

Actually, they don’t. All those characters are really specific, and I actually don’t think you could interchange jokes from one character to another, but I think it was probably him being a little bit self-aware and self-conscious that these are all characters who are in a very similar life stage, who have a very–

Susanna: The same education [unintelligible 00:50:28]

John: [unintelligible 00:50:29]

David: You can also just look at how it looks on the page. Some people are more verbose. Some people speak more simply, but yes, you should never be able to move a joke from one character to another and have it work the same way. Everyone should have their own voice and meaning, and that was what I was talking about earlier, that I have this ethereal belief of writing that everything exists behind a wall and you have to find it, and I think that is truly characters. That is most vivid with characters. If you start writing their dialogue and you start seeing them, you start hearing them, then you are really going to get a sense of who they are and what their specificity is.

Susanna: The caricature thing, it’s okay if the first draft, they feel a little pushed or a little broad. You’re either dialing something up or down. This is such a basic thing to say, but if it seems like how people would actually talk, or you could imagine a person in your life who would talk or act the way a character is talking or acting, sometimes we do things that are a little over the top as people in life. Just as a director reading scripts that other people write and thinking about directing them, there’s a first script problem that David and I talk about sometimes where just the main character feels like the avatar for the writer.

It’s usually a person who’s more passively observing the world’s hypocrisies and they’re witty and funny and everyone around them is an idiot. I’m speaking in broad terms, but that character, to me, it’s not that interesting. I wouldn’t know how to tell an actor what they’re playing, really. I recently read a script where that was the problem and it was by a young writer. I just thought, “I bet this writer is in their 20s, and I bet this is what amount of life experience they’ve had, and I can feel that in the way it’s written.” In that case, it was a really funny script. There was just a glibness to the writing, and it felt like the writer was punching up their own best joke.

John: I absolutely hear you there.

Susanna: To me, usually those are the characters that, if it’s the main character leading you through the journey and that character is just a little bit of a cypher except for their elevated wit, it feels like a first script to me.

John: Specific advice for Alex here, I feel like maybe you’re having a hard time listening and hearing how people really are different. Assuming this is a fair note that you’re getting from multiple people, that your characters are all sounding the same, I think what you might try to do with your script is just cast it in your mind. Cast actual actors in all those places and imagine how those actors are actually saying those lines. Doing that may give you a sense of, “Oh, there’s actually so many more variables I could be dialing in here.”

If I cast this as Christopher Walken versus Woody Harrelson or– what different choices would make sense given who’s actually going to be doing these lines? That may give you a sense there because you might think, “Oh, no,” and I’m just impersonating someone else’s voice, but you’re not really. Words you’re writing in a script is not going to sound like that specific actor.

Susanna: Whoever plays the part is going to be–

John: They’re going to bring their own specificity, but if you write it for one specific actor, another actor can play that part and it will feel unique and different and it won’t sound like all the other characters. That may be a first good exercise for Alex to try.

Susanna: Real people too. If you have an uncle who is-

John: Oh, totally.

Susanna: -always drunk, I don’t know, whatever, a drunk uncle, whatever you have. You can just– basing it on someone, whether it’s your imagination of an actor or some person in your life that if you were asked in a private booth to talk about that person, you would be able to describe them, good and bad.

David: I think the other way that a lot of newer writers get into the trap of just making characters feel similar, which is another way of saying generic, is that their supporting players, their one-line parts are extremely generic. I would try to avoid too many police officer number twos and just a bunch of people that you are trying to differentiate between the characters who are important and the characters who aren’t. If everyone feels like they have interiority and if everyone feels like they have some sort of vividness, then it does sort of come through everywhere in your script.

I think there’s a lot of– Cameron Crowe does this really well. The Coen brothers do this really well. I would look at movies and just really focus on the people who are in it for one scene and are really popping as a great way to just specify everybody in your script.

John: It may also be helpful to look at some movies that you really enjoy and love, and watch them while you’re reading the script, and really get a sense of like, “Oh, it’s not just the actor’s performance. It really was the words on the page that got to that performance.” That may also remind you like, “Oh, yes, dialogue, it does start here, and characters are really found in these words I’m choosing to have them say.”

Susanna: I think also with the TV show, we were asked the other day what [unintelligible 00:55:20] about story engines for a show going forward. One thing about our show which circles back to your original question about tone, John, was that we have a married couple on the show and we sort of tried to make their marriage really specific even though they’re not the leads of the show and it’s not a show about a marriage. They’re just people in the office, but we ended up wanting more and more and more of them.

If every character has something in a dynamic or in their voice that feels like, “Oh, I want to watch that person in a million different situations,” then it tells a buyer or whoever, if it’s in a TV format, “I want to watch more episodes of those people,”-

John: Totally.

Susanna: -and it just encourages them to see more of a long life or whatever it is you’re pitching.

John: You look at The Office and-

Susanna: Yes, exactly.

John: -just how deep, and how full that room was of very specific voices, that you felt like, “Oh, you could follow any one of these people, and it would be incredibly entertaining.”

Susanna: I think comedies are a good way to study it too. I was going to recommend Jury Duty, which is so largely-

John: Love it.

Susanna: -improvised, but each person-

John: Yes, it’s so well done.

Susanna: -is so specific. You couldn’t swap anyone’s lines with anyone else’s lines.

John: No.

Susanna: That’s on the broader side. I don’t know what tone you’re writing, but yes, it’s useful to try to do that with everybody.

John: All right. It’s time for our one cool thing. My one cool thing is an article by Adam Mastroianni. I’ve linked to him a zillion times. I feel like I should be paid a referral fee here. This blog post you did was so useful for the start of a new year, called So You Want to De-bog Yourself. De-bogging, basically, you’re stuck in a rut. You’re facing a problem, a real-life problem, not a story problem, a real-life problem. What I think Adam is so good at doing is shining a spotlight on certain aspects of a situation and giving it a name so you can actually identify, “Oh, that’s what I’m doing.”

Two examples here. First off is stroking the problem, which is like, “I’ve got a big problem. Man, I have this big problem. I have this thing and this thing and this thing.” You’re not actually trying to solve it. You’re just stroking it. You’re basically just acknowledging there’s a problem here and you’re telling everybody about this problem, but you’re not actually trying to solve it. Stroking the problem is a thing I’m going to probably start using a lot when people express their issues to me. The second thing he calls out is the try harder fallacy, which is basically like, “Oh, man, that didn’t really work at all. You really need to try harder next time.” Almost never do you actually need to try harder.

[laughter]

John: You probably were trying as hard as you possibly could. You have no shortage of effort you put into it. You gave it everything. There’s no secret reserve of energy that you could have– It just didn’t work. You’re going to need to try a different way to do it because trying harder is not going to get there. It’s two of many examples in this really good post about getting out of the muck that you find yourself stuck in.

It’s for real life, but I guess it’s our characters too, because our characters are often trapped in situations. If we as writers are telling them to try harder or to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, that’s probably not going to actually really work. A good post and I’ll put a link in the show notes. David, what do you have for us?

David: I have a few connected cool things. My first artistic passion was drawing and painting and cartooning and illustration. My origin story as a writer at all is because I wanted to draw comic strips and political cartoons. Anything artistic, if you don’t use those muscles, they atrophy. I’ve been drawing with my children. I realize I’m not as good as I used to be. I’m a really big New Year’s resolution person. My New Year’s resolution is trying to draw or paint or something every day, either with a pencil and paper, pen and ink or my iPad. The essential iPad drawing program is Procreate.

There are a few companies that make brushes and color systems and fake paper to really emulate some beautiful mid-century comic book style or illustration style. Retro Supply and True Grit are two companies that do that. Retro Supply also has a lot of great videos on how to draw heads and color theory. That’s really great.

Then the other thing that is keeping me honest with my New Year’s resolution is the International Society of Character Artists, of which I am a paying member, does something called caricature resolution in January. Caricature artists all over the world, from beginners to masters, draw the same celebrity every day of the month-

John: Oh, that’s great.

David: -of January. You can find this by searching for the #caricatureresolution2026 on Instagram or on Facebook. They also have an Instagram page. It’s just a really fun way to just see what different character artists are doing, and also if it’s something you want to try whenever this airs, you can catch up.

John: What was today’s celebrity?

David: Today was Bette Midler.

John: Oh, great. She feels like a natural person. [crosstalk]

David: She’s got a lot of hair, a lot of big features.

John: That’s really great. The other things you recommended, those are plugins or things you put into Procreate?

David: Yes. You can download the brush packs and the fake paper and the color systems.

John: Great. I love it. Susanna, what do you have for us?

Susanna: I saw an incredible independent film-

John: Please.

Susanna: -that I wanted to talk about. It’s this movie called The Plague. It’s about 12-year-old boys at a water polo camp in the early aughts. I watched it because I’m on the jury of the DGA first-time feature committee. This time of year, I always get a packet of movies that either are just coming out, haven’t come out yet, or I just wouldn’t have necessarily heard of because they don’t necessarily have the marketing push. I so relate to that that I feel really strongly about seeing all these movies and getting excited about them and plugging them.

This one was really incredible. Just the writing and directing was really impressive and singular and specific, but also just having known kids that age at that time, just the zeitgeist is so perfectly captured.

John: That’s great.

Susanna: The music is perfect. The performances, which are almost all 12-year-olds. Joel Edgerton plays the coach. It’s about hazing and boys at that age. It’s really exceptional, so I recommend that movie highly.

John: That’s great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Matthew did our outro this week. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We are low in the folder on listener outros, in part because, Drew, people are sending through outros that don’t have the boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Yes, very important. Basically, that is one of our only rules.

Susanna: That is it. That is what you need to do.

David: Can you just clip John just saying that and use that as an outro?

John: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

John: We definitely will. We definitely will. Send us through your outros. We’d love to have more of those, ask@johnaugust.com is 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 Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. The Scriptnotes book is out and available wherever you get books. Get your Scriptnotes book.

David: I bought it for a bunch of young writers, and they probably really enjoyed it.

John: Hooray. Fantastic. We just got the British copies here, which are slightly narrower than the US copies, which is lovely.

David: They write a little narrower.

Susanna: It’s so pretentious.

John: It’s so pretentious. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You can find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on taste. Susanna, David, it’s so nice to have you back here.

Susanna: Thank you. This was really fun. Thanks so much.

[Bonus Segment]

David: Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

John: Okay.

Susanna: Thank you.

John: Thank you, David. Thank you for bringing us back in here. Drew asked this question. [unintelligible 01:03:38] wrote in about Taste.

Drew Marquardt: I argue often with my friends about old movies, and I get accused of having bad taste, and I was wondering if there’s a method to acquiring good taste. Also, is there a definition to good taste?

John: All right, taste. Let’s talk about taste. My initial instinct when I thought about taste is I often refer back to Ira Glass has this piece about taste where it describes how you develop taste before you develop talent. There’s this conflict between the two of them, and it goes through things. I brought this up, and then I realized, oh, Susanna, you know Ira.

Susanna: I married him, and that is how I acquired good taste.

David: That’s your good taste?
[laughter]

John: That’s how you get good taste, is marry Ira Glass.

Susanna: Yes, I’m goal-oriented. I always strive to have good taste-

John: Absolutely.

Susanna: -and I just went right to the top.

John: I knew I liked you for that. Let’s talk about taste because [unintelligible 01:04:27] concern here is that they have bad taste. It’s like, “Well, no, you have your own taste. You have your own specific–”

Susanna: Who’s saying this person has bad taste? What’s their taste?

John: That’s crazy. Developing your taste and understanding your taste is, I think, a crucial stage of development. It’s basically figuring out what do I like, and then more importantly, why do I like it? What is it about this genre, about this movie, about these things that spark for me that I really enjoy? What is it about these things that I don’t enjoy that are elements of that? It’s worth some time to think about what are those things, and what is a unique fingerprint for you that defines what is good to you?

David: I think that you go through this journey in your life where when you were young, there’s definitely things you don’t like. You look back at this movie I loved when I was seven, and it is garbage, but it definitely fell within what you enjoyed then. Maybe that is something that as you get older, because I think the next step, once you start getting a little– if you’re listening to this podcast, maybe you’re a little bit pretentious, that you feel like there is some sort of value in dismissing other people’s tastes. Looking at other people and thinking, “I like smart things, and you like dumb things,” and that is how you place it.

Then you go through this other journey where you’re like, “Oh, well, actually, some things that are just a mass appeal I really enjoy,” or, “I like this little niche,” whatever. You feel less embarrassed about your taste. You feel about your taste as not something that you want to place against other people. It’s something that’s yours. You embrace. You want to see what you like. It’s this journey that you go through to finally just feel like you can reconcile it. I think what [unintelligible 01:06:10] is probably experiencing is perhaps– I don’t know how old [unintelligible 01:06:14] is, but maybe it’s his friends being a little bit pretentious as they start to learn about their own taste.

I think it’s just really important to just try to take in as much as possible. I think it’s a boring thing about me that I really, really love The Beatles, but I really, really love The Beatles. When you explore what makes them great, they’re very good at their instruments. They’re very good at singing. They’re very good at the technical ability, but they’re not the best at all of that. They took in everything. Bob Dylan too, just took in everything that was available when they were learning and coming up and almost had this encyclopedic knowledge of all of the music that came around it and synthesized it into their own stuff.

Then it was this ability to say, “This is what is good for us,” and give each other shit to say, “Not that line, Paul, not that line, John.” Then that is basically what made The Beatles great, was their very, very refined taste. That taste doesn’t happen without really, really taking in as much as you can and taking in things that you would never think you should take in. Every little piece of it is part of what you build and build and build to what you like.

John: Taste is a crucial factor when I’m looking to work with a person or to collaborate with a person. For a project that we were working on with the company, I needed a designer. The first criteria was just taste. I knew I would find people who were very talented who could build the thing, but also taste is a crucial thing because I can’t give you taste. I have my own taste, but I couldn’t explain why this thing needs to be over there. I needed somebody with that form of taste. Susanna, you, as directing movies, you’re working with collaborators, and their taste is so crucial. They need to be able to have an eye for what it is that they respond to and ability to communicate back to you why they’re making these choices, right?

Susanna: Yes, I think judging other people’s taste is a trendy thing to do. Words like basic, that person is so basic. It just means that they have a taste for certain things that are popular and a certain aesthetic that is popular in certain parts of the country and certain class. It’s all about– there are so many things that are coded in that too, that comment. I think, ultimately, my taste is just what I’m naturally drawn to and interested in and what’s pleasing to my eyes and ears and senses. Sometimes that’s just entertainment that isn’t necessarily elevated.

I would consider myself someone who has “good taste,” at least the taste that makes sense to me. I know when things are entertainment but not nutritious entertainment and when they’re not, but I guess that I would still consider that part of my taste. It’s not a secret that’s in a closet and my taste is only the things I admit that I watched.

John: No.

Susanna: It’s hard to even say what we mean when we say taste. I think it’s mostly coded with trying to say I’m smart, I have good taste, I have an eye.

John: It’s so weird that we use the word taste, because as a sense, it’s the only one that has a sense of revulsion. It’s like, “Oh, that’s delicious,” or, “That’s revolting.” You can imagine a thing. It’s weird that we’re describing a tongue experience for what art is supposed to be.

Susanna: There’s a value judgment, right?

John: Yes.

Susanna: It’s like asking someone what’s their taste and you can answer that question free of judgment, but then people also talk about, “Oh, that person has good taste,” as though we can all agree that there’s a bad taste. I think that’s what you’re saying. It’s like– I think for me, the experience of hiring people is I want to feel aligned with what they—obviously, when you’re hiring a cinematographer, you look at their lookbooks and their decks and they show you what you want the visuals to be. For me, it’s important to talk to them and make sure that the dynamic between the two of us doesn’t make me question my own judgment.

John: Absolutely. You might find a collaborator who, what they like is completely valid, but it’s just not the thing. If you don’t want to be fighting over lens selections with your cinematographer on the set, that’s not going to do anybody any good. Neither are you going to be happy with the choices. They have to be aligned on a fundamental quality. Come back to your show, the tone is a very specific taste. If you guys weren’t aligned on that, or if you’re trying to bring in somebody who didn’t get that, it’d be a mess.

David: I think if we talk about the word taste and just the idea of– I think what we experience making the show is that when something, and I think it’s also what is such a value of a writer being on set and me being on set when Susanna’s on set or whatever, is that I know immediately when this isn’t our show, in the same way that I would know immediately if the milk has turned. You see something, you’re like, “No,” and I don’t have to explain that.

John: It’s a gut reaction. You just know it.

David: I will have to explain it often if I will have to tell a collaborator or have a conversation with an actor or get a light changed or something, but basically something is– and it is also understanding this is not an objective truth.

John: No.

David: I understand that someone else would sit and do their version of a thing and they would want the line delivered that way or they would want this shirt on or whatever, but for me, I know that it tastes wrong.

John: Yes.

Susanna: Yes.

John: The reason why we’re using this tongue sense is because it is like an inherent thing.

Susanna: It’s visceral.

John: It’s visceral. It is. It’s a feeling like, “Oh, that’s wrong.” The Henson Company, we always talk about something is muppety or it’s not muppety, and something can fit in that world or it can’t.

Susanna: It’s an essential thing about it. It’s interesting too, casting comes into play all the time, or I guess just I’m casting something right now. There’s a very specific part, and thinking about different actors playing that part, it’s like they just either essentially are that part or they’re not, no matter how good they are. I don’t know. I guess that diverges a little bit from just a conversation that’s strictly about taste, but it’s just me matching something to a specific image of it in my head, it either works or doesn’t work, and how much can an actor interpret a part and get to where I need them to get to or are they limited by something in their innate self that isn’t quite–

John: I look at some executives who’ve gone on to careers, like an executive who went to a big streamer, and his job is in a very specific division at that streamer, and it’s like, it’s not his taste. I know it’s not his taste. This is not what he’s called to do, but this is what he’s doing, and that just seems like a prison to me.

Susanna: I have so many meetings with people like that. They’re like, “Well, right now I’m working in–” eye roll, whatever.

John: It’s like, well, I don’t know how to help you here because clearly, how can you be giving good notes on these projects when it’s not a thing you like or enjoy? How am I supposed to take your notes seriously when it’s like, “Yes, you can tell me what the algorithm or what you think your bosses want, but you would never watch this movie.” I think I’ve tried to be more honest in my career over time. There’ve been projects I’ve pursued because, “Well, of course I should pursue that,” but then I was like, “It’s not really my taste. It’s not really a thing that I enjoy.”

David: It’s what’s complicated about criticism, and we can all agree that there are just some things that are just bad.

John: There are things that are bad because they’re bad executions of a bad idea.

David: Yes, I think we can agree, except for a few maybe weird tax dodge reasons. No one sets out to make something bad, but yes, there are some things that are– but then other things are just like, “That’s just not for me.” I think it’s a very internet-brained thing. I think it’s thinking that not for me means it is not for existence, and I think as I’ve gotten further away from the part of me that just wants to dismiss people who don’t have my taste, like the 20-year-old version of me, I love that things exist in the world that are not for me.

On your and other people’s recommendation, I watched the first episode of Heated Rivalry, and I was like, “I respect that show. I don’t think I’m going to keep watching that, but I think what a well-made version of a thing that is not a thing for me, and that’s fine.”

Susanna: I think that I really applaud any well-executed version of whatever the person set out to make. I’m a big fan of that, and I do appreciate it even in genres I wouldn’t gravitate towards.

John: Totally. Yes, like slasher horror is not my thing, but I can recognize like, “Oh, that’s a well-executed version of that thing.” We talked on the show some time ago about the syllabus, what movies and genres should you probably see just so you actually have an understanding of what they are? Because there may be things you just don’t know that you love because you’ve never seen them, and so I think you do need to have– part of acquiring a taste, and going back to the question here, it’s like, “You’re talking about old movies because you’re having bad taste.” Well, it’s great that you’re watching old movies, for starters, because-

Susanna: What’s this person watching?

