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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John, a standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

[music]

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. You’re listening to episode 680 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you write action set pieces that work both on the screen and on the page? We’ll talk with a writer who has made that her calling card. Then it’s a new round of How Would This be a Movie?, where we take stories from the news or history and squeeze the cinematic juice out of them. To help us do all this, let’s welcome back the screenwriter behind Bumblebee, Birds of Prey and The Flash, Christina Hodson.

Christina Hodson: Hello.

John: Christina Hodson, we’re so happy to have you back.

Christina: I’m very happy to be back. I cannot believe you’re on 680.

John: It’s so many episodes.

Christina: That’s so many.

John: Yes, but as we’re doing the Scriptnotes book, now we’re in sort of the last minutes on Scriptnotes book, it feels like 680 episodes. There’s just a lot there. It’s been a lot of sifting through stuff and the culling phase now where it’s like we’ve had these amazing guests on. It’s like, oh, we want to do a little breakout chapter with them. It’s like, oh no, there’s no room. There’s no room for these people.

Drew Marquardt: Ryan Reynolds, gone.

John: Oh, he’s gone. Ryan, if you’re listening to this, sorry. You were terrific. You’re wonderful. Twice.

Christina: They pick you for me, Ryan.

John: Christina, we want to bring you in here right now just to let you know that you’re such a valuable part of the Scriptnotes community and yet you don’t have your own chapter.

Christina: Fuck.

John: You can swear if you want to on the show.

Christina: I forgot to apologize in advance. I will be swearing.

John: All right. We’re going to have some swearing. We’re going to have some good crafty things. We’re going to talk about story. But in our bonus segment for paying members, I want to talk about the cold email, when you have to just email a person you’ve never met before and pitch your case and do that because it’s a thing I find myself having to do a lot and some people are terrified of it. I find it delightful.

Christina: You do it all the time?

John: Yes.

Christina: Who are you sending cold emails to?

John: People I have questions about what they’re doing. Sometimes on a professional level, sometimes for like the apps we’re working on. I’m actually kind of shameless and I have some techniques which I think other people who are scared to send those emails could probably benefit from.

Christina: Is it possible that your technique is being John August?

John: That is a part of it. Just as a little amuse-bouche for the real advice here, is that people are so much better emailing on behalf of somebody else than for themselves, so pretend you’re somebody else. Pretend you’re doing it for somebody else.

Christina: I used to make phone calls and pretend I was an assistant for myself.

John: You’ve got that British accent though. It still helps. It works. It really does.

We have a little bit of follow-up. Highland Pro shipped, we’re so grateful to everyone who’s been playing with it and installing it. You, Christina, were actually really helpful in the launch of Highland 2. Do you remember that?

Christina: I do remember that. Never in the world did I think I could possibly be helpful in anything to do with software.

John: You were, because one of the features in Highland 2 which you helped to work out was gender analysis. We were the first app that had a thing where you could put your script and say, what were the male and female ratios in the script in terms of dialogue and stuff? We put that in there first. All the other apps copied it, which is great. They could all see what that was like. Do you find yourself using those tools now?

Christina: I have not used them in a little while, but I think it definitely made me more mindful of it in general. I think now I don’t start writing a character without thinking a bit more carefully.

John: It really is sometimes in the conception phase where you’re thinking of like, wait, if I do it this way, there’s going to be so few female characters, or they not going to have any chance to actually talk with each other.

Christina: Totally.

John: This just all came out of the realization that there was like a study that you helped out on in terms of– You’re nodding like, maybe I helped out on it?

Christina: Honestly, I can’t remember anything.

John: Oh, it was pre-pandemic. It’s all a blur.

Christina: It was Me Too, and Me Too got wiped out by COVID.

John: Me Too, like hashtag Me Too, not like Me Too, me also.

Christina: No, I feel like my memory of hashtag Me Too got completely wiped out by hashtag COVID.

John: Absolutely. Everything’s been memory hole’d. It’s so scary. One of the things I find so helpful sometimes is just I will Google myself and find like, oh, did I talk about this thing? Because there was a New York Times article we were both in.

Christina: When I Google myself now, I find you.

John: Absolutely. There’s a lovely shot of the two of us at your house.

Christina: Pretending to read notes from my notebook [laughs]. I find that endlessly amusing.

John: All journals are basically 100% accurately portraying what really happened in a moment.

Christina: Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.

John: Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb. One of the things I’ve noticed, the difference between launching an app versus launching a series or a movie is that– There’s some things that are similar. Obviously, you get reviews, you get articles written about you, which is great. You get features. I got a feature of the app store for Highland Pro and ratings, star ratings. But with a movie or a feature, you’re just done at a certain point.

It’s just like, oh, it’s out there and it’s finished and it’s this completion versus something like an app. We’re constantly putting out updates and there’s bug fixes and Drew gets emails and we’re all responding to stuff. You have a chance to fix things, which is great, because it’s not frozen in amber, but there’s also a responsibility to keep doing

Christina: Also, it actually hangs over you forever.

John: Yes, it does hang over you for a while. Anyway, thank you to everyone who has left a review, that is super, super helpful and left us a star rating. If you haven’t tried Highland yet, it is available on the app store for Mac, for iPad and for iPhone. It’s a 30-day free trial. Give it a shot.

Next up and follow up, director’s chairs. We were talking to this on a recent episode about sort of the scourge of director’s chairs. We got some really good feedback and follow-up. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Sarah writes, “Last summer, I was six months pregnant as the on-set producer. You think your butt hurts? I was dying. Finally, I gave in and bought my own chair, which was an outdoor rocking chair I bought at a sporting goods store. It’s much lower to the ground, so it requires us to stick down the monitors. I had to swallow my pride a little as I was now a pregnant lady in a rocking chair on set, but I was so much less miserable. Highly recommended.”

John: Christina, what’s been your experience with director’s chairs and chairs on sets?

Christina: Very bad. I’m clumsy and I like to sit cross-legged, so I always do something wrong. I also always put bags where I shouldn’t and then hide things in the pocket and make them heavy and then they tip and I’m a disaster. Director’s chairs are terrible.

John: They are terrible.

Christina: There’s got to be a better solution.

John: There are better solutions. Ryan wrote in and what did she say?

Drew: “I was a producer on The Walking Dead and everyone had back problems after using the traditional director chairs at Video Village for the last 10 years of our show. Eventually, our prop master found a bamboo director’s chair and this made a huge difference for the execs. The props team had rolling carts that the chairs would be hung up on and transported to the next set or village move. The train was brutal and these chairs are a bit heavier, but to save a few people who kept us employed safe from back surgery, the team was happy to help out.” She included a link, which we’ll put in the show notes.

John: That’s great. It’s nice to see that there are solutions out there and it’s just a matter of people stepping up and saying, hey, this is important for me and for everybody else around you to just do this better.

The common threads we see, which Sarah’s first email talked about, is that you got to be lower to the ground. Part of the problem is that if you can’t put your feet on the ground while you’re in the chair, you’re going to have more problems. The other problem is the seat, and the little sling seats, you would think it’d be comfortable, but they’re the worst. It just pinches you in a really bad way. We won’t probably fix this problem on this podcast.

Christina: We could burn them all.

John: That’s a thing we could do.

Christina: Just as a suggestion, guys, this is why you invite me back. Great ideas.

John: Great. Let’s continue on with mammograms. This is from 679. We were talking about mammograms.

Drew: Stephanie B. writes, I’m writing in response to 679, where the terrific Liz Hannah’s one cool thing is to get a mammogram. She pointed out that insurance doesn’t always cover mammograms if the patient is under a certain age.

Even after age 40, my health insurance only covers mammograms every other year. I paid out of pocket for my own mammograms on the off years. There’s a little secret hospitals don’t advertise. They will almost always discount an uninsured procedure like mammograms. My hospital in Atlanta gives me an 80% discount for the mammograms if I pay out of pocket.

Always ask and call around to check different hospitals because this is one time when it doesn’t matter if a hospital is out of network since insurance isn’t covering it anyway. My breast cancer was caught early with a mammogram I paid for on my own and it was taken care of quickly. I’m so, so glad I didn’t wait another year to get a mammogram that my insurance would have paid for. Please don’t put it off. To all the men listening, please remind all the women you love to schedule a mammogram. They really do save lives.

John: This is great advice. I was like, I’m not following mammogram advice super closely. I have a daughter who will eventually need mammograms. I will say that the women in my life who’ve had breast cancer, it’s always been a situation like, oh, I should have gotten a mammogram earlier, but because of insurance, because of whatever, I didn’t do it. If you have any suspicions, if you have any reasons to think-

Christina: Even if it’s not an insurance thing, people just put them off.

John: They do.

Christina: Because it feels like you just did it because a year now goes in like a week. You still got to go.

John: You still got to go. Same thing with colonoscopies. When you reach the age of getting colonoscopies, you just do it and it helps.

Finally a bit of follow up, Birdigo, which is the game that I’ve been making with Corey Martin. We had a demo that people loved and a lot of people were running and saying like, hey, I played through the first 50 legs that came for free in the demo and I want to just keep on playing. Basically, I’m jonesing for more Birdigo and I’m locked out. What we’ve done is we’ve unlocked the first level for everybody so you can play it as many times as you want. We added a bunch of new feathers to get your points up higher and we added keyboard support. If you’re playing on your laptop, it’s actually a really great, fast and different game. If you want a little word game that has really cute, fat birds in it, Birdigo is on Steam right now. They’re really cute little birds.

Christina: I’m very excited to pick it up now that I know it’s yours, I didn’t realize, I saw it on the agenda and thought, but now I’m very excited to find out.

John: Birdigo is like Scrabble or Boggle, but with cute little birds.

Christina: Who doesn’t like that?

John: You just play yourself and it’s tremendously fun.

Let’s get to our marquee topic here, Christina Hodson. I want to talk about writing action because you’ve become an action sort of go-to writer. I see that grimace, but it is true. That is probably top of your calling card, is you write big action movies with set pieces in them.

I love a set piece. I love a set piece that works really well and so often you read bad set pieces in scripts. Let’s just talk about what doesn’t work on set pieces in scripts and the bad things we’ve read, because I’m sure you’ve gotten sent stuff where it’s like, oh no, no, no.

Christina: It’s so bad. There’s so many different ways to make them bad. I feel like we should be positive though and talk about what makes them good. Bad things are like, when it’s a whole block of text that you turn the page, no one speaks, and it just makes you go, oh God. Because it’s fine if no one speaks during an action set piece. It’s like, oftentimes people can’t speak during an action set piece, but you can still break up the page. The white space on the page is critical.

John: Yes, this podcast has been about white space on the page since episode one. It’s just so crucial to help the reader get their way down the page, because if you give them a wall of text, they’re going to skim.

Christina: I know, it’s really sad, isn’t it? We can read books, but in screenplays, if you turn the page and you just see like wall of text on two sides, you’re like, no, I won’t.

John: No. Some bad action sequences on a page, I just get lost. I have no idea, like what am I actually supposed to be following? What is the point? What is the purpose? What would I be seeing?

Christina: Sometimes people feel like, because they know they want the set piece to be two or three minutes long, they have to cover two or three pages, but they don’t actually have anything to say for two or three pages. They just write stuff and then you read it and you get so bored and so lost.

The big thing I find really frustrating is when the person clearly has zero sense of the geography of the space. That’s how I think you can tell, and this is where I’ll turn it into a positive because I’m so positive today, John.

When you read a writer who has a good handle of the geography of the scene they’re writing in, it can be in any genre. We ran a writer’s program, Lucky Chap and my company, and we were looking for writers who wanted to write in the action space. Often they didn’t already have an action sample and that was the whole point of why they wanted to do the program. You can tell even in a drama when someone has a handle on the geography of a scene, because they use whether or not someone is in the room, out of the room, coming in, walking in, sitting down, standing up. All of the spatial stuff basically that can add tension and storytelling and character stuff is there on the page, whatever the genre. A really good writer and a really good action writer always has a sense of the geography of the space.

John: Absolutely. You sense that you are in that space with them. We talk about, we see and we hear useful things that a screenwriter might choose to use, but it’s crucial that you as the screenwriter are placing the reader in the seat, in the theater. Experiencing this thing around them and so they’re simultaneously within the space of the scene and what it’s going to feel like on that screen.

Doing both things at the same time, it’s really tough. I think people tend to give short shrift to action writing because they feel like, oh, well, it’s storyboarded and there’s a stunt coordinator and the director and all that stuff. All true, but there has to be a plan for it on the page.

Christina: Yes. Also, I was going to say, this is a really important thing where there’s a big difference to me between a production draft, like a shooting draft and your first draft. The draft that’s going to go out that you’re trying to sell a spec with is written completely differently to the one that they’re going to shoot on the final day. The first pass of the Flash, by the way, first 12 drafts of the Flash, the third act is very, very short because it wasn’t intended to go on and on. It was like quite short and simple and contained and whatever.

By the time we got to the end, there’s 30 extra pages because you’ve got, like you say, HODs who want to do this and actors who want to do that and different set pieces and things that need to be all laid out really cleanly on the page. You can’t be sexy and succinct in the production draft because you’ve got hundreds of people whose jobs are dependent on understanding exactly what it is that the director wants to put on screen.

John: I want to both agree with you and also encourage our listeners not to take that too far. The idea that like a shooting draft is completely different than a script you sell, for a lot of things, it’s not. You shouldn’t at least discount the work that you’re doing in your production, in your own script.

Christina: Oh, I think the first one is way more important, because that’s the one that sells it.

John: Exactly.

Christina: That’s the one that gets you the job, gets you the next draft, sells you the project.

John: Absolutely.

Christina: To me, that’s a thousand times more important. I hate my production drafts. I sometimes like my first draft.

John: Sometimes the production draft, it’s because you’ve had to add all these little scenes to do these different things.

Christina: Costumes are asking you to like state exactly what weapons everyone’s holding and what exactly everyone’s wearing and when the jackets come on and off and stuff that you don’t normally care about.

John: Really inelegant stuff.

Christina: Yes, really inelegant stuff.

John: Absolutely. What we’re mostly talking about here, like this is the writing that you’re doing to let everyone see like this is the movie. You’re selling the movie on the page. That means you have to really clearly communicate what we’re seeing, what we’re hearing, what we’re feeling.

Christina: I was about to say, feeling for me is the main thing. You can change so many things about the way the action plays out and the specifics of the space, but the feeling should stay vaguely the same. You should know what you want it to feel like, the intensities, like the ebbs and the lulls.

John: Absolutely. And the vibe. Is this a cool, crisp, everything is sort of precise or is it just chaos? That’s the thing that you’re going to be able to communicate on the page. I think most crucially is, yes, you as the writer and storyteller are welcoming us to this world, but if we don’t have characters and the character’s experience within those moments, it’s pointless.

I’m thinking back to The Flash and like some of the moments you have, which I love The Flash, by the way, I think I’ve talked about this on the podcast. All the scandal around The Flash and Ezra and everything else, it’s a really good movie and Ezra Miller is good in it too. As challenging as everything was around that, it was so specific to that character’s experience of those moments is what makes it land.

