Search Results for: relatable

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 645 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. For showrunners, the first season of a television show is often a trial by fire as they figure out what show they’re actually making and how to do it. The second season can be both easier and more difficult, as showrunners have the benefit of experience but also the burden of expectation.

Today on the show, we have two showrunners who have just delivered the third seasons of their respective shows, which was an absolute cakewalk. Am I correct? There were no issues on either of your sides?

Jen Statsky: Not anything, yeah.

Meredith Scardino: Zero.

Jen: Really simple.

John: Great. Episode’s over. It’s done. Nothing to talk about.

Jen: Not much to talk about it.

Meredith: Credits.

John: Credits roll. Thank you for joining us on the show. Let me introduce you. Meredith Scardino is a writer and producer whose impressive listener credits include Saturday Night Live, The Colbert Report, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. She has four Emmys and a Peabody. She is now the creator and showrunner of (sings) Girls5eva. Bing!

Meredith: That was beautiful.

John: Thank you. I love myself a musical sting, a little introduction moment. It’s one of those few credits that you just don’t skip past, because you’ve got to embrace it while it’s there.

Meredith: It’s Jeff Richmond. He makes a good theme song.

John: After Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, we desperately needed another musical comedy to watch in the house, so we went back and re-watched Seasons 1 and 2 to get ready for Season 3. Man, I need songs. Even if they’re diegetic like they are in your show, I want characters to sing.

Meredith: It’s fun, and the cast is great at singing.

John: Yeah, which is nice. Sarah Bareilles, she’s a ringer. She’s actually genuine.

Meredith: She’s done this before.

John: Once or twice.

Meredith: A little bit.

John: But who knew she was funny? You knew she was funny.

Meredith: She’s hilarious. She’s absolutely hilarious, and so is Renee Elise Goldsberry from Hamilton fame, who no one quite knew she was absolutely hilarious, as she is, although I watched her in Co-op on Documentary Network.

John: Oh my god, so incredible.

Meredith: She was so committed to the bit.

John: Love it.

Meredith: You’re like, “Oh, that lady, committed.”

John: Alex Brightman is also in Co-op, and they’re just so fantastic in that.

Meredith: So fantastic. Then you got Paula Pell and Busy Philipps, who we knew were hilarious already, but you didn’t know they could sing.

John: All things you figured out. Jen Statsky is a writer and producer who has written for shows including Parks and Recreation, Broad City, and The Good Place. She’s the co-creator and showrunner of Hacks, for which she has won an Emmy, a Golden Globe, and a Peabody Award. Welcome back, Jen.

Jen: Hi, thanks for having me. I’m sad you didn’t sing Hacks though. I was hoping.

John: Here’s the problem. It’s a really good show.

Jen: Not a musical show though.

John: No notes except you could add some songs. Would it hurt you to have a catchy song?

Jen: I do think that catchy songs would be helpful. I guess it’s not too late. Maybe next season it can be full musical.

John: That is a prediction that I might be willing to make. We’ll get to that in a second here.

Jen: Meredith, can you lend me your entire writing staff?

Meredith: Yeah, sure. Let’s do it.

John: A lot of the times on the show we have guests who have just finished their first season and they talk about what they’ve learned, and that’s great, but I really want to talk about what’s easier and what’s more difficult about being an established show and going into things where you know stuff.

But I also want to talk about this moment we’re in as an industry, especially for series, because both of your shows debuted at a different time, when there was this era of streaming abundance. I want to talk about what’s gained and what’s lost when streamers are cutting back so much right now.

We’ll also tackle questions from listeners about nonbinary characters, mentorship using the past tense, and finally, two years ago, I made a prediction about what would happen in the third season of Hacks, and I mailed it in a sealed envelope to Jen. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we will open that letter and see how right or wrong I was. She’s holding it up to the Zoom right now. I’m looking at it. I’m looking at my weird penmanship.

Jen: I’m so proud of myself that I didn’t open it. When did you send this?

John: Two years ago.

Jen: Two years ago.

John: There’s a postmark on it. Is there a date? Is it listed?

Jen: Oh yeah, June 2022. Wow. I was so terrified that if I opened it before everything was done for Season 3, you’d have a much better idea than we did, and then I would be like, “What do I do?”

John: There’s a Season 4 still, so if you’re searching for something, maybe it’s in there.

Jen: We’ll see.

John: I’m not actually 100 percent sure what I wrote, so it’ll be a surprise for both of us.

Jen: Great.

John: Only for Premium Members in the Bonus Segment.

You guys are on your third seasons, but to set the stage, can we go back in time and think about the shows you actually pitched originally when you were talking about doing these shows and figure out what that was, compared to what the show ended up becoming. Meredith, can we start with you? What was the pitch for Girls5eva?

Meredith: The pitch was a reunited girl group, one-hit wonder from the late ’90s, Y2K era reunites in the present after they get sampled by an up-and-coming rapper named Lil Stinker and tried to give it a go again. It follows four of the surviving members of Girls5eva. One sadly had swam off the edge of an infinity pool in the mid-aughts.

It follows being a woman in your 40s. There’s a lot of stuff about that. But it’s also a very big underdog story. It’s got a ton of comedy. It’s very hard jokes, fast-paced. We also look back at the past and do lots of flashbacks to their old, regrettable music, the way they got chewed up and spit out by that pop music machine that didn’t really value any of their voices. We just see the fun, ragtag comeback story of hilarious, very different women, who all internalized the pain of that big loss of the one-hit wonder going away in different ways. It’s a really fun show.

John: That very much describes the show that we end up seeing right now, but do you think that was actually all there in your original pitch? Was it a pitch, or had you written a script?

Meredith: It was both. I had written the pilot. Basically, I would go in to network streamers. I had a fake CD that I made, because I had an art background. I made a fake CD that was basically like, “This is what their… ” I made discount stickers, like it had been in the Sam Goody discount bin. I had the cover, and then on the back I had their track list, so it gave you an idea of what kind of group this was.

John: That’s incredible.

Meredith: I even sealed it with one of those plastic industrial sealer things on top, because I didn’t want anyone to open it, because I didn’t have a real CD in there and I didn’t have any music written. Again, just for weight, I put in DVDs from the Jack Lemmon collection that I had.

The pitch was very much similar to what the show became, and I think because I had the pilot. Basically, I’d do the whole pitch. I’d do the song and dance, 20-minute, like, “Here’s what it is. Here’s all the characters. Here’s where they go.” Then I’d leave behind the script. It was nice, because when you pitch something, it’s not always a complete descriptor of what you might end up writing. My producers and I made the decision to be like, the best way is just to be like, “Oh, do you like this thing that you’re reading?” That’s the best indicator of what the show is.

John: We can clarify, this is a situation where a leave-behind is completely appropriate, because you own and control everything here. You weren’t doing free work for them leaving this behind. This was, “I pitched you this. This is the evidence that I really can pull off this thing I just described to you.”

Meredith: Yeah, exactly.

John: Now, Jen, the initial pitches for Hacks, I think we talked about this when you were on the show before, but remind us, what was the process of pitching Hacks and getting it set up originally?

Jen: In 2015, my co-creators Paul W. Downs and Lucia Aniello and I had been talking about women of a certain generation of comedians and how they had never really gotten their due, especially in comparison to their male counterparts. And so we had this idea for a show that would be about the redemption of a comedian like that through the lens of her relationship with a younger comedy writer who had benefited from the ways in which this woman fought.

It was a long process to the pitch, because in 2015, Paul and Lucia were full time on Broad City and they were making a movie and I was full time on Good Place. It took us a while before we were ready to go out with the pitch. But that was to our advantage, I think, in many ways, because we kept working on it through those years. And by the time we got to go around town and pitch it, we had a very thorough, probably too thorough pitch, where we went through to the end of the series, to how it would end, which is still to this day what we plan on doing for the end of it. I did not have any cool leave-behinds. Maybe we would’ve gotten more yeses had I.

John: But you didn’t have a finished pilot? Did you have a script?

Jen: No, we actually hadn’t written a script. It was a pretty thorough 30, 35-minute pitch, but that was it. We didn’t have a script.

John: Wow.

Jen: We didn’t have talent attached. It was really just the idea and all the work we had done to build up the idea.

John: You said you had multiple seasons figured out for what the general arc was of the show. Now that you’re in Season 3 of it, how close are you to that plan?

Jen: We’re still very close. We’re still very close to the plan. Now, of course, obviously, there’s things within the season that happen, and your writers come in and they pitch things and you say, “Oh, that’s an amazing idea.” For example, we knew at the end of Season 1, it was in the pitch, this massive fight and that Deborah would slap her and what it would be. That was all thought out. But for example, Ava sending an email with dirt about Deborah that would then be this huge rift between them, that came in the writing of the show. There’s smaller story moves that of course have come up over the course of the years writing this show. But the major tent poles for what each season is and Deborah’s arc and Ava’s arc have remained from what we pitched.

John: Meredith, did you have multiple seasons figured out at the start?