John: -you’re getting a sense of how we got to this place right now in cinema. If there’s things you love, great. If there’s things you don’t love, also great, but try to figure out what it is about those things. We’re saying it’s a visceral reaction, a gut reaction, but there may also be some details there that would be helpful for you to understand, like why don’t I like this? That’s good.

David: This is related to it, but it is part of my moviegoing experience in the last several years, is rewatching movies I’ve loved and feel like I have enough distance from them that I’m now watching them as a new person. I had this experience with The Graduate, which was always one of my favorite movies, and it remains one of my favorite movies in the rewatch, but I connected to it in a completely different way.

As an adolescent, I related to Benjamin Braddock, and that was the prism I saw it through, and now I watch it, and I find him insufferable and think the movie is great, and the movie is commenting on that, and understanding that if, for whatever reason, at any different point in my life, I watched The Graduate and didn’t like it, that it is also just much more of a reflection of me than it is of the piece. I think we as individuals, not we in this room, because we’re all perfect, but other people have a really hard time differentiating something that just does not connect with the version of who they are at this moment and think that it is a flaw of the piece of art.

Susanna: Somebody was saying, I can’t remember who said this, but I agree, that when you watch Reality Bites as a teenage girl, which I did. Everybody loves Ethan Hawke, and then when you get older, you’re like, “That guy–“ If your friend is dating that guy, you’re like, “Don’t date that guy.” Ben Stiller has a good job. He has health insurance. That’s who you want to be with.

John: Oh, so good. Thank you for this discussion of taste.

David: Of course. Our pleasure.

Links:

• PONIES Trailer | On Peacock January 15th
• Susanna Fogel and David Iserson
• The last time Susanna and David were on the show (Episode 361)
• The Work of Art by Adam Moss
• So You Want to De-Bog Yourself by Adam Mastroianni
• Procreate emulators True Grit and Retro Supply Co.
• International Society of Character Artists’ character resolution 2026
• The Plague (2025)
• The Taste Gap by Ira Glass
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by 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.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

CRAIG MAZIN: My name’s Craig Mazin.

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

DREW: So far, so good.

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

DREW: Oh, my God.

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

CRAIG: We’ll rank them.

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

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

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

CRAIG: Now, we have 14 witches.

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

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

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

CRAIG: Why were you guys anti-family?

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

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: Oh my God.

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

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

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

CRAIG: Do not buy now. Buy never.

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

CRAIG: $249?

JOHN: That’s a lot of money.

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

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

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

JOHN: 50% off.

CRAIG: Yes. What does that cost?

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

CRAIG: There’s a free version.

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

CRAIG: Why? What? [chuckles]

JOHN: It’s so painful. Yes.

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: No, it’s not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: Indeed. Absolutely. Rise of Fascism and–

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: That’s called talent.

JOHN: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: I’m going to finish it.

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

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

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

CRAIG: No.

JOHN: Okay.

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

JOHN: Yes, just at the right distance.

CRAIG: Just at the right distance.

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

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

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

CRAIG: They’re getting there.

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

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

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

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

JOHN: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: I would go with A, also.

CRAIG: Hard recommend on A.

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

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

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

CRAIG: There’s a lot of them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: [chuckles] My nightmare.

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: Absolutely true. Absolutely true.

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

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

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

JOHN: Or I can Google them.

CRAIG: Oh, God.

JOHN: I Google them in the car.

CRAIG: Lady whose name I don’t know.

JOHN: No, like a producer of this thing.

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

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

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

JOHN: It was years ago.

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: There’s no easy way.

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

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

CRAIG: What’s wrong with you?

DREW: Because it was egregious.

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

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: Wait, 10 years ago?

JOHN: Maybe a little less.

CRAIG: How old are you? 12?

DREW: Yes. Yes, I was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: No. Steven’s great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: No.

CRAIG: I was confused. Go on.

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

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

CRAIG: At the Academy Museum.

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

CRAIG: Okay, fair.

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

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

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

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

JOHN: Please.

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

JOHN: He was the spirit of 1995.

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

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

CRAIG: Awesome.

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

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

JOHN: No.

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

JOHN: I’ve forgotten that, too.

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

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

CRAIG: Oh, no.

JOHN: Yes, I’m sure he’s delightful.

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

JOHN: I don’t remember either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: Palm pilots, somebody has a Newton.

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

CRAIG: Yes, I think that’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: How much heat is that thing putting off?

CRAIG: How many candles did they have?

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

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

JOHN: Candlestick maker.

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

JOHN: No, candlestick maker makes the candles.

CRAIG: No, the candlestick maker makes candlesticks.

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

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

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

DREW: A chandler.

CRAIG: A chandler.

JOHN: A chandler.

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

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

CRAIG: Chandler. Chandler Bing. He made candles.

JOHN: It was candles, yes.

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

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

CRAIG: Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: LOL.

CRAIG: Their hair.

JOHN: Haha.

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

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

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

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

JOHN: It’s probably really dark.

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: Of course, buried under a floorboard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: Nobody stank. It’s not notable.

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

JOHN: We’ve heard this on the podcast.

CRAIG: On my show-

JOHN: Doesn’t happen.

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

JOHN: Me?

CRAIG: Yes.

JOHN: All the time.

CRAIG: Oh, gross.

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

CRAIG: Sexy.

JOHN: Playing it against each other.

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

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

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

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

JOHN: But we can understand it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: It could be from anywhere.

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

CRAIG: Ish.

JOHN: Ish, yes.

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

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

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

JOHN: Dwarves are either Scottish or Irish.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: Dirt just stays hot?

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

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

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

CRAIG: How do you pump heat out of dirt?

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

CRAIG: Coils of water through it.

JOHN: Yes.

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

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

CRAIG: It’s dirt cheap.

JOHN: It’s literally dirt cheap.

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: That makes all sense.

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

CRAIG: Oh, that’s really interesting.

JOHN: Isn’t that so clever?

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

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

CRAIG: Spinning a little flywheel or something.

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

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

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

CRAIG: That’s a little explosive.

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

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

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

CRAIG: That’s explosive.

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

CRAIG: I love the idea of that wave motion.

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

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

JOHN: No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: I understand that tone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: We’re saying Amazon now.

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

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

CRAIG: It’s done by program.

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

CRAIG: I was shocked. Keep going.

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

CRAIG: I have a lovely glass here.

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

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

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

CRAIG: We call that S tier.

JOHN: S tier.

CRAIG: S tier.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: Witch, iconic. Iconic is the-

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

JOHN: No, that absolutely cannot be true.

CRAIG: I disagree with you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: Is she C or D?

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

JOHN: Cersei.

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: I don’t even know that book.

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

CRAIG: Exactly. She’s the orig.

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

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

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

CRAIG: Whoa. Hold on. You can’t.

JOHN: Wicked Witch. Oh, so we can’t?

CRAIG: No, no, no.

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

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: That is the witch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: I’m not in that generation.

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

CRAIG: I’m excited for the hate mail.

JOHN: Maleficent.

CRAIG: Oh, well.

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: C or D.

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

JOHN: Morgan le Fay.

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

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

CRAIG: Nickelodeon/Disney Teen Witches?

JOHN: Absolutely. A young TV show teen witch.

CRAIG: We might as well throw in Bewitched.

JOHN: Bewitched separately.

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

JOHN: They are a teenager plus.

CRAIG: Yes.

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

CRAIG: I love Bewitched.

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

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

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

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

JOHN: I think it’s fair.

CRAIG: I think she’s A.

JOHN: I think she did some good stuff here.

CRAIG: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: I’m going to say C.

JOHN: I think C feels fair for this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: We don’t have the witch.

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

JOHN: She lives in a candy house.

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: Wendy the Good Little Witch.

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

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

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

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

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

JOHN: She’s both.

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

JOHN: I know about it.

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

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

CRAIG: She petrifies.

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

CRAIG: Yes, and she’s Satan.

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

CRAIG: This is a huge blind spot for me.

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

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

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

CRAIG: I think so.

JOHN: You say–

CRAIG: The Weird Sisters from Macbeth.

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

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

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

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

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

CRAIG: Now the emails come.

JOHN: Now the emails come from our premium members.

CRAIG: Could you not mention the–

JOHN: Because we didn’t think about it.

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

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

CRAIG: On our program.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Okay, so. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 688 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome back a seven-time guest.

Craig: Oh.

John: He is a comedian, filmmaker, and podcaster whose new special, The Good Life, debuted this week on Netflix. It is the legendary Mike Birbiglia. Welcome back.

Mike Birbiglia: Hey, guys. This is my favorite podcast. I, on the flight here, listened to the Taffy Akner Moneyball episode. As a fan of the show, I request-

Craig: More?

Mike: -more breaking apart a movie.

John: Oh, yes. The Deep Dives? Yes.

Mike: Oh my gosh.

Craig: I think he’s right. I think he’s right. We don’t do it enough. I guess what we do do enough, or maybe too much of, is having Mike Birbiglia on the show.

John: No.

Craig: Seven-time host. We should give you the jacket, the robe that SNLers get.

Mike: The Seven Timers Club.

Craig: The Seven Timers Club.

John: Here are the episodes he was on. First was in 2013 for My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend Screenwriter. That’s way back to your first film. Then, Austin Forever in 2014. That was an Austin Live show, which I had forgotten that we actually– that’s where you first–

Mike: My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend Special. Then, what was it? We talked about Sleepwalk with Me, the movie? My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend wasn’t a movie.

John: It was number two. Yes, okay. That was a special, wasn’t it?

Mike: That was a special, yes.

John: That was a special, right. I think I first saw you– Joss Whedon interviewed you at the Writers Guild Theater for Sleepwalk With Me.

Mike: For Sleepwalk With Me. 2012. Woo.

John: 2014, Austin Forever. 2016, Don’t Think Twice. Your movie, which we all loved.

Mike: Thanks.

John: It was so early on the dissection of how comedy groups work and how improv works and all that stuff. It’s held up really well.

Mike: Oh, thanks.

John: We had you on in 2019 for The New One. We had you in 2020. You were part of a big episode with What We’re All Up To during the pandemic. We checked in with you there. I was a guest on your show, which we also aired on this very podcast. Your show called Working It Out, your podcast, is phenomenal. I recommend it to–

Craig: I have seen it. That’s the thing. That’s why I like the idea of maybe putting this on video because I like watching you-

Mike: Oh, wow. Thanks.

Craig: -more than I like listening to you.

Mike: That’s fascinating.

Craig: I actually turn the sound off.

Mike: Oh, you turn the sound off?

Craig: Yes. I just watch you.

Mike: I’m like a silent film podcast star to you?

Craig: I blow it up and I just look at you mouth. Yes, Sexy Craig likes your podcast.

Mike: Oh, I’m so glad that we’re recording this.

John: Recently on your podcast, you had Gary Simons, who works with you on that podcast.

Mike: Yes, true.

John: He’s also a stand-up comic. You were talking through the process. It was so good in terms of answering questions about what it’s like to get a career started as a stand-up comic in the way that I think we’re trying to answer those questions for aspiring screenwriters. It was just so, so smart.

Mike: Thanks a lot. It’s funny. There were two episodes back-to-back that were Scriptnotes-esque but in the comedy space. The Gary Simons episode, which we basically speak to what do you do in the first three to five years of trying to be a comic? Then the week before Ira Glass comes on and decides, “Hey, I want to try to do stand-up comedy.”

Craig: I was impressed by this. I really was.

Mike: It was like, “Well, what happens if you’re not a stand-up comic? You want to try it. I perform 10 minutes. What is your critique of these 10 minutes? It’s not unlike the three-page challenge.

John: What I’d like to do with you on the podcast today is talk about how you write a joke for the stage, for a sketch, or for a scene. We have some scenarios. It’s like how would this be a movie, but how would this be a joke? We have some scenarios we’re going to talk through and figure out what is the comedic premise for each of these types of writing and how different they are. A joke you tell on stage versus a sketch versus a scene, they’re really different needs even though they are all potentially finding comedy in a situation.

Mike: That’s great.

John: Cool. We’re also going to answer listener questions on breaking a story, using an idea, TV remakes. In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about video and social and all the infrastructure behind the scenes and stuff, because you and your team do an amazing job with video for your podcast, the marketing without making it feel like marketing. You must have email lists that are managed. I’d just love to know what all that’s like, because it’s just–

Craig: Because we want to beat you.

Mike: Sure.

Craig: Teach us your ways so that we may overcome you.

John: I just want to know more about that.

Mike: That seems great. I love that.

John: Cool. Drew, we have some news.

Drew Marquardt: We do. We realized that Spotify had comments on the podcast episodes.

Craig: Oh.

Mike: No idea.

Drew: So we turned them off. Oh, we have yours too.

John: The Spotify comments we were getting on Scriptnotes episode, and the reason we turned them off, they’re all about The Last of Us, Craig.

Mike: Oh my gosh.

Craig: Great. I’m sure the people that take time to leave comments on Spotify love the show and all the decisions we’ve made.

Drew: Very measured feedback.

John: Mike, yours are still on. You may not realize this, so we have a sampling of some of the comments on your Ira Glass episode.

Mike: Amazing.

John: Rory wrote in and said, “Maybe the best episode of the show feels like the core of what this podcast should be about.”

Mike: Oh, wow.

John: String of Numbers says, “Props to Ira for being open and vulnerable in his work. It was interesting to see Mike pointing out where the punchline should go and Ira being less sure how to approach that.”

Mike: Sure. All right.

John: Elise says, “Love this show but “Hiking is walking” is a joke made on Sex and the City-

Mike: Oh.

John: -by a character played by David Duchovny 20 years ago. It’s not original.”

Mike: Fair.

John: Then we also looked at the YouTube clip for that and it said, “You don’t know this, but in my brain, you’re my dad.”

Mike: Me or Ira?

John: Yes, to you.

Mike: All right.

Craig: You wanted it to be Ira, didn’t you?

[laughter]

Mike: He is in some ways, I said this on the episode. He in some ways feels like my dad.

Craig: He’s a very paternal.

John: He is, yes.

Craig: Yes, he gives that vibe.

John: Yes, but I think there’s a lot of dad energy in this podcast right now. We’re all very in that dad–

Craig: Even you. Even you, Drew.

John: Yes. He’s a young dad. Young dad. He has a young child.

Mike: Oh, you have a young child?

Drew: I don’t. No.

Mike: Okay. Perfect.

[laughter]

Craig: Because he seems so ambivalent about it?

Mike: Yes, exactly.

Craig: I know I have five kids, but I don’t know if I’m real.

John: Drew looks like he could be pushing a stroller, though.

Craig: Oh, for sure.

Drew: I’m going to take that as a compliment.

Craig: Drew, are we allowed to ask you how old you are by law?

Drew: I don’t think legally, no.

Craig: Okay. I’m not asking you. If you volunteer it, I’m just curious.

Drew: I’m 35.

Craig: I already had a five-year-old and a two-year-old by that point. I would say yes, he’s stroller age.

John: Final comment on your YouTube. Why do I just now realized Mike looks a lot like Matt Damon? Do you get the Matt Damon comparison?

Mike: Yes. Cross between Matt Damon and Bill O’Reilly.

Craig: Oh, wow.

John: Oh, wow. That’s it.

Craig: I would adjust that to just Bill O’Reilly.

John: Now, once it, you can’t unsee it. It’s crazy.

Craig: You are young, kind Bill O’Reilly.

Mike: Every time– so over the years, I get Paul Rudd. The one I got for years was James Van Der Beek.

John: [crosstalk]

Mike: When I was on Late Night with Seth Meyers once, and James Van Der Beek was there, I was like, “People tell me I look like you.” He was just like, “I don’t see it.” Anyway. Now I never say what people compare me [unintelligible 00:07:02]

Craig: The next time you’re on O’Reilly, you should bring it up.

Mike: Oh, God.

John: Where is O’Reilly now? Is it a podcast or is it a video? I don’t know. He’s not on a network anymore.

Mike: I think it’s probably some a self-release thing, right?

Craig: Podcast thing. From his bunker.

John: Yes, it’s wild. Mike, talk to us about this special. I saw versions of this along the way. I saw you had Mike Birbiglia and Friends, where you did some of the material in this. Then I saw the full thing on stage, and I saw it last night in its finished Netflix form. I think we’ve talked on previous episodes about your process, which we can see as a bunch of note cards up on a board.

Mike: Sure.

John: What was the inception of this, and when did you find the pieces fitting together?

Mike: The inception of it was two years ago when I finished The Old Man in the Pool, which was at Lincoln Center, and we filmed it for Netflix. I always talk on my podcast about this concept of obsession. What is the thing you’re obsessed about, can’t stop thinking about? As a writer, it’s like, “Well, just write that. Just free write on that. This Is My Journal, it’s like I’m free writing on that at breakfast this morning.

Two years ago, it was just like, “Oh, this is weird. My daughter is eight years old now, and I don’t know a lot of the answers to the questions, because kids just always ask so many questions. I was knocking it out of the park till age eight. Then all of a sudden, it’s like, “Oh, these are tricky questions.” I just went– my first thing is always like I go to the comedy cellar. I go to small 100, 200 seat comedy rooms, try out a ton of jokes. Those jokes eventually become stories. At a certain point, I start to form the stories into having, similar to how you guys talk about it all the time, of so-then causality versus and-then lateral movement story-wise.

About a year into the process, my dad had a stroke, and so much of my life became about taking care of my dad. I started to think in relation to, “Okay, what if the show was about how do I explain things to my daughter?” and also, “What is my relationship with my own dad?” It becomes this– the title is The Good Life, but it becomes a meditation on the question that my daughter asked me when she looked up at a smoke shop called, The Good Life, “Dad, what’s the good life?” It opens the special with an existential question, “What is the good life?” It makes the audience wonder that. Then I go through a lot of stories with my daughter and with my dad, and then it arrives at a thesis at the end of what is the good life.

John: Yes. Great. When you’re figuring out these pieces, one of these things you get to do as a stand-up comic is just constantly test the material and constantly see what actually resonates with the audience. When we’re writing scenes, we’re writing scenes but they just exist on a page. We don’t hear them. We don’t feel them. We don’t get a reaction. You’re constantly getting the reaction. What was the culling process like of like, “Oh, I think it’s this idea.” How developed are jokes you’re telling in those initial rooms?

Mike: The jokes at the beginning are– they’re developed insofar as I’ve run them by friends who are comics, usually. Our listenerships are similar in the sense of it’s a lot of creative people who are either working as creatives or want to work as creatives. I always say, try to build a community of the people around you. I look around at the people who I started with, and we were all broke and struggling in our 20s. I look around and go, “Oh, they’re doing really well now.” ‘You know what I mean? There is a thing to creating your own community of people who are at your level.

I feel like now it’s like people like Pete Holmes and John Mulaney are people who in my 20s were trying to figure it all out, and we would run jokes by each other. Now everyone has a really good career, but still you run jokes by each other. Then even, I think it was one of those Largo shows that you were at and Mulaney came on and he gave me a joke that ended up in the special. There’s a line where I go, “I’m a comedian. My wife is a poet. Together, we’re a sculptor.” I came off stage and he goes, “What about this?” He goes, “It doesn’t make sense, but what do you think of this?” I was like, “Yes, I’ll try that.” It somehow does make sense in the context of the special.

That’s what it is. It’s like, you start out with, you bounce jokes off friends, which is what my whole podcast is. Then when you figure out something that you think is worth an audience seeing, you put it out there. Then I go on tour, and that’s really instructive bringing it to all different cities because you see like, “Oh, yes, this isn’t just a provincial sense of humor in New York City. This is something that plays everywhere,” or it doesn’t play. I think a huge part of being a comedian is figuring out what doesn’t work.