Christina: I also think just generally people, not even just beginning writers, I think a lot of writers sometimes think put character on hold and just focus on the action. To me, like you’re going to have a dead set piece if you’re only thinking about the action. You have to be telling a character’s story through the action. You can reveal so much about a person in the way that they fight or the way that they run or the way– Like, are they resourceful? Are they sloppy? All of those things and the way people work together, to me, each of those action set pieces should have its own beginning, middle and end that gives you a little story arc and a character arc.

John: I pulled out three examples of some really good action writing and some really different action writing to show the range of what this looks like and feels like. The first is from James Cameron’s Aliens, which we’ve referenced endlessly on this podcast.

Christina: Why not? Just keep referencing it.

John: It’s so good. As you guys are watching, it’s scene 114, but it comes pretty late in the movie. They are waiting for this ship to take them back up to the station. I’ll read this aloud, but we’ll put a link in the show notes too.

They watch in dismay as the approaching ship dips and veers wildly. That’s uppercased. Its main engines roar full on as the craft accelerates towards them, even as it loses altitude. It skims the ground, clips a rock formation. The ship slews, side-slipping. It hits a ridge, tumbles, bursting into flame, breaking up. It arcs into the air, end over end, a Catherine wheel juggernaut. Ripley shouts, run. She grabs Newt and sprints for cover as a tumbling section of the ship’s massive engine module slams into the APC and it explodes in twisted wreckage. A drop ship skips again, like a stone engulfed in flames and crashes into the station, a tremendous fireball. It goes on. It gets to the Hudson’s. We are in some real pretty shit here.

Christina: I want to ask you a question.

John: Yes.

Christina: How do you feel about caps in action?

John: Let’s talk about caps. Here’s what’s uppercased in this section. Crashes into the station, a tremendous fireball, that’s uppercase. Roars full on, veers wildly. To me, these are things that are sort of catching my eye and also, they tend to underline sounds that are happening here. How are you feeling about the uppercase?

Christina: Generally sound I do in caps, generally. In action, it gets so tricky because there’s so many loud moments and there’s so many big moments and crashes. If you do every crash and bang and whatever, capital can get too much. I have had one hilarious experience in a studio job with an old school, terrible producer person who is no longer with us, so I can shit all over him. He was a mean, mean man. He once told me that a set piece I’d written, he was just like, “This is dead. This is nothing. This is terrible. You got to rewrite this completely. There should be real punch in it.”

I was not this much of an asshole, I only did this because this was 17 free drafts and it was early on in my career: I just added caps. I didn’t change anything else. Oh, I also underlined the scene headings. I resubmitted it and he was like, “This is incredible. This is what I’m talking about. This has real pizzazz.” I was like, wow. He just needed capital letters.

John: That’s what he needed. He needed something to hang on.

Christina: Underlining and capital letters. I just think there’s too much sometimes, I find it, like when it’s overused. This to me is nice.

John: This is really nice. These paragraphs are longer than I would normally use myself. This is like six or seven lines, some of these paragraphs. Yet I read every word of it. I was never tempted to skim because it was catching my attention, holding my attention. Sentence fragments are there. Clips of rock formation. Did it need a subject there? Great. You have parallel structures because basically you have the implied subject is continuing from sentence to sentence. It’s just really good writing.

Christina: Nice short sentences.

John: Love it. Let’s compare this to Tony Gilroy who wrote Bourne Identity and many other things including the new Andor. I’ll read this, but you actually do need to see this because what Tony is doing at the end of every sentence basically, it’s a dash-dash.

Christina: Not even end of sentence, he’s interrupting himself constantly.

John: Absolutely. Basically, it shows just constant movement. You feel like what the tension is.

Bourne, the light bulb. He’s tossing it across the room, over her head, into that frosted window and she ducks down as it shatters. Everything starts happening at once. Silenced automatic weapons fire, raking into the apartment, and the frosted window peppered with holes, and Marie on the floor as the window shatters above her. Castel, he’s in the air shaft hanging from an out-of-sail rope, but off guard, firing blind, strafing the apartment, and Bourne kicking that chair across the room, and Castle reacting, instinct moving target, and the chair just strafed to shit, and Bourne rolling away, and Castle, he’s coming in.

The last piece is a window frame crashing away as he swings to the apartment, and Marie, right below him, shit raining down as he flies, and Ward throwing the knife and Castle turning back too late, the knife catching him in the neck, and it just keeps going.

Christina: I think people need to read that, because it sounds crazy when you read it.

John: It does sound just absurd.

Christina: It’s fucking cool on the page.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Christina: Because you see exactly what it is. The thing that he does here, which I like very much and which I think is a little bit also a thing that we should talk about, which is breaking the rules. Which is he’s using the names of the characters to create shots which are almost like cut between.

John: Yes, totally.

Christina: You can’t realistically start. This is easier because you’re just in one room, one space with characters. Sometimes you’re doing an action set piece where you’re moving between characters who are not right next. They’re not really in the room together. They’re in the same, call it like industrial plant, but they’re in different spaces. If you had to do a new slug line for every time-

John: You can’t.

Christina: -it would just be an impossible read. I have had a line producer once who made me insert those later and it was horrific for the read.

John: No, impossible.

Christina: When you’re doing the first draft, forget the rules. Find your style. You can basically break the rules and do it however you like as long as you’re consistent with yourself.

It’s really annoying when people switch up. I’ve seen people who do in capital letters on John August, colon, and then do the next line and do whatever. Here, he’s just doing the name of the character in capitals and it’s one smooth sentence. Whatever you’re going to do, make it your style, but then stick to it throughout. Otherwise, it gets crazy making.

John: If you do have people in different spaces, but you’re constantly in between the two of them, what I’ll tend to do is establish a scene header for one, establish a scene header for the next one, and then say intercut. Then it’s really clear that I’m doing uppercase or whatever for the person when I’m back in their shot or in their space, because otherwise, it’s all scene headers and it’s exhausting for us. Here, what I like so much about what Tony is doing is it’s almost you’re seeing shot by shot. Each line is basically just a shot, and it’s great.

Christina: Oh, I had one that I thought of last night when I was thinking about this. One of my favorite ones. We’re like– Just, you know Tony Gilroy, David Koepp. David Koepp’s Jurassic Park script, the one that he’s got on his website, is so good.

The sequence that is the best where they’re outside the T-Rex Paddock when the power goes down. He does this really well, where he’s moving between the two cars, different spaces, very fluently, and it just ups the attention massively, because every time you move away from one character, you’re wondering what’s happening to the other one and it’s fantastic use of exactly this.

John: Yes. Let’s wrap this up with The Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver. The version I could find for this isn’t properly formatted, so there should be actually a little extra returns and spaces in there. I liked a lot of what they were doing here.

Exterior lab day, Jacobs, a security guard, and the two officers are huddled behind a squad car. Other employees are hiding and watching from the safety of the parking lot. They suddenly realize that everything has gone silent. A moment later, lab doors fly open. Officer 1 says, “Here they come. A massive primate barrel towards them.”

Officer 2, “There’s more of them.” Jacobs, “Those are my chimps.” They duck as the apes run by. Some of them get right up and over the car they’re crouched behind. Bam, bam, bam, bam, as the chimps hit and leapfrog over the squad car and their heads. The apes stampede across the parking lot, where several use Jacob’s black jaguar to vault over the fence. The last is Buck, whose weight crushes the car and then they’re gone, every last one of them. Quiet now, except for car alarms.

Christina: Nice.

John: Nice. It’s really smart writing here. I loved how much I could hear it and feel it. I loved the way crushing the car. There was an anticipation. It felt just right.

Christina: Yes, and you feel the chaos work is quiet, which is lovely. It gives you a nice out on the scene. People sometimes just forget about the end. The end is really important.

John: The end is really important. Absolutely. I always think about action sequences as being like, they’re the songs in a musical. Instead of breaking into song and dance, you’re breaking into this action sequence. Those are going to have beginnings and middles and ends. They’re going to have verses and choruses. It’s going to feel like a thing. Often, it’s just like, action is just happening and then it’s over and you don’t know it. Nothing’s really been achieved.

Christina: You feel nothing.

John: Yes. Empty action is just–

Christina: Such a bummer.

John: It’s a huge bummer.

Christina: It’s a waste.

John: Yes, it is. Talk to us about Flash or Bumblebee or Birds of Prey. Action writing on the page that was surprisingly difficult, that was a real challenge to convey. You might have had a vision in your mind, but it was actually hard to get those words down.

Christina: They’re all difficult. It’s one of the bits I love them most. It’s the bit for our job that feels most like playing.

John: It is.

Christina: I literally will get the toys and play with them. For Transformers, I made them send me Bumblebees, which, by the way, was really hard to get. You’d think that would be really easy working with Hasbro trying to get hold of Bumblebees?

John: No.

Christina: No, it was not easy. Yes, I wanted to the toys, because for me, there were things like the way they transform and using action through the way they’re transforming. That is incredibly hard to write because it’s nebulous.

It’s actually interesting with the Alien, that’s an interesting example, because when you’re writing that stuff that doesn’t exist, you have to pick a lane on how much you’re going to describe stuff. Because you can’t go into crazy detail and just put every new nebulizer and whatever. You just can’t, because it gets so boring on the page. You also need to create a sense that this is otherworldly and it is different. It’s a really tricky balance.

John: Talk us about then on the page, how are you talking about transforming? Are you describing those middle states? Are you describing how a limb as a limb is shifting from one thing or phase to another? What kind of stuff are you doing?

Christina: I have two things that inspired me. One is that I wanted the kids in the audience to feel the way I felt when I was a kid and I was playing with Transformers. Which sometimes it’s really fucking tricky and you’re trying to bend that arm back into a bloody door and you can’t. I wanted do that for Bumblebee. He’s a broken robot. I wanted to sometimes feel that. Mostly, I would go by the way it felt for the characters doing it.

Then I also went with the way it was for Charlie, Hailey Seinfeld’s character, is what does it feel like around her? Often, that was more about scale and sound rather than specifics of names of pieces and things. It was just about what would it be like if your sweet little Volkswagen Beetle just stood up and towered over you. Yes, playing with sounds, feelings, scale, things like that.

John: Scale is a thing that’s often missing in action-side pieces too, or on the page, you’re just not feeling like, you have a semi-truck and you have a bicycle. It’s that difference–

Christina: Missing or just that wildly wrong?

John: Yes.

Christina: The number of times I’ve seen people dive off a thing 300 feet and you’re like, “They would be dead. That’s not a thing. You can’t do that.” People often get scale wrong and distances away from each other.

I really recommend to people that they look online or go out into the world and measure things and feel what it’s like, because otherwise it just feels silly. As soon as people start doing that, as soon as you don’t feel that you can trust the writer, that they know what they’re talking about, you check out a little bit because you’re like, “This is just nonsense.”

John: You mentioned LuckyChap, and I remember having lunch with you. You were talking through this program you were working with LuckyChap to help writers who are not traditionally action writers get some experience there. What were you teaching them? What were the common things you saw that you needed to get people comfortable writing?

Christina: Honestly, it was more about teaching them how to get into the space rather than doing the actual writing. They were a whole mixture of levels. There was one writer who wasn’t even in the guild yet, and then there were many who were experienced in TV but had never been in features. Like I said, when we were reading submissions for those, we were often reading a drama as a sample for someone who wanted to be an action writer. You could get the sense of whether they could.

What we were really “teaching,” I shouldn’t be allowed to teach anyone anything. What we were really focusing on was how we would help them outline the movie. They came in with sometimes a title, sometimes an idea, sometimes just a character dynamic. Then we spent four weeks all day, every day in a room, breaking those movies down, outlining them so that when they were pitching them, they actually had a whole movie rather than just a kernel of an idea. Then we had wonderful people come in, talk to them about–

One of the things actually, which is one of the things we should talk about here, which is Chad Stahelski came in and talked to them about writing action and creating action set pieces. Chad Stahelski did the John Wick movies. If you’re interested in this topic, go look up any of his stuff online. He talks about this stuff incredibly eloquently because he comes at it from a place of real passion and love. He talks about Buster Keaton and humor and storytelling all the way through action. It’s not just like, pull out your guns and go bang, bang, because that’s going to be boring.

John: We had Ryan Reynolds on the podcast talking about Deadpool and really thinking about that as a physical comedy movie. Really making sure the set pieces reflected the specificity of who that character was and what they were trying to do and why those set pieces were not [unintelligible 00:29:33] other things.

Christina: It was so playful and fun and funny all the way through.

John: Absolutely. Getting back to what you were doing with LuckyChap, what’s so important about the way you’re approaching it is that it’s not like an action sequence is something you drop into another movie. You have to build a movie that can support an action sequence. And you have to build the action sequence that actually tells the story, and they have to go hand in hand.

Christina: Yes, absolutely. Otherwise, you just end up with a piece that feels wonky and weird. Which happens a lot.

John: It does happen a lot.

Christina: Wait, you said one thing, though, which I think we should talk about.

John: Please.

Christina: Specificity.

John: Yes.

Christina: Because this is a real Goldilocks one, and I’m sure you, have found this. Either people are way too specific, and they’re using all these terms that you don’t know for martial arts that you wish you knew, but you don’t, or they’re not specific enough and it’s just like, “Uppercut, uppercut.” That’s a bummer, too. You don’t want to– Listen, we all know there are some writers who write, “This will be the coolest car chase you’ve ever seen,” but don’t do that.

John: Never do that.

Christina: Just don’t do that. I know people have gotten away with it, but don’t do it.

John: When you see that in a script, you feel like they’re embarrassed. They’re embarrassed by this. They recognize it’s going to be hard to do, and so they just don’t want to actually do it.

Christina: Or, they’re just really cocky.

John: Yes.

Christina: Anyway, but I do think it’s a mix with the specificity. For me, I look at it as zooming in and out as well, particularly in things like battle sequences. I’ve had to write a few, big scale battle sequences where you’ve got hundreds of people and then key characters that you have to follow. For me, often that is about picking the moments that you want to highlight. I’m not saying never use specific martial arts terms. If it’s relevant, because, for example, it’s a character who’s just learned a thing that they didn’t know, if you’re writing Neo, sure, it’s fucking cool to drop in a turn that it doesn’t matter that the reader doesn’t know exactly what that kick looks like. Because the fact that they don’t know what it looks like helps inform the way the character is experiencing it too.

Then also have moments where you zoom out, particularly if it’s a big, long battle sequence or something. Go from a tiny detail of swords clashing between two characters you know, and then zoom back out to what it feels like to be on that battlefield.

The other example that I love of this that I read often when I was writing, I wrote a Swords and Sandals thing at some point. David Benioff, of course, is masterful. David Benioff’s Troy script, that film is fun. It’s not one that anyone ever talks about. The battle sequences in that are incredible. Then there’s a really good one-on-one fight scene where he does another thing of “breaking the rules”, where he does–

It’s the Orlando Bloom plays Paris, when Paris fights Menelaus in that one-on-one in front of everyone. He does a very cool thing where he goes into Paris’s POV and he switches to second person. It’s all, you’re in there sweating, like you can feel your heart beating. It’s really fun and it’s really evocative.