Meredith: Yeah. I had basically eras of what I thought they would be doing, like chapters. Each season has adhered to that, where Season 1, it’s so much of the adrenaline of the reunion, trying to do everything the old way they used to, and then realizing, like, oh no, god, no, there’s a better way, and trying to just get it going again. Then Season 2 is very much about, okay, now they have an album they can make. What will they say once they have that moment to be in the studio as a group and they’re the actual songwriters? Then Season 3 felt like, okay, you gotta go promote that album and get on the road.

In their future, I would like to see them – they’ve been underdogs clawing for relevance for three seasons, and I would like to see what it looks like for them to have a little bit of success and how they navigate that.

John: Both of your shows are about women in entertainment who are grappling with their legacy, who were big stars and then they see their stars teetering, and so they’re trying to remain relevant or rebuild their careers without seeming desperate. They’re both shows about ambition, but they’re also insider shows. They’re shows about the entertainment business that look behind the curtain and inside. Classically, it’s a thing we do, but it’s also a thing we’re told, like, don’t pitch those shows, because no one wants to watch those shows, no one wants to make those shows. Did you find resistance to the fact that there were shows about the industry?

Meredith: I feel like people say that, but then there are so many shows that people – 30 Rock, even Entourage. There’s like a million shows about… I don’t know why people say that.

Jen: You do always hear that. You hear, “Don’t pitch an industry show. Don’t pitch inside baseball. No one wants it.” Then you turn on your TV and there are so many of them. So many of them have been acclaimed and awarded. I don’t know what it is. I guess no one wants to admit that they do make them.

But I will say, I don’t know how you feel, Meredith, but we pitched the show in 2019, which was during still the boom of streaming. When we pitched the show to Max, it wasn’t even Max at the time. It wasn’t even HBO Max. It was the Warner Media streamer that didn’t even have a name. They just knew that Warner Media was gonna do a streamer.

I think we very much benefited from pitching during a time when it was a seller’s market, and a good idea was a good idea. Credit to Suzanna Makkos, because she heard the pitch and she got it immediately and she made it happen. I don’t know that today, as we speak to you in 2024, I don’t know that Hacks gets bought or I don’t know that it gets made. Part of it I think would be reluctance to do a show about the industry. But I don’t think we faced it at the time. I don’t know. Did you, Meredith?

Meredith: No, I didn’t feel that coming off of anyone that we pitched to. But I also just think that in some ways the show is about the music business in some ways, of course. You get to make all those pop culture references that can be really fun to write, and all of those observations. But at its core, it’s about four women in their 40s trying to do something at the time when you’re normally retreating into the habits and ho-hum of life and you wonder if your greatest days are behind you. It’s about so much universal… I feel like Hacks is the same way. It’s not just about comedy.

Jen: No, it’s not just about… Yeah, you’re exactly right. The shows will work if they’re about universal, relatable things that any viewer, whether they’re in the industry or not, can connect with. Like you’re saying, women in their 40s and their friendship with each other, or in the case of Hacks, a very specific friendship and collaboration between two people and, honestly, just an older women in her 70s. We talk about it a lot. It’s about her quest for dignity. I think that is incredibly relatable to anyone watching of that age.

I think you’re right that what it is when they say don’t pitch an industry show, it’s kind of like don’t pitch an industry show that is about nothing else, that doesn’t have anything underneath it. As long as there’s something underneath it and you’re speaking to relatable universal themes that humans connect with, I think you can set a show anywhere.

John: Both of your shows are comedies, but they’re very different kinds of comedies. I want to talk about their relationships to jokes. Meredith, your show is in the tradition of 30 Rock or Kimmy Schmidt, where it’s a very joke-dense show, where there’s an expectation there’s a certain number of jokes per minute. People are being funny and they’re also not acknowledging that they’re being funny. It’s very much in that habit. Three seasons in, or more seasons when you think about Kimmy Schmidt too, is that just a natural form for you? Do you feel that in your bones?

Meredith: It is. First of all, I was attracted to it like a moth to a flame. But also, I think coming from late night, The Colbert Report, where you’re just taking in input from the news and churning out jokes and satire and character, like boom, boom, boom, boom, that muscle is the one muscle in my body that’s not atrophied. I’m very jacked in that capacity. Then going and working with Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, whose style I absolutely love from 30 Rock, and they came from SNL. I think there’s something a little bit coming from sketch and late night that imbues into the episodic execution.

At Kimmy Schmidt, we had that similar rhythm. It’s joke, joke, joke, joke, joke, but you also get to say all the things. I feel like there’s no shortage of the points we’re making about women feeling irrelevant or whatever we were trying to say. You can still say them even while the breakneck joke pace is breakneck.

John: Hacks is obviously about jokes also, because literally it’s two characters who are wrestling with coming up with material. There’s a comedy writer and a comedy legend. But what’s different about the jokes in Hacks is often they will say a joke and they will acknowledge that that was funny. Both parties that were around them will acknowledge that was funny. But they’re competing basically in comedy with each other. How early in the process of actually writing this did you figure out what that was gonna feel like and where the level was? Did you even know as you started filming how you were going to play that?

Jen: Yeah, I think from the get-go, we knew that we wanted this very specific tone that was a mix of comedy and drama. I’ve said this before, but for us, casting Jean Smart was – she embodies exactly that. She can do hard, funny comedy, but she can also be incredibly grounded and dramatic and heart-wrenching in that way. Once we got her, we said, “That’s our North Star. That is the tone of the show.” That’s what we were always going for.

You’re right that we have this cheat code of we want characters to be able to say jokes and be very funny, but it’s all within the grounded realm of you’re watching a show where characters are supposed to be funny and they know they’re funny and they know they’re making a joke. That was just the particular tone that we wanted to go for with this show.

John: Question for both of you. As you’re thinking about the outline stage or figuring out what is happening in the episode, you’re figuring out what the scenes are, how much does that need to be driven by, “Okay, this is the dramatic story points I need to get across,” or can this scene actually be funny?

Maybe start with you, Meredith. I’m thinking about, they’re on tour. You need to figure out what it is that’s happening in the show. Is it mostly about the emotional stakes that are progressing, or are you thinking, “Okay, these are gonna be good arenas that will allow me to make jokes.”

Meredith: What you want is to find the match where the emotional arc that you’re trying to sell for your character and their evolution over the course of the series is then told through a story that’s funny. That’s what I’m always looking for. Sometimes you’ll have an idea that’s just funny, but you’re like, “I don’t know where it lives.” Or this is popping into my head, but Wickie on the road getting tempted to cheat on her very stable, very nice boyfriend that she has back home, who’s a lunch lord, which is the masculine version of a lunch lady. You’re like, “Okay. What would be fun about… ” You’re trying to just find the match.

We ended up coming up with this idea of her having her idea of female arousal. She was talking about having a Home Alone doorknob for this guy Torque that she meets on the road. Then we wrote a song called Home Alone Doorknob. It is all coming from the fact that she’s being tempted on the road. It’s a real story about is she going to cheat, is she going to fall prey to her old ways of thinking about herself first and not thinking about another person. You’re telling that story in an absurd way, but it has a grounded core underneath it and some emotion. Renee Elise Goldsberry is incredible at walking that line, at making you feel for a character that’s talking about a Home Alone doorknob, being tempted to cheat. Yeah, but always looking for the match.

Jen: Yeah, it is very true. When I look back at scenes in Hacks, that always has to have an emotional reason to exist. For example, I can think of a scene from a Christmas episode we did this past season. I think this was my fault. I’ll take responsibility for this.

Hannah Einbinder’s character, Ava, grew up in a suburb of Boston, which is also where I grew up. And Irish step dancing is a huge phenomenon among Boston girls growing up. I went to many an Irish step competition, in the audience, not participating, which was actually weird. Why was I there? But at some point, I was like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if Ava had Irish step danced? She should do that performance at the end of Deborah’s Christmas party.” We shot it. Hannah took days and days of Irish step lessons. She’s really good at it, because Hannah comes from a cheerleading, gymnastics background, so she’s very physically skilled. But also, it was really funny. But there was no emotional reason for it to exist in the episode. It didn’t come from, oh, and she needs the warm reception that the performance will get after a tough night or whatever. It wasn’t connected to anything. It was just purely me going, “That would be funny.”

We ultimately ended up cutting it. I think it’s a really good lesson exactly what Meredith is saying. The emotion and the story reason has to come first, or else you’re writing something different, which is like sketch comedy or something, which is great, but it’s not really the shows that either of us are making.

Meredith: You can always feel it too when you do a table read. When you have good story energy, you can just feel you’re locked in.

Jen: Yes, totally.

Meredith: You don’t feel any of the awkward tension that you might feel if you’re on a first date or if you’re talking to a new person or whatever that awkward thing is.

Jen: It just flows in a different way.

Meredith: It flows. Then when you do stop down for something that is comedy nerdery indulgence, that I love too – we all do it. We all pitch things that you want to just see on screen. But then they do stick out, and then you suddenly feel awkward. It’s not working. You’re like, “Oh, that just has to go. It’s just gotta go.”