Craig: Yes, I wish that we had that. Although I suppose what we do– we don’t quite have it on the granular level that you do because I don’t think any of our friends would just go, “Hey, here’s a scene.”

Mike: Yes, sure.

Craig: It starts on page 37. You don’t know what happened before. We will share scripts, and we will look at– maybe even it’s more common to happen deeper into the process where we’ll say, “Okay, here’s a cut of.” You, actually, you had that testing procedure for your movie-

Mike: Don’t Think Twice, yes.

Craig: -Don’t Think Twice, where you would have a reading and people would there and then discuss it, which was really smart.

John: It’s hard to iterate. Long form writing is just hard to iterate overall.

Craig: It is.

John: You can’t watch this whole thing. When I was doing Big Fish, the musical, we could iterate. Every night, we could see the show like, “Oh, this is what’s working. This is what’s not working.” I can swap out jokes. We could move whole scenes around. In film and TV writing, it’s not really possible.

Craig: Yes, it is a little scary to know that you’re chiseling in stone and then sending it out into the world. What I love about what you’re saying, it’s what– we talked about writers’ groups last week, I think. Part of me gets itchy when people write in and they’re like, “I’m part of a writer’s group,” because I think, “Well, what if all the writers in that group aren’t very good?” because the odds are they’re not.

Mike: Sure.

Craig: Then they’re all giving each other advice, and it’s maybe bad. Then I think, “Okay, if you do find yourself hitting a mark, getting a job, entering, to look around for people that are also like you, and what I think has changed, I don’t know if you agree with me, John, when we started in Hollywood, it felt like you were isolated and that, in fact, we were all meant to be in competition with each other. We were like horses in our stall before the gate opens.

I think as the internet brought everybody together, that went away completely and became more like, Okay, I’m going to pick up a phone, “Have you worked with this person?” or, “I have an idea. Do you think this is a good idea?” I love that you can do that with– does it ever hurt?

Mike: Which part of it?

Craig: When you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to try this show. Okay, Mulaney, I’m going to run this by you,” and he just stares at you and he’s like, “No.”

Mike: No, I don’t think that hurts. I don’t say– Look, I think not doing well with a joke with friends, it’s hard in that moment. Not doing well with a joke on stage is hard in that moment. I think you have to, like there’s an imperative to view it as I’m getting feedback for something that will be finished later. It’s like the wisest thing that almost anyone ever taught me is my editor, Jeffrey Richman, who edited this special, he edited both of my movies, he edited Severance, he did Escape at Dannemora, he does a lot of stuff with Ben Stiller. On both movies, I had moments in the edit where I go, “What are we going to do? This is a disaster.”

Craig: Oh, sure.

Mike: He just goes, “Oh, we’re not going to hand it in till it’s done.” It’s so simple of an idea, but I think that that’s– all artistic process, you just don’t hand it in till it’s done.

Craig: What I think people that work in comedy have, that people who have never worked in comedy don’t have, is this, which is, sometimes I describe it as a work ethic, but what I really think it is humility. Comedy humiliates you.

Mike: [laughs] Yes, sure.

Craig: Humiliates you. Then, as part of the process, you must get re-humiliated over and over and over-

Mike: That’s right.

Craig: -to the point where you don’t even see it as humiliation anymore. You see it as part of the process towards turning it in before it’s done.

Mike: That’s right.

Craig: A lot of people who come in drama have this opposite point of view. Their point of view is, “I need to treasure my instincts. That is my voice, and what I have done, therefore, is correct, regardless of what people think.” I think having a little bit of that isn’t such a bad idea, but I’m far more admiring of the humiliation sequence.

Mike: Liz Gilbert has this, who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, and many other great things, has this TED Talk that’s so good about the idea of not being a genius but having a genius, and holding it, and fostering it. That way it doesn’t become about you, or you, or you.

Craig: Oh, yes.

Mike: I think that that’s really key as a comedian. You can never think, “I am funny.” You have to think, “I want to create something that is funny for these people.”

Craig: That’s brilliant. I think that’s absolutely brilliant. Now, also, you probably need to then do the same thing for whatever the opposite of genius is, the self-loathing, the critic, I guess, which is sometimes hard for me. I should imagine like, “Okay, it’s easy for me to imagine there’s genius over there. That’s not me.” Now I have to figure out like, “Okay.” Also, there’s a critic over there not in here. That can be difficult. I like that.

John: I want to talk to you about how you bring yourself to your work. As writers, we’re always putting ourselves in our scripts and in our pages, but it’s all disguised. It’s never really exactly us. We’re never identifying like, “Oh, this is me doing this thing,” versus your stand-up, which is all about what has happened to you. All of your comedy is very centered on your experience of things that happened to you, and the people around you, which is a challenge because your wife, Jenny, your daughter, Una, they’ve been part of all of your specials. We know a lot about them even though we’ve never met them.

Mike: My parents, yes.

John: Your parents, especially in this one, and your dad, who’s unwillingly dragged into this story.

Mike: Oh, yeah. So you’ve been talking to him about it?

John: Oh, yes. Can you talk to me, as you’re developing this material and trying it on stage, how do you find the boundaries of like, “Well, this is me, Mike Birbiglia, as the individual person, versus me, the performer, who is creating this funny thing that’s not me”?

Mike: That is probably the most challenging part of it. I think that’s part of the reason why I’m going to take a few years off from autobiographical storytelling right now, because my daughter is 10, and she’s entering those years where I feel like you don’t want to make someone more self-conscious about all their stuff.

Craig: Yes, and you probably don’t want to be looking too closely at it either-

Mike: No.

Craig: -having gone through it twice.

Mike: Oh, yes.

Craig: It will be a great story for you 15 years from now.

Mike: Sure, yes. That’s what Jenny– My wife is a poet, brilliant poet, but she always says, whenever we’re going through something that’s really hard, she’s like, “Write it down. Just don’t release it now.”

Craig: I like how concise that is, have you ever checked to see if she’s constantly speaking to you in haiku and you just don’t remember?

[laughter]

John: It’s been a long constant this entire time. We’re going to wind back to the table, and I’ll think, “Oh, everything was a haiku.”

Craig: That would be the most brilliant thing ever.

Mike: She’s very wise and poetic person. Yes, that is hard. I’m pivoting over to the thing I’m writing right now. It’s fictional. I’m writing a movie and hopefully shoot next year, in the vein of Don’t Think Twice, a small-budget indie comedy. Yes, I’m going to take a few years off from it because I do think it’s hard. I’m talking about my dad. My dad’s in his final stage of life. He could go tomorrow. He could go in a year or two years, but it’s the final stage of life. It’s so hard. Yes, that side of it, I’m always juggling what am I saying and am I depicting the person well. Am I trying to find myself as the joke of the story-

John: Exactly.

Mike: -as opposed to just taking on people?

John: Absolutely. In this last special, you’re talking about how terrible nine-year-old girls are, which is just true, nine-year-olds are terrible. There’s a reason why you go to the jumpy gym where everyone’s going to get hurt because everybody gets hurt. All that stuff is very relatable, but none of it is directed. Your daughter comes out well in all of it.

Mike: True. I love my daughter, I hate her friends.

[laughter]

John: Yes, absolutely. A class of people is great, but the focus of the humiliation is always you. It’s your hard nipples.

John: That’s right.

Mike: It’s all-

Craig: I get that too.

[laughter]

Mike: The thing that’s funny about that, about the autobiographical side of that, is the hard nipple story is basically, I’ll paraphrase it for the audience, but it’s when I was 12, I had hard nipples. Sometimes something happens during puberty. I was always a hypochondriac, so I thought it was cancer. I went to my dad– he’s a doctor– and go, “Hey, Dad. I have hard nipples.”

John: On your special you say like, “Dad, I have cancer.”

Mike: I have cancer. He goes, “Why do you think that?” “I have hard nipples.”

Craig: I loved how calm he was. Why do you think that?

John: Exactly.

Mike: He’s a neurologist. No emotion.

[laughter]

Mike: I was like, “Well, see for yourself.” I take off my shirt. In the living room, he feels my hard nipples. Then he gives me the briefest medical diagnosis I’ve received to this very day. He goes, “Nope.” That was the end of the conversation.

[laughter]

Craig: What a comforting presence in your life.

Mike: Yes, exactly. This is a great example of when people ask me, “Are these stories true?” Sometimes they’re not true in small ways that you would never guess. When my dad felt my nipples, it was in his bedroom.

Craig: Oh.

Mike: I took it out.

Craig: Yes, that’s smart.

Mike: I relocated it to the living room because the audience–

Craig: You don’t want them going where you don’t want them going. You want them going there a tiny bit, which is, LOL, my dad’s feeling me up.

Mike: LOL, yes.

Craig: If he’s feeling me up in his bedroom, that’s not LOL.

John: What’s also crucial, though, is that you had already set up that your dad would come home from his two jobs and sit in his chair and read his war novels. You’re able pull it back to war novels. He sets down his war novel and puts his hands on your hard nipples.

Mike: That’s right.

John: You already created the image for us, which is why it’s so much better than what it is.

Craig: Apparently we have the same dad.

Mike: Yes, exactly.

Craig: I love dadness. I have to say it’s underappreciated in our society. We make fun of the fact that the dad comes home sits there and reads the war novel or watches the History Channel or plays a very long version of some World War II simulation with a friend. It’s wonderful. Let’s celebrate that.

Mike: Yes, sure.

Craig: Let’s celebrate that guy.

John: The last thing I want to talk to you about before we get to these “how would this be a jokes” is transitions. We talk on the show constantly about transitions and how you move from scene to scene. I’d seen your special on stage, but watching it filmed, I was very aware of when you’re transitioning from one idea to the next idea, from one tone to the next tone, from we’re in this world, now, we’re in this world. I’m sure it’s a thing that you worked out doing the show again and again live. You were able to pivot on such small spaces. Sometimes it’s a gesture, it’s a single word repeated, and pull us along to a completely new thing.

Mike: Sure.

John: Are you writing that? Are you thinking that or is just how it works on stage as you’re feeling it out?

Mike: I would describe that as the final stage of the development in a two-year process. It’s probably the final six months just figuring out how is this story, so then this story, so then this story, so then this story. My director, Seth Barrish, who also directed the special and– it’s a confusing title for people, but he is a dramaturgical person. He works through the script with me and the logic of the script. We’ll spend an extraordinary amount of time. He’ll go, “When you go to the hard nipples story, and then you go to but actually your dad wasn’t physically affectionate, but you are physically affectionate with your daughter. You hug her, you say, I love you. I don’t understand the connection between those two ideas.”

It’s almost like he’s making– what Seth is doing is he’s making his brain blank and — or attempting to — over and over and over again, making, trying to imagine what it would be like as someone who’s never seen the show, getting rid of the curse of knowledge. Getting rid of the curse of knowledge. We have these long, drawn out conversations. I’m sure you guys deal with this in television and films all the time, which is like, you’ll end up taking something that was 150 words, and then at the end of the edit, it’s four words. But those four words are the right four words.

Craig: Absolutely.

Mike: That’s a lot of what we do.

John: Last night, we were also talking about how a thing you do really well, which you see other comics do, but I was really struck by it last night, is we’re on one thread, and then you take a diversion, and we’re on another thread, which is really, really funny. Then you pull us back to the main thread, and we’d forgotten that we were on that thread, and yet we’re like, “Oh, yes.” You get a jolt of energy because you’re back on the main thread. You had forgotten that you’d taken a detour. It’s not a recall. We’re just rejoining the story that we were already on. It’s really well done.

Craig: You get to be a genius, because if you’re talking normally with people, you cannot maintain 12 spinning plates, including a hidden one up your sleeve, that you then go, ah-ha, and ah. You plan your own brilliance so that when you do come back around to things, it’s magician stuff. Right?

Mike: It’s a very strange art form, in the sense that, as a comedian, when you meet people, you are always a letdown because you look like that guy on stage, and your voice is the same as that guy on stage, but there’s less jokes, there’s less causality story to story. The transitions aren’t great.

Craig: No big surprises.

Mike: No big surprises.

Craig: No full circles.

Mike: Yes, nothing comes full circle.

John: No natural segues, no.

Craig: Just a lot of stammering, and then, and sweat.

Mike: Also, what I’ve noticed through the years is, I think comedians are people who are frustrated at parties because when we perform, people laugh or don’t laugh. They don’t interject. They don’t go, “Let me tell you about my sleepwalking story.” ‘You know what I mean?

Craig: “No, no. Sir, sit down.” Heckler.

Mike: This is the best one-

Craig: Yes?

Mike: “I’ve got the best sleepwalking story here. Everyone shut up.”

Craig: You do. You should just bring somebody with you to parties, who can tell other people to shut up.

Mike: Yes, can you imagine if comedians showed up at parties, and we’re like, “All right, everyone step aside.”

John: Yes, we do.

Craig: Yes, all of your stupid stories, wrap them up.

Mike: With your banter.

Craig: We’ve got a good one that’s crowd tested. Yes, that must be really frustrating. That’s like being, I don’t know, you play in the symphony, and then you go to somebody’s backyard where everyone’s like, “Oh, we’re going to do a quick jam. What do you play? Violin?” “Yes.” The guy banging the pot lid is really loud and–

Mike: You guys must have that, though, with movies, because people– everyone has a take on movies and television. Then you come in, and you’re like, “Okay, here’s my take, and mine’s right.”

John: Yes, but also, the movie is not happening in front of you. No one’s expecting, “Craig, make a movie right now.” There’s not that performance.

Craig: If it were that.

Mike: Yes, it’s–

Craig: If it were a party where the idea was to write a short scene, then I suppose that would be really frustrating.

John: Yes, I suppose, beautiful people who are photographed, they’re still beautiful in real life, but they’re not as attractive, they look immortal.

Craig: The wind machine is on and so forth?

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, but you’re absolutely– you guys are in the worst spot. Congratulations.

Mike: Thank you so much.

[laughter]

John: Let’s take a look at writing some jokes. We have three different stories that I’ve pulled from recent news things. We’re going to start with the Run Club Haters. This is a story in Curved Magazine, a New York magazine, by Melissa Dahl. Drew, can you give us a short summary of the lead here for this story?

Drew: One Saturday morning in April, Amy was running along Kent Avenue in Brooklyn, one of her usual routes. It was a sunny spring day. The sidewalk was crowded with runners, some running alone like her, and others in big groups. At some point, she realized one of those big groups was headed straight towards her. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Amy, who’s 31 and has been running in New York since 2015.

It was, in her memory, a group of young women running five to eight abreast. They were completely across the sidewalk, she recalls. This is the most runners she’s ever seen taking up a path, but she’s gone head to head with run clubs before.

Usually she moves aside, even if it means briefly stepping into the street or a bike lane. This time, she wanted to test something. She didn’t change course, and neither did they. It was something of a game of runner’s chicken, which ended when Amy ran straight through the pack, colliding with one of the women. “Neither of us fell, but I think she was definitely shook,” Amy says. The woman started apologizing, but Amy didn’t stick around to.”

John: This article goes on to talk with organizers of run clubs, including some who accidentally started a run club because they just posted on Instagram, “Oh, I’m going for a run if anyone wants to join?” and then 100 people show up. They’re also talking about parks that are now requiring permits, costing $1,000 for people to do this. This is as a story space, and I was wondering, let’s first start talking about, where are the jokes? Where’s the comedy we could find in this-

Mike: If we were Amy.

John: -if we were Amy or if we were anywhere–

Craig: I don’t want to be Amy.

John: If we were anywhere–

Craig: I don’t want to be in the run club.

John: We could be any of the characters in the story, but if this is something that happened to us or around us, where are some of the jokes? Where are the comedic premises there?

Mike: I think, first of all, you’d have to be Amy in the story. If you’re one of the big group of bird people who essentially wallop someone in the street, that’s not going to be very relatable, but we’ve all been the Amy of the story, which is– I would say, if this were my story, if this were something that happened to me, it would be talking about the observation in general of when people take up the whole sidewalk. You can bring up different examples.

One of my examples that drives me nuts is people with dogs where they’re on one side of the sidewalk, the leash goes across. It’s essentially a trip wire created by them and their evil dog, and they don’t act like they’re taking up the whole curb. I would go into observational things about that, and then I would go into, how do you feel about walking? Are you afraid of walking? How do you feel about walking in the city?

Ira Glass, in some ways, taught me how to tell these types of 7 to 10-minute stories. He always thinks of it in terms of a story, non-comedically, is a little bit of plot, how do you feel about the plot, a little bit more plot, how do you feel about the plot? In my case, as a comedian, it’s a little bit of plot, some jokes about the plot. A little bit of plot, the jokes about the plot. In order for us to care about Amy’s story, or “my story” walking down the street and running into a herd of runners, is you have to know that pushes my buttons as a character. Right?

Craig: Not enough to know that anybody would feel particularly annoyed. You really feel.

Mike: That’s right.

Craig: If this were in a very broad movie, there’s the classic escalation technique. It begins with, I’m running, and there’s one guy just staggering, “I got to go run.” All right, and then there’s the guy with the dog, and then there’s two runners, and then there’s just a wall of runners, and then there’s a Zamboni.

Mike: Yes, that’s right.

Craig: You just keep– it just gets stupider and stupider if it’s–

Mike: That’s straight from Naked Gun.

Craig: That’s Naked Gun. I do think there could be a sketch version where you are part of the run-

Mike: Oh, the runners group? Yes.

Craig: -where the run club is the most heinous, horrible group of people. It’s not just runners, it’s people in stretchers, and it’s– I could see that.

John: It’s taking me back to– on safari and you’ll see a bunch of animals stampede, and it’s like, “Oh shit.” One runner by themselves is not threatening at all, but you see a pack moving towards you, they just– all of your instincts kick in. It’s like, “Oh, this is a dangerous situation.” I also want to get back to what you talked about, humiliation and Amy being humiliated or being the source of– the problem is her is also, I think, really important too. What is it about me that I decided like, “Today, I’m going to be the person, I’m not going to move.”

Craig: Today I decided is really good. Maybe the setup is like every day I see the run club, I turn around and flee. Today I’m not going to because a friend told me to stick up for myself and my therapist. I’m going to hold my head high, and I’m not going to move, and she’s killed. That’s all, they kill her, which is a really good lesson.

Mike: I have an analogous story years ago that I do as stand-up sometimes that’s never found its way into the special. It’s a similar city scenario, which is years ago, I’m rushing down subway steps at the West Forest stop. One of the jokes I make is, I’m always in a rush, I have nowhere to be. I’ve never had anywhere to be. I’m always in a rush. I trip on my lace. My dad taught me how to tie my shoes when I was a kid– he was never around. As I’m not good at it, and so I trip fourth step from the bottom, fly in the air, I land on the ball of my shoulder.

Craig: Argh.

Mike: I know. I often tell people growing up, I know. I was that guy writhing on the floor.

Craig: Dirty subway floor.

Mike: Dirty subway floor. People blowing past me-

John: Of course.

Mike: -just like, “Are you okay?” “No.” “Good,” or “Yes, good,” and then they’re gone. Then, what I sometimes say– nobody’s like, “Oh– “ “If you’re laughing, you’ve been one of these pigs. I want you pigs to know, we’re not fooled by your faux generosity.” It is a similar scenario where, essentially what you’re trying to explain is what your point of view is, what your status quo is. It’s not dissimilar to movie writing. Then what happens, and then what happens because of that.

John: Because of that, there’s a chain of events, there’s a causality like this was not the end of the story. It’s moving to the next thing.

Let’s try our next thing. This is a story from Slate’s Care and Feeding. The advice is from Michelle Herman, but the letter writer is anonymous. Drew, help us out.