John: All right, we’ll find that script and put a link into the show notes. Actually, I’ve never read it.

Christina: It’s cool. It’s very cool.

John: Awesome. Let us move on to our next topic, which is how would this be a movie? For folks who are new to the podcast or new to this segment, every once in a while, we’ll put out a call to our listeners and say, hey, tell us stories from history or from the news that you’re curious about how we might make these into movies. The examples that we’re talking through today, some were things that I just happened to stumble across and bookmarked. Other stories come from our listeners who sent them in.

All right, our first one is A Man of Parts and Learning. It ran in the London Review of Books. It’s written by Fara Dabhoiwala and it tells the story of Francis Williams and sort of the backstory, but mostly centers around this painting, which was a real question of like, is this painting a portrait in a positive light or a negative light? Is it just super racist? Drew, can you help us out with a summary of what we know about this?

Drew: Sure. In 1928, this unknown, strangely proportioned painting turns up from the 1700s. It’s determined to be this portrait of a black Jamaican intellectual named Francis Williams and that it was formerly owned by a white writer named Edward Long who wrote the book History of Jamaica in 1774.

John: Let me stop you there because at this point in the article, you actually see what the painting is, which is included here. If you look at it, it is a man who’s dressed in a formal attire. He’s got a blue coat, gold trim, white waistcoat, knee length, breeches, and his impossibly skinny legs. He’s got this powdered white wig. His hands are tiny. One is resting on this open book. His face feels out of proportion to everything else. You’re like-

Christina: Is it very good?

John: Is it very good? It reminded me a bit of, there was that Spanish painting, The Restoration of Ecce Homo, with the Jesus face. I don’t know if they have repainted it. It’s not that bad, but it’s not good.

Christina: Yes, although I will say so. I looked at it and was like, “Oh, why are we going to talk about this just not very good painting.” By the end of it, I fucking love the painting.

John: Yes, isn’t it great?

Christina: Yes.

John: You cannot tell at the start, is this a mockery? Is it a satire? Continue with what the description is.

Drew: Francis Williams was born enslaved, but he eventually gained his freedom. He was wealthy. He was Cambridge educated. He was arguably the most famous Black man in the world at the time. Lon’s book is actually a racist hatchet job. It’s incredibly denigrating and dismissive of Williams and many white scientific racists, which is a term they used a lot in this. At the time, they attacked Williams’ achievements in order to argue that slavery was necessary.

At first, this portrait’s value is dismissed. Then later it’s rediscovered. It’s assumed by scholars that it is this caricature meant to mock Francis Williams. After this author commissions a modern high resolution scan, it’s discovered that the painting is actually a rebuke of the racist assaults and character assassinations that Williams endured. The author researches every detail to discover it was likely commissioned by Francis Williams from this avant-garde American painter named William Williams.

Christina: I love this article.

John: Yes.

Christina: I’m not going to lie. When I saw it on the internet, I was like, this is going to be dry. It’s so long. I was like, John, why are you making me read this? I loved it.

John: Yes, I loved it.

Christina: There’s twists and turns and reveals. Everyone should go read it. That doesn’t make it an easy movie.

John: It doesn’t make it an easy movie. Let’s talk about sort of ways into this movie. Because, okay, this is a biography of Francis Williams, which is certainly possible. He was the most well-known Black person in the world at a certain time. Grew up enslaved, got out of slavery, but then ended up having slaves of his own. That’s problematic.

Christina: Problematic, yes.

John: Studied at Cambridge. Clearly very, very smart. He was a member of scientific organizations. In the forensics of doing this painting, Dabhoiwala actually discovers that, oh, that’s Halley’s Comet in the background. He actually literally had proven when Halley’s Comet was coming back. Clearly a brilliant man. You could do the straight biopic without looking at the painting. I don’t think you would. The painting is too interesting.

Christina: No, I was thinking of like comps. If you do the academic version where it’s about him, there’s like the theory of everything, but that’s Hawking who everyone knows. There’s a beautiful mind, but that’s really about something actually very different. I then thought about Belle written by Misan Sagay and Amma Asante, which was also actually based on a painting. There was very little known about her story. It was really just a painting, and then they created this fictional story. None of those feel quite right for this one. Did you find a way in?

John: I’m not sure I found a way in.

Christina: I’ve got two, just to be competitive.

John: All right. I have zero, you have two. My halfway in is I do think you’re probably intercutting between the investigation of the painting and the real person and sort of how stuff reshapes around that. I’m curious what you’re-

Christina: That was one of my two, John. Thank you for saying you had zero. That’s one, and I was trying to find them. Please, for the love of God, can one of your readers find the movie that is on the tip of my brain that I cannot find? There is a movie. It’s not The Hours, but it’s not totally similar to The Hours, where it is playing with someone in the present investigating something in the past. It’s a little bit Possession, but I haven’t seen Possession, so I know it’s not Possession, the A.S Byatt one. It’s doing that intertextual thing where someone is discovering and learning something in an old thing, and then you’re seeing that thing play out at the same time.

I do think you could do that. I think the reason, though, that we both want to do that, is just that it’s so fascinating what this very, very deeply passionate, nerdy person did. Who doesn’t love that? Someone going deep diving on this, the details and the twists and turns and how exciting it is when they reveal, this tiny little detail that you didn’t notice before. I think it’s too nerdy to be a movie.

Then the way in that I actually got excited about was the person that painted it, William Williams. Super fucking interesting. The first known paintings of this person, one was a celebrated Native American, one was an outspoken abolitionist, and then the third, according to this, is this guy. It’s Francis Williams.

John: If you look at the other paintings, they’re all weird in the same way.

Christina: Oh, and that’s why I came to love it. There’s details, like the wrinkled stockings. How cool and weird is that little detail?

John: I had assumed that he was just a bad painter who just didn’t see anything.

Christina: He’s not.

John: He’s actually not.

Christina: He’s not. He’s awesome.

John: It’s the same way that Tim Burton draws really exaggerated people. He draws exaggerated things.

Christina: Totally. There is something I think potentially really interesting about the relationship between– The idea is that Francis Williams, at the end of his life, he’s wealthy. They all said he was by then nothing. He’s wealthy and successful, he is. He does own some slaves, and I’d like to gloss over that. He’s doing Rodale, and he chooses to commission this. He’s the one who chooses what goes in the painting. There is something really powerful about the idea of an older Black man, and this young white artist. This man is trying to tell the story of his life through the white man’s paintbrush, because that’s the only way he can get his story to actually be listened to, because no one will fucking listen.

He’s got this idiot, Ed Long, who’s written this horrific book that just makes him sound like nothing and has basically erased him from history. He’s choosing to put himself in history. There is something potentially really beautiful about that friendship between them that could be– Obviously, it’s not a Portrait of a Lady on Fire, that becomes a romantic relationship.

Lindsay Doran, I went to one of her amazing talks at Austin Film Festival, and at the end of it, she was talking about King’s Speech and how they tested that movie, and it didn’t test that great. Then all they did was add the title card at the end that talks about the lasting friendship between the King and his speech consultant, passing, and that friendship.

Just that title card, just saying they were friends until they died, just completely transformed the scores. It makes sense. This is what I was missing from the story, is I want a friendship or a relationship story at the core of it. That, to me, felt like the most obvious place to put it. Let’s sell it.

John: We’re selling it. We’re selling it tomorrow.

Christina: John, taking it out tomorrow and we’ll sell it.

John: I’m embarrassed. Seemed to me like there’s no relationship in here. You need to establish those relationships because it cannot be between the person investigating him and Williams himself, because that is–

Christina: You could, but it’s such a struggle.

John: It’s Julie and Julia, and they’re separated by time and place. I do feel like some equivalent of the journalist of Fara Dabhoiwala feels important because there are so many cool things he discovers along the way. He discovers that like, oh, that book on the shelf is actually this book and this book could have only gotten there by–

Christina: I know, but aren’t we just excited about that because we’re nerds? In a movie, is that as exciting as we think it would be, or would it be cool to see it from the perspective of Francis having William Easter egg it in the thing? I’m so with you. I loved reading it.

John: Yes, but it is a cinematic idea.

Christina: I don’t know, but it’s cinematically exciting being like, oh look, this book was published in this year so it couldn’t possibly have been 1726. It must’ve been 1762. We’re excited, but we’re losers.

[laughter]

John: We are losers, but I think that’s potentially a good story. Really difficult to break. I think just the outlining of this is really tough on how you’re moving back and forth between the timelines and how you’re telling stuff. I think it’s also really cool.

Christina: Everyone should read it.

John: Everyone should read it. Second story, when a deadly winter storm trapped a luxury passenger train near the Donner Pass for three days. The article we’re reading is by Robert Klara for Smithsonian Magazine. It’s a true life event that happened. Drew, talk us through what the reality was.

Drew: In January, 1952, a severe blizzard struck the Sierra Nevada and traps this luxury passenger train, the City of San Francisco, near the Donner Pass. The train, en route from Chicago to San Francisco, becomes immobilized by massive snow drifts, stranding 226 passengers and crew members for three days. During this period, they endured freezing temperatures, dwindling food supplies, and the threat of carbon monoxide poisoning. Rescue efforts were hampered by the harsh conditions, but eventually, all individuals are safely evacuated.

John: Christina, so we’ve had many train movies. We have Snowpiercer, we have Murder on the Orient Express, which actually features a train that gets stuck in snow as a plot point. This was a real-life historical incident. Some people died in the process of rescuing things, but no one on the train itself appears to have died. Is there a movie here, in your estimation?

Christina: I think it could work as a setting in the way that those movies used it as a setting. I think it could be a really fun setting for anything from a heist, to a murder thing, to a whatever. Is there a version where it’s really– It’s not Society of the Snow. They don’t eat each other. It’s only three days. They’re a little thirsty and a little hungry. I’m not that excited about it. I would want to either add a big genre element, like a thriller, heisty, murdery thing, potentially a romance.

By coincidence, these are both train movies, but Brief Encounter and Before Sunrise came to mind, where you have some intense love story that develops in three days. Then at the end of three days, they have to say goodbye to each other forever. The one detail in the story that made me giggle and made me think of Triangle of Sadness was that there were some dedicated staff who remained on latrine patrol, and they would take buckets of snow and deal with all the piss and shit [laughter], which you could do some funny satirical class thing, maybe.

John: Yes, Train to Busan hits on some of that stuff too. I agree that this is a setting, but it’s not actually a movie. It’s not a story, because we don’t have characters in there yet. We just have a general place.

I think them being trapped is part of it, but I think they’re going from where they’re stuck to whatever tiny town they end up in, it’s also fun. There’s something about that feels interesting too, and it could lend itself to a comedy. It could lend itself to something else, because there’s like, the whole point of a train is that you get to bypass all these places that you would otherwise get stuck in.

Christina: Oh, like that. A bunch of rich people descending on a small mountain can be kind of funny.

John: Absolutely. There’ve been various versions of it, but for 9/11, when all the planes got grounded, there was a plane that was stuck in a tiny town in Canada. There’s an article called When the World Came to Town. It’s essentially just like, it’s a bunch of people stuck in an unfamiliar environment. It’s always a good setup for comedy. I didn’t feel like a pressing need to take this one exact point.

Christina: We won’t be pitching this one tomorrow as well?

John: No.

Christina: We’ll just stick with A Man of Parts and Learning.

John: Yes. Next up, a UK teen’s parents send him to Ghana. He took them to court by Lynsey Chutel for the New York Times. Laurie Donahue, a listener, sent this through.

Drew: British parents send their teenage son to a boarding school in Ghana believing he is at risk for being drawn into gang culture in London. The boy, initially unaware of his parents’ intentions, thinks that he’s visiting a sick relative, but upon discovering true reason for the trip, he contacted the British consulate and initiated legal proceedings against his parents, alleging abandonment and seeking to return to the UK. However, the judge ruled that the parents acted lawfully within their parental rights to safeguard their son from potential criminal activities.

Christina: He’s still there, guys. I read this and then only got to the very end where I was like, “Oh, this kid is still only–” He went when he was 12. He’s still there. He’s only 14 or 15 now, still stuck.

John: Still stuck in Ghana.

Christina: It’s harsh.

John: As we said before, relationships are important. Lots of relationships here and lots of really interesting relationships. You can definitely see the multiple perspectives on what this is. This is a family that wants to protect their kid, and they believe that their kid is safer in Ghana than he would be in London. That’s really interesting. That perspective is really interesting. We can see it from the kid’s point of view. It’s like, “Oh my God, how could you ship me away to Ghana when I have this life here in London?” You would think that the life would be better and easier for him in London. Yet-

Christina: The judge said no.

John: The judge said no, and also knife culture.

Christina: Oh my God, I know. The judge said it was like a sobering and depressing moment. I was like, “Yes, as a British person reading this, this just makes me real sad.” The picture of the knives in the London like [crosstalk]–

John: All the seized knives, yes.

Christina: London, not so good. If you’re willing to trick your 12-year-old and send them away to a country where they basically know no one, because I think he actually doesn’t– They’re from there, but he really doesn’t seem to know anyone from there. Just sending your kid anywhere where they don’t know anyone and in that situation, you’ve got to really be worried about where things are at in London. Yes, I feel bad for London.

The only way I would want to see this as a movie is if it starts with this setup, it’s super depressing, but then it becomes magical and wonderful. He finds incredible friends and the school is amazing, and he ends up really happy. The version where he sues his parents is– The version where they send him and then he discovers great things and connects with family and whatever, that could be great.

John: There’s a version of this where he wins the lawsuit and is able to get back. It’s a question like, do you need any–

Christina: Gets back to the knives on the streets of London.

John: Get back to the knives, or that, basically, his parents’ vision for what his life was like is actually not accurate or he’s able to overcome it. Those tensions are really interesting. I don’t think you need these actual people at all. I think the situation is what you care about and you could pick a different kid, a different family. It doesn’t have to be Ghana. It could be whatever.

That idea of this immigrant family who’s come to a place with one vision and then they see the dangers in this vision and they want to send their kid back to the place they came from, it’s really understandable and relatable. We can see both the family’s point of view and from the kid’s point of view, why it’s [crosstalk]–

Christina: Maybe that’s the way it is, that there’s something nice about if the kid can learn to see in his parents’ home country what they see in their home country, and they can then see in their new home country what their son does. Maybe there’s something redemptive and nice there.

John: Also, I think about the non-immigrant families, you’re always worried for your kids and you’re always, you want to protect them. What that means and what you’re able to do really depends on where you come from. A family of greater economic means can send them to a private school. They can shelter them. For this family, this is what they thought their best option was. From the kid’s point of view, of course, they’re going to say no. That’s not what they want. Is it a movie?

Christina: I’m going to say no.

John: Yes, I think it’s maybe a movie. I feel like it’s like a Sundance-y movie.

Christina: Oh. Yes.

John: I think it’s a smaller movie, but I think it could– I don’t know. I think the good version of this gets some Academy Award attention.

Christina: Do you end it happy or sad?

John: I don’t know. You could end it in a way that like a Palme d’Or winning movie at Cannes is neither happy nor sad, just sort of in that place.

Christina: Crunch [laughs].