Jen: Totally.

Meredith: Even though it’s funny. If you had the reason behind it, it might-

Jen: It might live.

Meredith: … be the greatest moment of the show.

John: This is three seasons in that you’re still encountering these situations. It feels like the first season you make the discoveries, things that work, things that don’t work, things that can fit inside one actor’s mouth. You learn things in that first season. But three seasons in, you’re still learning things about your show and what works. Going into this third season, what was the process of figuring out the shape of the season? What was the blue sky whiteboarding? How did you figure out the basic shape of what the episodes would be?

Meredith: At the end of Season 2, we bit off that Girls5eva, they pile into a van and they’re gonna go on tour. And they don’t have any idea of where they’re gonna go, except that they have a hit song in Fort Worth, Texas, because they wrote a pandering song about the city, because it was the biggest city in America that didn’t have a hit song about it.

Going into Season 3, there’s so many things to figure out, where you’re like, “Okay, we need to sell the road, but we also shoot in and around New York City, and we’re not gonna go on the road.” It was like, production-wise, how do you pull off the road without hitting it? We come up with ideas of what’s a home base they could go to. Hotel rooms. A hotel chain looks pretty much the same in every town you’re in. Does someone have reward points? Gloria did. That’s how we came up with the Marriott Divorced Dad Suitelets where they stay throughout the tour. You swap the art out. You swap the drop and whatever. That was good problem solving.

But then you’re also blue skying, like, “What would happen on the road? Dawn’s pregnant. What does it look like if she tries to get a prenatal checkup in the Ozarks? What does that look like?” You’re coming up with, what are some things that would happen that would challenge our characters, push our characters out of their comfort zone?

You’re also thinking, what is the end goal? We went into the season. I had done a lot of pre-work headed in and had the hotel and some rough ideas about, oh, maybe Wickie and Summer have never actually been alone together and they realize that in Season 3. Just a million different ideas. But then early in the blue sky, in the room, we figured out maybe Wickie bit off something massive to make this tour being a Taylor Swift-level tour, and so she books them at Radio City Music Hall, and they’re not that kind of act, and she books them on Thanksgiving. That gave us the engine, like, okay, how do you get to Radio City?

We had six episodes, so it was a short four hours of content to get them from Fort Worth to New York in six months and get a baby out. There was a little bit of math, but also just the fun of pulling off the plot of that, plus all the character development.

John: But also, in planning this to be a tour, you were blowing up your sets. Classically, in comedy, you always get to go back to your sets. Those things are established. You have to establish characters you go back to. You blew up all those things for this season, because you didn’t have those things. Her apartment is gone. A lot of the places we were expecting to see are gone.

Meredith: We did bring it back in Episode 6, because they return to New York. There was a return to some of those comfort sets that we had seen. But yeah, in some ways, the four of them together always feels like it’s somewhere. That always feels like the show to me. Whenever we get them together, no matter where they are, it feels familiar, whether it’s the Macaroni Rascals chain or the van or the hotel room or wherever it is.

John: Now, Jen, your tour was Season 2. We are leaving your sets behind and then hitting the road and going into a bus.

Jen: Same dumb problem of making the show really expensive.

John: Yeah, and the aesthetics are just different. You had to actually go places. We expect to see outdoor locations much more in your show.

Jen: Yeah, there’s a certain, I guess, tone and look that has been established with the show. Yeah, it was a lot of on-location shooting for Season 2, which was really, really challenging from a budget perspective. Also, just credit to Jean Smart. She’s 72 years old. It’s different driving to Universal to shoot on our stages than it is going to Tarzana at 5:00 in the morning.

Season 2, we knew going in it was gonna be on the road, and so those were our benchmarks. Much like Meredith is saying, the strength of a show when you have characters that are so good together, is as long as they’re together, you still feel like it’s the show. That’s how I feel about Hacks is that as long as Deborah and Ava are together, it is Hacks.

Then going into our third season, we had ended Season 2 on a pretty big cliffhanger, which was that Deborah and Ava had gone their separate ways. Deborah had fired her, benevolently, so that Ava could go pursue her own career. We had this huge question of how do we get them back together. That was really the first thing that we tackled when we came back to break Season 3.

Now, we knew that the arc of Season 3 and the thrust of it would be Deborah finding out that there was this late night position opening, and Deborah would say, “Okay, I want that chair. I’m going for it.” We always knew that that would be the thrust of the season. We specifically had to figure out how do Ava and Deborah get back together. But it ultimately felt very correct and satisfying to us that it would be only as Deborah goes after this biggest thing in her life, this biggest goal that’s she trying to achieve, she would need Ava’s help.

John: Now, can you talk about production in both of these situations? I’m trying to remember. Season 2 of Hacks, that was pre-COVID? I’m just trying to remember timelines of things.

Jen: Season 1 of Hacks was COVID, pre-vaccine. We were shooting, but I would get calls, the studio being like, “All the hospitals are full. Do you want to shoot today?” I was like, “This is up to me?” Then Season 2 was still COVID, but people were vaccinated, felt a little bit lower key. Season 3 I believe was the first time we got to shoot without masks, so kind of crazy to actually see people’s faces after three years of working with them.

John: But Season 3 also had dealt with the strikes probably. Were you able to shoot before or after the strikes or both?

Jen: We are so lucky that this show has been received the way it has been. But every season we’ve had some pretty significant production challenges. Season 3 was no different, in that a little less than halfway through shooting, we needed to shut down, because Jean Smart had a health issue and she needed to go have a procedure. We shut down for a few months so that Jean could go and take care of herself and get healthy, which of course was of the utmost importance. Then we came back for four shooting days, and then the strike was called. When I look at the calendar, we started shooting Season 3 in November 2022, and we wrapped in January 2024.

John: Wow.

Jen: Someone said to me recently, “It’s like you’re making Boyhood, the TV show.” It was taking so goddamn long. Yeah, very challenging, long Season 3 production.

John: Do you shoot episode by episode? Do you block shoot? What’s the plan?

Jen: We block shoot as much as we can. We try to get as many scripts done before we start the season as we can, so that we can be nimble and be efficient budget-wise, because if we tried to do it just episode by episode, it would be prohibitively expensive. We do block shoot. The first episode of Season 3 that was locked was Episode 8 of 9. The first shot of the season, this drone shot that comes into Caesars Palace in Vegas, that was the very last thing we shot.

John: Wow.

Jen: It’s very much boarded like a movie, in that you’re bouncing around.

John: Meredith, I noticed on Season 3, I believe it’s one director for the entire run?

Meredith: Yes, Kimmy Gatewood.

John: Has that always been the plan, or why was that choice made?

Meredith: The block shooting of the whole season was a budgetary decision. Kimmy was just also a perfect choice person who could bite that off. Obviously, it was confusing, with one scene that’s in Episode 1, you’re shooting one scene that’s in the finale, all on day one. We had done things like that in the past.

I remember being on set of the Kimmy Schmidt interactive special that had a million potential permutations and universes that you could end up going into and timelines and talking to the actors, like, “Okay, so this time you’re in the blue sweatshirt and the zombies came,” or whatever it is. That was fine.

The one benefit of block shooting is that you have to get all the scripts done ahead of time, which meant that I was free to be on set the whole time. I didn’t have to do that thing where you’re sprinting between trying to check out rehearsal and then you run upstairs and then you’re finishing a script and then you’re looking at an edit and then you’re working on an outline and then you’re pitching another thing. That was not part of this season. The scripts had to be done by this pre-production time. We did it. We prepped, and then we had a very dedicated strike of a shoot. We did the whole thing in six weeks.

John: Wow. Jen, you had a background in more traditional comedy. I’m thinking of The Good Place, or sorry, Parks and Recreation or Good Place, more episode by episode. Can you talk through pros and cons of traditional schedules versus block shooting?

Jen: I think what’s nice about the network formula, the way that Parks and Rec and Good Place were run, was that it honestly just allows you to do more episodes, because it’s this machine you have going. Parks and Rec was 22 episodes. There’s no way we could make 22 episodes of Hacks the way we do it, which is that Paul, Lucia, and I are in every step of the process. We are writing, and then we are on set every single day, and then we are editing. We all do every step of that process. That is just the way we want to do it, because we want to have all of our eyes on every single part of the process. Now, we’re allowed to do that and able to do that, because we do 8 to 10 episodes, but when you do 22, there’s just no way. There’s too much. There’s not enough months in the year to do it that way.

I think from my time on Parks and Rec and Good Place, it worked like a very well oiled machine, that Mike Schur would be in the writers’ room most of the time. Writers would be on set managing their episode and overseeing it. I think what was really nice about that model – and we’ve talked about this – is that it allows for more of a training ground. The writers are empowered. I certainly learned how to run a show by working on Mike’s shows and seeing how he did it, but also being given the power to be on set and having to take on that responsibility.

This has been well covered, but as we divorce the writing from the production from the editing, writers are given less of a chance to do that. There are certainly tremendous advantages to the older model that was tied to longer season orders in that it just makes better writers. Better writers come out of that process, because you become a producer and you become a showrunner that way.