Drew: My mother and father divorced more than 10 years ago when I was in eighth grade, after my mother learned my dad was cheating on her. Once my parents split, my father married his affair partner, Ruth, and moved out of state. They ended up having two kids who are now eight and five. After my dad moved out of the house, he never paid a penny in child support, and I didn’t hear a word from him again, until now.

My dad told me that my five-year-old half-sister, Amelia, was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. Her medical team wanted her to undergo a bone marrow transplant, but neither he, his wife, nor my half-brother was a match. He asked if I would be willing to undergo a screening to see if I am. Long story short, I am.

I find myself utterly conflicted. This man, who was supposed to be my dad, to love and provide for me, shattered my family with his selfishness. He abandoned me for the woman he cheated on my mother with. He wasn’t there to teach me to drive or to see me graduate from high school or college.

While I spent a decade dealing with the pain and rage his walking out on me caused, he started a new family and forgot I existed. Had his daughter not needed a donor, I doubt I would have ever heard from him again. Here he is, crawling to me, hat in hand. Part of me wants to tell him and his wife to leave me alone and never contact me again. I’ve never met my half-sister. I feel no connection to her. But then, there’s this stupid part of me that says that my father and Ruth were the ones who hurt me and that Amelia is innocent. That denying her a potentially life-saving treatment as a means of taking revenge against her parents would be wrong.”

Craig: That’s the stupid part? Okay. Because this guy cheated on my mom and left and didn’t pay child support, I now have a golden opportunity to murder a little girl.

John: Oh my God.

[laughter]

Craig: It was pretty awesome, actually. I also like that she said “affair partner,” by the way. There’s a whole side bit on that, like partner, the way that partners become a thing. In our society, it was just husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, and now everyone says partner. I never know if people are gay or not. I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know if they’re working together or romantic.

Mike: It’s a startup?

Craig: Affair partner.

Mike: It’s an app they’re working on.

Craig: Yes, exactly. An affair partner is incredible. That’s like granting status like cheating– Anyway.

John: There’s lots of things to unpack and potential comedic things to hold on to, even though this is not obviously comedic. There’s some good stuff here.

Her rage to this disappearing dad, that conflict and that my expectation of what this man is versus the reality is great comedic fodder. Obviously, her relationship to whatever this donor, her half-sister is fascinating. The space of bone marrow donations and would you help out a stranger? The trolley problem of it all is also fascinating. Mike, what’s your way in?

Mike: Yes, I think the way in, with anything that dramatic, I always say to people like, “You need to find one joke that works because the one joke that works indicates to the audience, ‘We’re all okay laughing about this.’” The way that Drew read it, and it was beautiful, was a little bit like a eulogy where it’s a sad story. That’s a tough story. If you just told it like Drew told it on stage in the first person, people would not know to laugh. They would go, “Well, what’s the funny part?”

I just think you need to find a joke. It’s like I have a joke in my special where I go, “My dad was a doctor and in his free time, he got his law degree. That’s how much he didn’t want to be a dad.” The audience knows that my point of view is I’m over that part of it. I’m okay with that part of it.

I had bladder cancer when I was 20 and the first joke I figured out was like, I had bladder cancer, but it’s funny because I’m a hypochondriac. I think the funniest thing that can happen to a hypochondriac is you get cancer because it affirms every fear you’ve ever had. “See, I told you. Remember last week when I thought I had rickets? I was probably right about that too. There’s going to be a lot of changes around here.”

Craig: “When I showed you my nipples–“

Mike: Exactly, yes. If someone wanted to do a comedy bit of this, it’s like, “Well, where is the first joke that indicates that this is okay?” That joke has to be really good. Probably nothing I could come up with now, but it’s like, “My dad wasn’t around as a kid, and then he called me because he wanted my bones.” Just something where just you break open how outrageous the scenario is, and then it turns on itself. I think you can do like, “My dad wasn’t around, and then he wanted my bones,” and then try to come up with a joke around that and then say, “But actually, I’m torn on it because this girl deserves this, and she needs this, and I could help.”

I think with a story that inherently has such high stakes, you have the ability to both have jokes and have dramatic moments. In The Good Life, there’s four or five times where it goes to a dramatic moment just because the audience– a lot of it is, the audience doesn’t see it coming at a comedy show. In some ways, it’s the ultimate surprise. I think the back and forth of jokes in comedy, I think jokes and dramas, it is the potential there.

Craig: You could also– I could see occupying a character and the character is a woe-is-me character, who’s like, “Anyway, my dad left, and cheated on my mom, and then married this other lady. They had a great family that was incredible. He never talked to me ever until his daughter was sick and he came for my bone marrow and I thought, ‘He loves me.’”

[laughter]

Mike: That’s good.

Craig: It depends, like occupying– I do enjoy comedians who occupy characters.

Mike: I love that.

Craig: I love that weird space. It’s always interesting meeting them afterwards and going– like Natasha Leggero occupies a character. Then you talk to Natasha offstage and you’re like, “You are the opposite of that person.” It is–

Mike: Then you can heighten that and be like, “Then he asked to borrow $75,000 and I was like, ‘Maybe this isn’t love.”

Craig: “Wait a second. As the marrow’s leaving me, I thought, ‘Wait. Wait.’”

[laughter]

John: Let’s talk about this as a scene. I would say it could be a movie, which is a whole dynamic, but you could also imagine a scene where you’re talking to this girl at a party and it gets to the point where it’s like, “So now I don’t even know if I should donate marrow to this kid.” It’s like, “What are you talking about? You are going to kill a small child.” There’s that, it’s a good build up for like, what kind of monster are you?

Craig: Or you’re like– Obviously, you all know where this went, I didn’t do it.

[laughter]

Mike: Right, exactly.

Craig: She’s been dead like, I don’t know, three or four years now.

John: Oh God. Oh my God.

Craig: I got to go tell you, it feels great. They tell you it won’t, but it does. Revenge is awesome.

John: Yes.

Craig: Got ya.

Mike: A lot of that is– Those are like three different POV takes on the same–

Craig: With different tones.

Mike: Yes, a lot of it’s persona. Anthony Jeselnik gets away with a different type of joke than I get away with.

Craig: I wish we could send him that. Oh my God, Anthony Jeselnik. Can I just–?

John: Again, occupying a character’s place. [unintelligible 00:40:43] area.

Craig: Completely, but I just want to salute–

John: Oh, I assume that. He’s not actually like that, is he?

Craig: Oh God, I hope not.

Mike: Not that I know of.

Craig: Yes, no, that would be insane.

Mike: I’ve never had an interaction with him like that.

Craig: The mathematical precision. He’s the closest thing that comedy has to Agatha Christie. You know there’s going to be a twist and you’re trying to figure it out-

Mike: Yes, that’s right.

Craig: -and you can’t. It just happens over and over and over and over.

Mike: That’s right. Yes, that’s right.

Craig: He’s just, the craft there is pretty remarkable.

John: Great. This last one, we don’t have that part to read, but this is a New York Times article by Heather Knight and Loren Elliott, with great photos and video by Elliott. It’s about the coyotes of San Francisco. Basically, there were no coyotes in San Francisco, but 10 years or so ago, they started coming back in, and now there are more than 100 coyotes in San Francisco, and they’re letting them be, largely.

One case, they were going after a young child and they went after that coyote. Basically, they do keep down rodent populations and other things, so there’s a reason to be there. It’s just so jarring to have coyotes in the city that never had them.

Mike: Wow.

John: Coyotes are cool. Obviously, in Los Angeles, we’re used to coyotes in our neighborhood. We have coyotes all the time. The comedic space of predators in an urban environment and like how a person interacts with them, what the moment is.

Craig: This is in San Francisco?

John: In San Francisco. Hacks this last season has a coyote episode where Jean Smart’s character is hearing the coyotes howl all the time. She’s putting out bear urine to scare them away. She has a showdown with a coyote at the end. Let’s talk about what can we imagine the comedic premises are for talking about coyotes on stage? What are the handles for that?

Mike: For me, it would have to be story-based interacting with a coyote. I’m trying to think if I have– Do you guys have any good animal stories of interacting with animals?

Craig: My mind goes to just right off the bat, but what is–? Isn’t a coyote just an asshole dog?

John: Yes. [crosstalk]

Craig: Why have we put it in this special category? It’s just, I’ve looked at them. They’re hungry dogs. That’s all they are.

John: It’s a sense of like, what’s a dog off leash though. We have a sense of like, “Oh, dogs are wonderful,” but when you see in a dog in a place you don’t expect to see a dog or a dog who doesn’t seem to have an owner, that’s–

Craig: You call it a coyote. Right. They’re like the hobos of dogs.

John: I was just in Egypt, and Egypt is just like, there’s just dogs everywhere. There’s street dogs.

Mike: That’s right.

John: I was like, “Oh, wait, why don’t dogs get hit?” Mike pointed out like, “Oh, we’re seeing that’s the logical fallacy. Basically, we’re seeing the dogs that survived and–

Craig: You see the dogs that aren’t hit.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes. Coyotes in San Francisco probably, I think the hacky version would just be to start making fun of San Francisco. It’s like, “Oh, now the coyotes keep moving into our neighborhood and the rents are going up.” I wonder where [unintelligible 00:43:29] Coyotes don’t seem funny to me.

Mike: I feel like I would break it–

John: Come on, Wile E. Coyote is an incredible character.

Mike: [laughs]

Craig: The thing is, Wile E. Coyote is, we’re laughing at him, I suppose, but he’s not doing anything irregular. I’ve never seen a coyote use an Acme product.

Mike: If I were going to go into animals, which I ever, if I ever did, it would be the inherent contradiction. So much of comedy is about inherent contradiction. The contradiction is similar to what you’re saying, it’s like, we eat animals, we own animals. We shoo away animals. How are we deciding? Yes.
Who made up the rules on this?

Craig: I think Gaffigan’s got–

Mike: Oh, did he have–? [crosstalk]

Craig: He’s got a pretty good one of like, we eat the animals that aren’t cute.

Mike: That’s right. That’s right. Contradictions would be the thing that would go down, and also the personal story, but I always tell people, one of the probably the smartest things I did artistically was like 25 years ago, I had been doing set up punchline, set up punchline, set up punchline based on things in the news, things happening around town. Then, at a certain point, I was like, “If I wrote about my own experiences, then no one can steal that idea.” Really, no one has that idea. No one’s lived that.

The first thing this makes me think of is like, there’s animals in the walls of my apartment that just run over us. Sometimes Jen will just be like, “Mo,” she calls me Mo. She goes, “Mo, what are we going to do about the animals?” I’m like, “I don’t think you know who you married. I don’t really know. I have no plan for the animals in the ceiling, and I’m not going to have one.” You know what I mean?

Craig: Right, and, “You know that about me.”

Mike: Yes. I don’t know. I do think like finding the what’s your story, the thing about standup comedy and in relation to storytelling, is that the more you have examples of things of your experience of dealing with something, the more people can see themselves in the story. They’re not judging it as, “Oh, this is another guy or lady with a hard take on coyotes,” or this or that or whatever.

I always just try and think, “What’s the personal way in? What’s the personal way in?” Because ultimately, you actually, by telling stories are exhibiting a point of view. Because it’s in the form of a story, the audience isn’t as suspicious of the point of view.

Craig: Yes. Also to give you credit, it’s not a persona. This is actually you. You’re incredibly likable. You’re incredibly likable in no small part because you’re not afraid to be vulnerable. A lot of comedians, their persona is, “I figured it all out. I figured it all out. Let me explain the world to you idiots.” Right? Your persona and your personality is I haven’t– I’m on a journey. I often don’t know what to do. I’m scared a lot. I’m confused. Everyone’s like, “Okay, I’m with you now on this.”

Mike: It’s so funny you should say that because the other day, I did an interview for Time Magazine and she goes– The reporter was great. She goes– It’s a funny question. She goes, “What’s your appeal?”

[Laughter]

John: I love that. That’s so good.

Mike: I’ve never been asked that, “What’s your appeal?”

Craig: Oh my God.

Mike: It forced me to look inward.

Craig: Oh my God.

Mike: She goes, the appeal of Jim Gaffigan is that he’s clean and he’s relatable. The appeal of this person is that she’d go there. I go, “Huh.” It’s so funny what I–

John: It’s amazing.

Mike: What reminded me of it is that my answer is similar to Craig’s.

Craig: There you go.

Mike: If I really had to think about it, I think people think they’re on the journey with me because I’m cataloging these eras of my life as honestly as I can. The audience, I think, trusts that I’m trying my best. I think the people who like me are trying their best. It’s weird to say that that’s my “appeal”, but I think it is probably close to that.

Craig: When she asked the question, was it–? There’s two different meanings to that question. One is, “I’m curious, what do you think your appeal is?” The other one is, “What is your appeal?”

John: Yes, there’s two different reads of that.

Craig: “I’m just so confused why anyone likes you. Can you explain why people like you?”

Mike: It was generous though. I think she’s a good writer. We’ll see how the article comes out.

John: It’s reminding me of when we were doing Big Fish on Broadway, after the Wednesday matinees, sometimes we would do talk-backs, where people could stay in the audience and talk back. It’s always really old people who stick around, who’d go to the Wednesday matinees in the first place.

It’s me and several of the actors at the front of the stage talking to people who stuck around. This one old woman, she asked me a question, she’s like, “Why are you so confident?” I’m like–

Mike: Oh my gosh. Why are you so confident?

John: Yes, and it’s just–

Mike: Wow.

John: It was actually just.

Craig: What a confident-shaking question.

John: Yes, and it sort of put me on my heels, like, “I guess I am con–“ I had to sort of do introspection, like, “I guess I am confident, but why am I confident?” Like, “Who is this person who is speaking right now who is confident doing this thing?” It was a while. It really did shake me a bit.

Craig: Yes, of course. It’s a rattling question. “Why are you so confident?” It’s suspicious.

John: Yes, it’s a challenge to it.

Craig: Yes.

Mike: I think to go back to this point of view and comedy concept, it was like, why is Jeselnik Jeselnik, and me me, and Gaffigan Gaffigan? Is a majority of what you do if you’re trying to be a comedian is you try to figure out who you are on stage in relation to the audience.

Craig: What’s your appeal?

Mike: Yes, it’s what’s your appeal?

Craig: What’s your appeal?

Mike: It’s like, “Oh,” and it takes years. Sometimes it takes a decade or more.

Craig: It is interesting seeing comedians early in their careers as opposed to where they end up. Sometimes it’s sort of unrecognizable.

Mike: Absolutely.

Craig: It is a fascinating thing to watch them evolve into the groove. Sometimes I think like, “Oh, do people get trapped? Because they get very successful, and then suddenly, that fake accent and get ‘er done thing that you’re doing, you can’t stop doing it.

Mike: Are you speaking of someone specifically?

Craig: No.

Mike: Just in general?

Craig: No, just in general, like–

[laughter]

Mike: Hypothetically, if someone was like, said a joke and they’re like, “Get ‘er done,”-

Craig: That would be like–

Mike: -that would be a thing that you’re leaning on a crutch.

Craig: They were like had a job that isn’t really a job anymore, like a cable guy, [crosstalk] or a plumber, or whatever.

Mike: Yes, exactly.

Craig: Yes, like what do you do then, because you’re stuck making all that money?

Mike: What if you never were a cable guy?

Craig: Or had that accent.

[laughter]

John: So good. [crosstalk]

Craig: Then, what do you do? Then what do you do?

John: A crisis of inauthenticity.

Mike: This is like a three-page challenge of personas.

John: What if Mike Birbiglia had a heel turn, where I actually just like, it goes off for a little while, then it comes back, and it’s just like this shock comic, this– I would love to see it.

Mike: It’s funny–

Craig: “Hickory dickory dock.”

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Mike: No, I do think that there is a version of the next few years, where I’m leaning a little bit away from personal stuff, where I do something that takes on the religion, politics, world events, but in an evergreen way. I think what drives me crazy about topical comedy is that you just go, “Okay, this isn’t relevant today, even. It was relevant 24 hours ago,” but I would like to see something that has a wide-spanning, like the last 20 years of living in America.

Craig: It sounds like something that O’Reilly would do.

[laughter]

Mike: Yes, a cross between Matt Damon and Bill O’Reilly would do.

John: As we wrap up our discussion of coyotes, I do want to share one photo, which I think is a great comedic premise. This little white dog is wearing, it’s called a coyote coat, and it’s basically, it looks like a life jacket, but it has all these little plastic spikes on it, so that a coyote can’t bite it and carry it off into the woods. I can just imagine like having to buy the coyote coat for my dog, or just like my dog having to wear the coyote coat. It’s like you’re in a war zone now.

Craig: I think that is, some people might think that that disrupts the Darwinian process, but I think that it is an example of the Darwinian process. You become so cute that a larger, stronger animal dresses you in special things so that you aren’t devoured. It’s a strategy.

John: It’s a strategy.

Craig: That’s a strategy.

John: Yes. Let’s tackle some listener questions. We have one here from Chris.

Drew: Let’s say I heard an idea for a short film expressed on a podcast by a working actor, writer, comedian,-

John: Mike Birbiglia.

Drew: -and wanted to make that film, but was not able to make contact with said person to ask permission. Could that film still be made and shown publicly? Is there credit to be attributed? What if there’s a line spoken by an actor that is nearly identical to what was expressed in the podcast? In this case, this would be 60-second film for social media, just for context.” I can already hear Craig saying you can’t copyright an idea, but maybe the person or podcast details are important.

Craig: Yes, I will say you can’t copyright an idea, but that doesn’t mean you should be doing this.

John: It also feels like stealing a joke. It feels like–

Craig: There’s legal lines and there are moral lines. Legally, could you get away with it? Always remember, legally getting away with it means you were sued, spent money to defend yourself, and won, which is not ideal. In this case also, it’s just, yes, come up with your own idea. That’s my feeling, is if that person wanted to do a 60-second short bit about that, they would. It’s a little odd. I don’t think I would recommend that.

John: The fact that you’re doing this on a podcast with a working actor, writer, comedian, it’s their thing, they may actually do a thing with. If you heard it in a conversation or your brother said something, it’s a different kind of thing. You could also just ask their permission.

Mike: I also think, yes, building on what you were both saying, is as creatives, if you’re pursuing a creative profession, it is so oversaturated. There are so many things being made simultaneously. I actually think the only chance any of us stand is to have our work be so much ours and not something that’s already filmed, recorded, and out there in the universe that you’re actually– It’s a weird case against the argument. The idea is that it’s out there. Even if it’s not a short film already, someone said it, so it’s a little bit less original than you’d want it to be.

John: Going back to what we were just saying about hiking is just walking, that idea, what’s out there, is it’s not an original idea, and so great, do something else that is specifically to you.

Mike: 100%, and by the way, to speak to that person’s note, that’s an oddly helpful piece of feedback, is like, once that person says, “Hey, that’s out there in blah-blah-blah way,” sometimes people, along the tour for two years, people will say to me, “Hey, this line you have is similar to this comic’s thing you have.” Often, I’ll go and I’ll dig it up and I’ll try to find it, and then you have to make a judgment call. Is it too similar? If it is, can I write it in a different direction?

I had one a few specials ago where someone, when it came out as a special, was like, “That’s my joke,” and I was like, “I don’t know what to tell you, I never saw your joke, and it’s filmed right now, so I don’t– It’s parallel thinking, and I feel bad that that’s the case, but there’s nothing I can do.” It’s definitely best efforts to not do that.

John: Dylan in Little Rock has a question.