John: It’s a crunch. I could imagine this being a movie that actually comes from the country that they’re being sent back to. Essentially, if it was a Ghanaian movie and this is basically the same setup, but you really follow the story as it happens back in Ghana, that’s also really interesting.

Finally, zombie colleges. These universities are living another life online and no one can say why. The article we’re looking at is by Chris Quintana from USA Today. Drew, talk us through what this article is describing.

Drew: The author starts looking into these zombie colleges. There’s one called Stratford. It ends up being these colleges that used to be real, but have since shuttered and they’re online, but they’re connected to nothing.

Christina: To be clear, Drew, there are no zombies attending the colleges.

John: Yes, I was a little disappointed too when I ended up past the headline.

Drew: We don’t know.

John: Here’s the reality. There are these colleges that shut down because they were no longer economically viable. Then somebody, somewhere, it’s like, oh, I can pull them up online and get people to-

Christina: Give me application fees.

John: Give me application fees and basically cash the application fees. In some cases, they will actually like, someone from that college will call you about what major do you want to study. A person naively could think like, “Oh, this is a real place.” I guess because these colleges were real as of a couple of years ago, googling them, you might think that there’s still a viable college. It’s not nearly as much fun as a college for zombies, though.

[laughter]

Christina: Oh, I know. On my little notes that I jotted down last night, for the first one, as you could tell, I got excited and wrote a whole page of scribbles. Then there’s like less for the train, and there’s like three lines for the UK teen. For the zombie one, you will see it’s literally just the bullet point and nothing.

John: An empty bullet point. There’s something cool about that. The term “zombie college” is better than the actual story.

Christina: Than the actual story [laughs].

John: It’s just a scam. A journalist investigating a scam can be interesting, and maybe it can lead someplace. At the end of this article, I didn’t have a bigger perspective on it’s just scammy people doing a scam.

Christina: People who go to college and want to eat each other’s brains, who doesn’t want to watch that?

John: Yes, that’s good. Yes on zombie colleges, no on this specific article. Let’s do a recap of how this would be a movie. I think we’re both excited for A Man of Parts and Learning, a Francis Williams movie. Difficult, but potentially great. Some really good roles in there. The trapped luxury train, it’s a setting, but it’s also a setting we’ve seen, so you’d have to do something interesting and new with it. I don’t think you need to have that specific incident as the basis. The Ghanaian teen, I think it’s a small movie. You’re less convinced.

Christina: I’m less convinced. I think you could, but I think anything could be a small little indie. Is it going to be a good small–? I think you should start out writing a small little indie being like, this could really work and move people. I see why people leave the Eccles Theatre clapping.

John: Yes. Honestly, I bet there’s a filmmaker out there who won’t have the identical life, but will have a similar life. I think you could find somebody who can make this movie and is like, oh yes, that’s my story. Honestly, the opposite is probably very common too. I have a couple of friends who’ve- they grew up in a struggling country and the parents shipped them off to the US or to the UK. They never saw their parents again, but their parents did everything they could to put them out there in the world.

All right. Let’s answer a question or two. We have Albin in Finland.

Drew: I was wondering how you create side characters specifically. Are there any guiding practices to help you figure out what side characters should be present in a story and what role they should play, or does it come up naturally? I found that it’s difficult to write a first draft when I don’t exactly know what roles all the characters should play in the narrative. I think getting a better grasp of this would help immensely.

John: Side characters, these are supporting folks who are not your protagonist, they’re not your antagonist or a key love interest. They’re characters who are in multiple scenes, but maybe it sounds like Albin doesn’t know quite who they are yet or what function they’re playing. Christina, as you are mapping out a story and you were actually just working on a project with a writing partner too, what are the conversations you’re having about those not central characters?

Christina: It’s really tricky because they take up space.

John: They do.

Christina: You don’t want them to be so generic that they’re just interchangeable. “I’m the funny best friend.” They’re always such a bummer to read. You also do want to utilize sometimes the shorthands. If you choose to have an assistant who is unusually older– Do you know what I mean? If you do something unusual with one of those characters, it can be really distracting in the reader and people go, well, something more is going to happen to that character, right? There’s got to be a reason why you made your assistant 65 years old.

It’s just a tricky one because it’s a bit Goldilocks. In theory, you want every side character to be like all the side characters in True Romance, where they’re the most amazingly specific, wonderful, life-enhancing humans. But also, you don’t want to be tediously shiny things all around the story.

John: I found that in planning out a story, those side characters who might appear in like three scenes over the course of the movie, I won’t really know who they are as I start writing. Then as I get into scenes and I recognize what I need in scenes, then they’ll become more specific and I’ll realize, okay, that’s this person who keeps coming back through, or I realize like this kind of character shows up in three different scenes, it should be the same character.

Christina: I sometimes think of it in terms of what our main character, what it says about them in the relationship with the main character. Often, I’ll use it as a parallel to another relationship. It’ll be a subtle thing that hopefully no one will ever even pay attention to, but you might just feel it there as an echo.

John: You can feel sometimes in scripts and in movies where a character is just there to set the ball so that the hero can spike it. That can be really annoying, and yet it’s also functional. Is that the character there who can evoke dialogue or actions from our hero that moves the story forward, that’s a good use for the character. You don’t want to think of them as strictly functional, but ultimately to you, they are, just the same way that your scenes are functional, even though they are hopefully engaging themselves.

Christina: I would say if you’re doing a pretty detailed outline, look back at the end of it and just make sure you clock which of the three scenes, and then maybe it’ll occur to you as you’re looking at it from a distance. Oh, I could do this, and then they would have their own mini little arc because people like to be closed out.

John: They do, yes.

Christina: No dingly danglies.

Drew: Let’s try one more here from Daryl. How can I establish a writing routine whilst trying to seemingly balance so much? I’m a student and I’m somewhat struggling to balance writing with school and exercise, healthy eating, living, and whatever else. Am I trying to do too much or do I just lack discipline?

John: Oh, Daryl, it’s all your fault.

Christina: Oh, Daryl, please get a good answer from John August and then give it to me because I don’t know yet. I still haven’t figured it out.

John: First, I want to ask about whilst. Do you use whilst?

Christina: Whilst, if I’m trying to sound very British and posh.

John: Yes, but you probably grew up using it. Are you using it in daily life in America?

Christina: Out loud with my mouth?

John: Yes [chuckles].

Christina: No. No whilst. Whilst. No, I don’t think I’ve ever said it out loud.

John: [laughs] Listen, Daryl, you have to give yourself some grace. Yes, you’re trying to do a lot and if you are having a hard time fitting writing into your life and you want to do more writing, you need to recognize, okay, well, what are the times that I’m doing other stuff that I’m willing to not do that other stuff and write? That could just be giving something else up. It could mean making different choices about other hobbies and other stuff, but you’re going to have to make a choice to do some writing.

Christina: I’ve actually got recycled John August advice here.

John: I’m excited to hear it.

Christina: Because you changed my life a little bit with this, but it only lasted briefly because I’m an idiot and I can’t stick to anything. You, I can’t even remember if it was on the podcast or just in life, you told me about sprints.

John: Oh yes, let’s talk about sprints.

Christina: Just doing little short periods, setting yourself a goal. It can be really short, but giving yourself– Even if it’s 40 minutes, set a timer, just do it and don’t– Sometimes trying to clear out an afternoon for writing or a morning or a day is just impossible.

John: We won’t get more done in an afternoon.

Christina: No, you won’t. If you have a job and you have the whatever, and you come in the door and it’s the 40 minutes between walking in the door and making your dinner, and you just have 40 minutes, you will not get distracted. You will not look at your emails because you’re like, I only have 40 minutes. You have the timer running right next to you. Then you just go. You just give yourself a junk.

John: Yes. Just yesterday, I was doing that for edits on the ScreenPants book. I set the timer for an hour and I just did an hour’s worth of work. When the timer beeps, I went a little bit over that. If I had not set the timer, I don’t think it would have actually, I wouldn’t have opened the file.

Christina: I want you to know, I’m such an evangelist for your advice. I give it to everyone and I never do it myself. I don’t know why, because the period that I did it, I was the most productive I’ve ever been. I’m terrible.

John: Yes. Daryl, timers could help. Adjusting where you’re prioritizing that writing time can help too, because it can feel selfish to just take the time and to shut everybody else out to do stuff. That’s what writing is, yes.

Christina: We’re all selfish.

John: We’re all selfish. Be a little selfish. It’s time for our One Cool things. I have two comedy-related one cool things. I went and saw Mike Birbiglia’s new show, The Good Life, this last week. It’s so funny. He’s just so smart and so funny. He’s been on the show multiple times. It’s just observations on life and the way he’s able to weave in personal stuff and family stuff in ways that’s generous to the folks he’s including, but also helps talk about larger themes.

It’s so great to see somebody who can just do that so effortlessly. See his show. I think there are more dates on. We’ll put a link to his website in the show notes. You should also listen to his podcast called Working It Out, which is like Scriptnotes, but for standup comics and just talking through their process and how they come to what’s funny and they workshop some jokes in the course of it.

Second comedy thing is the print version of The Onion is just so good and people need to subscribe to it because it’s just so great. This last week’s just- everything, every story on the front page made me giggle. Trump administration offers free at home loyalty tests, Baby Saves Affair, US military bands man with girls names from combat. It’s all just so smart and to get it delivered.

Christina: It looks so lovely in your hand.

John: It feels so good. I strongly encourage you. We’ll put a link in the show notes to The Onion site, but it comes once a month and it’s just delightful. Christina, what do you have for us?

Christina: My one cool thing is a person and his company. It’s Padric Murphy who runs a company called the Research Department. It’s researchdebt.com. Drew will hopefully find a link and include it. He is amazing. I’ve known him for a number of years. He was a co-producer on Babylon, worked on a number of movies for a long time, worked with Baz Luhrmann for a long time, has always done research for movies just as part of his job.

Then a few years ago, just went out on his own, made it his job, set up this company. It’s just him right now. Although I think people should beg to be working with him because he’s just incredible.

I hired him last fall to research a story. I knew what I wanted. I knew the character stories. I knew the character dynamics. I knew everything that I wanted on a personal level, but I didn’t know when or where the story was set. I knew it was period, I knew I needed to deal with some colonial stuff, and I didn’t know what country or what time period because I didn’t know how I would then lay it into the history. It’s not about the history, but it’s very important that I have the setting.

Working with him was the most incredible experience because he’s not just a research nerd, he’s incredibly creative. His instincts on story and just listening to it and hearing it were amazing. The thing that he would do that was coolest was actually taking it all the way back to side characters.
I would have things like, “I’ve got this side character. It’s a maid.” We landed on Malaysia in 1914, which is not a place or a time that I knew much about. Then I had this side character who was a maid. I needed her to be of a certain ethnicity, a certain age. I was like, “This is what I think I want to do in the story. Does it sound plausible?”

He would go off and then find journal entries of people who were basically that same age, race, in the same time period. I would get actual flavor of what those people’s lives were like. That kind of thing is so extraordinary. I don’t even know how he physically does it, but then he scans all the pages in the books so that you have all of the resources, and then he puts it into a credibly digestible format. He’s amazing. He’s worked on a few TV shows and features as well. For any executives or creatives or whatever listening, he is amazing.

John: That’s fantastic. Researchdepartment.com. Dept. Love it.

Christina: D-E-P-T.

John: dept.com. That is our show for this week. Scripted and produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chialelli. Our outro this week is by Vance Kotrla, who’s a first-timer. If you have an outro, please send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a 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’ll find those all at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today on the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the Art of the Cold Email. Christina Hodson, so great to catch up with you.

Christina: [chuckles] Great to see you and speak with you for the first time today.

John: Come back anytime and sooner, please.

Christina: Anytime. I’d love to. It’s a delight.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. As billed in the opening, the cold email. I’m old enough and you’re probably old enough too [crosstalk]–

Christina: What are you saying, John. I’m a child. I’m so young and fresh.

John: Did you ever make a cold call where you just had to call somebody?

Christina: That’s how I got started in this industry.

John: First, let’s talk about the cold call because the cold call is genuinely terrifying because you’re interrupting someone’s life with a phone call, which is just scary, but we had to do it.

Christina: How else did we do it back in the day?

John: We didn’t have email.

Christina: It was when I wanted to work in film. I had gone to my university career service and they said, “You can’t work in film. That’s not really a thing. Do you want to be a journalist at the BBC?” I was like, “No, I want to work in movies.” They were no help. I went online, but it was early crappy internet when you couldn’t really find anything good. So I got a yellow pages and looked up film production and then just made a list of all of the offices and cold-called all of the numbers.

I need to tell you that I am a person that, to this day, I’ll like go and do big studio pitches with big grownups. I still can’t make restaurant reservations on the phone. I’m so bad at speaking on the phone. I hate it. It like cripples me with anxiety, but I did it.

John: I’m so impressed that you did it. You made a list and you just did it. How did you set yourself down on a phone and pick up the phone and just do it?

Christina: I forced myself to do it. I reminded myself that the person picking up the phone was just the receptionist. They are probably not having the best day in the world. As long as I’m nice, as long as I’m not annoying and an asshole– No, sorry, I probably was annoying, but I wasn’t an asshole, I don’t think. I wasn’t demanding too much. I was pretty specific in what I was asking for, which was, do you offer any internships? Is there anyone that I could talk to about possibly doing any work as a runner? I’ll photocopy or I’ll pick up sandwiches.

Because I was offering something and because I made myself fairly succinct, which is hard for me, as you can imagine, it helped. I finally got someone who asked me a question and we had one thing in common. From that one thing, I like spun it out into like a 5-minute conversation and then 10-minute conversation. Then he was like, well, we don’t have anything now, but come in and have a cup of tea with me and maybe you could do some reading. That’s how I got my first job. Reader, then runner, then intern, then free intern assistant for a year, then an assistant. Yes, it’s tough.

John: Yes, but you did it. You were able to make that cold [crosstalk]–

Christina: It was cold calls.

John: Cold calling is much worse than the cold email. Let’s talk about the cold email, which is at least you’re not ruining someone’s day by calling.

Christina: No. Sometimes they ruin my day. They make me so mad. Because it’s a cold email, you should try harder. You’ve got all the time in the world.

John: Let’s talk about a bad cold email you get and a good cold email you get. What does Christina Hodson get as a cold email?

Christina: I’m so mad just talking about this. The bad ones, the ones where they’ve copied and pasted it, and they’ve like changed the font on your name because it’s copied and pasted and so the formatting is all wrong.

John: Oh, the worst. The worst.

Christina: They’ve copied and pasted the credits in to be, “I love your film, bah bah bah,” but they’ve like copied and pasted that and you can tell. They also sometimes haven’t removed some of the other ones that you didn’t write. It’s so maddening. There’s just no point in doing it. It actively makes me want to block you forever.

John: Yes, I hear that. The mismatching fonts is just a dead giveaway. To me, a good cold email is one that is from the subject line, I can tell what it is they’re trying to do, what they need. It doesn’t say like from a fan or something like that. That doesn’t help me out. It’s specific about a movie.