John: Now, Meredith, Jen had a trio of people who were there to oversee stuff. On your shoots, were you the only writer around? Was there anybody else you can go to to help you out on that stuff?

Meredith: Yeah, this season we built into everyone’s contracts that they would come back for the week of their episode and be paid to be on set.

John: That’s great.

Meredith: That was important, for the exact reason that Jen’s talking about. You really learn by doing and being on the job and being empowered to make the decisions about a prop that’s not working or quickly doing a rewrite of a line that’s not working for an actor or whatever it is. You need that experience. That was very important to us.

Season 1 and 2, just because of the nature of the way the things worked, I was alone a lot on set and tired. But also, directors were very helpful. I had producers that would pop by if they were available, Robert or Tina. Jeff Richmond would be around too. Very incredibly helpful. Some writers would come by as well if they were available. By that point, our room was wrapped, so that was more like just to stop by and hang out, really. Not really on the clock. Also, during COVID, we weren’t allowed to have any visitors really.

Jen: That was for the majority of Hacks shooting it’s been COVID.

Meredith: That’s right.

Jen: Writers couldn’t come to set.

Meredith: That’s a good point. Maybe they didn’t come really Season 1 and 2, but yeah, Season 3. The new Writers Guild agreement, it has that thing in that where you have to have at least two people stay the entire course of shooting, I believe, right? Which I think is a great thing.

John: That was one of the things we heard from most going into the negotiation was it wasn’t just lower-level writers feeling like they weren’t getting experience. It was other showrunners who just felt completely abandoned and lost. They were having to carry the entire thing on their backs. It was incredibly difficult.

Jen: I give you so much credit, Meredith, because having three showrunners is incredibly helpful, and even then it’s really helpful. I’m like, “Oh, maybe we need a fourth showrunner,” sometimes. I give you so much credit, because doing it one person is really challenging.

Meredith: I lost a lot of stress weight.

Jen: That’s good.

Meredith: I was just trying to suck protein shakes. How many calories can you put in a shake?

Jen: Oh my god.

Meredith: So I can drink in as much as I can. It was still more exciting than not.

John: Season 3 is now behind you. Looking forward to a potential Season 4. When does the process start? As you’re working through Season 3, are you also thinking about, “These are the hooks we’re gonna establish for Season 4,” or are you mostly just focused on, “We gotta get Season 3 put to bed.”

Meredith: I think obviously the priority is getting Season 3 out. Then as we have in Seasons 1 and 2, we have a little bit of a tease of something to come. At the end of Season 3, you see the big time calling Wickie. It’s her old song from the early 2000s when she went solo, Yesternights.

John: Yesternights is such a great word.

Jen: So good.

Meredith: It is featured in the show The Crown, the finale of The Crown, so obviously, she’s gonna blow up and Kate Bush. That promises what could come. My phone is always just – if something occurs to me, I’ll just throw it in my notes app and revisit it later if there’s something real. But I try to always have rough designs, but not anything too prescriptive or rigid, because I feel like there’s always so many exciting surprises that come that you don’t want to be too locked into anything.

I remember in Season 2, we knew they were gonna do an album for a label. We made the label the Property Brothers label, because everybody’s branching out into so many passion projects that they have. They were on Property Records. We wrote that not knowing if we’d ever book the Property Brothers. I thought worst case, we could just get two brown-haired guys with beards. Maybe we’d get Vince Mulaney and Adam Scott to play them or something.

John: But of course they stepped up.

Meredith: But then we found out they stepped up, and they said they’d be happy to be in it. Then my favorite thing in the world happened. Drew Property, which I’m gonna say is his last name – it’s not, it’s Drew Scott – he sent us some assets to show off, “Hey, we can do all these different things.” One was a reel of voices that he did, animated voices. One was some music, because they’re very musical. Then one was this incredible reel of him doing stage combat in a backyard with guns and just attacking a stuntman and doing all this Jack Ryan stuff.

We saw that, and the writers and I were just like, “This is the greatest thing I have ever seen. How can we license this and put it on the show and use it in some way?” Then that’s what led to the big fight between Gloria and one of the Property Brothers that was I think a couple minutes, three minutes or something. We did not cut much of that out. We wanted it to be incredibly long.

Going into that season, could I have ever imagined that we would do something like that? No. I try to be loose with some of the things that we want to do, knowing that it could change.

John: Jen, we’ve established that you went into your pitch knowing all these seasons. As you’re looking at a fourth season, where are you at in your process? How do you get started?

Jen: Similar to Meredith, you set up these things at the end of Season 3 that you know you’re gonna follow through on. We knew at the end of 3, Deborah’s gonna get this show. That would be a major thing we’d be dealing with in Season 4 is Deborah having this show and getting that off the ground and how does that go, especially when she and Ava have a new dynamic to their relationship.

But it’s also very true what Meredith said. You do have to remember that the process is very much so alive, and so that even though we have figured out a lot of things and we have these benchmarks and tent poles for the entire structure of the series, there are surprises along the way, and there are things that are like, “That’s a better idea. That changes the path, but that’s a better idea.” You have to, I think, be really open to those.

I think that’s one of the reasons that I love being on set and why I can’t just go, “I wrote the script. Go execute it. I’ll do editing or whatever,” is because the process is so alive that you have to be paying attention to every part of it, because things come up while you’re shooting, while you’re witnessing the way the actors are delivering the lines, that you need to be on top of and change and be willing to change and be willing to adjust. We have these big story points that we are moving towards for Season 4, but of course, there’s always gonna be things that we adjust if it’s a better idea.

John: We have a few listener questions here. I’d love you guys’ opinions on what our listeners should do in these situations. Drew, help us out.

Drew Marquardt: Noah writes, “How should I describe nonbinary characters in action lines so as not to confuse my readers? For instance, how should I use they/them, or should I just use a character’s name instead of a pronoun?”

John: For context here, so thinking about inside a script, so it’s not how the characters around them are acknowledging, but what you’re reading on the page. What’s your instinct for that?

Jen: I guess my instinct would be, if it’s a scene that is solo with the character, you can use pronouns they/them. But yeah, if there’s maybe multiple people in a scene, I don’t use pronouns a lot in the action. Sometimes I’m trying to get the page count down, and I do. I’m almost always using their names, like, “Deborah moves to the other side of the room.” I’m just always using the character’s name anyway.

Meredith: So am I. I remember on Kimmy Schmidt, we were like, “Why did we name Jane Krakowski Jacqueline? It takes up so many characters whenever we’re describing her in an action line.”

Jen: I gotta say I love the name Ava. Ava, it has worked out.

Meredith: Ed would be great. I get why they made that show.

Jen: [Unintelligible 00:42:39] for the scripts.

John: My instinct would be, I understand the question. You’re trying to make sure the script feels inclusive. But if it’s important the character be nonbinary, great, call it out on the page if it’s gonna be acknowledged in the scene as well. But not to worry too much about it. You’re right to always be thinking about how do we not confuse the reader. Your answer in terms of just use the character’s name a lot is probably the better choice. On screen, we’re gonna be seeing that person’s face. The person’s name stands in for their face on the page. Drew, another question. How about this one from Tara?

Drew: Tara writes, “I recently won a competition for a yearlong mentorship from two major Hollywood screenwriters. I’d love some advice on how to make the most of it. For context, I’m on the East Coast and almost 48 years old and plan to do this for the rest of my life. I’m a no thanks to retirement, like Craig. I’ve written, produced, and directed three short films, and this is my first feature screenplay.”

Meredith: I think it’s great if you have a feature that you’re working on. What an amazing opportunity to have this amount of time to bounce things off of and get feedback from these mentors. The tangible stuff is always great. I think for me, when you’re mentoring someone, sometimes a lot of the questions are like, “How do get an agent?” Some of the things that have nothing to do with writing.

I think that the things that have the most to do with getting your screenplay in the best possible shape by the end of this mentorship and also, how do I navigate the business, asking questions like, “What would you do if you were me?” Those kind of things are always helpful. But I think, wow, what a great gift to have a project and two great people to be looking at it whenever you want them to.

Jen: I think that’s great advice, because of course you want to use these mentors to ask questions about the business if it feels important and relevant to you. But the business changes at breakneck speed, especially in today’s moment. But good story elements don’t change. I think like Meredith is saying, getting really specific of the script, like, “Oh, was this Act 2 break surprising to you? Did you see that?” Just really honing in on making that story and that script the best it can possibly be will be the most beneficial thing to you.

Meredith: Tina Fey always is a real big advocate of a table read, even if you don’t have production coming up. In this year, it might be worth putting together a little table read of your script when you feel like it’s in good shape and inviting these mentors or at least filming it so they can watch later. It’ll help you realize where your screenplay really needs work.

John: I’ve had a couple mentees over the years. Often, the best questions they can ask are “how” questions. We agree that this is a thing that needs to change. It’s a moment that’s not working right. But how do I get it there? How are the ways to make the scene work the way I want to do? Show some different examples.