Drew: “I’m feeling myself getting a little bit paralyzed. I’m feeling that I need to start writing in order to feel accomplished and hold onto some momentum, but I’m not feeling that I have really broken the story in a satisfactory way, and I don’t feel that I know the characters as well as I could or maybe should. I’ve considered that the process of writing may help me to come up with new ideas and fill in some of the gaps, but when do you consider a story broken? How do you know when your characters are developed enough and how much character development work do you do before you write?”

John: Yes, so breaking a story means different things in different contexts. In a TV writer’s room, you break a story, you’re figuring out all the beats on a big whiteboard, you’re doing that stuff. The process of writing a feature film, it could be more experimental and you’re sort of putting things together as you’re doing them. I often won’t have the full thing broken as I start. I’ll just feel it out along my way. There’s probably not a perfect answer for this. You’re writing something right now, is what you’re writing broken? Do you know what all the beats are?

Mike: It’s so funny. Whenever people say this term, breaking a story, I’m always like, it’s not my process. Mine is, I have an idea for a story, I write it out in an outline. At a certain point, I take it as script. At a certain point, this is where I am right now, I take it back to outline because I’m trying to isolate all the individual character arcs, and I can’t do it in a script form. That’s literally what I am right now. My brain can’t do it.

How do you guys deal with that, actually? That’s a question from me to you. How do you deal with managing, like in the case of my movie, it’s like, there’s eight characters. It’s akin to a movie like Four Weddings and a Funeral where not everybody has to have a meaningful arc, but unless they have like a little miniature arc, I do feel like there’s some threads that are unfinished.

Craig: I think I probably wouldn’t start writing until I understood all of that.

Mike: All of it.

Craig: Yes, but that’s me. I think your process clearly works for you, and it’s perfectly fine. Anyone’s process is fine if the outcome is good. I think breaking the story is actually, I agree with you, it’s not a useful term. It comes really from writer’s rooms, from 14 writers eating Mendocino Farms and hashing out, “Okay, this episode, this happens. What’s the A story? What’s the B story? What’s the C story?” It is procedurals, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: There isn’t a mechanism to it, which is important for that process. For a movie, I never use the phrase, “breaking the story” for a movie. Really, I would say, outline. I start with a very broad outline. Who’s the main character? What is the thing that needs to happen at the end? What would be an interesting beginning for that? What is the premise of this thing, and what’s the journey?

Mike: I think one of the best things you can have in terms of breaking a story or to use that term is like figuring out, can I pitch this in 25 words or 50 words? And is that compelling? If I told this to a friend and I said it in the first person, are they interested? I think that if they’re not interested is when you start to go, “Okay, let me figure out where I’m losing their interest.”

John: Yes, I just pitched a project yesterday, and in the early conversations with people, it wasn’t fully broken. I sort of knew what the beats were, but by the time where I was actually pitching it to a buyer, it really had all the beats. You could feel what the entire movie was and that’s, I guess, what I would consider broken. It’s like you really can have a sense of what all the sequences of the story were going to be.

Mike: It’s funny, you hear terms like breaking story or industry terms, and in so many ways, the work I enjoy most is people trying to reinvent what their artistic process is. If you look at Last of Us, for example, I think my favorite thing about it is it’s not like other television shows. That it is, in some ways, weirdly, doesn’t resemble a TV show. That it feels like life, it feels like we are in this apocalyptic scenario and oh my God, what is that? What would I do? What’s she going to do?

Craig: Oh, it’s definitely not like other shows.

[laughter]

Mike: Don’t you think that’s part of it is like making things that don’t feel like other things?

Craig: Yes, I do think so. I think that’s become more and more important because there are 14 million television shows. The trick is to find a way to both be different and also compelling. It is very easy to be different and bad because a lot of difference were considered by our forebears and tossed aside because they were bad. I would say to Dylan, you need to slow down a little bit and ask yourself if maybe the story that you’ve come up with, any of the things that you think of as fixed in position should be fixed in position.

Sometimes we get stuck. We build a column and a load-bearing wall, and then we’re like, “I can’t fit the rooms I want around this.” Maybe the problem is the column and the load-bearing wall. Those things that we think of as immovable, maybe start moving them.

Mike: I also think you look at things that we admire, I was saying like Last of Us, another one would be like the films of David Lynch. It’s like if you try to put Mulholland Drive into the story-

John: No.

Mike: -the story format,-

Craig: You create that story.

Mike: -of McKee or something, it’s like,-

Craig: Or you could-

Mike: “I don’t know what that is.”

Craig: Pitch that in 50 words.

Mike: Yeah, I don’t know.

Craig: That would be the pitch.

Mike: Yes, exactly, that’s the pitch.

Craig: “What’s it about?” “Yeah, I don’t know.”

[laughter]

John: All right, let’s do our one cool things here. I’m going to call an audible, and so I’m going to pivot from what I was going to recommend to in terms of just like breaking the form and spinning a bunch of plates. John Mulaney’s show, Everybody’s Live, it’s just gotten really, really good.

Mike: Oh yes, it’s great.

John: If you’ve not watched it at all, go back and watch the episode, guests are Sarah Silverman and Patton Oswalt, but the show is just nuts, and Mulaney’s blindfolded through the whole episode. 19,000 things are happening, and it all holds together really, really well. It’s postmodern in the sense of like, there’s a theme kind of, but it’s just crazy. it’s just I’m really admiring what they’re able to pull off once a week on Mulaney’s show, Everybody’s Live, on Netflix.

Craig: Amazing. What about you?

Mike: I was thinking of young comedians and newer comedians. There’s this great comic named Chris Fleming who came on my podcast recently, and he just kills me. He’s a Massachusetts guy like me. He — talk about burning it all down — he just has no allegiances to anyone, specifically in culture, and so he’ll say things where I’ll just– I said to him on my podcast, “Do you know that–?” the person he’s referencing? He’s like, “No.” I go, “You don’t know that person you said that crazy joke about?” but he’s great.

Craig: That’s awesome.

Mike: He’s super funny, and to speak to the kind of David Lynch with The Last of Us of it all, of creating a thing that hasn’t existed before, when I look at Chris Fleming, I don’t go, “Oh, that’s like this.” I just go, “Whoa, that’s Chris Fleming. I love that.”

Craig: Yes, who is this?

Mike: Who is this?

Craig: That’s my favorite. I’ve been on a roll for one cool thing for games, so I spoke to Inevitable Foundation, which is run by Richie Siegel, and it was a lovely group of folks. He was kind enough to send along some of the feedback, which was all bad, and [laughs] not really. They were very happy. One person in their feedback said, “Oh, and by the way, since I know Craig likes these sort of things, he really needs to play Blue Prince, if he hasn’t.” Blue Prince is as in blue, the color, and then Prince, P-R-I-N-C-E, but of course, this is a pun on blueprints. The game is so simple and so hard, which I love.

Mike: Oh, wow.

Craig: You have inherited a mansion from your mysterious uncle. Your job is to go through and explore the mansion, which has 45 rooms, find the 46th room, and you will be able to keep the mansion. The mechanics are every day, you start in the foyer, and there are three doors, and when you open a door, it gives you a choice to draft what room goes there, and there are like 40 types of rooms, and you pick it, and you start to move through, and every time, the house is different, and some rooms just stop, and you know if they stop or not.

There are costs, and keys, and methods, and puzzles, and it’s roguelike, because then the next day, you’re like, “Okay, that didn’t work, let me try this.” It’s early on for me, and I’m so beautifully frustrated.

Mike: Wow.

John: Love it.

Craig: Yes, it’s really, it’s like when you come across a fresh idea like that, it’s really cool, yes. Blue Prince, and it’s developed by Dogubomb.

Mike: Great.

Craig: You can get it on PlayStation, Windows, Xbox, your Steam Deck, which is where I play it, and so forth.

Mike: Very nice.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help this week from Sam Shapson. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Don’t leave comments on Spotify because we turn those off, but you can leave comments to our YouTube videos, which we have a Scriptnotes YouTube channel.

Mike: You do?

John: Yes, we just added this week.

Craig: Another place for people to yell at me about Joel. I’m Scriptnotes Premium, by the way.

John: Thank you very much for that.

Mike: I joined recently. I love it.

Craig: Oh– [crosstalk]

John: You get all those back episodes.

Mike: I love it. Two of my faves are Dennis Palumbo of course and the Craig Mazin, Here’s How to-

John: How to Write a Movie.

Mike: -How to write a Movie. It’s so good.

Drew: Those are both available on our YouTube.

Craig: We should probably charge extra for them.

John: We should. Yes, yes, how do we charge extra?

Mike: Yes, supplements.

Craig: Because we got to get these cool new microphones.

John: You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You can find those at Cotton Bureau. You get the show notes with all the links to the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all those premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this every week. For Craig to dream of new microphone setups in our office studio here.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back episodes, like episode 99 and How to Write a Movie. Bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the infrastructure of being a standup comic and doing all the things that you have to do to actually make a living. With that, Mike Birbiglia, thank you so much for being on the show.

Mike: It’s such an honor. I love this show. My favorite podcast.

John: Aww.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Mike, one of the things that impressed me when I came to record the podcast at your place is that you do video, you’re promoting the podcast, but it’s also part of your bigger machinery because you have to, as a touring comic, you have to plan all that stuff, you have to do marketing, you must have a giant mailing list. I want to talk to you about sort of the infrastructure it takes to be a comic who’s doing the kind of stuff you’re doing.

Mike: It’s funny, I was on The Town podcast the other day, which is really good, and we had this discussion of this thing where Matt says, “Do comedians need Hollywood anymore?” The answer is they don’t.

Craig: Not at all.

Mike: Weirdly, they don’t, and I think that that’s good. I think the things to make comedy and get the comedy to market are less and less expensive and more easy to access. It puts the onus on you to make something that’s great and sets itself apart from all other things, but also, you have to get it to market and market it, really. There’s a lot to that.

John: Getting it to market, there’s Instagram, there’s YouTube, those are crucial channels for comics. What else?

Mike: Weirdly, sometimes I’ll say, because Mabel and Gary and Peter and Joe, that’s my company, and we all produce the podcast together. Mabel and Gary are in their 20s, and so sometimes they’ll point out things to me that I’m just going, “Oh, I wouldn’t have thought of that at all.” For example, at a certain point, like two years ago, Mabel goes, “We have to have the podcast on video. I’ve never listened to a podcast.”

[laughs]

John: Yes, that’s my daughter too.

Mike: I was like, “What do you mean you haven’t listened to a podcast?” She goes, “I’m sorry, I just I put it on. I don’t look at the video, but it’s on. Sometimes I’ll reference it, I’m like, ‘Oh’.” There is a degree of rolling with, so then we did it. Rolling with where culture and media is going. Then the other side of that is, sometimes I’ll say to Mabel and Gary, I’ll go like, “We have to be aware of what are the platforms that are next. Because when I was coming up in the 2000s, it was Myspace. Myspace is gone.”

Craig: It is? I’m spending so much time on that.

[laughter]

Mike: Your premium membership on Myspace is $49 a month?

Craig: Yes.

John: I have a friend request, and you never get nothing.

Craig: It’s the only place people don’t yell at me about The Last of Us.

Mike: Of course, Zuckerberg is spending billions of dollars every year to make sure that Instagram is still relevant, still relevant, still relevant. Cut to, at a certain point, it’s not going to be.

Craig: It’s the opening credit sequence of Silicon Valley, just watch them go up, watch them go down.

John: That’s right.

Craig: Explode, implode, come back, grow. You have to have– Well, really, it sounds like part of your infrastructure is youth.

Mike: It’s youth. Yes, it is. Yes.

John: A mailing list. Is there a mailing list people subscribe to and you send out blasts with all your upcoming tour dates?

Mike: That’s right, and I’ve been doing that oddly since I was in college. I would do shows at the Washington, DC Improv, and I would have comment cards on the tables and say, “If you have your email address, I’ll send out a newsletter once a month.” I think the infrastructure is Maichimp and one of the companies that does it–

John: Mailchimp is so effing expensive.

Mike: I know.

Craig: Mailchimp is expensive?

Mike: It’s on the pricey side.

Craig: Also, then everybody, their podcasts are sponsored by Mailchimp, so Mailchimp is just like rotating the money around.

Mike: Yes.

John: Yes, it’s a money cycle.

Mike: No, it’s true, but I do think the relationship between artists and audiences has just gotten closer and closer through the years, and such that things that are massive, and it’s a comedian who’s playing Madison Square Garden, you might mention that person’s name to someone else, they go, “I’ve never heard of that person.” They’re playing Madison Square Garden, and it’s just them talking into a microphone, you’ve never heard of them.

Craig: That’s right.

Mike: It’s astonishing.

Craig: That’s happened a few times recently to me, where I don’t know, and that’s part of getting old. I actually love the way the world is slowly getting cottony and sealing me off in preparation.

[laughter]

Craig: I don’t mind that, but I do love talking to the people that work for me that are younger because– Riding back and forth from location every day with Ali Cheng, who used to be my assistant, and now she’s a writer on The Last of Us. Ali was able to explain to me in deep detail the whole Kendrick and Drake thing as it was happening, because I was like, “I don’t know– What is going–? First of all, who’s Dot?” She was like, “Oh my God. Okay.” But then, I was so into it.

John: Yes, sure.

Craig: Then I was deep in, and I was– Then the next day, I’ll come in, I’m like, “Oh my God. Did you see?” It keeps you plugged in, but you’ll need somebody to help you.

Mike: Yes, I think the key thing about entertainers in this moment is continuing to be open to where everything is going and nonjudgmental about where it’s going. Because if you become the judgmental person of like, “Oh, back in my day,” blah-blah-blah, I think you’re toast, or you will be toast.

John: Someone like Gary, who’s working for you, or Mabel, they have their own careers, they’re developing their own online presences.

Mike: Absolutely.

John: They have their own analysts. They have to figure out all that.

Mike: Directing things and short films and all kinds of stuff, yes.

John: Yes, so who teaches you? Basically, you just have to learn. You get in the crowd and see what everyone else is doing, because it’s not like you can go to film school, you can theoretically, learn how to write a screenplay. If there’s no comedy school, I guess you could go through-

Mike: UCB-

John: UCB.

Mike: -or improv and stuff like that. Yes, there’s no path to be a comedian, but at the same time, there never was a path, right?

John: Yes, it was always figuring out how early in a career does a person need a manager or an agent who’s doing mostly standup?

Mike: I’ve always thought– People ask me who are starting out all the time, how do I get an agent? When I think back to my agent now, Mike Berkowitz, who I’ve worked with for I think 25 years, he was starting out. I was like one of his first two clients. He started out at a management company, but he was doing the side, booking thing on the side. We’re the same age, and so we came up together. Now, he represents Kevin Hart and John Mulaney, all biggest comics on the place. He’s a huge agent, but I think part of it is surrounding yourself with people who you respect, who are in your roughly age group, and even level.

I think there’s a sense of like, “Oh, I need to sign,” I’ll throw out someone who’s dead, but it’s like, “I need to sign with Bernie Brillstein.” It’s, “No, no, you don’t need to sign with Bernie Brillstein. He doesn’t have time for you. You need to sign for someone who’s three rungs below Bernie Brillstein.”

John: Yes, absolutely. Signing with an agent who was really a peer and who I was grinding with together was incredibly helpful, because he just knew the right people. He knew what was actually happening.

Mike: The people who are young, while you are young will be the stars of tomorrow across the entire field.

John: Absolutely.

Mike: -and so making friends and making bonds and collaborations with people who are in your peer group and investing in those people, and hopefully, they invest in you. That’s, I think, one of the best things you can do.

John: How much of your work time is devoted to writing, figuring out the comedy, figuring out that work versus the career of like setting dates, and doing social media, and doing all the other stuff? What is the split?

Mike: I would say like it’s 2/3 the art, 1/3 marketing, but I would say, there are periods in my career where it is like 70/30 marketing. It’s miserable, but it was because there wasn’t enough work, and so it’s like, “Oh, I have to advertise my work more. I have to market my work more.” It’s like, you’re always rest always, and I think this is true of everyone.
It’s like the next hurdle is like, “We got to figure out the key art.” The next hurdle is, “We got to figure out the trailer.” The next figure, “We got to figure out what the Instagram tile is that conveys the idea of this whole project.” All that kind of stuff. It’s like, it is important. Yes, I try to minimize it, but it’s like, I don’t think anyone gets out of doing that.

John: I think one of the big differences between a pure screenwriter and what you’re doing is that we talk about like a screenwriter has to be entrepreneurial, but it’s like that whole level of magnitude is greater. You literally are responsible for how much the money’s coming in, whether you’re getting that date, whether you’re getting that thing to happen. Your income is so directly tied into how much promotion and everything else you’re doing for yourself.

Mike: Yes, and also, I feel like you have to have an awareness or try to have an awareness of where the business is going, where it’s been, where it could go, where we can’t possibly imagine it’s going. The AI discussion right now is so interesting because it’s like, it’s some people going like, “All right, easy on the AI stuff,” it’s every other conversation, but it’s like “No, no, it literally could change everything.”

John: Oh, absolutely.

Mike: Everything.

John: Yes, next week or a week after, I do once a full episode where we really just look at it because you look at not just the, how it’s impacting writing, but you look at the new video production things that come off, which is like, “That looks completely photorealistic, and the speech lines up,” and I just don’t what we’re going to do.

Mike: It’s astonishing.

John: Because like, maybe you won’t have to tour anymore because you could just press the button and there’s Mike Birbiglia. You’ll be this age forever.

Mike: Yes, we can only hope.

[laughter]

Mike: I got to lock in age 46, because it’s not getting any better.

John: This is the good life. Congratulations to get on the special, and thank you for coming on.

Mike: Thanks for coming to the screening last night, it meant the world to me.

John: Cool.

Links:

• Mike Birbiglia
• The Good Life on Netflix
• Mike’s previous episodes: 121, 168, 261, 427, 443, and Working it Out: Screenwriting Advice You’ll Actually Use
• Episode 660 – Moneyball
• Ira Glass on Mike’s podcast Working it Out
• Elizabeth Gilbert TED Talk
• The Run Club Haters by Melissa Dahl for Curbed
• I Hadn’t Heard From My Dad in Over a Decade. Now He’s Returned With a Brazen Request. I’m Actually Considering It. from Slate’s Care and Feeding
• The Coyotes of San Francisco by Heather Knight and Loren Elliot for NY Times
• Coyote Vest
• Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney
• Chris Fleming
• Blue Prince
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription!
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Shapson. It’s 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: This is episode 686 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do writers and the characters who create handle the obstacles that they encounter? One’s approach to problem solving can reveal a lot about otherwise hidden mental processes. We’ll discuss ways to tackle pernicious problems in real life and on the page, and what it says about the problem solver. First, we have a lot of follow-up from previous episodes, including a master class on how to do the lunch order if you are a PA.

Craig: Oh, this is good.

John: Yes, so we asked our listeners, they sent in, and man, they delivered this time.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: Yes, so really good advice here. We also have a ridiculous and completely unworkable proposal about movie tariffs that will never actually happen. But we can use that as an excuse to talk about why we want to incentivize domestic production and ways a sane administration might try to do that.

Craig: Yes, somewhere inside the fog of crazy is a topic worth discussing.

John: Yes. Our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about tombs, because I am just back from two weeks in Jordan and Egypt, where I got to live my Indiana Jones fantasy. I’m here to answer any questions you have about relics and burying of the dead, and travel through exotic locations.

Craig: I just played the Indiana Jones video game, so I feel just as qualified.

John: Basically, the same thing.

Craig: Yes, if not more so.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I really went deep down there.

John: My question is, did most of the Indiana Jones game take place with like a bunch of tourists jammed around you in a crowded Egyptian museum?

Craig: No.

John: No. I’m surprised the museums in the Indiana Jones game are probably empty.