A good cold email is like, hey, I’m putting together a documentary about women in Tim Burton movies. If the subject line was like Women in Tim Burton movies Documentary, oh, okay, I can see what that is. Quick introduction of like, this is who I am. These are some of the things I’ve done. I’m working on this thing. Could I convince you to come in for an interview for 90 minutes one day?

I’ll probably say no, but at least I’ll understand what the request was. It’s when something is so vague or takes forever to actually get to the ask that I’m like [sighs] “Ugh.” It kills me.

Christina: What about when they’re coming from, not someone trying to make you jump, when it’s someone that is starting out in the industry, that’s reaching out to you for advice? Now you have a whole podcast, they have a whole system they can go through. Do you have any tips for those ones where it’s like– I very often get a, “Could I take you out for a coffee?”

John: The answer is no, from my side. Also, I have a podcast and I can push people towards–

Christina: You’re like, I’ve got 680 episodes you can listen to.

John: Yes. The answer to that has generally been no. Let’s flip it around when you or I need to ask an expert in something about a thing. You were just talking about the research department, who’s a guy who is probably doing a lot of those cold emails to- trying to get those things. When I need to reach out to a specialist in something, I’ll just be very clear like, hey, I’m a screenwriter, I’m working on a thing about this. I see you’re an expert in this field. Could I get on the phone to ask you 10 minutes worth of questions about this subject?

If I read an author’s book and I really liked it, I’ll just reach out and say like, “Hey, I really enjoyed your book. Quickly, I’m John August and this is my thing. I just really wanted you to know how much I appreciate that.” No one’s going to get upset to read that.

Christina: No one’s mad about that.

John: No one’s mad about that.

Christina: No one’s mad about those.

John: If you’re a cold email, make someone’s day a little bit better.

Christina: Yes. I also think with that, in your example of reaching out to a specialist, because I’ve actually recently done that, some people don’t want to talk on the phone. Some people are like me and don’t want to make restaurant reservations because it involves being awkward on the phone. So I give them the choice. I say, “I’m happy to talk on the phone for 20 minutes or whatever, but if you’d rather email, I can lay it out here,” so that they have the option.

John: Yes. Give them choices. Don’t let them feel boxed into a thing.

Christina: Be specific about the ask. The general, like, “Can I take you out for coffee one day and pick your brain?” I’m like, no.

John: No. I never want my brain picked.

Christina: No. If someone emails and say, “Can I pick your brain? It’s this.” Then they give me one question in an email and the rest of the email is actually thoughtful and I think they have bothered choosing to ask me specifically rather than just generic screenwriter, then I might be like, oh yes, actually, this is an interesting question and you seem nice.

John: Do you seem nice and not like a crazy person?

Christina: Do you seem like you bothered proofreading your own email? Typos in those emails drive me crazy. Especially if it’s someone trying to be a writer, which it most often is.

John: One step better than cold email though is the introduction email. When some neutral person has done this or you’ve asked for a CC into a thing, then best practices are, they’ve CC’d you in, you put them on BCC so they can disappear off the thread and you can actually just do this. Drew, you’ve had to do some cold emails.

Drew: Oh God, yes.

John: Talk to us about what you find successful and what you dread.

Drew: It’s being specific with the ask and making the ask easy, to your point. If it’s one specific question, it’s a very short, that can be a fun after– If you need a break for something, you can answer that question. The general is always death. Especially like, because I’m essentially John’s firewall for emails.

Christina: [laughs] You must get so much.

Drew: We get a lot. To your point on the, it’s usually an assistant who’s having their own day. The things that are easy to elevate, that’s great. That’s fun. Think about that intermediary, whether that person exists or not. I think if it’s an easy ask, great. If it’s not, if it’s more complicated, you’re probably not going to get anywhere.

John: We did a 100th birthday party for our house. Our house turned 100 years old.

Christina: Congratulations house.

John: Stuart Friedel, who’s a former Scriveness producer, undertook this giant research project to figure out the whole history of the house and basically everyone who ever lived in the house.

Christina: That’s so cool.

John: One of the things I’ve always admired about Stuart Friedel is he is incredibly good at the cold email. He actually has none of that shame in there that stops someone from reaching out. He will just do it.

Christina: He does it in a way that’s charming and that people respond to.

John: Absolutely. He was able to get all this information because he was just unafraid to reach out to people and make that happen. In the setup to this, he said, “Oh, it’s easier for you because you’re John August?” It’s like, sure, but it’s also easier if you’re working on behalf of somebody else. For that, sure it’s his job. He’s sort of doing it for us. I was able to do it brilliantly because he had no sense that it wasn’t proper. Of course, it was proper. His asks were Also really clear. It’s like, we’re talking about one house.

Drew: There’s also that sort of motivation too. If it’s a thing that’s important to me, I will always be terrified to send the email or call or whatever. If it’s easy, if it sort of doesn’t matter–

Christina: This is just for John, who cares? [laughs]

Drew: Yes, totally. My wife’s favorite animal is a red panda. I was like, I wonder if a zoo would let us hang out with the red panda. I got shockingly far up the chain at I think the LA Zoo, maybe San Diego Zoo, where I just called. I was like, hey, can we hang out with a red panda? They were like, let me ask. I don’t know. I got like three or four people up the chain. The only reason we couldn’t is they were like, well, the red panda’s pregnant. We’re going to have some weird–

Christina: What? They’re going to get inundated now.

Drew: I know, right? That was one of those things that was like, that doesn’t affect the rest of my life. It’s just fun.

Christina: I’m going to think you like an email to hang out with animals.

John: Christina Hodson, Instagram. Will you message people on Instagram or not?

Christina: I’ve done it once, drunk, but I don’t know how to use Instagram. I have it under some– I had a cat who’s not even alive anymore. It was under her name. I drunkenly, in an Uber, once messaged someone and then didn’t know how to check my messages. The reply, I found two months later.

John: No.

Christina: No, I’m not.

John: Not a good strategy for you.

Christina: I don’t think I would do anything professional on Instagram.

John: Yes, I’ve done a couple of professional things on Instagram.

Christina: You probably have a very professional Instagram.

John: It’s also the difference of I think being a man versus being a woman on Instagram. Just the amount of crap that a woman gets on Instagram is much higher. Back when Twitter used to exist, that was the really useful way for me to reach out to somebody because I could– If I already followed them or if I deliberately followed them on that, they would get a notification because I was a verified person and then I could DM and that was–

Christina: Back in the early early days, it was just like, are you a funny person? If I scroll back in your tweets, are they witty?

John: Absolutely.

Christina: Then you can get anything you want. It’s a very different world now.

John: Yes. That is the nice thing, though, about even Instagram is that there’s a little bit better sense of like, oh, this is the actual person, versus an email could come from anybody. It’s really hard.

Christina: Yes. Sometimes it’s a catfish.

John: It could be a catfish. You never know. Christina Hodson, you’re not a catfish. You’re an actual real-

Christina: I’m a real human.

John: -a real star.

Christina: [chuckles]

John: Thank you again for joining us on Scriptnotes.

Christina: Thank you so much for having me.

Links:

• Christina Hodson
• That New York Times article with John and Christina
• Bamboo Director’s Chair
• Birdigo on Steam
• Action samples: Aliens, The Bourne Identity and Rise of the Planet of the Apes
• David Koepp’s Jurassic Park screenplay
• David Benioff’s Troy screenplay
• A Man of Parts and Learning by Fara Dabhoiwala
• When a Deadly Winter Storm Trapped a Luxury Passenger Train Near the Donner Pass for Three Days by Robert Klara
• A U.K. Teen’s Parents Sent Him to Ghana. He Took Them to Court. by Lynsey Chutel
• Zombie colleges? These universities are living another life online, and no one can say why by Chris Quintana
• Mike Birbiglia
• The Onion in print
• Padraic Murphy’s Research Department
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Vance Kotrla (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 and you’re listening to episode 676 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drew: But an interstitial shot? That feels bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dennis: Oh, my pleasure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: You wrote Welcome Back, Kotter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dennis: Absolutely.

John: It’s a gift.

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

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

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

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

John: That’s a great question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Definitely. Second question here from Ethel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Bonus Segment]

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

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

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

John: The Basic Instinct problem, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes, I get that.

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

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

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

John: Thanks.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to Episode 659 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Often, in film and television, our protagonists are facing economic hardship. Today on the show, what if your hero’s problem is too much money? We’ll look at three stories in the news about excessive fame and fortune and ask, how would this be a movie? This week, we have a ringer to help us answer this question. Mari Heller is a writer and director whose credits include Diary of a Teenage Girl, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Her new film is Nightbitch, which just debuted at Toronto. Welcome back, Mari.

Mari Heller: Yay, thanks, John. I’m so glad to be here.

John: In addition to all of your writing and directing credits, you also played MacGruber’s mom. Craig would be really upset if we did not acknowledge that you are officially canonically MacGruber’s mom.

Mari: I was expecting you were going to say Queen’s Gambit, but I like that it went to MacGruber’s mom. I appreciate it.

John: Queen’s Gambit, sure, a meaningful, dramatic role, but come on.

Mari: The most important role of my lifetime. Not the mother to my own children, but the mother to MacGruber on the MacGruber TV show on Peacock.

John: Yes, everyone can see that there today. We’re going to talk through, probably not very much MacGruber, but we’re going to talk through Nightbitch. We’re going to talk through, how would these be movies? In a bonus segment for premium members, I would love to talk film festivals because I think maybe all of your movies have gone through film festivals. Is that right?

Mari: Yes, all of them have.

John: I want to talk about film festivals, both for when you’re trying to sell a movie originally, but when you’re also trying to launch a movie into the world and what writers and directors need to think about when their movies are playing at film festivals.

Mari: That’s a good topic. I like that.

John: Yes, great. I try.

Before we get to any of that, Drew, we have actual Scriptnotes news.

Drew Marquardt: That’s right, we do. You, Craig, and I will be headed to Austin for the Austin Film Festival at the end of October. We’re going to be really busy.

John: We are going to be so, so busy. Currently, on the books, we have four official events. We have a live Scriptnotes show and a separate three-page challenge. I’m going to be doing a panel on video games and graphic novels with Jordan Mechner. Plus, there’ll be a special 25th anniversary screening of Go with a Q&A afterwards led by Matt Selman of The Simpsons fame.

Drew: Oh, that sounds great.

John: Yes, I’m really excited for all of those. If you’re going to go to Austin and you already have your festival pass, you should be able to attend all of these for free just with your pass. There’s one more thing. We are planning an afternoon event in Austin, probably on Thursday the 24th, for the launch of the next version of Highland. This one is open to everybody, but we do need you to RSVP so we can figure out the logistics and how big a space we need and other stuff. So if you are interested in coming to that, Drew, how should they get on a list?

Drew: I will put a link in the show notes for the RSVP and you can just go through there.

John: Thank you, Drew. Now, let’s get on to the other news. We’ll start with this article by Matt Belloni and Puck about Hollywood’s 10% problem. He’s referring to a study that came out a couple of weeks ago that only one-tenth of the 500-plus movies that were either released or scheduled for release by the major studios and streamers between ’22 and 2026 actually came from an internal development slate.

The movies that development executives are theoretically working on at studios, very few of those actually are the movies that they’re releasing. Often, as screenwriters, we’re thinking like, “Oh, I’m going to go off with this open writing assignment that’s at a studio,” or they have this internal idea or they’re buying a spec script. And really, very few of those movies are actually getting made.

Mari: Yes.

John: It’s funny that Disney has not created an original live-action movie franchise since National Treasure 20 years ago, so two decades for that. It feels like so much of the theoretical work that we’re doing as writers does not ever actually make it to the big screen. Did this feel true to you, Mari?

Mari: Feels true to me in my limited experience. I’m sure it does for you too. When I was starting out and had first gotten an agent based on a spec script that I wrote with a writing partner, we were constantly going out for assignment jobs. We were constantly answering every call and getting– our first paid jobs were all things that never got made. I started to see a journey where I was an employed screenwriter with nothing ever getting made, where I wrote a made-for-TV movie for Disney for YA audience.

I wrote a number of pilots that sold for the networks when it was still more of the pilot game. I was like, “Okay, this is great. I’m getting health insurance and I’m making enough money to live.” But at some point, I want actors to say these words. The purpose of writing these scripts is that I want somebody to say them out loud and for it to get recorded and maybe even somebody sees it. I started to see a situation where development hell just becomes your experience of Hollywood. That’s all you get to do is just develop, develop, develop, but nothing actually gets made.

John: Absolutely. To slice apart these numbers a little bit more. Obviously, some open writing assignments are based on studio IP. That’s probably not quite what this is here, but that it’s sense of, “I have this original idea that I’m going to take out on the town and sell as a pitch or sell as a spec script.” Very few of those are getting made, at least at the majors. Now, this study omitted A24 and Neon. Some places are also making more originals. That also probably is undercounting genre movies that are getting made. There are horror things that are at certain price points.

Mari: Horror, it’s like the exception to every rule, right?

John: Yes.

Mari: In terms of theater audiences and how they get made and how much money they make.

John: Yes. You and I were both in the same situation where, listen, I was lucky to get some movies made, but I had a lot of movies that did not get made. I know so many writers who were in the guild for years and had no credits to show for all the hard work they’ve done. I think that partially pushes people towards television where at least like, “Hey, my name is on a screen at least. The work I’m doing is being said by actors,” like you’re saying, and it’s actually out there in the world.

The other part of this study, which I thought was interesting, is there’s charts. Listen, I don’t know that we can actually verify all the data that’s in there, but they talk about how many of these movies that are greenlit really came with so many elements attached. It was almost greenlit by the time the studio bought them. They had director attachments. They had progress to production built into the thing. The studio couldn’t help but make these movies. It wasn’t that the hard work of development executives brought this thing to fruition. That’s frustrating. It also feels like it was always true in this industry that most stuff has some other aspect to it. Increasingly, everything has to be completely safe before they’ll even consider greenlighting it.

Mari: Well, I think it’s a minor miracle when anything gets made. I think it takes so many things coming together at the right time and so many pieces have to line up. Sometimes having a lot of different attachments to something, I know I do that as a filmmaker, is I try to make sure that by the time I’m trying to get something greenlit, it’s an impossible thing to say no to because everything’s already moving.

The train is already going and all of these actors have slated this into their schedule or we got this tax incentive or whatever it may be. It’s putting enough pieces together so that you feel like you can push the thing over the finish line and actually get it shot because it’s just so easy for– particularly movies is what I know more, but it’s so easy for a movie to fall apart. There’s eight million ways that it can fall apart and there’s only one way it can get made.

John: Well, let’s jump ahead, though, and talk about Nightbitch because I want to talk about this as a movie and how this came to be because this is your fourth feature film as a director?

Mari: Yes.

John: Great. You’re a known quantity. Everyone knows you know what you’re doing here, but my understanding is like this wasn’t a thing where you went to them. Instead, they came to you. Is that accurate?

Mari: Sort of. This movie is based on an incredible novel called Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder. It was her first novel, but it was a splashy-enough novel that it got on the radar of a lot of people. It was acquired by Annapurna, Sue Naegle, who was working at Annapurna at the time. Amy Adams and her company and Stacy O’Neil together both read the book and decided to option it.