When they come to me with questions about, “My manager wants to send it to this person,” when they come to me with a specific question about, “What should I do with this next situation?” that’s always much more helpful than, “How do I get an agent?” It’s specific advice for specific moments, or like, “This producer is taking too long to respond. Do I send this email?” Those are the quick answers I can give them. That may be something that Tara is able to use with these mentors. Last question here is from Stephen.

Drew: Stephen writes, “What’s your take about using adverbs in the past tense to convey emotion when writing action? For example, the slug line is, ‘Exterior restaurant parking lot, moments later.’ The action line is, ‘Exiting with Dre in tow, Sean checks his order. They screwed it up again.’ I want to make it known that this has happened before. I want to hammer home his frustration, but should I just find a better way to write it? Should it just be, ‘They screwed up his order,’ or am I over-thinking it?”

Meredith: Oh my god. I am so confused. Can you read it one more time so I can see what’s wrong with it?

John: It’s confusing. Here’s what it is. In the action lines, Sean is not saying they screwed up again, but there’s an uppercase line here, like, “They screwed it up again.” We’re reading this reaction that they screwed it up again.

Jen: It’s giving us the emotional feeling of, “Oh, god,” I see, I see, versus speaking to format of, why is it all of a sudden switching tense. I see.

Meredith: I think it’s fine.

Jen: I think it’s totally fine.

Meredith: It’s totally fine.

Jen: I sometimes put a smiley face in the action line. I’m really going wild and not sticking to format when I’m writing the script.

Meredith: Also, so many people don’t read the action lines. So many people read the dialog and skim them. I would always advocate just generally to keep those short. This is not the question, but don’t try to be too cute, put jokes in your action line, because that’s never gonna be on the page, something a little winky or whatever. Keep them real simple. If it makes sense as you’re reading it, even if grammatically it doesn’t agree with the tense you used earlier in the clause, I think that’s what you go with.

Jen: I think as long as the story keeps moving and it’s enjoyable to read, that’s all that matters, never a grammar shift or anything like that. As long as it’s keeping me engaged, that’s all I care about.

John: 100 percent. It is time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our listeners. Meredith, do you have something to recommend?

Meredith: I have a person to recommend.

John: I love that.

Meredith: It’s a person that Jen Statsky knows very well.

Jen: Oh, wow.

Meredith: Chris Fleming.

Jen: Yes. Oh my gosh.

Meredith: I love Chris Fleming. He’s a stand-up. So funny. Has a special. Also, I just saw him live in March at Town Hall. It was the happiest hour and a half ever. I love him. He’s so funny. I love how unpredictable he is. I’ve been in comedy a while, and you can start to get where a premise is going, even if the comedian’s incredible and has a cool execution. But I’m like, “I feel like I know where this is going.” But with Chris Fleming, you do not know where it’s going. It’s very surprising. He’s firing on all cylinders. If you see him come through your town, get a ticket.

John: Here’s a question for you, Meredith. Someone like Chris Fleming you see, like, man, this is a great comedic voice, do you think, “I want to just watch them,” or, “I want to hire them on as a writer for something.” Does that kick in?

Meredith: I want to know him. I want to go to coffee with him every morning. I want him to be in my life. I want him to be my domestic life partner. I would love to work with him. He’s great. But yes, I’m just also enjoying it. But yeah, of course.

Jen: I will say, Meredith, I’m so happy you brought up Chris. Same exact thing. You work in comedy a really long time, not to sound jaded, but it’s very rare that someone so organically surprises you and it feels like you’re seeing something new and fresh for the first time.

A friend of mine showed me Chris’s videos. I was like, “Oh my god, this is the funniest person I’ve seen in so long.” I told my manager, I said, “I will do anything to work with this person. He is so deeply funny.” Then I ended up producing his special for Peacock, which you can watch now. It’s on Peacock. I’m so happy that you shouted him out, because Chris Fleming is so deeply funny and talented and special.

John: Love it. Jen, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

Jen: I do have a One Cool Thing. We’re going on a stand-up comedy theme for this one. This one may sound like it’s connected to Hacks, and it is, but I gain nothing from promoting this. I have no financial stake in this. But Hannah Einbinder, who plays Ava, has her very first one-hour special coming out on Max on June 13. I have seen it. She is so phenomenal. If you’ve seen Hacks, great. If you haven’t, guess what? You can still watch this special and you will love it.

Hannah is – the same way with Chris – such a unique, special voice in comedy, doing something that I’ve truly never seen anyone do before on stage. Her tone and delivery is so specific to her. It’s unlike anyone else. She’s such a gifted also physical comedian. We do a little bit of that in Hacks, but the way she moves on stage and her physicality and her act-outs and voices, it is just so phenomenal.

Again, I financially do not benefit from this special. It’s actually bad for me if more people see her, because she’ll be unavailable to shoot the show Hacks. That’s how much I like this special and think Hannah needs to be seen as an incredible stand-up comedian. It’s called Everything Must Go. It’s Hannah Einbinder’s first special, on Max, June 13.

John: Excellent. I’m gonna break the pattern. I’m sorry. I don’t have a comedian recommendation. My recommendation is – the camera in your computer monitor is terrible. They are terrible. They’re not good. They’re not optimized for that. But the camera in your iPhone is fantastic. It would be so nice if you could just use your camera on your iPhone as your computer camera, which you can now. This thing called Continuity. If you’re on a Mac, it automatically already works. You can choose your iPhone. The problem is you need a place to actually put your iPhone. They have this thing now which is a little mount to the back of your monitor, where it just connects by MagSafe.

I’m right now using my iPhone camera. I’m gonna show the difference to you guys so you can see what the difference is. This is the built-in camera for my monitor.

Meredith: Oh, god! Hideous!

John: It’s hideous.

Meredith: It’s like a Bigfoot.

John: This is the iPhone version. It’s a better thing. We’re still stuck on Zoom for a lot of pitches and things, so if you are lamenting the terrible camera in your computer monitor, there’s a solution here. The one I have is from Belkin, but they don’t seem to make it anymore. We’ll put a link in the show notes to a thing that seems almost exactly the same. It just connects on the back. It’s lovely. It just makes things look better.

Meredith: That’s a hot tip.

John: 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 Roger Corser. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions.

You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hats and drinkware now. They’re all great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on opening up this envelope I sent more than two years ago about the future of Hacks. Meredith, Jen, an absolute pleasure talking with both of you. Congratulations on three seasons of incredible entertainment.

Jen: Thank you.

Meredith: Thank you so much. Thank you.

Jen: Thanks for having us.

[Bonus Segment]

John: The time has come, Jen Statsky.

Jen: Hold on.

John: I emailed you after you were on the show last time. I’d just watched and loved Season 2, and I had a prediction about what was gonna happen in Season 3. You said, “Write it down.”

Jen: I think I made a joke, because I was like, “Wow, wonder if it’s better than what I have planned. Write it down and send it to me, please.” Then you, in a great move, said, “I absolutely will. I’ll send it. I’ll write it down. I’ll send it and put it in a sealed envelope.” I have in my hand that very envelope, postmarked from June 2022. It has been burning a hole in my desk for almost two years. Let’s open it.

John: Let’s open it up.

Jen: Let’s see what you had to say.

Meredith: Should we do a little ASMR of the opening?

Jen: John, before I read this, do you remember what you wrote?

John: I have a general sense of what it was. I think that it was about the power dynamic shifting between the two of them, where eventually Ava would be the boss. I think Ava created a TV show is where I think it is.

Meredith: Good idea.

John: Let’s see what I actually wrote down.

Jen: We’re opening it now. Here’s what it says. “John August prediction for Hacks Season 3. Ava sells a TV comedy and Deborah is ultimately one of the leads. It puts them in an uncomfortable boss-employee relationship, since Deborah isn’t used to being subordinate and Ava is constantly being undermined and second-guessed.” Then there’s a heart, which is very cute. It says, parentheses, “The show within a show barely survives.” Very good pitch. Meredith, I don’t think you’ve seen the Hacks Season 3 finale. How could you?

Meredith: I have not seen the finale.

Jen: But there is a dynamic shift very close to what you’re guessing there, John, in the Hacks season finale. While Ava doesn’t sell a TV show the way you’re predicting, you are, in a good way, I think, getting at this dynamic shift in their interpersonal relationship.

John: What I was envisioning was that it was a scripted series. It was a scripted series more like a Hacks series gonna be reflecting their dynamic. But of course, Hannah would have created it, would actually be the showrunner behind it. The talk show thing is really interesting, because that star is still the star, in a way.

Jen: Is still the star, yes. It is Deborah’s white whale.

John: It [crosstalk 00:56:34].

Jen: It always felt like that would be the thing that Deborah would be going for, to get.

John: I’m glad I wasn’t completely wrong.

Meredith: I think you did a great job.

Jen: I think you did an amazing job, because even though the plot details are slightly off, the emotional details were right on, of a dynamic shift and the power flipping. I think don’t quit your day job.