Craig: They are, unless it’s just you and a strange giant is attacking you. Yes, no, it’s remarkable how empty things are. You do move around the Vatican quite a bit.

John: Oh, sure.

Craig: In the ‘40s, during World War II, and you’re ducking various fascisti.

John: Yes, fun, exciting. Yes, we’re recording this way before the conclave has even started, so we don’t even know– People are listening to this in a time where there may be a new pope, but Craig and I have no idea who the pope is.

Craig: We don’t know.

John: No, we don’t.

Craig: Oh my gosh, I don’t care.

[chuckling]

John: I’m excited for some change. I like things to happen. No knock against the existing pope who died.

Craig: Be careful what you wish for.

John: Yes, it’s wild. It’s wild. Let’s get into some follow-up, because man, we got a bunch of it.

Craig: Okay.

John: We’ll start off with last week on the show, or maybe it was two weeks ago now on the show, Eric Kripke was on, so he’s the guy who runs The Boys and lots of other great shows. We were talking about a listener question on– And Craig, I’m curious what you would call this, an episode that exclusively follows one of the characters, that it’s not a normal episode, it’s a standalone. Do you have a term that you would use for that?

Craig: I don’t.

John: I don’t. We were trying to bat around some. Our listeners came up with two good terms that they’ve used in writers’ rooms. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Aaron writes, “In our writers’ room, we call it our Rosencrantz and Guildenstern episode, as a nod to the delightful Tom Stoppard play about the side characters in Hamlet.”

John: Which makes sense. You’re elevating people who would be on the sidelines instead of centering it around them. The second solution from a different Aaron I thought was even better.

Craig: All right.

John: I’ve been in a couple rooms that have called them silo episodes, as in one character is siloed away from the rest of the cast and given their own story, and really, their own specific role building. It felt like after Girls did the Marnie episode and then the Shosh in Japan episode, that it started a conversation, at least in rooms, about this unique episode format and what to call it.

Craig: That’s interesting.

John: I like silo.

Craig: Silo episode. What do you do on the show Silo, however?

John: Yes. There’s an episode of the second season of Silo that is basically a Silo episode that just follows one of the characters.

Craig: Solopsisode.

John: Yes.

Craig: I think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is decent, but it implies you’re following a couple of characters on the side.

John: It is, and also, to me, it implies a specific tone of what’s going to happen. It’s like a behind-the-scenes, that a normal episode is happening over on this side, and we’re just not noticing it.

Craig: Yes, like I really wanted to do a partner series to Game of Thrones that was just like a couple of soldiers who were posted somewhere out in Westeros, and things were happening in the background that they would occasionally hear about. You’d be like, “Oh, God, that’s the Red Wedding.” They didn’t really know, and it was mostly like, “Ah, gathering taxes, and my foot hurts.” The guys wouldn’t let me do it. That’s weird, yes.

John: That’s weird.

Craig: That’s weird.

John: That’s weird. All right, so those are some good suggestions from our listeners. The second bit of follow-up is a conversation you and I had. We were talking about how to make our phones less addictive and less interesting, and different techniques for that. I know you took social media off your phones.

Craig: Yes.

John: For this trip to Egypt and to Jordan, I was a little concerned, passing through security and stuff like that, and making sure, someone’s taking over my phone. I don’t want there to be anything on my phone. I almost went as far as to just get a burner phone that I could take with me and just not have all my stuff. What I ended up doing instead was going through and basically taking everything off my phone and really paring it back to just the essentials. I got rid of all the–

Craig: You just have the stock app and weather? [chuckles]

John: Exactly. You can take those off, too. You can take the stock app off.

Craig: Now you’re just down to tips?

John: Just weather. Then I also went through and changed the icon style and stuff like that to make the phone just less useful. Craig, here’s my phone now.

Craig: What in the world am I looking at?

John: Describe it to our listeners. We’ll put a screenshot in and just check out. [crosstalk]

Craig: Sure. To start with, I’m going to put my glasses on to really investigate here. It is a sickly mint green background, and it is monochromatic.

John: Yes.

Craig: Then the apps themselves are in gray/green scale. No color other than green, black, white, gray. There’s 10 apps total.

John: There are multiple screens, so you can swipe.

Craig: Oh, yes. This phone says, “Don’t look at me.” That’s what it says.

John: It was good. I actually did not look at it very much on my trip at all. In addition to going to the dark mode style and the larger icons, which also gets rid of the names of the icons, it makes the phone harder to use in a way that I actually found really useful. Based on location, you can figure out where the apps are. It broke me of my habit of constantly playing on my phone to check on a thing or to open Instagram.

Craig: It’s going to be wild when the next thing happens that makes this end, because something is going to happen that makes it end. We know that much.

John: What’s going to end?

Craig: The phone. It’s going to end, right?

John: It’s going to be that little thing that it’s, whatever they do on black mirror console, which is the little dot you put on your temple.

Craig: Something’s going to happen, and it will end. Then, boy, that’ll be a day. That’ll be an interesting day when it ends.

John: The post-phone era?

Craig: The post-phone era. Yes, but not yet.

John: We had talked an episode in 683 about long takes. That was before we saw a bunch of things that were about long takes. When we recorded the episode, it was before the Oner episode of The Studio, which I thought was delightful. This guy, Aidan wrote in and he had done a comparison of your Chernobyl scene with the rooftop clearing and a scene from Michael Clayton. Drew, talk us through what this post is. We’ll put a link into it as well.

Drew: The post is a comparison of those two scenes. They’re about the same. The Michael Clayton scene is 2 minutes and 11 seconds. The rooftop scene in Chernobyl is 2 minutes and 2 seconds. Despite the fact that they’re about the same amount of time, the subjective lengths, which is how long it feels like it lasts, is very different because it’s the assassination scene in Michael Clayton. The murder scene happens frighteningly quickly, whereas the rooftop scene feels agonizing and slow.

John: It’s just a nice comparison side by side.

Craig: That’s what I’m going for is agonizing and slow. I did get some additional feedback from Jack Thorne, who pointed out– And this is something that Seth Rogen pointed out as well. I did a LA Times roundtable with him that I guess will be coming out shortly. Both of them said the same thing, which is that planning for long takes, writing them into the script is a way to protect the writing itself, of course, because no one can really mess with it. It’s true. You can’t really decide what to do, say, with a script of Adolescence other than shoot it. That’s a fair point.

John: Yes. Last bit of follow-up here. In 682, we talk about words we don’t have in English, like words we could have wished existed in English, but it doesn’t actually happen. We had a couple of people write in with words that they’re looking for that are not in existence anywhere. Talk us through these. First, let’s start with Shauna in Vancouver.

Drew: She writes, “I regularly think about how I wish there was a word, probably a German word, for the feeling you have when you get to the end of a mystery novel and it’s deeply unsatisfying.” She did with additional undertones of, “Now I’m angry and disappointed that you broke my trust and wasted my time.”

Craig: I think it’s just unsatisfied, isn’t it? [chuckles]

John: I get that she’s feeling a specific kind of unsatisfied because it just took so long, and there is an aspect of social trust in there, too. Yes.

Craig: Yes, but I think we have that word, actually. I don’t think an extreme version of an emotion qualifies for a new word. You just put the word very in front of it, and you’re there.

John: Yes, isn’t that like a thing they teach you in writing classes is that anytime you use the word very, there really is a better word out there for it?

Craig: Oh, most certainly, and it may not be necessary at all. There is that whole “I don’t like adverbs thing,” which, you know?

John: Yes.

Craig: Listen, sometimes very is great.

John: Yes. It’s an intensifier. You know that very comes from verily, that it comes from truly?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes, which is just such a strange thing to think.

Craig: Yea, verily.

John: Yes, as an intensifier. It’s actually apparently very common in languages to say “Truly this” and that becomes the intensifier.

Craig: I actually often will say, truly. It’s a good one.

John: That’s true.

Drew: Is that what we’re doing with literally?

John: It is. The way that literally started as being true, and then it’s just an enforcement.

Craig: Yes, but that one’s wrong.
[chuckling]

John: Yes, it’s still feels wrong to us.

Craig: It’s wrong.

John: It’s wrong.

Craig: It’s just wrong.

John: More of words that don’t exist from Reed.

Drew: Reed writes, “You mentioned the Russian word tosca as a deep anguish that can never be resolved.” A word in Welsh that I’ve always enjoyed is the word hiraeth. It’s about a similar deep longing, but is a more positive spin on the feeling rather than an undefined existential despair. The rough translation is a profound longing for a home, place, or time that you can no longer return. A homesickness for something that maybe never was, the echo of our soul’s past.

Craig: Nostalgia.

John: Yes, but it’s a feeling of nostalgia for the moment you’re actually currently in, maybe?

Craig: He said past, did he?

John: It is past.

Drew: He said past, or it might not even exist? Just a vibe you wish you could go to. I feel like Ren Faires do this.

Craig: Oh, I see. It’s sort of like a nostalgia for something that is fictional, even. A longing to be in your memories of Middle-earth, even though you’ve never been there.

Drew: Seems like it, yes.

Craig: If that’s the case, then sign me up.

John: A script I read recently actually did refer to the sense of nostalgia for the moment that you’re in right now. I love this thing, and I know it’s going to escape me, and I already miss this.

Craig: I have a version of that, which is, I know I should be enjoying this moment right now. Later, I will look back at this wistfully and wish that I could be back there. Right now, I’m miserable. [chuckles]

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s a tricky one because sometimes I think back to when I was younger, you miss these things. I miss things that at the time, I wasn’t thinking about at all. In fact, in many ways, and almost always, my life is better now than it was when I was in my 20s, except, my back doesn’t hurt as much, and I’m not that much closer to death. I wasn’t able to enjoy that at the time, and there are things right now I know that I’m not, I’m just, I should be enjoying more.

John: Yes. A related concept is sort of second-degree fun. Yes. Things that are actually unpleasant in the moment, but then you look back at them with a fondness. It’s like, “Oh, yes, remember that horrible thing we went through and did together?”

I was commiserating with Scriptnotes’ Megana Rao about the Giza Pyramid, because she had done that with her family. We were texting afterwards, wasn’t that just the worst? Yes, it’s the worst. It is the most unpleasant experience to go inside the Giza Pyramid, because you are climbing up this ramp. You’re stooped down, almost on hands and knees, climbing up this ramp, and packed, sardine tight with a bunch of strangers. It is just the most claustrophobic thing. You get to the emperor’s tomb. What do you think’s in the emperor’s tomb?

Craig: A sarcophagus?

John: Nothing. Not even a sarcophagus. Everything’s been taken out of it. It’s just an empty room with– There is a stone box where the actual real sarcophagus used to be, but it’s so unrewarding, and yet the experience as a whole is still second-degree fun. It’s like, “Oh, yes, I went through that thing.”

Craig: Right. You have a great story of how awful it was.

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh, I’m not going there.
[chuckling]

John: What we should have done, and Mike was pointing out, is that, as we were lining up to get in, people are squeezing past you to get out at the same time. Some of them have this most horrified expression, and they’re sweaty, and they’re just exhausted. It’s like, “What am I doing?”

Craig: Right, like take a hint.

John: Yes.

Craig: I think it’s fair to say, as they’re coming out, “Should I get out of this line?” A bunch of them will be like, “Oh, my God, you need to get out.”

John: What would I say? I would be honest with them and say, “It’s not cool to actually, when you get up in there, but also, maybe you want the story.”

Craig: I would probably say something like, “We should all be home. Don’t go anywhere, ever.”

John: Yes, that’s a choice, too.

Craig: Yes. That’s just me.

John: Secondary fun, it’s almost a word in itself.

Craig: Do you know a tomb that you can go into where something actually is there, rewarding just to see? All of the tombs in the Indiana Jones video game. All of them. Everyone.

John: I need to speak up for the Egyptian tourism council. The pyramids are fantastic. Actually, going in that one tomb is just such a weird experience. The other tombs, the hieroglyphics everywhere, there’s still color on the walls. It’s actually genuinely impressive.

Craig: They’re not all–

John: No. Most of the tombs are spectacular. It’s just that the one that’s in the giant pyramid that you think should be the absolute coolest. No, it’s empty because everything was stolen out of there years ago.

Craig: Everything was stolen.

John: The reason why the King Tut is famous is because the tomb wasn’t opened until the ’20s.

Craig: That’s right. Yes. That’s when the curse happened.

John: That’s when the curse happened. Also, I just– The last bit of Egypt trivia here. They have photos of what the actual vault looked like in there. It was just a bunch of stuff piled up. It wasn’t like it was neatly arranged on shelves and stuff. It was all just a pile in the corner.

Craig: It’s a storage unit.

John: It’s a storage unit. It was like, “Here’s some chariot wheels for your sky chariot.”

Craig: Right. What do we throw in there? Oh, he loved chariots.

John: Yes. He loved bread. We need to make a bunch of stone things that look like bread because he loved bread.

Craig: Oh, you know what? You can get things like that at Pottery Barn.

[chuckling]

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s just Pottery Barn crap.

John: What it reminded me most of is my mom would go to Montgomery Wards or JCPenney’s to pick up her catalog orders, and they would have the refrigerators because you could buy a refrigerator there. You’d have the refrigerator, and some of them had the plastic food in there. I loved the plastic food.

Craig: Plastic meat.

John: Loved it so much.

Craig: Loved it. There was always a lamb chop. Oh, yes.

John: Yes. Oh, yes. We had a lot of lamb back in those days.

Craig: Yes, so much lamb.

John: We have one more missing word here. Let’s talk about Mitch’s proposal here.

Drew: Something that could be useful to have for describing an important feeling you want to attain in storytelling. I believe it was described by Rachel Kondo at the live Austin episode, but it’s a word for something that’s both surprising and inevitable. If anybody could get it to take off, it’s John and Craig.

Craig: We do talk about that all the time.

John: Yes. You want surprise and inevitable, but it is that feeling like, “Oh, of course.”

Craig: Maybe we just portmanteau to surprevitable.

John: I like surprevitable.

Craig: Surprevitable.

John: Let’s do it, Craig.

Craig: Done.

John: Done. Surprevitable. Let us talk about– Another bit of follow-up here, which is on first jobs. We’d asked our listeners, so many of you have worked as PA, so many of you have had to do the lunch run for an office or for a writer’s room. Man, there’s got to be so much shared wisdom out there about how to do it best.

Honestly, there was so much shared wisdom. We got– Drew, I don’t know.

Drew: Oh, dozens of emails.

John: Dozens and dozens of people. Rather than read through all of it, we’re going to put together a blog post we could link to so that it’s on the internet and everyone can always find it.

Craig: Great.

John: Drew, talk us through some of the section headers here and what some of the highlights were, things that were surprising even to you.

Drew: Sure. We start with just picking the restaurant because that’s a whole process. Simple things like making sure to ask about dietary restrictions, looking for restaurants that are good, balanced of healthy, and greasy. No tacos was a thing that came up because LA’s got great tacos and people probably want them, but they are, according to some people, the single-handedly, the most painstaking who ordered the place.

Craig: Everybody gets four different tacos, and then they all get mixed up, and no one knows which goes to what.

John: Also, I feel like tacos don’t travel well, fundamentally.

Craig: They don’t. Soft tacos, sort of.

John: Yes, but everything slides off across the [crosstalk]

Craig: It gets wet.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes. No, tacos is a bad idea.

Drew: Homestate seems like it’s an exception to that, according to some people.

Craig: Homestate’s solid. Yes, Homestate’s solid.

John: How about taking the order? That’s a thing you clearly messed up if the order doesn’t get taken right. Talk to us about that.

Drew: We got some good horror stories in here, too, on that. A great thing is just to make sure that you would include a link to the menu or a PDF copy, even if you have to make one yourself because some people, you can’t trust them to find the menu themselves. They’ll ask you to get items that don’t exist or things that are out of season, sandwiches that they used to have but aren’t available anymore. Double-check it when you place it over the phone.

John: Oh, I guess people still have to do phone orders for some stuff. Craig, on Last of Us, when you are doing a phone order, is it printed out and handed in front of you when you’re circling, or how are you getting your thing?

Craig: In our writing office that we have now, our PA sends us an email with a link. “This is where we’re getting today’s lunch from. Let me know by this time what you would like.” You click on the link, you look around, and you respond back. So far, so good. Seems to work.

John: That’s great.

Craig: We don’t have a very big workload.

John: That’s actually very small. How about when you’re actually in pre-production or any of that stuff, or if you’re going out on a location scout, what’s the order there?

Craig: Typically, I don’t participate [chuckles] because it’s good to be the king. I can get whatever I want. Typically, the office will– It’s like a choice of three things. There’s an app that people can log into, and my camera order is called Eatly or something like that. Then everybody puts their thing in, and it all gets delivered roughly around the same time.

John: Okay, so it’s more like what we do for D&D. For D&D, when we’re playing each week, we’ll send out a link and everyone pick their things and at a certain point, it’ll cut off, and will submit the order.

Craig: It’s a group DoorDash thing. It’s sort of like that except we’re going to say “You can pick from any one of these three today.” Typically, it is a somewhat curated menu as well because some of those restaurants are like, “Hey, we can do this, a lot of this, but we can’t do a lot of those things.” When we’re on scouts and stuff, we usually just pick a restaurant.

John: Yes, makes sense. This is too long to read through on the show, but we’ll include Kelly’s Quiznos horror story. The punchline of this was, there is a Quiznos order, it was like a big Quiznos order. Quiznos called like, “Is it really this big? I know it’s a big order.” The total was $409. They ended up making 4,000 sandwiches.

Craig: No. Wait. How did they even make 4,000 sandwiches?

John: I don’t know.

Drew: She doesn’t even know. They called to confirm, and they went through the whole order. Apparently, everything was fine, but they made 4,000 sandwiches.

John: An order of magnitude difference.

Craig: They were supposed to make 400 sandwiches.

John: The total was supposed to be $409, so it’s not even 400 sandwiches.

Craig: It was 40 sandwiches?

John: Probably. That feels right.

Craig: They were just like, “Well, they might need a few extra.” [chuckles]

John: Yes.

Craig: How did they do that? That can’t be right.

John: That’s the exception, but it’s the horror story that underlines why it’s so important [crosstalk]–

Craig: I have so many questions lis where is this Quiznos? How did they do that? Do they really have the ability to make 4,000 sandwiches on the spot? I don’t believe this.

John: It does seem possible.

Craig: This feels urban legend to me. I don’t know.

John: Timing is so important, and so we’ll have a little session on timing. Basically, based on the restaurant, do you need to put it in an hour ahead, two hours ahead, 30 minutes ahead? What is it going to be? I just know from the Mendocino Farms at the Grove, it’s like, Good luck. You have to be able to navigate that.

Craig: I would be so bad at this.

John: I like the suggestion to label everything at the restaurant, so that as you’re double-checking, you actually label whose things and what they’re at the restaurant, because that’s a way of verifying–

Craig: That you got everybody’s [crosstalk].

John: That you actually got everybody’s thing, and that everybody eats the right thing. Suggestions of getting a giant plastic bin from Target to put everything in, so it doesn’t slosh around inside your car.

Craig: Smart.

John: Hand everybody their lunch, so rather than laying it out on the table. I actually like put it in there in front of them. [crosstalk]

Craig: Yes, that is a nice thing to do.

John: Yes, because it also reconnects that you are the person who did this thing.

Craig: It keeps people at the table, and you don’t have this weird scrum, and somebody’s– Because, again, it’s like dealing with children, like kindergartners. They’re going to pick up the wrong thing. They’re not going to look at the name. They’re just going to see, “Oh, it’s a sandwich that I ordered,” except that that one was somebody else’s that didn’t have mayonnaise on it. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve ended up with the–

John: The mayonnaise sandwich. We know. Listeners know that Craig hates mayonnaise. Any white substance that’s spread on a sandwich–

Craig: Disgusting. We were talking about today in the room was the British nightmare, known as salad cream.