John: That’s great.

Mari: So the book was optioned before I came on board, but it hadn’t even been published yet. It was one of those situations where it was an early manuscript and it had enough buzz to it that people started reading it. Amy Adams and Sue were the ones who said, “Let’s try and send this to Mari.” I hadn’t worked with Amy before, but she knew my work. She sent it to me.

Really, nothing had been done. All that had been done is it had been optioned. It was like, “Who knows if this is a movie? If anyone could make it into a movie, we think you could.” She sent me the book and I read it and came on board really early.

John: Let’s break down some of the parts of that because I think some people outside of the industry might not know who these players are and how they all fit together. Annapurna is an independent motion picture-producing entity and Sue Naegle was running it at that point. Sue Naegle was my former TV agent. Sue Naegle is fantastic. I love her to death. And it’s not surprising that they read this book when it was in manuscript because most books that sell in Hollywood sell very early on, way before they come out. Every Friday, I get this email that has summaries of all the different agencies that are covering all the different books like, “These are the books that people are talking about.”

Mari: There’s whole departments at the agencies, literary departments who cover all the books that are coming out, especially the ones that have a lot of buzz.

John: Beyond that, there are book scouts out of New York who are looking for those things. Individual producers might have their own book scouts who are hunting those things. They have bandits who try to find, “These are the areas of literature that we’re most focused on.”

Mari: Right.

John: When Yoder’s book came out and got the buzz and attention it did, it’s maybe not so surprising because the people who are the early barometers of what’s going to be cool had already read it and said, “This is going to be interesting.”

Mari: Right. I think what’s surprising about it is that it was her first novel. I think often, it’s a novel from a known entity that comes out that gets bought up quite so early. I think it was very exciting.

John: Amy Adams had read this book. Annapurna read this book. They decided together to work together to option this book. Then they need to find a filmmaker, a writer. Ideally, a writer-director. They came to you. What are those initial conversations like? Are you both feeling each other out in terms of like, “Is this a movie?” What are those conversations like?

Mari: My first initial conversations, and I can say this in this type of situation and podcast and I wouldn’t say it necessarily to everybody, but is I’m often looking for– I don’t want to get involved in projects that are so far along that I’m just being brought on as a director for hire. I really want to be able to make something my own. I want to be able to come with a vision and make something from the ground up. The fact that the first conversation I had with Amy after I read the book and I was totally moved by the book, I found it really impressive. It spoke to me in a really emotional way. I was postpartum. I was about six months postpartum on having my second kid. It was very personal in the moment that I read it.

John: What year would this have been? Is this 2020? When is this?

Mari: 2021. My daughter was born in 2020 and it was post-pandemic-ish, but still pandemic vibes around town. I was very isolated. I had moved out of the city. I was living in the woods, raising two kids. This book really spoke to me.

John: Actually, we know that you were isolated, living in the woods, because there was an episode we did of Scriptnotes where we asked a bunch of our previous guests, “Hey, during the pandemic, what the hell are you doing?” You were generous enough to tell us about moving out of the city and being in the woods and homeschooling your kids in New York with a group of other people. You’re just making it work.

Mari: You have such a good memory. Maybe you are a robot. You remember something from so many years ago on Scriptnotes. Yes, we were in a pod with another family. We were splitting up the homeschooling duties. We were each trying to get time for our creative work, which was so difficult at the time. That’s when this book got sent to me, not too long after that, once my daughter was born, and I was really home with her. Actually, Jorma was off prepping the MacGruber TV show.

He was away and I was home alone with two kids for the first time. The book, it spoke to me on an emotional level. Then when I spoke to Amy about it, it was great that she basically said to me, “I have no idea if this can be a movie or not and I don’t really know what it should be, but I would trust you to figure it out.” That was exactly what I needed to hear to also know, “Okay, this isn’t a train that’s already moving that already has everything figured out.” I get a lot of creative latitude to make my decisions.

John: Let’s talk about the decisions you’re making here because I haven’t read the book, so I’ve just seen your movie, which is fantastic, and everyone should see. Just so we don’t forget, when does it come out?

Mari: It doesn’t come out till December 6th. We’re doing the festival circuit right now. We just did TIFF. We’ll be at festivals all over, from the Hamptons to London to Middleburg and throughout the fall, and then it’ll come out in theaters on December 6th.

John: You said the book speaks to you, but what is your initial instinct about how to adapt this thing and to find your way into it?

Mari: It’s like a big internal monologue of somebody who is living as a newly stay-at-home mom and is isolated, has moved out of the city, is living in the suburbs with her son. Her husband travels for work a lot and she’s losing her mind. It wasn’t immediately clear how I would adapt it or what the form would be exactly, but I knew that the themes were something I had been wanting to explore for a while.

I’d been wanting to write a movie about motherhood and bodies and women’s aging bodies for a while. I had been toying with a number of ideas along those same themes. This just gave me enough excitement. I don’t know. I was so excited about what the book made me feel that I just was like, “I’ll figure it out.” I embarked on my adaptation without having a totally clear plan of how I was going to adapt it.

One of the first things that I realized was the central question of the book, or at least when I read the book, in my mind was, “Oh, God, have I made a horrible decision by becoming a mother? Did I screw my whole life up?” That felt like it was the central question that I was going to explore, and then that gave me some framework for what I wanted to focus on because the book has a lot more storylines and plot that happen where there’s a pyramid scheme with all the other mothers.

There’s a number of other storylines, but it became clear like, “No, this is a story about long-term relationships and parenthood and motherhood.” My central question that I want to be exploring and thinking about is, has this woman made a huge mistake by becoming a mother? Then really early on, that gave me the ending of the movie, which is not too much of a spoiler, but there’s a birth at the ending of the movie. I thought that’s the way to answer the central question is by seeing a birth. That’s something that wasn’t in the book.

John: The character’s journey gets her to a place where the idea of being a mother is not an affront to her. She comes to embrace both what she needs as a person and motherhood and able to find a unification of these two different sides of herself.

Mari: Exactly, a unification of the rage and all of the untethered parts of her that have felt like motherhood broke her apart and is able to bring them back together. If you think about that time in the world coming right out of the pandemic and I was pregnant during the pandemic and I remember I had one of my really good friends said to me, “Having a baby is the ultimate act of optimism,” and I thought, “God, that’s true.” I wasn’t feeling very optimistic about the world in that moment, and yet I was embarking on this journey of optimism by having another child. Yes, the end of the movie speaks to that choice and how you make that choice even when it doesn’t always feel like the clearest answer.

John: I want to go back to the question of, “Is this even a movie?” Because if you think about the internal monologue aspect of the book and you’re able to stage some of this as voiceover that’s directed to the audience, it could be a stage monologue. It could be what the Constitution means to me. It could be a thing where it’s ready to deliver to the audience, except that then you wouldn’t have the actual child in front of you.

I think one of the things I need to ask you a question about is, “How the hell did you get this performance out of the twins, I guess?” I’ve never seen young people on screen so much like such young people who have to actually do the thing you need them to do so that the scene could happen. As a writer who knew that they needed to direct this movie, I would never have put such young people in so many scenes, and you did. Talk to me about both the decision as a writer to, “I’m going to try this,” and as the director who actually had to pull this off. What was that process?

Mari: Well, first, I’ll say, thinking about whether this should just be a stage monologue or whether this was something that I wanted to be more of an experiential film where you get to put yourself in the shoes of a parent of a very young child and really feel what it feels like to be that person, I thought a lot about Diary and that this piece feels like a companion piece to The Diary of a Teenage Girl because it is a very subjective movie.

The attempt is to really place you squarely in the shoes of a person who’s in the middle of a major life transformation and she’s sleep-deprived. Every day feels like the same as the day before. Things are blending into each other. She doesn’t remember when she last changed her shirt or when she last took a shower or when she ate anything but Mac and cheese and fried hash browns.

That got exciting for me to think about creating a totally subjective world, where we’re trying to give an audience an experience of what it feels like because I realized, “Oh, friends of mine who haven’t had kids or family members who haven’t had kids, they have no idea how insane I felt and how this experience of being a first-time parent with a very little kid stuck at home, how much you do lose your mind.”

That became the fun thing about thinking about it as a film and why it is more than just a monologue. Then, yes, I have a big pet peeve about kids in movies who look like little Hollywood actor kids who don’t act like kids because I feel like it’s so deceiving. I don’t know about your kid, but my kids are wild. I had a little boy first. He always had so much energy.

He was up at 5:00 in the morning running crazy right away, even from the time he was really little. Just not a kid that you would have seen on screen. Not a kid who’s just quietly sitting in the corner while the grownups have conversations. Somebody who’s climbing on your head and it’s a very interactive physical life that I embarked on with him. So I really wanted to find kids who weren’t really actors and were really kids who would play.

John: Well, how old are these twins? Because when you say they’re not really actors, to what degree are they even aware of what they’re doing or they’re just having fun?

Mari: They were two when I cast them. They turned three on our camera test day. We found them through a twin forum on Facebook. We were out plastering with twin forums to find twins who could come. Then the way that I cast them was I just hung out for days at parks. I had twins come in batches basically to come and meet with me and I just played with them for hours on end until I found the twins who I felt really could play and pretend and were down to play these different games with me, and yet were also good listeners in their own way even if they had a lot of energy and wildness and spunk and humor, but also could listen and take direction and understand pretend.

These two boys, Arleigh and Emmett, they were just the perfect twins. I feel so lucky that I cast them because it could have gone really poorly. They gave one of the best toddler performances in a movie, as you said. They really are very realistic. We made the environment really fun for them, I think. They loved coming to set. They knew everybody’s names. They knew where to put the microphone. They got really into the mechanics of filmmaking. We let them check out the camera. We let them check out the props. They understood everything about what we were doing and what everyone’s job was. We made everything a game. So I think they had a really good time.

John: I’m doing this animated movie right now. One of the first conversations I had with the director was, “To what degree is this camera looking into a world versus the world that’s being projected onto the screen?” They’re really fundamentally different aspects. One of the things I think you do so nicely is that balance between the camera feels like it’s just documenting a thing that’s happening in front of you.

You feel like the kid is just actually a natural kid and Amy Adams is a good actor. She’s just rolling with it, which totally works. Also, the subjective reality is you’re pushing things at the screen that are not necessarily just the camera documenting a moment. When we’re in her point of view, it is a subjective experience. We’re shoving things at the audience rather than we’re supposed to believe that this is really what’s happening in front of the lens.

Mari: Right. It’s that tricky balance of having it feel not staged. You do want to feel like the kid is just a kid who’s acting like a kid. Between the editing and the framing and the ways in which there’s repetition, you realize it’s actually all very carefully planned. There was the trick of needing the kid to be able to say certain lines that scenes needed in order for the scene to actually progress the way I had written it.

There were certain scenes I wrote very much knowing we will improv whatever the kid ends up saying. They’re walking down the street hand-in-hand. “What do you want to talk about? That leaf up there or a truck rolling by or whatever it is? It doesn’t matter what you say. We’ll find something great in whatever your conversation is as long as it’s not about the cameraman.”

Then there were other scenes where I knew, “No, I need a really specific thing. I need you to ride on your mom’s back, tell her to play horsey with you, and then tell her that she’s got fuzzy hair coming out of her back.” We figured out games for how to do this. A lot of times, it was call and response. I would do a game of like, “Ready. Repeat after me. Say poo.” “Poo.” “Go.” “Go.” “Moo.” “Moo.” “Ruff.” “Ruff.” “Ah.” “Ah,” or get rhythmic games going, and then you say, “Mama fuzzy.” “Mama fuzzy.” “Louder. Mama fuzzy,” or whatever.

However it was, it was getting this to be something that was fun and playful for them, but sometimes it was trickier than others. I’d have a plan for how we were going to make something into a game for the kid. They would not be in the mood to do that thing that I was thinking of, or I’m thinking of this one scene where Amy thinks she’s lost her son at the playground. When she finds him, she runs for him. We had him sitting on this grass. I think this was day one or two, so he had just met Amy.

I had him sitting on the grass and I said, “Okay, and then she’s going to run up to you.” Well, he didn’t know as soon as I said action, she was going to be screaming, crying, running up to him. He turned around and saw this woman who he had just met really the day before screaming at him. He stood up and started running away, a very natural response. We realized, “Oh right, we need to figure out a way to make this game. Okay, you’re playing hide-and-go-seek. You count to 10. Even when she screams and runs for you, you can’t get up until you get to 10,” something like that.

John: In addition to all the challenges of these very young actors, you put a bunch of dogs in your movie. These are another classic rookie mistake, putting dogs in your movie. Dogs at this point, there are trainers. There’s ways to do it. How much of the dog action we’re seeing are, “This is what the lens saw,” versus you had to go in and post and move dogs around to make this all work?

Mari: Most of it is totally practical. There’s a tiny bit of adjustment in post when it comes to, “Oh, this one dog was misbehaving,” so we moved them over here or whatever. Actually, what we really did was we worked with really great trainers who spent a lot of time casting and training the dogs for the very specific behavior that we wanted in the movie. I wrote scenes and action for dogs having no real basis on how dogs behave.

Because the dogs are supposed to be a little bit magical and non-realistic in the movie, the things that I needed them to do were not necessarily things that dogs would do. Things like bowing to another dog. I had read things about wolves and how they’ll sometimes show their neck to another dog, so I would take things from research like that and put them into the script, but then we had to actually get dogs to do those things. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t work.

John: In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, we had to train hundreds of squirrels to pick up nuts and shake them and then put them in the right places. Each time you see a squirrel, they’re trained for that one specific thing, and then you’ll never see that squirrel again. It’s all unique stuff.

Mari: We needed a squirrel to just run up a tree for this. I remember as I was going through my budget at one point, it was going to be $13,000 to train a squirrel. I was like, “But the squirrel doesn’t do something that a squirrel wouldn’t do. It just needs to run up a tree.” I was like, “No, we’re not doing this. I can’t pay $13,000 to train a squirrel.” We took that out of the budget and we just wandered around the park until we found a squirrel and filmed a squirrel.

John: I want to wrap up by talking about tone because you mentioned that the dogs were somewhat magical. One of the things that is so fascinating about your film but also unsettling is it always feels like it’s just about to tip into a different genre. Music-wise, we’re often getting close to horror moments at times. It feels like it’s a horror movie that doesn’t ever fully get to the horror thing.

Obviously, there’s a whole tradition of body horror that’s part of this. The experience of being a woman of that age and motherhood is a body horror story, and yet it’s also a comedy. There’s funny moments. There’s moments of marital strife that are appropriate in other movies. How did you think about the tonal shifts and how did you communicate them? Were there discussions both on the script stage and on the set about, “Where are we at here?”

Mari: Well, a lot of what I thought about was when reading the book, the mother does turn into a dog, but it’s not like The Fly or other transformation movies where that metamorphosis is painful or horrifying. If anything, it’s cathartic and euphoric. There was this whole element of body horror and the metaphor being as you enter into perimenopause and you go to look in the mirror and, “Oh, God, what’s that weird hair sprouting out here? What new wrinkles do I have?” and all the ways in which we look at our own bodies as we age and we think, “Who is that? I don’t even recognize myself,” taking that to a sort of extreme level.