Meredith: Jen, great job not losing the letter.

Jen: Not losing it. I know.

Meredith: Where did you keep it?

Jen: I kept it in my office, my desktop drawer, and I didn’t touch it.

Meredith: That’s great.

John: That’s nice. Meredith, on your show, the shifting power dynamics are present through the whole thing. I’m thinking about Wickie clearly is the biggest star and she’s not the songwriter and those ongoing dynamics. It sounds like your next season, God willing, is a lot about how they hold together in what’s gonna come next.

Meredith: It is always interesting to see. It’s interesting, I think, to see people change and go through an evolution. Sara Bareilles’s character, seeing her find her alpha side would be interesting, I think, to explore. Every episode, somebody’s more in charge than the other and telling somebody how to live.

John: In doing the Charlie’s Angels movies, I often use this metaphor of fighting the monster. For both the original and for the second Charlie’s Angels, every day on Charlie’s Angels was fighting the monster. You weren’t quite sure who the monster was going to be. Some days you were the monster. But every day everyone had to band together and fight the monster. That’s how we made those movies and why they were so incredibly painful and difficult and bruising to make. Those challenging dynamics.

Even doing the first movie, I already recognized that, oh no, I’m the problem here, and yet I’m just gonna own – I’m not gonna change. I’m gonna just let myself be the problem of the day, and then someone else will be the monster tomorrow that has to be fought. It’s tough.

An absolute pleasure talking with both of you. I will not write down a prediction for Season 4, but I predict it’ll be great.

Jen: Do you have anything you want Meredith and I to send you a prediction for?

Meredith: Do you want us to predict anything?

John: We’re on Episode 645. We just recorded Episode 645. Episode 700 will be our next big milestone. That’s more than a year away.

Meredith: We could pick the topic.

John: Pick the topic of Episode 700.

Jen: A retrospective on the career of Jen Statsky.

John: Absolutely.

Jen: Just kidding.

John: Absolutely. What happened?

Jen: If you want the show to end on 701.

Meredith: If you want it to be done at 700.

Jen: You want subscriptions to plummet.

John: Good stuff. Thank you both so, so much.

Jen: Thanks, John. Thanks, Meredith.

Meredith: Thank you so much.

Links:

• Meredith Scardino on Instagram
• Jen Statsky on Instagram
• Girls5eva on Netflix
• Hacks on Max
• Chris Fleming
• Chris Fleming: HELL on Peacock
• Hannah Einbinder: Everything Must Go on Max
• Stouchi iPhone Camera Mount
• 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 and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Rodger Corser (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](https://johnaugust.com/2023/basic-instincts).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has a little bit of swearing. I use the F-word, and I use it in a non-PG13-safe way. If you have a kid listening to this show, and you don’t want them to hear the F-word, just a heads up.

**Craig Mazin:** But they should hear it.

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 611 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, why are characters doing what they’re doing? We often talk about motivation in terms of high-level wants like love and pride and jealousy, but what about those base animalistic desires? We’ll look at how those inform characters both on the scene and story level. Then that movie you loved, that TV show you devoured, that book that changed your life, will you be able to find it next year?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** We’ll discuss the impermanence of media in the age of digitization and how to think about it as consumers and creators, Craig. Also, in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, Craig, do you want to talk about swimming?

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** I have this weird relationship with swimming, because it’s one of those few things where humans are born able to swim, but then they forget to swim. Then if you aren’t taught how to swim-

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** … you just have this whole weird relationship with swimming. I want to talk about swimming.

**Craig:** I have a different swimming experience than you, I think.

**John:** Great. I’m excited.

**Craig:** We’ll find out.

**John:** Cool. We always push listener questions to the end of the episode, and I feel like they’re rushed, so I thought we would start with some listener questions this week, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** Thank god. I know you’ve been clamoring for this for years.

**Craig:** I honestly love listener questions, because it matches my lack of preparation perfectly. It’s the perfect thing for an improv artist.

**John:** You are an improv artist. That’s what we learned.

**Craig:** I’m an artist.

**John:** You are an artist. Drew, start us off. What questions do you have for us?

**Drew Marquardt:** The first one comes from Wren. They write, “How close is writing for movies and TV to writing for comics? The way I do it and have seen it done resembles scripts for animated series quite a bit, but I also don’t know how close those are to live action. Have either of you ever been curious or even dabbled in comics?”

**John:** Craig, have you written any stuff for comics or for graphic novels?

**Craig:** No, sir.

**John:** I’m doing one right now. I was familiar with the form beforehand, but this is my first time actually writing in it. There’s not one standardized format the same way there is for screenplays. All screenplays look kind of the same. Different writers and different studios will do things a little bit different for how they format stuff. A lot of it’s done in Word, but sometimes people are using screenwriting software. I’m using Highland for it.

What I’m doing looks like a screenplay except that panels I’m putting in brackets. You can see the screen description for that panel is in a bracket, and then there’s dialogue that goes with it as part of that. It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s been a bit more of an adjustment than I expected it to be. You have to be thinking more visually than what I would do in a screenplay, because I’m really thinking about how is this flowing across the page, what is the bottom of the page, now I’m turning to the next page. Not every writer is doing that, but that’s worked really well for me and the artists I’m working with.

**Craig:** I think maybe the only script I’ve ever seen for a comic or graphic novel is, I’ve read some of Neil Gaiman’s original writing material that was then used for Sandman, which is a glorious piece of art. I mean, god, if people have not read the Sandman series, all of it, they really need to. It’s just remarkable.

**John:** Last year or the year before, I read Sandman. I got the giant hardback book. It’s terrific.

**Craig:** It’s incredible and kind of mind-bending. Neil has promised to come on the show. We keep missing him as he’s out here or he’s over there. We have to figure it out, because he’s just a giant. It was fascinating to read.

It reminded me more than anything of the writing I did way, way back in the very beginning of my career, when I was working in advertising, because in ad copy, at least back then, it was a two-column thing. On one side, there was the things that the person would say, and on the other side was what you would see. You were learning how to write audio and visual side by side, in a column, which is fascinating. In a way, it makes more sense. I think we’ve talked about this on another episode before. It allows you to match the words with the visuals in parallel, as opposed to in sequence, which is what we do.

I don’t know if you’ve run into this, John. When you’re writing a screenplay, there’s a bit of action that really needs to come after the dialogue to have the punch you want. However, once you read it, you understand it’s supposed to have happened during what the person said. You have a choice. You can either put it before or you can put it after. Neither is correct. That’s an interesting aspect of that format that I really like. I’ve never done it. Wren, dive in and tell us how it goes.

**John:** Yeah. I would say most of the graphic novel stuff I’ve read has been more towards a screenplay format recently. I looked at some DC books. It looks more like a screenplay, although sometimes dialogue isn’t centered the way we do it in screenplays. But it feels kind of like that. There’s a wide range of way to do it.

I think it makes sense that it is kind of like what we are used to with scripts, because it is just about, here’s the visuals, here’s the dialogue that’s happening. You can emphasize sound effects the same way you want to do it. But you have many of the same limitations that you’re not able to… You’re generally not describing what things feel like or smell like or anything else. You’re not doing other book kind of stuff in a graphic novel. Cool. What else do we have for a question?

**Drew:** Ian writes, “What’s your take on the use of photo-real de-aging and how it will or will not influence what is written? Do you think audiences will learn to accept de-aged actors such that there will be studio push for scripts that feature performances from actors who are beyond their prime or even deceased? If so, as writers, would you approach a script differently if you knew that the film or series was going to feature a 30-year-old Steve McQueen or Sidney Poitier? Or you can fill in the blank. At what point do writers have to consider the technical capabilities of the medium or the audience’s ability to believe what they are seeing? Or are all of these issues an answer to why it will never become widely used in cinema?”

**Craig:** Currently, de-aging is weird. We’re definitely in the uncanny valley zone. It’s not necessarily because the visual effects work itself isn’t perfect. I think it is a little bit more just going, “That’s not how that person looks.”

We actually did an experiment on de-aging Pedro Pascal, because in the first 20 minutes of the first episode of The Last of Us, he’s supposed to be in his 30s, and then we jump ahead and he’s in his 50s. Pedro’s in his 40s. As it turned out, with a little bit of makeup on either end, we were able to make it look like he was 20 years apart. I can’t even imagine how much money we saved on that in terms of aging. It’s much easier, obviously, to age somebody with practical makeup.

The de-aging itself was impressive, but the fact that I said impressive kind of gives away the problem. It needs to be unnoticeable, in a sense. We may get there.

What strikes me is that people still psychologically value authenticity, and so anybody can have a really close reproduction of the Mona Lisa hanging in their home. Brushstroke for brushstroke, there are people out there who are making these beautiful replicas of the Mona Lisa. Sometimes forgers make such close copies that experts really struggle to tell the difference, and yet everyone is obsessed with knowing if it’s real or not, because we value it. We just do.