Drew: Oh, yes.

Craig: Disgusting. If you look at the Wikipedia page for salad cream, it describes it as something like a thick, pale yellow– [chuckles] It’s like, I’m already out. It’s like pus, basically. It’s disgusting. Sorry, Heinz.
[chuckling]

John: Then our last section is on general advice, which is good stuff, and it actually applies to a lot of the functions of being the PA in an office. It’s like, the stuff you’re doing doesn’t feel rewarding in the moment, but it is so important for the actual successful functioning of the room, the show, the whatever it is. Recognize that you’re not always going to get credit for the work that you’re doing, but know that you’re actually doing a great job.

There was a book I read over this break that was talking about custodians. This woman was feeling bad about her job, and she was a janitor at a place. They said, “No, you’re the custodian of the building.” It’s your job to make sure that this building actually works for everybody. That reframing was really important. In some ways, you’re like the custodian of the people who need to eat food.

Craig: Yes, and I will say that, and I hope this is true, that the PAs are appreciated when they’re doing this well, because I have been in circumstances where the person doing it wasn’t great at it. Every day, it was just, “I wonder who’s going to either not get lunch or get the wrong lunch. Who will it be today?” Every single day.

Thank you to all the PAs out there who are making sure we’re well-fed. By the way, let’s face it, we’re all in better moods. One o’clock rolls around, the hangriness that sets in, whoo.

John: It’s rough. It’s tough, we all know it. This was a very good experiment. Our next experiment, I would like to have our listeners talk to us about their best suggestions and tips for pitching on Zoom. It’s obviously a thing that started during the pandemic, but it’s now become the norm. I’ve been talking to a lot of writers recently who say like, “I hope to never actually pitch in person again because it’s just–“ They so much prefer pitching on Zoom and the ability to keep eye contact with the whole group and to have your nose at the top of the screen. I would love to hear people’s best practices for doing that.

Craig: Yes, you don’t have to memorize anything, I suppose, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s all there.

John: It’s there.

Craig: I like that.

John: It’s also tough because you don’t have the real feedback of a person paying attention or not paying attention, which has pros and cons.

Craig: Yes, and then there is– I’m still old school enough to believe being in a room with somebody, there’s a little bit of– I don’t know. You feel where they’re going one way or the other. You can sense it.

John: You do. There’s been cases where I’ve really misread a thing where I felt, “Oh, that went terribly,” and I’m driving off a lot. I get the call, they want to make a deal.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes, so it’s crazy. I’d love to hear people’s suggestions, things they’ve learned, tips and tricks, but also, I love the horror stories. [chuckles] If you have your equivalent of the 4,000 Quiznos sandwiches, I’d love to hear that, too.

Craig: I assume it’s going to be, I shared my open browser tab with something, something.

John: Yes. I’ll say a pro of pitching on Zoom, I think, for up-and-coming people is that you can have more people in the room. You can have an assistant listening in and actually gleaning from that stuff, which is if they were in the room themselves, it would be distracting, but if they’re just an extra person on the little screen, it’s fine.

Craig: True.

John: All right, let’s get to our marquee topic. I want to talk about problem solving because this actually came up because a listener was writing in about a different thing. She mentioned this technique called rubber ducking, which I’d never heard of before, which is talking through a problem, especially like it comes from my coding. Talking through a coding problem to an inanimate object, like literally a rubber duck, saying “Okay, first I’m doing this and then I’m doing this.” You’re explaining it to a non-animate object to really think through your logic and verbalize it, and express it aloud.

It got me thinking about us as writers, but also our characters are often having to solve problems that are put before them. Looking at how people solve problems, it’s a great way of exposing how their brain actually works and how they’re forming a mental model of the world around them. I wanted to talk through some techniques for solving problems, but also why it’s important to show characters solving problems in stories.

Craig: Ultimately, there is a problem. If the character doesn’t have a problem, then I don’t care about the story. There is a problem, and then there are sub-problems and sub-problems. We know we’re invested in them solving things. The first question I like to ask when it comes to this particular topic is are they any good at it? It can often be, I don’t know, engaging watching somebody that is terrible at solving a particular problem who has to solve that problem.

John: You’re asking, does the character have expertise in this? If they don’t have expertise, are they good at being able to communicate with others and find out and solve a problem even if they don’t actually have the information themselves? Can they find the information? Can they find the expert? Can they draw from various sources to get to the answer that they need? In so many of our shows, I’m really thinking of procedurals, but also even the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, different people have different strengths and they have to work together to come up with an answer to the problem that’s facing them.

Craig: There are two kinds of problem-solving that we engage in as storytellers. One kind is a process problem. It’s straight up logic or insight. If I solve this problem, I will have information needed to do something, but I will not be changed. The process of solving this problem does not require me to grow or push past a boundary.

Then there are the problems where, in fact, the only way to solve it and the only way to unpack it or see the insight is to grow as a person, or in the solving of it, it changes you. We need to engage in both levels of problem-solving all the time. The non-character-y problem solvings, those are the ones we just have to be careful about because down that road sometimes is what David Zucker would call, “merely clever.” Clever sounds good. Clever is clever, but no one gives you a ton of credit for it unless it’s really clever. Otherwise, it’s meh. “Oh yes, you figured it out.”

John: Yes, so you’re talking about the problems that characters are solving that it’s not their fundamental flaw. It’s not a thing that’s going to transform them. We were talking about Michael Clayton earlier, and Michael Clayton is a problem solver. He comes in there to fix a problem, and so seeing him fix those problems is one of the rewards of that story. It’s saying like, “Oh wow, look at the expertise and competence, the social skills, his ability to read the situation, to read the room, crucial and fundamental.” Ultimately, it’s all in service to a greater arc and journey for him, but it’s great to see that level of expertise.

Craig: Yes, and that’s why that problem solving is fun to write and it’s fun to watch, but there are times where we think, “Oh, somebody just needs to get a clue about where to go next.” We have to create a problem for them to solve. The problem can’t be too hard to solve. The problem should be a fair problem to solve, so that people at home theoretically could have solved it also, but didn’t. Then we need to always ask, “How would this person do? How do they react to frustration, to not being able to see the answer?”

John: That’s what I think makes creating the right problem and showing their solution to the problem so rewarding for us as writers is that it lets us illuminate what’s actually going on in their head. It forces them to interact with the environment around them, with the people around them to solve the problem.

What I thought we might do is talk through– I think I have a list of 10 classic problem-solving techniques, and how that might work on seeing, but also for worth of words that you’re going to hear that really involve this thing. Rubber ducking is just there to describe that while you’re talking to an inanimate object, and it forces clarity because you have to explain something clearly, it slows you down. It externalizes the problem which is good.

In real life, the thing that I found I stopped doing a lot, especially when I’m talking through with my team on some software stuff, is I’ll say, “Let me explain back what I think I just heard.” You’re probably doing a similar thing, too, as you’re solving problems on your show. It’s like someone has dumped a bunch of information, and you’re trying to synthesize and process it back. In some ways, you are serving as the rubber duck to them. “I heard all this stuff, this is what I got out of it.” You’re showing it back to them.

Craig: Yes. I will sometimes– I guess this is the Socratic method. I will just start asking questions. Somebody has laid something out, and I think, “Okay, here are the parts that made sense to me. Here are the parts that are confusing.” I’m just going to start asking questions about every single thing that is either confusing to me or doesn’t feel right or feels incomplete until I know everything, until I don’t have any snag anymore.

John: That can seem argumentative, but it’s argumentative in the classic Socratic method of basically it’s exploring something together.

Craig: It’s interrogative. I think it’s interesting to watch people question. The questions that we ask and the way people answer things is in and of itself a great opportunity to learn about character, but it’s also a great opportunity to get information across without feeling lamely expository. It’s questioning. This is an interview. I like that.

John: Next technique would be free association. This is where you don’t censor the unworkable ideas. You swing bail, “Just tell me everything.” It’s when they say “No bad ideas.” It’s often used in comedies because like some of the ideas are just truly horrible, awful, terrible, bad ideas. At some points in some stories, you actually need that crazy solution because in proposing the crazy solution, then the other character says, “No, we can’t do that, but we could actually do this thing.” You find connections just because you’re willing to go crazy.

Craig: [chuckles] It is sad in a way how we tend to punish the big swingers in fiction because they take these big idea swings, and people are just, “Shut up.” Then one of them goes, “Everything you just said was insane, but wait.” [chuckles] They just existed to make you angry enough with their bad idea that your brain finally barfs up a good one. But in real life, it’s necessary because sometimes the answer to the problem is to realize you were trying to solve the wrong problem entirely.

John: Yes, and that’ll come up occasionally in these other approaches. Third one is to refactor or rewrite it from scratch. It’s basically rather than try to fix this thing, we actually just need to replace it completely. When a character proposes that, it does tell you about their instincts, which could be the right instinct because basically, you’re trying to fix an unfixable thing. We need to scrub it, or that they are so perfectionist, they’re idealists in a way that it’s not practical. I love to hear when people are like, “Oh, do we need to throw the whole thing out?”

Craig: Yes, I’m a big believer in throwing the whole thing. It’s the Gordian Knot solution, right? Just chop it in half, done.

John: Yes. All right. Decomposition, which is to take a problem and break it into smaller, more addressable chunks, which is so often the right solution that people are trying to just tackle too big of a problem, and you break it into smaller things. You’re like, “Oh, I know how to solve each of these little individual things. It’s just the big thing that seems so daunting.”

Craig: There are so many wonderful examples of this in movies. When people are explaining something that’s seemingly impossible to other people, they break it down. Maybe my favorite is in Ocean’s Eleven, where Danny Ocean is explaining, not yet, how they’re going to do it. He is explaining what the problems are and he is going little by little by little, one by one by one. It’s this, it’s this, gets worse, gets worse, gets worse. In doing so, you understand that he’s laid the groundwork for the solutions. We now know all the things that we’re going to have to solve.

John: Absolutely. The Martian is another great example that’s like every character in it is basically taking this giant, unsolvable problem and break it into solvable problems. The minimal viable solution, which is rather than try to get a perfect answer, let’s just get an answer that solves the issue okay for now, so we can at least– By getting something that works kind of, that we can see what we need to do next. That’s when you get characters say, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.” It’s just something that works.

Craig: It’s probably the thing that you would want to then replace with the good answer. It feels like a duck, not a rubber duck, but ducking. Evasion and unwillingness to face the problem in and of itself is a fun aspect of how characters approach problem-solving.

John: Analogization, basically saying, this thing is like this other thing. It’s recognizing that this specific situation may never have occurred, but it’s like other things that have occurred. It’s a case for generalists. It’s a case for people who’ve done other things, and a specialist may not see a thing that a generalist can recognize because they can pull from history or other fields.

Craig: Harold Ramis, describing the situation with the ectoplasma container in terms of a giant Twinkie. This is my favorite example. “Tell them about the Twinkie. It’s a big Twinkie,” but it’s essential. I didn’t really get into analogization. I said, “Well, I did in Chernobyl in the sense of like, I described a nuclear reactor like a car, like gas pedal, brake pedal. You do have to figure out how to make it relatable to somebody that doesn’t know the specifics and doesn’t need to.

John: Absolutely. Metaphors are how we communicate knowledge. It’s finding what the right metaphor is for this thing. That can be a useful metaphor for what the problem is, but also a metaphor for what a solution would look like. Very related. It’s just finding earlier solutions. I get frustrated by people who assume, like “This is the first time this has ever happened.” I always say like, “No, this must’ve happened a thousand times. Someone else has solved this before. We just need to look for the right way to find the answer that they came up with, because it’s probably the right answer.”

Craig: Or in their attempts to solve this, we see what we should not be doing, or we deepen the mystery. Why didn’t that work? It should have worked.

John: That’s a very good point. If there’s not a solution that’s out there, there must be a reason why there’s not a solution out there.

Craig: Right. It helps define your particular problem as a character as difficult.

John: Stepping away or letting something incubate, which is basically, rather than try to solve the problem right now, we are going to take a break, let our brains rest. We’re going to take a shower, which we often mention on this podcast. We’re going to come back to that when we are rested or when the situation has changed. That the problem may be that there’s actually not a solution in front of us because of where we are right now at this moment, but there may be an answer to this down the road.

Craig: Yes. This is an opportunity for epiphany, which can be a little silly sometimes, but a good epiphany.

John: Love it.

Craig: Worth its weight in gold. Typically, an epiphany comes when someone’s given up. RIP, Val Kilmer, Real Genius, a movie that all nerds and fans of comedy and people of the ‘80s love. He is trying to solve a problem with a laser. Because the laser is sabotaged, it explodes, and he’s out of luck. He’s not going to graduate, he’s not going to get the job, and he’s in absolute despair. He gives up. In that moment of giving up, he beats up a refrigerator, some ice falls out, he looks at the ice, and he goes, “Oh my God, I got it.” He solves the problem.

John: Sometimes it’s the recognition that the obstacle is you. The obstacle is your own pride, your own stubbornness. It’s only by taking a step back, you would say like, “Oh, this was the solution there.” Only by creating some space is a solution possible.

Another technique is what’s called test-driven development or contradictory development, which basically, first you establish what the thing should do, what it needs to do, and then you can test whether you succeeded. Then you can think about how to implement it. Rather than first trying to find a solution, find like, well, how will you know what the real solution looks like, so we’re not passing it by?

Craig: Just so people are clear, this is not just applicable to obviously defined problems. You can apply what you just said to romance. I look at those two people, that’s what I want. Now, problem, how do I get to that?

John: It really comes down to– We often talk about it. What is the thesis, and challenging that thesis, basically. How will I know that this thesis has been sustained or disproven? You got to define those terms first. Often, we’re looking for a solution without actually looking for how we’ll know a solution is satisfactory.

Last one is related to rubber ducking. It’s the Feynman technique. It’s named after Richard Feynman. Basically, you try to write an explanation in a way that a child could understand it. This is a thing we do all the time in movies, is basically simplify it to another character, and you’re finding metaphors, you’re finding ways to explain a thing so that you can actually get a non-expert to understand what it is that they need to be looking at.

Craig: Which requires you to really understand whatever it is and really be able to break down the problem. Ideally, a character can break a problem down and describe it in this matter very quickly. There are times in movies where somebody comes along, you’ll see this in movies that involve military confrontations, where somebody gets in there and there’s chaos all around, they’re like, “What do we got?” Ba-dup, ba-dup, ba-dup. Fast. No one has time to go on and on. If you have somebody in the middle of chaos taking their time, that’s just comedic.

John: It is. The thing I hope to never hear again is explain it like I’m five. It’s just so cliche.

Craig: Redundant and everybody should be explaining everything like we’re five.

John: That instinct is correct. It’s like finding the way to have a character explain something in a very clear way to a person who’s not an expert in it is incredibly valuable. Yes, you can overdo it at times, but you look at shows like Succession that we love so much, they’re able to take really complicated things and sometimes they’re talking up at the very high level so we don’t actually understand, but also fundamentally, they’ll bring it down when it’s important. The Big Short does it so well.

Craig: The Big Short was designed to teach us something important that was complicated. When you have shows like Succession, people like Jesse Armstrong are really good at understanding when they should not talk to you like you’re five because they want you to be impressed with these people who all know stuff you don’t. But when they need you to understand it for you to connect to the drama, somebody’s going to explain it to somebody like they’re five.

John: There’s times where they’re talking in high-level technical jargon, equivalent of like science-y. It’s gobbledygook to us, but we believe that they understand what it is. What’s crucial is that when there’s a problem to be solved, they’re able to then put it in terms where you can actually understand what the stakes are and what the solution feels like even if we don’t understand exactly how it all fits.

Craig: Yes. I don’t know why getting this person to call that person is going to make a difference. All I know is I have 20 minutes to get that person to call this person and the first person is in space, and the second person is in a submarine. What do I do?

John: Yes, exactly. You’ve made it really clear. All these techniques we’re talking through are ways you can think about solving problems in real life and that’s why they feel real and meaningful. Here, because of Scriptnotes, we’re really talking about how you have your characters address problems and create scenes where they’re solving those problems in ways that are interesting and engaging and hold the audience’s attention, and let us into our character’s thought process, which is so hard to do sometimes.

Craig: Yes, let us experience the frustration. Let us experience false celebration. Sometimes our characters have figured it out. No, they haven’t. That’s a terrible feeling. We’ve all felt that in life where we thought we solved it and then we’re like, “Oh no, we did not.”

John: It crosses every genre. It’s in comedies, it’s in mysteries, it’s in dramas. Everything is going to have problem solving. Every horror slasher movie is like, “How are we going to get through this?”

Craig: How are we getting out of this woods?

John: That’s what makes it so universal and so relatable. It’s making sure you’re setting up those problems in ways that can force our characters into really good problem solving. Cool. Speaking of problem solving.

Craig: Segue man.

John: Segue man. We’re recording this on Tuesday. Who knows what the status of the world is at this point.

Craig: What world?

John: This president has proposed a 100% tariff.

Craig: I like that, “this president.” That’s a great way to do it.

John: A 100% tariff on movies produced outside of the United States. As we were recording, Jon Voight came out with this other thing which is explaining more about it. Craig, can you briefly for people who are not aware, what is a tariff and why does it actually not make any sense here at all?

Craig: A tariff is a tax that is levied on imports.

John: Imported goods.

Craig: When some product crosses our border, it goes through customs. At that point, the government can levy a tax upon it. The people who are selling it, sell it to us, but when we buy it, that purchase price, there is a tax. We, on our side of the border-

John: The consumer of it.

Craig: The consumer pays the tax on that material. That is the cost of getting stuff from another country. If there is a tax on, for instance, steel from China. China does not pay more. They don’t pay that tax at all, but the people who import it do. The idea, of course, is to say, “See, we’ve made it too expensive to import this. Now you have to use the steel here.” Of course, what in the [inaudible 00:44:42] is that? The price goes up dramatically because they can, because the supply goes down and the demand is the same. Importantly, tariffs are on products.

John: Things that were put on a ship and they crossed it– it went through customs. A DVD that was manufactured overseas and brought in, you could apply a tariff.

Craig: Yes, you can. What you can’t do is put a tariff on labor that has occurred entirely in another country. Look, we can talk about how horrible runaway production has been for California in particular. Right now, finally, Sacramento seems to be taking this seriously. Seems to be. I just want people to understand, when somebody goes to make a movie in the United Kingdom, they fly there and then everybody who works there is paid there. All the things that they use to build sets, to dress people are there. The thing that comes back is a card with digital information? What is there to tax exactly?

John: That’s one of the reasons why specifically when power was delegated to the president to enact tariffs and things like that, movies were excluded as were books, things that are just intellectual property.

Craig: It just don’t work that way.

John: All that said, let’s talk about–

Craig: I can’t believe Jon Voight doesn’t know this.

John: Let’s talk about the instinct to make movies and television shows in the United States, which is not a bad instinct. No, we love that. To incentivize production within the United States through incentives, through taxes or other incentives, and to make sure that we have a sustainable industry so that continue to make things in the United States.

Craig: This is a good topic for a show about problem solving. Let’s start with what is going on. What has happened? Places outside of California, in the United States, notably New Mexico, Georgia, Louisiana, provide tax incentives. The way those generally work is that they say, “Hey, everybody that works here and all the money that you spend here on things, the sales tax and the income tax so that the people earn from labor, we’re going to provide back to your production. The thing is you’re powering the economy just by being here and by putting income in people’s pockets. We want you to come here, so we’re not going to tax you on that stuff. We’re going to give that back to you.”