That has a level of horror to it and just gore and grossness. We get some really great groans when we see this movie in big theaters as you can imagine. There’s some really nasty stuff. When it came to the actual transformation, it was really important that the transformation itself didn’t feel painful or horrible, but it felt euphoric. That was our guiding force. We did always want to be dancing on that edge.

I definitely think there’s a misconception if anybody goes into this movie thinking it’s a horror movie. I think it’s more of a psychological drama with a lot of comedy, more than anything in the horror realm. We played with horror tricks. We played with visual styles that tip their hat to the more horror genre, whether it’s like she’s walking down a hallway and we’re doing the push-pull visual styles or music as well. Ultimately, it’s really a story about motherhood and transformation. I don’t know. The things I got more interested in were less of the full horror parts of it and the more parts that made me laugh.

John: Well, let’s put Nightbitch to the side for a second because everyone will get a chance to see that and they should and think about some other movies down the road. Someone might be coming to you, Mari Heller, to say, “Hey, how about this article to adapt into your next thing?”

You have three choices here. We’re going to start with one that’s not even an article. This is the first time on Scriptnotes where we’re actually just going to a Threads post. Not even a Twitter post, a Threads post.

This is a post by Bo Predko. I have no idea who Bo Predko is, if it’s a real person or if it’s some other corporate entity. This is so short. We’ll actually just read this all aloud. Let me read the setup and then you can read the bullet points here.

All right, so it starts, “You’re 23 years old dating Leonardo DiCaprio in LA. Private parties, yachts, jets, signing NDAs every month. You’re 100% sure Leo loves you because he let you touch his Oscar. Let’s be real. You’ll be forgotten in two years. Here’s what to do when you’re dating a celebrity.” All right, help us out.

Mari: Number one, keep the contacts you make in a separate list. Number two, network like a shark at high-end parties. Number three, leverage the relationship to collaborate with luxury brands. Number four, save and invest the money from the lifestyle perks. Number five, eyes will be on you. Grow your social media following. Number six, read every paper you sign. Number seven, learn from Leo’s work ethic and use it to fuel your own goals. Number eight, stay out of unnecessary drama and keep things private.

John: All right. Mari, you and I both know famous people. This is not unfamiliar territory to us and it’s not unfamiliar as a setup for a movie in a way. We’ve seen other stories like a normie dating a celebrity and what that looks like and feels like, and yet I like that it’s an inversion of what we normally expect where the wide-eyed, young, doe-eyed girl falls in love with this guy and has her heart broken and learns a valuable lesson. Assuming that you know this going in and here’s how you’re going to plan for it.

Mari: Right, and not just plan for it, here’s how you’re going to abuse the system that would abuse you.

John: Yes, which I thought was exciting. Let’s think about this as, how would this be a movie? If this came towards you, what is your instinct? Where do you start? Are you thinking about who this young woman is? Are you thinking about the situation? What’s interesting about this to you?

Mari: I guess what’s interesting is the way that younger generations are approaching everything with a savviness that maybe I didn’t grow up with and playing the game. Everything about this scares me a little bit, to be honest. The idea of using a romantic relationship for your personal gain, it’s just so dirty and gross, but I also see the humor in it, especially using somebody like Leonardo DiCaprio because he so famously dates young women and drops them quickly.

I think in all of the comments below, so many people were commenting on how young this person would be, who he’s dating. It’s a funny subverting, I guess, a subversion of the expectation, like you’re saying, especially if it could be a misdirect, maybe. Maybe there’s a way that you start off really believing that this person is a bit of a dupe and that they’re in this situation having no idea what they’re doing. Then you start to realize, you could uncover it like The Usual Suspects or whatever and realize that they’ve been manipulating it the entire way.

John: Absolutely.

Mari: Everything’s been a plan.

John: There’s a Taylor Swift song, Mastermind, where she reveals like, “Oh no, you thought this was an accidental thing, but actually, I planned this whole thing the whole time through.” It also made me think about All About Eve because in that, you have the young assistant who, of course, takes over the role. What’s different is that in something like All About Eve, the assumption is like, “Oh, I want to be an actress. I want to be you. I have this other skill, which I’m going to be able to manifest by getting close to you.”

Here, and I think this is a generational difference that you’re pointing to, is that it’s not just about, “This is how I’m going to become the famous actor or whatever.” It’s like because we have this role of influencer and just like a person who’s able to monetize their fame, the goal is, “I need to become famous and get the brand deals, and that’s what I’m going to do. I want to become like Kylie Jenner. I don’t need to be Charlize Theron.”

Mari: Right. It could be fun if you did a movie like this that has the Being John Malkovich thing where the celebrity is in on it, in on the joke of it all, enough that they’re willing to use their own real name like if Leonardo DiCaprio would do this movie, let’s say it was a movie, as himself, right? It could be poking fun at his own celebrity and expectations of him as a celebrity. There could be something fun about that.

John: Well, if you think about Seth Rogen’s This Is the End, and you look at that as an example. They’re all playing themselves like highly characterized versions of themselves. There’s something really interesting and clever about that.

Let’s talk about the inversions of this because right now, this is a young woman dating Leonardo DiCaprio. What is the version of this where she’s famous and he’s the guy who gets swept up in there?

Mari: It’s not as fun.

John: It’s not as fun.

Mari: It’s just not as fun.

John: No.

Mari: It’s the person you always assume is going to be the victim, which in a scenario like this where the man has all the power and the age and all the influence and the fame and all the money and the woman is in the more subversive role and then she turns out to be the one who’s actually controlling everything, that could be really fun.

John: I guess because of the setup and because it’s supposed to be Leonardo DiCaprio and there’s this history of him dating for two years at most and then discarding, the idea that there’s an expiration date on the relationship is built in, but it doesn’t always happen that way. Matt Damon’s wife was a normie and I think that’s still going fine. There are famous people who marry normal people and it’s not always a Ben Affleck or a J.Lo.

Mari: I just love how comfortable you are with saying “normie.” That’s really making me laugh.

John: We know other people who aren’t Leonardo DiCaprio level but who work in the industry and who are comparatively famous, who are married to non-famous people. That can work. It’s just it has to be–

Mari: In fact, I think I see those relationships and I tend to believe in them the most, especially people who’ve been together since before they got anything. Often, if somebody has a really cool spouse, it can make me like them more.

John: 100%. Someone who does have a cool spouse, at least a very devoted spouse, is Palmer Luckey. This is an article by Jeremy Stern writing for Tablet Magazine. He’s talking about Palmer Luckey, who is an inventor, clearly brilliant, clearly some things about him that are challenging for people around him. He created Oculus Rift. He sold that to Facebook for $2.7 billion, then got fired by Mark Zuckerberg after he made this $10,000 donation to this pro-Trump troll group that was dedicated to “shitposting” in real life.

He tried to build this nonprofit that was about prisons. Ultimately, he founded Anduril Industries, this defense technology startup. It makes autonomous weapon systems. It’s now valued at $14 billion. It’s not just Mark Zuckerberg creating Facebook. There’s a two-step thing here. He’s able to rise and fall and rise again in ways that are really interesting. He’s married to or still with his high school sweetheart.

Mari: Except for they didn’t go to high school, they were both homeschooled.

John: Exactly right. The homeschool of it all feels relevant and appropriate. This comes in your direction. What parts of this are interesting to you? Where do you think a movie exists here? What are even the boundaries or the edges of the story you might want to tell on this?

Mari: Well, that’s the issue. The story is fascinating. Fascinating and overwhelming. I got tired just reading this story because there are so many twists and turns. I think the question comes down to, what type of story are we telling? What are we meant to feel about this person? Are they a hero in this story? Are they a tragic character? Are they somebody that we’re rooting for or are they somebody who we’re vilifying? Also, what are you saying? I couldn’t even feel through reading this article what the takeaway is.

What am I meant to feel about this person and what he’s done in the world? Yes, his brain is impressive. Yes, what he’s accomplished is impressive. I love somebody who’s been in this long relationship with somebody for so long through all these ups and downs. He has a thing in the article where he talks about how other people in the tech industry are all trying to keep all options open at the same time. He likes to pick a path and stick with it. There’s something about that ethos, which is really fascinating. But god, I would not know where to begin with this. What did you feel?

John: Listen, you could do the cradle to present day with him and rise up through the homeschool, but that’s going to be too much. It’s not going to be interesting. I think the instinct of, do a Social Network, where you’re focusing on one aspect of that person’s career and take that and you’re fictionalizing and fudging what you need to fudge to create the version of the character who makes sense for the course of your two-hour movie feels right, but it actually just misses so much.

Because if you’re talking about the sale of Oculus to Facebook, eh, that’s actually not– he’s getting fired is interesting. Maybe he’s getting fired from Facebook is the starting point and then having to build back up. It feels like that second founder story and the revenge story. Again, like you, I don’t know if he’s the hero of the story or if he’s an anti-hero that we’re following through the story. I don’t know where we want the audience to sit with our relationship with him.

Mari: No, and I don’t know what the ending is. I don’t know where you’re taking it to because Social Network, it’s all around the court case, right?

John: Yes.

Mari: What would be the framework that you were taking this person’s life through? It feels like the story is not over yet.

John: That’s really a part of the problem is that because of the court case, you could have a resolution of the court case. Even though Zuckerberg is still making a new story, it feels like that’s the resolution here. I don’t know what the resolution is at this point. We also need to talk about how challenging it is to make a movie about a living person. You’ve made two biopics.

Mari: Sort of three.

John: All right, so can you ever forgive me? Are those people alive at this point?

Mari: No, everybody’s dead.

John: Great, so that’s helpful for you.

Mari: Ooh. That’s the best-case scenario. I hate to say that.

John: A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. Fred Rogers was still alive as you were making this?

Mari: No, he passed away. His wife was still alive. A lot of the people who we were putting on screen were still alive, but he was not alive.

John: What’s the third biopic?

Mari: Well, it’s not exactly a biopic, but The Diary of a Teenage Girl is based on Phoebe, who wrote the book. It’s based on her real life and real people in her life, including her mom and her mom’s boyfriend. It wasn’t a biopic, but it was still based on people’s real lives. I actually cringe at the idea of calling any of the movies biopics because they aren’t cradle-to-grave stories and I don’t love biopics in general, but they are based on real people.

John: Yes. Where I come out with Palmer Luckey and Tell Me How You’re Feeling is that I think there’s so many things that are fascinating here, but I don’t think this article or any story about him specifically right now at this moment makes sense to do.

Mari: No.

John: If you could make this with his permission, I don’t see that working out very well. If you make this without his permission, he feels like a person who could be litigious and you could be in for some real situations there.

Mari: I could see like an organization on the right, somebody within the Trump world wanting to make a biopic of him as a hero for the right because the contribution he made was to a Trump troll account. Then eventually so many of the other people in the tech world ended up coming out for Trump and he feels like he was the one who started that. I don’t know. I wonder, it would almost be like a propaganda film.

John: Yes. I could also see if someone tried to do that, I could see him pushing it back against that too because I think he believes himself to be outside of those systems completely.

What I do think is maybe useful about this is to think about this as a kind of character and think about it as a template for sort of like an interesting character to build a new fictional character off of.

Mari: I think you’re right. He’s like an archetype that we don’t see very often and it makes you realize, my husband always says he finds it interesting when I adapt books because things don’t follow a certain way that they’re meant to go. Books take narrative in different directions or characters are more complex than they would be otherwise.

I think there’s something about him that’s sort of contradictory, like the fact that he is in this long-term marriage and has chosen to become a parent. It’s not what you would expect, but it gives you permission to look at a character and think, oh, you can make weird choices.

John: Yes. Agreed. I think he’s fascinating. I think people should read the article and think about him as a character, but I don’t feel like people are going to rush out and like, I want to make the Palmer Luckey movie. I just don’t see that working out well.

Mari: I can’t tell. Somebody might. It would not be me.

John: Look at Succession. You’re not going to make a movie or a series about the Murdochs, but what you can do is take some of the framework and some of the area around them and make a fictionalized story, and that may be the best approach here.

Mari: I miss Succession so much.

John: I miss it so much. It’s so good.

Mari: It’s so good.

John: It’s so good. All right, let’s wrap this up with sort of the opposite of Succession, which is How to Give Away a Fortune. This is by Joshua Jaffa writing for the New Yorker.

This is really fascinating. I’d sort of heard about little pieces of this before, but this is the first encapsulation where this is all together. It centers around Marlene Englehorn, who’s this Austrian heiress. Her family is incredibly wealthy because of a pharmaceutical fortune and her focus is like, I don’t believe I should have this fortune. I want to give away this fortune, but I want to give it away in a way that actually most benefits society.

And so to do this, I’m going to recruit a bunch of Austrians, 50 Austrians who are representative of our country and have them come together over the course of weekends to make decisions about how this $500 billion, this big chunk of money is going to be distributed to the world. I thought it was cool and ambitious and felt naive at times. There were lots of things that were interesting about it. I was trying to think like, could this be a movie? Would this be a movie? If this were a movie, who would you even center it on?

Obviously Marlene Englehorn is one choice, but the story actually puts a lot of its time in Emma, who’s this 80-year-old retiree who gets this letter recruiting her, which sort of feels like the Golden Ticket in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, come to this thing and we’re going to do this thing. She doesn’t even believe it at first, but then she participates in it. Marielle, what’s your instinct here? Is there a movie here? If so, how would you start?

Mari: What I think is so interesting about it is it plays on something culturally that we as Americans, I think, feel is very foreign to us, which is this idea that we’re such a capitalist society. I didn’t even really realize how much that’s baked into our everyday life until I spent time in Berlin. I was talking to an American acquaintance who had moved to Berlin, and he was somebody I knew from my days of making theater, and he was working as a theater artist in Berlin.

He was saying, yeah, the thing about having a job here or about Berlin in general is nobody’s going to get very rich, but nobody’s going to be very poor. We’re all working and making a good living wage, and doctors and theater artists make somewhere around the same amount of money. We all have jobs, and we all have health care, and education is free, and the quality of life is really good, and nobody’s going to be too rich, but nobody’s going to be hurting too much, or not nobody, but in general, it’s just much more socialistic in that way. We’re operating from a very different perspective.

Then he pointed something out to me, which was he was like, have you noticed that when you talk to people here in Berlin, the first question is never, what do you do? It made me realize how much we’re focused on just wealth and career and what we do and how we make money and all of these things in our country. That I found it really liberating and beautiful to think about a society that was really thinking about wealth distribution in different ways. Berlin had capped rental increases at that point as a city because they just didn’t want housing to become unaffordable.

All of these things that the society in itself was supporting a more socialist view of the world, and somewhere it jived with me from an ethical point of view where I just thought, “God, we’re an unethical country.” That makes so much sense. Even just reading this, I felt the same feeling of like, “Could you do this? Could you change the whole way we perceive money and capitalism in such a jarring way?” There’s something fun about it.