So we could keep certain people alive. I think everybody will just value it accordingly, which is to say it’s copy. There’s just something in our minds. We are aware that copies are less then. When it comes to performances and human beings, especially when we’re being asked to care and feel, authenticity does seem to matter. But who knows? Once the robots take over, who gives a shit?

**John:** Craig, you talked about authenticity. And I think that’s a nuance I want to dig into here, because it’s one thing if you have a 30-year-old Sidney Poitier suddenly showing up in your movie. That’s inauthentic. We know that Sidney Poitier was not there at all. But if you were de-aging Joel for 20 minutes in your show, that’s not really inauthentic, because you could’ve done it with makeup or someone else.

I think audiences aren’t going to necessarily feel different about like, that person was never even there versus, okay, we used some fakery on this, because makeup and other things could be used for that fakery. Yes, we will get to the point where we’re not going to see it, just the same way that most visual effects you see in movies you don’t realize are visual effects, because it’s just gotten so good. We’re going to stop noticing it, and we’ll only know that like, oh, Ryan Reynolds was 20 years old there and is now 40 years old. Something must’ve been done. You’re not going to see the seams, the way the uncanny valley problem that we’ve had up to this point.

The Indiana Jones movie, the last one, the visual effects on de-aging him were really good. I didn’t necessarily love that sequence, but I wasn’t taken out of it really by his face. That was the best version of that I’ve ever seen.

**Craig:** Yeah. What you’re getting at is that there is an inability for us to make the relative distinction. If you show me the real person and then you show me that person very old or very young or whatever, then I know, okay, it’s movie magic, but it’s fine. They’re really there. I think it’s the really there part.

One thing that’s interesting about makeup is the person is still there. When we de-age with VFX, we’re not sure the person is still there. That could be a different person, actually.

**John:** Yeah. It could be a face replacement, really.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. You start to lose the connection to the person. That gets tricky. That’s where I start to wonder how this will all go. But again, who knows? By the way, people may be listening to this podcast for the next million years, because Craig bot and John bot just keep going.

**John:** We do.

**Craig:** Oh, wait, did you just give it away?

**John:** Oh, sorry, yes. It’s already out there.

**Craig:** You mean they do. You gave it away. People have just been listening to ChatGPT for the last 12 years. That could happen. Everybody passes the Turing test all the time, all day long. Nobody knows who’s real. Nobody knows who’s not real. And so at that point, authenticity and reality and the concepts of those things completely dissipate and become irrelevant. But until such a time, I do think that when we start to wonder if the person that we care about is there, then we start to distance ourselves from the work.

**John:** Absolutely. We’re recording this in 2023, so we should say this is a live issue in the SAG-AFTRA Strike right now is the concern over use of an actor’s likeness, and so use beyond the grave and also how you’re using them in the course of a film or TV show. De-aging is part of that. So we’ll see. What else do we have for questions?

**Craig:** Christian writes, “If many viewers are watching with captions on, as a recent New York Times article claims, then what does that mean for screenwriting? Reading is a somewhat different experience than listening. It makes sense to me that a writer would approach something meant to be read differently than something meant to be only heard out loud. Should we lean into the fact that viewers are reading lines and not just listening?”

**John:** My instinct is no. I think it’s good to be aware that people are recently turning on the subtitles for stuff. There may be some reasons in specifically what you’re writing that you might want to call that out, like, “In the subtitles, people will see that they’re actually saying this,” or like, “Don’t subtitle this.” There may be specific reasons why you want to do that. No, I don’t see myself changing my writing at all based on the fact that some people are going to be watching this with subtitles on. Craig?

**Craig:** No. No. Subtitles are after the fact. It’s not our problem. I really don’t care. What I’m doing is making this for people to watch and listen. However, if they are deaf and need to read the subtitles, if they don’t speak English and need to read subtitles, fine.

**John:** Great. Love it.

**Craig:** Because look, when I watch a movie with subtitles, the reading happens without my conscious awareness. It just happens. It all goes away. The reason that people are doing this is because they’re able to do some other things while they’re watching it. My sense is, if they really, really care about something, they’ll probably focus on it. We should not anticipate that. That is a path to weirdness. Real weirdness. Just ignore it. Let it happen.

**John:** In our household, we are not default subtitles on, but for certain things, like my daughter loves to watch Love Island UK, and we have to turn it on, because it otherwise doesn’t make sense. There have been moments in theaters in the last year or two where it has felt like, oh, I wish I could turn the subtitles on, because the way this is mixed, the way the accents are hitting me, I’m having a hard time following every word of this, which is the nice thing about subtitles.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting, this whole thing about mixing and dialogue, because it’s been a topic of great conversation over the last few years.

A little inside story about weirdo Craig. The guys who did the sound mixing for Chernobyl deservedly won Emmys. Excellent team. The first time they played back the first episode, I left. I said, “Thank you. I need some air.” Then I walked out, and I walked for 40 minutes in London, lost myself somewhere. But really what I wanted to do was walk in front of a bus, because it sounded completely wrong.

I went back, and I said, “Okay, I’ve taken my walk. I feel better. Let’s talk about what’s going on here, because everything sounds very, very weird to me.” What they explained was that they had made a choice, which they were happy to unmake, that was based in part on feedback from the BBC. Not that we made Chernobyl for the BBC, but everything in the UK, a lot of it is driven by the BBC, because the BBC is this huge broadcaster, and they kind of set a lot of standards.

What happened was, elderly people, who comprise a great percentage of BBC watchers, had been complaining constantly that the dialogue just wasn’t loud enough. What the BBC started asking for was louder dialogue that was more centered in the speakers. Now, what that meant for me was everybody sounded too loud and also in the middle of the room, even though they were on two different sides of the room, which sent me into a full spin-out. Now, the guys worked all night. I came back the next day. Mwah, perfect. And so it went from there.

I was interested in that conversation, because on the other side, in the US, there’s been a proliferation of sound effects that are so loud and so obscuring that dialogue gets muddled into nothing. And it is hard to hear dialogue, because people just aren’t taking the time that’s required to really mix things beautifully. Dialogue is in and of itself the most important sound, I think, that’s coming out of your speakers.

Also, a lot of mixers don’t take the time, like the wonderful folks that mixed The Last of Us, to play things back through a regular TV. So most people don’t have a 5.1 or 7.1 system. They’ve got left, center, right, or sometimes just left and right. And what will it sound like there?

So mixing things to sound good across all those things is really difficult, and I hear shows that fail at it all the time. We’ve seen movies that failed at it, where I’m like, what happened here? Did no one care? I think maybe nobody cared.

**John:** I think they had other priorities. A thing I’ve noticed in sound mixes is that the people who are in the room know what’s being said, and so therefore they stop listening for whether it’s actually understandable. If you’re the director, you know exactly what’s happening, so you know what they’re saying, and so you don’t need to listen for it. A stranger would not know that. Just like it’s great to have fresh eyes, it’s great to have fresh ears on something. And you were fresh ears in that sound mix.

Now, here’s a question for you. It’s something that may already exist in the world. I’m just not aware of it. I’m thinking back to when I ride on the Peloton, one of the choices I can make is I can adjust the sound for more music or more trainer. I can adjust the mix between the trainer and the music, which makes sense, because they’re micced separately. To what degree can we do that now with 5.1 mixing? Is dialogue on its own track in a way that a TV setting could be adjusted to say, like, emphasize dialogue?

**Craig:** No, nor should it be, because down that road is a nightmare. It’s a little bit like giving people control over, I don’t know, the focus. It’s an artistic choice of how we mix things. Hopefully, people are paying attention, as they should.

I am particularly obsessed with mixing. What we can do is emphasize certain frequencies. Things are mixed together. You have all these channels. Obviously, when you’re doing a mix, you have your dialogue channels, your sound effects, your music, and then the music is broken out into stems. But then things get mixed down into sub-mixes and then eventually into one big mix, which then goes out, and here’s what it is.

In most AV receivers, which are the things that are processing your audio for a nicer television system at home, there are some audio settings that emphasize certain frequencies. So the human voice exists in a particular range. Male voices are here. Female voices are here. And then music, you have, everyone’s familiar with bass and treble, but the EQ, roughly. There are certain instruments that are very human voice-like. It’s the saxophone or the oboe or something. Then on the high end you’ve got your crash cymbals, and on the low end you’ve got your bass. And you can emphasize certain things slightly.

But the thing that I am hoping for, that we eventually get… And this is one of the areas where Chris… When Chris McQuarrie and I agree violently on something-

**John:** Dangerous.

**Craig:** … then it’s a thing. One of the things we agree violently on, and I know our friend Rian Johnson is a similar acolyte of this religion, is turning off the goddamn motion smoothing on your TV.

**John:** Oh, of course, yes.

**Craig:** What we’re hoping for is that eventually we can code into our content certain settings that are required, that if you want to watch this movie, it’s going to tell your TV to turn off the goddamn motion smoothing. Or I guess we did a language warning. Turn off the fucking motion smoothing, for the love of god. Similarly, it would be nice if it could also send an EQ and say, “This is how we think your EQ should be for listening to this based on what array of speakers you have.”