Those schemes, they’re literally called schemes, function in various ways. Typically, there is a percentage that they give you back, and there is often a cap. The state, or whatever the municipality says, once we’ve covered this much money in this stuff, we stop, we’re done because we just don’t want to give everybody everything. What ensued and what has ensued is a race to the bottom. This is the problem.

Listen, people get very angry about globalization. Well, that occurred. I understand the anger at the underlying problem, which is capitalism will draw everything down to the cheapest number, which means drawing labor down to the lowest amount of expenditure and enriching corporations as much as possible.

This is why California has resisted this sort of thing for a while, and it’s why a lot of people fundamentally are uncomfortable with this because what we’re saying is the only way to help working people, especially the working crews in California is to just give a ton of money to rich corporations.

John: Let’s talk about when incentives work properly and how they’re structured. If I can find a link to it, there was a representative from the DGA who explained on Kim Masters’ podcast in a really good way, what the new California incentives are supposed to be. The incentives are paying people back for their labor costs. Basically saying, “You employed these people in the state of California. That’s a good thing. Therefore, we are going to refund money to you based on that.” That’s really what it comes down to.

One of the challenges we face is that California labor costs are higher than they are other places. Sometimes that’s why you move to cheaper places to shoot, including overseas, which is really what this focus is of this, which is becomes hard to do. When you’re shooting a movie that is set in Philadelphia, but you’re shooting in Croatia because it’s just cheaper to shoot in Croatia, that’s a harder problem to solve.

Craig: It is. That said, there are costs inherent to shooting far away. A ton of people have to be shipped out there, including most of your key cast.

John: Your department heads.

Craig: Your department heads. There’s also just typically a duplication of efforts. You’re going to want to find what’s called a services company. If you’re shooting something in Croatia, you have a production company, you have your script, you have your production, and then you need to hire a Croatian production company that puts you in touch with the Croatian folks that you’re going to need to work on your movie or your show. People don’t want to do this.

Unless you’re making a movie about Croatia, nobody wants to go far away from the setting of the movie. It is disruptive, and it has really hurt so many people who make their living off of these production trades here in Los Angeles. Listen, it’s dollar to dollar at some point, who knows?

John: Cost of currency, everything else.

Craig: It’s impossible to figure this stuff out, except on the largest level. What we know is the argument’s not even close for the companies. For my show, it was like, this is the difference. You either can make it or you can’t.

John: With Canada, the dollar exchange is part of it, but also the incentives.

Craig: The exchange rate is definitely an issue, and that fluctuates, but the incentives are absolutely a part of it. What happens is you start to get even inter-provincial competition to see, okay, well Alberta knows that they don’t necessarily have as wide and deep a pool of crew as BC does. They increase their incentives to bring stuff, in comes The Last of Us, more people are trained, more people are hired, better for Alberta.

We need to do something about this, and the one thing I think we just can’t afford to do anymore is clutch our pearls about the fact that this is putting money in corporate pockets because they’re doing it anyway. No matter what we do, they are either keeping the money in their pocket and not giving it to us, or they’re getting money to replace the money they give to us. One way or the other, it’s happening. I would rather that we replace the money in their pocket and have them give it to us here in Los Angeles.

By us, I mean all of our grips, all of our electric, all of our catering, all of our teamsters and our seamstresses, and every single person that works on– construction is an enormous part of this, and it will power our economy. It’s important to do. No, we’re not going to get there by tariffs. We’re going to get there the other way, it seems.

John: I want to end this on a happy note, which is a movie that I’m helping out on is a very low budget, but based on low budget, was going to probably need to shoot in Mexico, even though it’s set in Southern California, and went through a whole bunch of stuff and then was able to get the California tax credit, and so is now going to be shooting in California, which is incredible. It’s the right thing for the movie, it’s the right thing for the state. It shows off an underappreciated part of our state. I’m incredibly excited for it. It was a slog to get there, but it happened.

Craig: It’s lucky because it’s a lottery right now.

John: It is.

Craig: You literally win or lose randomly.

John: It’s also in tiers based on what size production you are.

Craig: That’s the other catch here, because the way the new schemes that are being proposed are structured, it really does aim more towards lower budget or middle budget things. I think there’s a great argument to be made that the large budget things employ more people. It’s one of those things of like, “Well, do we want to give five different people X units, or we would like to give one person 10 X units?” I don’t know.

John: It’s really tough. The other reason why we can’t say tariffs mean a different thing, if we’re going to slap a fee on things that were shot overseas, they’re going to slap a fee on anything that we try to show overseas too. Nobody wants a trade war over this.

Craig: It is literally other than– I’ll even take it back because we don’t really export technology. We import it because we build it all overseas.

John: Our film and television industry is a giant exporter of culture.

Craig: It is the only exportation that we have beyond some limited crops, I think, and in some limited cases, some fuels. I can’t think of an industry that is just so exportive. We don’t need sledgehammers to fix this. We just need will and the unions need to buy in. It seems like they are. Unfortunately, they have to agree to somehow make the corporate paymasters happy. Talk about not letting the perfect get in the way of the good.

John: All right. It’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a person, her name is Hannah Ritchie. She has a great blog called Sustainability by the Numbers. She also has a podcast called Solving for Climate. She is a data scientist and writer who mostly talks about climate change, sustainability, all those things. She’s a person, as a data scientist, she actually crunches the numbers to figure out what is useful and what is not useful. She can talk about solar panel productivity and where the changes are there and the choices you can make individually, but also the choices systematically that governments make about doing things right.

She’s Scottish. Craig, you will love her accent.

Craig: Oh, Scottish.

John: She’s a really smart Scottish person.

Craig: I love the Scots.

John: I love them so much. Specifically this last week, she wrote about ChatGPT and there’s this meme going around of how much energy a ChatGPT query goes up, and it is so incredibly negligible. people say, “Oh, it’s 10 times as much as a Google search is.” A Google search is nothing, it’s a grain of sand.

Craig: Aren’t statistics fun?

John: Statistics are fun. I’ll point people to this blog post, but really I’ve learned so much reading her, but also listening to her podcast, talking about things like they’re putting sales on freighters now. Which is so cool.

Craig: Smart.

John: They retrofited because–

Craig: You save that much. If the wind blows, you turn your engine off, you save some money.

John: The expert they had on to talk about it was talking about how right now they’ll optimize for speed a little bit because sometimes it’s like, “Well, we’ll burn less fuel and go slowly and it’s worthwhile,” but with the wind blowing, when you don’t need it in a hurry, use the wind.

Craig: Absolutely. Imagine that.

John: It’s some stuff that feels like science fiction, but it’s actually people, actual scientists are doing it. Hannah Ritchie, Sustainability by the Numbers is her blog, but the podcast is called Solving for Climate.

Craig: I love that. I’ve got a delightful one cool thing, and it really is. It’s so cool. Our good friends at Rusty Lake-

John: Oh, yes. It’s another game. Another-

Craig: A surprise. [crosstalk] Yes. Our friends at Rusty Lake out there in the Netherlands who make all the wonderful Rusty Lake games, it is their 10th anniversary. To celebrate, they released a surprise game called the Mr. Rabbit Magic Show. Those of you who play these incredibly surreal games know that there’s Mr. Crow and Mr. Owl and Mr. Rabbit, and they are all very sinister. True to form, they just knock it out of the park.

It’s just like, hey, Mr. Rabbit’s Magic Show. There’s going to be 20 little puzzles and each one is– it’s just really, they’re really easy and you’re like blowing through them and then shit gets weird. Of course they supply a whole other game inside the game with incredible challenges to do. Getting and completing the whole thing, it felt like a full complete meal and extremely Rusty Lake, very intertextual. They’ve built quite a culture over there. It seems like such a nice place. I want to work there.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It seems like they have fun. They seem really cool. Congratulations to Rusty Lake. You guys and Fireproof Games who make the room games are my favorite iOS game makers.

John: Fantastic. I forgot to mention this before it actually happened, but I will say thank you to everybody who stopped by our booth at PAX East, the big game convention this last weekend in Boston. We were there with Birdigo, which is our game on Steam right now. I’m going to say great because it actually hasn’t happened as we’re recording this. I’m resuming it went fantastic, but I want to thank everybody who visited our booth and signed up and downloaded our demo for Birdigo up there.

Craig: Oh, I love that.

John: It’s so much fun. We made a little banner or something.

Craig: Nice work.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced my Drew Marquardt and Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you need an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. There’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Actually, we didn’t answer any questions today.

Craig: No, we didn’t.

John: We did some follow-up, though.

Craig: We must have an incredible backlog of questions.

John: Drew talk to us about the question backlog we have.

Drew: We do. We have some great ones that I’ve got in store.

John: We had four on the workflow today, which we didn’t get to because I’m always keeping an eye on time.

Craig: Sure. You know I love an all-question episode. It’s so much fun.

John: We’ll get there. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a weekly newsletter we have called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about on the episode today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you to all of our premium subscribers. You let us do this every week, which is so much fun. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back episodes and the bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on Egypt and Jordan and my troubles through the tombs. Craig, it’s nice to be back with you here in person.

Craig: Welcome home, John.

John: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. I am back from two weeks off the grid. I actually, literally, I put the out of office email thing. I didn’t check my email. I didn’t open my laptop.

Craig: Love it.

John: It was good.

Craig: I need that.

John: You should do that. I know you traveled to Spain for last of–

Craig: To work.

John: It was work work stuff. Craig, I’m going to encourage you to find a time and just say– because the world did not fall apart and like Drew and everybody else, they stepped up and they just did stuff. I just said like, “Just to handle stuff as best as you could handle.”

Craig: Or maybe the world falls apart.

John: Maybe it’s fine.

Craig: Whatever. I’m not funding crucial research into chromosomal repair. I admire you for flinging yourself across the globe. I have come to find travel so exhausting, so exhausting to the point where just even like, “Oh, we’re just going to do a one hour hop somewhere, a short flight.” I’m tired. There’s nothing about going up and down that exhausts me and going this last trip to Spain and then the UK and then back to LA again, I was just– oh man, I was knackered.

John: You were knackered.

Craig: I was knackered. You fling yourself. It was just you and Mike.

John: Just me and Mike. I thank God– This is our 25th anniversary. That’s the reason why we took this trip and thank God we get along well because we were with each other for 17 days solid. Literally never apart.

Craig: Melissa and I, I think our secret because apart–

John: You never see each other.

Craig: 17 days out of the year, I would say we love our independence and then we come together and then we like to go to our corners and then come back together again. I don’t know if I can spend 17 days straight with anyone. I love being alone. Oh my God, I love it. You guys close quarters, 17 days straight, grouchy, I assume from jet lag.

John: Not that grouchy.

Craig: Not that grouchy.

John: No, we don’t get that grouchy. We also we can recognize each other when like stuff’s happening. Here’s what I’ll say was different about this trip is it was– generally Mike plans our trips and he’s responsible for everything. This time we went to travel agents like, “Make this happen.”

Craig: A travel agent.

John: We went to the travel agent, who then went through a safari company, Expedite company for that. We had handlers at every set because we were going to the Middle East and we’re two gay men going to the Middle East. I was going to ask put us in a bubble wrap. You expressed some concern.

Craig: For you. I can envision concern for me.

John: I’ll say it all went really well.

Craig: That’s great.

John: We had to make choices to help us.

Craig: Yes. You weren’t wearing rainbow t-shirts.

John: We weren’t. Honestly, it’s helpful that Mike and I can be red as brothers. We weren’t pretending to be anything, we weren’t.

Craig: Nor were you necessarily in a situation where you thought, “Oh, we’re going to attract unwanted attention.”

John: Yes. We also had somebody with us at all times. We had a handler who could meet us at the airport and we also always had a guide for where we were. In Egypt, that’s an Egyptologist, and that’s a whole fascinating thing where it’s a licensed thing who you have certifications and tests and stuff like that. They could do things that people can’t do. That was great. I wish we had equivalence of that here because our tourism industry is just nowhere near as sophisticated as Egypt is.

Craig: It’s so funny you say that because every time I find myself driving along Hollywood Boulevard and I see how many tourists are there, I think “Why. Why are you here?” Did just dumped them out of a plane and we’re like, “Enjoy.”

John: We stick them on a van and unlicensed undertrained-

Craig: Good luck everybody.

John: -with maps to the stars.

Craig: With maps to the stars. It is true, in other countries there is because tourism is so vital. Obviously there is tourism to United States. I think New York must be and San Francisco’s probably huge.

John: LA’s probably number three.

Craig: LA’s up there.

John: Orlando’s also probably high.

Craig: Orlando must be. LA/Anaheim, the LA metro area must be pretty big and people go to– but it’s not as big of a wedge of our economic pie as tourism is probably for Egypt.

John: I will confess that, while I was in Egypt, I did a ChatGPT question, an 03 and one of the detailed questions, “Can you compare tourism into Egypt as a share of the economy, versus specifically Los Angeles or New York?”

Craig: What did you get?

John: It’s like 20%, 25% of Egypt’s economy, tourism it’s crazy.

Craig: It’s insane.

John: It’s 1% to 2% of LA County.

Craig: No wonder there’s a rather robust tourism industry there to help people. I think it’s great. Sometimes because I hate traveling, I don’t like people that romanticize traveling and people who are like, “I just like going places and I don’t know where I’m going. I just like find things.” I’m like, “I want to know where I am.” I’ll love to wander, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to just guess. I’d like to have a vague sense of wander.

John: This sounds like an advert on ChatGPT, but I’ll tell you the one other thing I did do-

Craig: Oh my God, you’re ruining the climate.

John: We had this PDF that travel agency had put together. Like, “Here’s basically all the stuff that’s happening. Here’s the itinerary for things.” The PDF was such a nightmare to read through, where are we? I gave it a ChatGPT and it’s like, “Read this, tell me what I’m doing tomorrow.” It would come back with an answer. Like, “Here’s what happens tomorrow.” It’s like, “Thank God someone can actually just tell me the answer to this.”

Craig: Someone?

John: Someone. Someone told me. I didn’t have to ask Mike. I could ask this. This animated object.

Craig: One day Mike will be as good as this.

John: As this. I also point by the camera on my phone and say things like, “What is this thing I’m looking at?” It could tell me. God, that’s the near future here.

Craig: I am so dedicated right now to going nowhere. I think in part it’s a reaction to how much travel I do because of the show. A lot of it is this weird inside Canada travel just all over. Boy, a year of it.

John: I’ll say, I haven’t had to travel for work a lot yet. That’s probably why I actually had some buffer in me where I could sustain it. It was 25 hours of travel to get back from Egypt yesterday. That’s a lot.

Craig: Wow. Cairo flies direct to–

John: Cairo to Dubai, the wrong direction, then Dubai to LA.

Craig: Oh, that hurts.

John: It does hurt. Ouch but we made it.

Craig: You made it and you’re back home.

John: It’s great. I will say that as I said in the main episode, the tombs are great. The wonders of the world, I get why they’re a wonder of the world. Petra is gorgeous. I was in the Wadi Rahm, which is the Red Sand deserts of Jordan where they shot Lawrence of Arabia and The Martian. It’s incredible. It’s mars. It’s nowhere on earth. It’s great to be able to do that. The other thing I did on this trip, which was helpful is every day I would just write down what actually happened.

I would just write and write and write and write pages of it and actually just helped me process what had actually happened. Sometimes just a thing happened and I couldn’t even tell you afterwards, and now I actually do have a recollection if I could cross as what it actually felt like.

Craig: Oh, it’s so healthy.

John: It felt healthy.

Craig: This is what I did when I got to Madrid. I got into bed. And then at some point–

John: You brought with you your game.

Craig: My steamdeck. Oh, by the way, John.

John: Yes.

Craig: This is what this segment should have been about.

John: Please.

Craig: I’ve completed Baldur’s Gate 3 on honor mode.

John: At D&D. Before I left you were trying to do it. Congratulations, Craig.

Craig: It is now complete. I did everything. No cheating took on every boss did it all.

John: Congratulations.

Craig: Golden dice. Actually matters more to me than pretty much anything else I’ve done.

John: Craig, one thing I genuinely admire about you is that you do not feel any shame about pursuing your hobbies and interests and spending time on those.

Craig: Oh my God, no. I don’t know why I don’t do it more. Granted, a huge part of it is dissociating.

John: It’s a way of coping, but I honestly feel like even if you– you’re in a no show.

Craig: Some people get very guilty about saying that, how much time they spend on a video game. I’m like, “Why are you feeling guilty? What better way?” People don’t feel guilty about watching television shows.

John: One of the books they read on this trip was Four Thousand Weeks, which you’ve probably heard of. Four Thousand Weeks is basically that’s how long your life is just 4,000 weeks, which is scary when you think about it. It’s like, “Oh, that’s not that long.” That’s 80 years and that’s how long you have. It’s become a test of like, “Well, is this the way I want to spend one of my 4,000 doing this thing?”

What the argument the book really makes is that the thing is you’re doing as hobbies, which is you’re just doing them because you enjoy them, those are probably things you should be spending your time doing.

Craig: The stuff. Also we’re just ill-equipped to handle it. We cannot mentally handle this problem. Our own fatality just short circuits everything. Because if you really stop to smell the roses, you will go insane. If you really stopped to go, “I am present in this moment and feeling my life slipping by as time elapses and I move closer to the 4000th week,” you’re going to fall apart.

John: I did some of that though on this trip. There were times where just like, we’re on a Nile cruise and so for four days I was just looking everyone go by on the Nile. A river cruise, rivers are like trains but slower.

Craig: Slow trains.

John: What’s also different is that people build things right next to the river. People live next to the river. The trains, you’re going through places like no one wants to live next to the train.

Craig: It goes by so fast you can’t see anything anyway.

John: Here you can see like, “Oh there is some guy washing his clothes in the river. There are some kids playing. Look, there’s some goats.” That was great.

Craig: You occasionally will dock and one of the passengers will mysteriously be murdered.

John: We watched Death on the Nile in the hotel where Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile which is so much fun.

Craig: First of all, amazing. Congratulations. That’s the first part of this trip I’m envious of, fully. When you say you watched–

John: I watched the old one.

Craig: Thank you. No offense to new one.

John: Michael Green and everybody else.

Craig: The old one is spectacular.

John: Just the silliest movie.

Craig: Ridiculous. So campy. Crazy.

John: Just wild. Also like Hercule Poirot has no reason to be. It’s all accidental. Doesn’t seem particularly concerned about how many people die in the movie.

Craig: Never. He’s a full sociopath.

John: The movie was actually shot at the hotel we were staying at.

Craig: Amazing.

John: We watched like the first half of it and then we had dinner and I was like, “Oh, this is right where they shot that thing.” It was so much fun. They’re like, “Oh, they’re at Abu Simbel.” We were there this afternoon.

Craig: Is that where the rock falls and smashes?

John: That was at Temple of Karnak.

Craig: Temple of Karnak. Yes.

John: Abu Simbel has the two giant Ramesses the second. It’s where Mia Farrow is crazy and he yells at them.

Craig: Mia Farrow. Boy, I love a classic Mia Farrow. I love a Death on the Nile. I love a Rosemary’s Baby.

John: It was fun. Anyway, Egypt. Jordan, great. Taking time off. Great. Love it. Huge fan of taking some time off and just doing things you want to do.

Craig: Glad you’re back.

John: Thanks.

Craig: Time to play some D&D.

John: We’ll do it. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

Craig: Thank you. Bye.

Links:

• The Production Assistant’s Guide to the Lunch Run
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• Note On Long Takes by Aidan Moretti
• Video tour inside the Great Pyramid of Giza
• Donald Trump Says He’s Pursuing 100% Tariffs On Movies Produced Outside U.S. and John Voight’s proposal
• Sustainability by the Numbers by Hannah Ritchie
• Solving for Climate
• The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show by Rusty Lake
• Birdigo
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on 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.