John: There’s something fun about it. I like that. You could look at Marlene Englehorn as being sort of the antithesis of an Ayn Rand character, basically, not believing that any individual is worth more than society, therefore, she should not be worth more than everybody else around her. There’s something really noble about that. One thing that the article has to do a lot of work to explain is that, well, how did this family become so wealthy in a country that is not to have such great disparities? It’s because of sort of inherited wealth and sort of the way that inherited wealth becomes this perpetual cycle that’s very hard to break out of.

As a story purpose, I’m not sure who the antagonist is in a way, I’m not sure like what the–

Mari: I wonder if from a story point of view, if it’s the type of story that starts out with this great idea and great intentions, and then as soon as you get into the nitty gritty of it, things go really wrong and you can’t– she sort of, like you said, has a little bit of a naivete about what this would do for people’s lives that is probably coming from a privileged position where she actually really doesn’t understand what people who haven’t grown up how she did need or want, the sort of rich person, “I’m the hero of my own story” narrative vibe. Then maybe she could actually come to a point where she actually has to grow and change also in some other way, I don’t know.

John: Yes, we were talking about Succession before, it feels like she’s almost like the Siobhan’s character in Succession if she actually believed the things she sort of professed to believe in Succession, and then she sort of keeps getting pulled back in. The other thing that reminded me of was The Good Place and that it was a chance for have characters wrestling about like what is good and right in society, like how do we do this thing?

Because the probably most interesting parts of the story, which I think is probably a better documentary than a feature film, is about sort of like, well, how are we going to prioritize these choices that we’re making as a society and as a subset of society who gets to make some of these choices? It comes down to at the end, I’ll spoil a little bit, is that they have a slush fund at the end where they have like these stickers, they can just apply their stickers that are each worth like $50,000 to different projects and it’s like they’re putting my posters around.

Mari: Very Succession.

John: Yes, which is absurd, but also you get it. There’s a certain point you’re throwing money at things.

Mari: Yes, it does feel like it’s a fun way to explore some bigger ethical questions, and you would almost want like economists and ethicists to come in and weigh in on all of the like pitfalls that you couldn’t anticipate. If you were fictionalizing this and narrativizing it, like what’s the most extreme thing that could happen in this situation?

John: Let’s do a recap of our three How Would this Would Be a Movies.

I think the surprise for me is like the one that’s probably closest to a movie is the Thread thread of Dating a Celebrity because How To Give Away A Fortune is so interesting, but it’s probably a documentary, it’s probably not really suited for a two-hour theatrical experience. Palmer Luckey, I don’t think we want to tell his specific story over the course of this time. We’d like him as a template, but I could imagine several different kinds of movies that are based on essentially this list of advice for dating a celebrity.

Mari: Yes. When I first read it, I didn’t think it would be a movie, but as we talked about it, I got convinced.

John: As we drop this podcast, you and I both be racing to get our versions of this story down and get them sold off there.

Mari: I’m going to call Leonardo DiCaprio right now.

John: Right now. Appian Way, we’re going to get in there and make that movie.

Let’s do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a blog post by Teresa Justino called, You Get To Be Fulfilled Now. She’s talking about how as writers, often we need day jobs to sort of get through and pay our bills and pay our rent. Often we think of those as survival jobs and she wants to recast those as what she calls thrival jobs, which are jobs you can thrive in even while you’re making a living to do your thing.

She says, “I love thrival because I believe it’s possible to find a job outside your chosen field that nonetheless contributes to your ultimate goals, supports you financially, and provides some sort of joy, fulfillment, and purpose. In other words, a job that allows you to thrive rather than just survive.” She talks about what that was like for her, but I think that’s a nice framework for us to be thinking about what we’re doing in terms of the work we do that is not the work we aspire to do. It applies to writers, directors, actors, everybody.

Mari: It reminds me of some advice you guys gave on the podcast a few weeks ago, I think, to somebody who was asking whether they should take a certain job within the industry even though they felt, I can’t remember what their hesitation was, and I loved that both of you were like, take the job, make the money, do the thing you need to do, and we need to all, not that you’re saying, “Oh, you just have to pay dues and we all have to pay dues,” but there is this sort of, I think, thing within Hollywood where people sort of believe somehow they’re just going to get handed their dream job out of the blue.

It just never has happened from what I can tell in the world. I agree, I feel like working in restaurants for 15 years and all of the different jobs I’ve done where I was a hard worker and I was good at multitasking and I learned lots of skills that helped me be a director and that everybody who I worked with recognized that I was a hard worker. There were times that I felt like that would be what I did for the rest of my life, and oh no, I want to do something else. But I was still going to give my all to jobs. I was still going to work hard and be the person I want to be in the world.

John: I think I always talk about with my early jobs, my sort of survivaly thrival jobs, is it was helpful for me to have a job that I didn’t hate, but I didn’t love, and that I could leave with enough brainpower left in me that I could still go home and write. That’s the balance, and there’s some, I do see sometimes people who will take a job that is so overwhelming that they don’t have anything left in the tank, and that’s not going to be the right choice. It made more sense to take a job, like waiting tables is physically exhausting, but it’s not using that same creative spark that you would otherwise be spending.

Mari: It’s true. My main thrival jobs of my life were all waiting tables and working as a camp counselor or for a daycare and taking care of children. That was much more exhausting on an emotional level than was waiting tables.

John: Yes, I can see it. What do you have to recommend for our listeners?

Mari: My one cool thing is a book that I just started reading that’s beautiful by my friend Priyanka Mattoo, and it’s called Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones. It’s a memoir, and it’s funny and relatable and just gorgeously written, and I recommend everybody reading it. She’s just a beautiful writer, and it’s a series of essays, and I think it will just warm your heart and make you feel less alone, which is what I think the goal of all art is.

John: Fantastic, Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones.

Mari: Bird Milk and Mosquito Bones, which is also just such a great title, right?

John: I love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, it’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

It’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware now. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become our premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on film festivals. Mari Heller, an absolute damn delight having you back on the show.

Mari: It’s so nice to be back, like coming home.

John: Check out Nightbitch, which is going to be coming out in December and many festivals before then, right?

Mari: Yes, please come and see it.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, we just mentioned film festivals. Let’s talk about film festivals. Nightbitch debuted at TIFF, but this was not your first experience at film festivals. Was the first time you were there with a movie, was that Diary of a Teenage Girl?

Mari: Yes, so Diary premiered at Sundance and that was a very specific and special experience because the movie had been supported by the Sundance Labs, a place you and I both know and love. Sundance had been, sort of my creative home in that way because I had developed both at the Writer’s Lab and the Director’s Lab. Then I got to premiere the movie at the Sundance Film Festival.

John: That’s amazing. So in that case, you want people to see your movie, but you want them to buy your movie, right? Because it hadn’t been sold yet?

Mari: Absolutely, it had not been sold yet.

John: There’s a lot of pressure there.

Mari: It sold at Sundance back when that still happened, which from what I can understand, movies don’t really sell at film festivals the way they used to.

Mari: Probably a topic for a bigger discussion, but like a lot of times, there’s been a lot of screenings ahead of time so people know what they’re going to buy or they premiere there and it’s weeks or months later that the actual sale happens.

Mari: That seems like it happens more often now, yes.

John: The case of, Diary of a Teenage Girl, there was that excitement of like, oh my gosh, there’s like two in the morning and the offers are going back and forth. That’s so cool and exciting.

Mari: That’s exactly what happened, which blew my mind that it played out in that way. What we did at the time was I took a lot of meetings before the movie premiered with a number of companies. I got to know the players and sort of people who were maybe going to be interested in the movie before they had seen the movie.

Then once the movie premiered, we were in that exact game of trying to sell the movie. Then three weeks later, I went to Berlinale with the movie to try to sell it to foreign markets. We had our foreign sales agent and I did a million meetings there and worked on basically selling off different territories to the movie too.

John: Good. I had two Sundance experiences. My first one was with Go and Go was a premiere at Sundance, but we already were sold. Columbia owned the movie everywhere in the world. This was just a happy premiere situation, like getting hype for the story and it was great. The second time was with The Nines and The Nines was not sold anywhere. We had that, the big screening, but really the purpose there was to find a buyer for the movie.

Like you, we had some conversations ahead of time. They hadn’t seen the movie, but they’d sort of knew who we were. We enlisted both a film sales agent and a film publicity agent who were there to make sure all the right people were coming to the screening. Of course, they don’t actually come to the screening because they’re getting busy with other stuff, so they have to come to a later screening or we’re burning a DVD for them so they can watch it in their hotel room. It’s so stressful to try to sell a movie at a film festival.

Mari: It is so stressful. At the time, I had just had a kid. He was five weeks old. I was at the film festival with a five week old baby and trying to understand the sort of ins and outs of selling this movie. UTA was representing the movie and having all of these meetings. It was, yes, it was very stressful and exciting. I’m glad I had that experience, but man, it was stressful. None of my other film festival experiences have been like that.

John: Let’s talk about the happier situation generally of a film festival where you are there to premiere your film, to debut it, to talk about it, but you don’t have to actually sell it. Something like A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood or Nightbitch, what do you go in with? Who has seen it before? Let’s talk about Nightbitch. Who had seen the movie before it debuted at TIFF? The programmers at TIFF, somebody had seen it, right?

Mari: Yes, so we had actually shown the movie to the programmers at TIFF the year before, before the strikes happened, because the plan was to premiere then. They were so passionate about loving the movie that they basically said, if you need to hold it for a year, we’ll hold a spot for you for next year, which was so kind and wonderful. So yes, programmers see the movie early. We had tested the movie. We had shown the movie to test audiences.

We had done some sort of tastemaker screen, or no, not tastemakers, not the right– toe-dip screenings, as they call them, where you sort of show them to journalists who will never cover the movie, but you get a sort of sense of how people might review the movie. We had done all of those preliminary screenings, and then, of course, I had shown the movie to everybody I had, no, in my house or living room or screening room or whatever, and done a million friends and family screenings. Because we weren’t selling the movie, the movie was already with Searchlight. It wasn’t the same situation where we needed to meet with people ahead of time in order to have them see the movie.

John: Let’s talk about the actual experience, then, of the premiere screenings. Was it at nighttime? Was it 7 PM, were you at one of the sort of marches?

Mari: It was 9.30 on Saturday night, which was a pretty key time, but late for me.

John: As a parent, yes.

Mari: Yes, I started that day at 8 AM doing my tech check of the DCP and checking all the theater stuff and showing up to make sure everything was going to sound and look great, and then I got into my glam, which is a wonderful thing, but, exhausting, too, and did pictures and press all day, and then the movie didn’t play until 9:30 at night.

It was really fun, though, because we were in a huge theater, this gorgeous theater that sat almost 2,000 people, and it felt like it was the hot ticket, Everybody wanted to see the movie, and I was getting calls and texts from everyone, “I can’t get into your movie, do you have any extra tickets, blah, blah, blah.” It just had this feeling, this energy, which I think that’s the best part about film festivals, is this energy of being together communally, watching movies, and people getting excited about something and hearing about something.

John: Because it’s in a big theater they’re not on their phone doing anything else, they’re actually just focused on the screen for once.

Mari: People are there because they love movies. People are geeking out over movies which is such a fun place to be, it’s always scary to show your movie to an audience no matter what but you feel like you’re watching with a ton of people who love movies and love watching movies and there’s just an energy that you can’t replicate. I remember Jorma talking about MacGruber premiered at South by Southwest and he was like, I’ll never have a better screening than that in my life. That was the most exciting, best audience reaction I could ever have.

John: Yes, Go’s premiere was also, it was at nighttime at Sundance. It was a great big party. My movie, The Nines, we had like the great big premiere, but like it went well, but like that’s by far the biggest house that’s ever going to see the movie. That probably is true for Nightbitch as well. You’re going to have a theatrical release, but this is the only one time you’re going to have that many people looking at their eyeballs directed towards your film at one place.

Mari: I sit in the audience and watch the movie at these film festivals because of that exact reason, because it’s so satisfying and fun to watch that many people watch your movie. I know a lot of filmmakers who can’t, who can’t sit there while it plays, and it just feels too much or actors who feel like it’s just too much to sit there while everybody watches the movie.

I think even when I was sitting there, this was only now two weekends ago, sitting there with the audience watching Nightbitch premiere, I was, as it was happening, doing that thing of being like, remember this, remember this feeling, remember that laugh, this feels so good, it’s never going to feel like this again.

John: It’s not your last festival, so let’s talk about that, because it’s not just, because this is really the start of awards season, and TIFF sort of kicks off awards season, part of the goal of doing this is to sort of get that first initial buzz started about sort of the things people might say like, “Oh, this should be on our list for picture, for screenplay, for Amy Adams, for other things.” All those things, those conversations are going to start happening, and you keep those conversations happening by going to different festivals. What does the runway look like ahead of you?

Mari: Yes, I’m so lucky that I can talk about this with as much experience as I’ve already had, because I had two years in a row, 2018 and 2019, where for Can you Ever Forgive Me, and A Beautiful Day, I did a very similar trajectory of film festival to film festival to film festival and press. An awards campaign, essentially. I am a little more prepared, I guess, this time around for all of that. I will be going to the London Film Festival, the Middleburg Film Festival, the Savannah Film Festival, the Chicago Film Festival, Hampton’s Film Festival.

I would be doing even more if my husband wasn’t off making a movie in Finland right now, and I wasn’t also solo parenting. I’m going to do as many as I can, and I have called on all the grandparents to help because it’s going to be quite a fall. Once you do the initial film festival, the rest of them don’t feel nearly as terrifying. They are a little bit more fun. You start to get your talking points down.

We all went to TIFF, the cast, me, the author of the book, the producers. Often what then ends up happening is we sort of split up and we each cover different territories when it comes to the film festivals. you become less– you’re more alone doing the next sections of it, so a few of us will go to London but I think like when I go I don’t know to Middleburg it may just be me I might be the only one really there representing the film, there to answer questions and do the press around it so it doesn’t have the same energy as the first time when everybody comes together and gets to celebrate.

John: The Nines went to Venice Film Festival it was like, “Oh what movies did at Venice?” I’m like, I saw nothing. I was there. That’s the other irony.

Mari: I saw nothing at Toronto either, no. I’ve never seen anything at a film festival when I’m there for a film. You’re working the whole time. Going to Sundance when I haven’t had a movie there is one of my favorite experiences because getting to see three movies a day or whatever you might be able to sneak your way into is such a cool experience. No, when you’re there with your own movie, you don’t see anything.

John: Yes, you’re in work mode. Mari, congratulations on the film you’ve made so far, on the festival so far, and all the festivals ahead.

Mari: Thank you.

John: Thank you for talking us through this.

Mari: My pleasure.

Links:

• Nightbitch | Official Trailer
• Marielle Heller
• Highland Pro Austin launch party – sign up here!
• MacGruber on Peacock
• Hollywood’s 10 Percent Problem by Matt Belloni at Puck
• Dating a Celebrity – Thread by bo.predko
• American Vulcan by Jeremy Stern for Tablet
• How to Give Away a Fortune by Joshua Yaffa for The New Yorker
• You Get to Be Fulfilled Now by Teresa Jusino
• Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones by Priyanka Mattoo
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• 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.