And if we could do that, and there could be a system that essentially responds to that, which is, by the way, not hard to do. I don’t think it’s a hard thing to do in an engineering sense. It really just comes down to somebody making something where they say, “Hey, when you turn this auto setting on, you’re giving the content control over your thing.” Oh, man. Yes, please, please. And by the way, motion smoothing is so fucking stupid to begin with.

**John:** How about you’re watching soccer? That’s I think the best case I’ve seen for motion smoothing. It actually does look like you’re looking through a window at it. It’s better for some sports.

**Craig:** Great. Then make that-

**John:** Listen to me.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** Backing sports here. It should be a sports setting.

**Craig:** It should be an option, like, “Oh, I want to turn this on for sports,” not like, everything looks like Days of Our Lives now. Congrats.

**John:** Yeah, it’s crazy.

**Craig:** I mean, what? And by the way, here’s what blows my fucking mind, now that we’ve got the language warning. No one gives a shit. That’s the thing. I don’t understand. People literally don’t even notice.

**John:** Younger people especially don’t notice it at all. It’s something about our eyes and our brains that we notice it more than other people do. It’s true.

**Craig:** But they go to movies. They see movies. They also watch things on their iPad, which doesn’t have motion smoothing. So they know what it’s supposed to look like. Then they put it on TV, it looks like Days of Our Lives. By the way, Days of Our Lives is fine. It’s just Days of Our Lives is supposed to look like Days of Our Lives. Everything gets turned into, oh, congrats, everything is now in focus. Congrats. Everything is sharp and weird-looking. And they just don’t give a shit.

**John:** Yeah. It’s crazy. So getting back to closed captioning, I want to think about this from an accessibility standpoint. You could say closed captioning is the accessibility standard, because the dialogue is there for you, but that doesn’t help all people who might need to have help with the dialogue.

The podcast app we use to listen to stuff is Overcast. One of the things that Marco Arment built into that is voice boost, which basically scans the podcast ahead and basically emphasizes the voices, makes the voices sound a little bit nicer. And it does genuinely work. I do wonder whether that is going to be the solution down the road is some sort of algorithm or honestly an AI that looks for and listens for the voices and moves them more front and center for people who genuinely need that to happen. That feels like a technology that if it’s not out there today, will be out there in months, because that’s a very doable thing.

**Craig:** Look who’s supporting AI now, you scab. Scab!

**John:** Scab.

**Craig:** Scab! I agree with you.

**John:** It’s an AI over any kind of algorithmic things.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Really, what you were talking about was those frequencies, but basically, the same way that we can take a song and strip out the music and just hear the clean vocals using these systems, they can do that for dialogue.

**Craig:** That makes total sense. I think maybe the medium that is leading the way on accessibility is video games. So video games have started to build in an enormous amount of accessibility features. The Last of Us Part II was the first game where I saw a full array of these things for both sound and visuals, including people who are colorblind, people who have focus issues. They gave you so many different options. That is different to me.

Look, if you have a disability and you cannot experience this content the way a author had hoped, you’re not able to do it, then providing some alternative that, again, the creator has authorized, makes sense to me, whereas giving everybody the ability to just turn up dials left and right because they feel like it doesn’t.

**John:** That’s how you wind up with motion smoothing on all the TVs.

**Craig:** Yep. You know that when Rian is in a Best Buy or something, he’ll just start turning them off on the TVs that are on? I think that’s amazing.

**John:** That’s the first thing I do whenever I go to visit a relative’s house for a holiday is I’ll turn it off without telling them.

**Craig:** They’ll never know.

**John:** They’ll never know.

**Craig:** They’ll never know. You know what? You did what we Jews like to call a mitzvah, John. That’s a mitzvah.

**John:** I knew the mitzvah word. It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** You know that word.

**John:** Let’s leave this high technology behind and go back to some primal instincts here. We often talk about character motivation, what characters want, what characters need. We talk about how want versus need is sort of a trap sometimes. I really want to focus now on not the higher-level things about love and community and support of your trusting spouse, but instead the four Fs, so feeding, fighting, fleeing, and fucking, which are the base level things that all creatures do. It’s how creatures survive. It goes back to Richard Dawkins and the Selfish Gene, that idea that genes want to propagate, and they propagate by staying alive and creating a new generation.

That is also true for our characters. It may not be the top-level thing we think about them, but sometimes it’s good to remind ourselves that these characters we’re making are human beings, and humans are animals, and animals do things for reasons that are kind of hardwired into their brains. I thought we might take a few minutes to talk about that and how it could apply to the stories we’re telling.

**Craig:** When I was studying this in college, the text referred to the four Fs: feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating, which we all thought was so funny. This is all very hypothalamic. Your hypothalamus, this is what it does.

I love this topic, because I think we probably begin our careers as writers and our paths as artists aiming ourselves towards complication, because what we’ve been told or what we think we’ve been told is that better art, let’s say, is about the more complicated, subtle aspects of human behavior, not the obvious, dumb things. In fact, there are no complicated aspects. There are simply complicated expressions of these things.

But what we do absolutely comes down to these four Fs. That is it. There actually is not much else, except I would add in that fucking would cover pleasure in general, because it’s inextricably linked to a larger reward system. So I would call it feeding, fighting, fleeing, fucking, and feeling good. I’ll make it the five Fs.

**John:** Five Fs, coined by Craig Mazin on-

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** … this episode of Scriptnotes, 611.

**Craig:** Thank you very much.

**John:** I’ve been on a safari. One of the best things about a safari is you’re in the jeep for hours, and you’re just basically looking at the four Fs. All the creatures that you’re seeing, they’re just doing that. They’re trying to get some food. They are battling each other. They are getting away from each other. It’s a bunch of gazelles who are trying to flee. Or they’re having sex. There’s these two lions just mating and mating and mating. It’s Game of Thrones is what you’re experiencing.

**Craig:** Look, kids.

**John:** It’s a terrific… Highly recommend it for anybody who wants to go see it. It’s also good to remember that’s also us. That’s also what we’re doing. We just have more layers over it. I was going to say this is the lizard brain. And as I looked up lizard brain, apparently that’s gone out of fashion. It’s a myth that we have a lizard brain that has layers built on top of it. That’s not really true. It goes back to the core things that drive all creatures, certainly all vertebrates. We’re trying to do things to propagate our genes to get us to the next generation.

**Craig:** Yeah. When we’re writing, I think it’s a really good idea to start there. A lot of times, what we’ll say is, okay, what does this character want? If you don’t understand what people in general want, you’re going to end up with a character that wants something that is so intellectual that no one gives a shit.

I see this all the time where people will say, “What this character wants is,” and then they will explain something. I’m like, that’s an interesting concept, but it’s not how human beings actually work. Again, we’ll complicate our behavior. We also lie to ourselves. We delude ourselves. And that’s interesting.

But you peel the layers away, all these Fs lead to another F, which is fear. Fear is really something that is used in response to these. We’re afraid to starve. We’re afraid to be killed. We’re afraid we will get stuck somewhere, fail. There’s another F. I’m up to six Fs now, seven Fs. All of that stuff is what underpins everything else.

It’s a really good exercise to ask yourself, if you’re struggling with a character that people just aren’t relating to, does this character actually want something that people generally want when you really get down to it, or have I created some foofidy, artistic, overcomplicated, intellectual simulacrum of a human being?

**John:** Let’s talk about the expressions of these different Fs. Start with the expressions of feeding and what feeding might actually look like in terms of a human character in your story. Feeding, like literally they could eat, but also, any time they’re trying to hoard or they’re trying to store up or save things, that’s all about feeding. It’s the fear of hunger down the road. Greed is essentially a feeding expression. It’s the desire to accumulate, to have those things. With control of the food, with control of the money, you have power, you have status. These are all tied up together.

**Craig:** Yeah. The economy, as complicated as it is, comes down to food in the end. Everything comes down to can we eat or not, or else we’re dead. Vampire stories, which most people think are about fucking, and to some extent are, I think are also about feeding.

**John:** Of course they are.

**Craig:** It’s a great way to analogize hunger.

**John:** They have a very specific hunger that has incredibly strict requirements on it. It’s difficult life to be a vampire, because they’re always driven by the need to feed.

**Craig:** The Hunger is a great movie. It is a really interesting way to tell a story of something we all experience. If we just make a movie about somebody who’s really hungry, their stomach is growling, and they need a sandwich, who gives a shit? They’re hungry and they need blood. Okay, now you’ve complicated the expression of a basic thing. Every movie or story that’s about addiction is about feeding. That is all addiction is. It is the same loop in the brain. I need to put substance in to keep going.

Always interesting to take a simple thing and then analogize it outwards in a different way, so that you can show something that’s fun, that is also relatable, because none of us are vampires, and yet we love watching vampires do shit, because in fact, they’re incredibly relatable. They’re just hungry and horny. Let’s get into the Hs.

**John:** We’ll get the whole alphabet in there.

**Craig:** The Xs are going to be tough.

**John:** Likewise, fleeing. Obviously, we think about fleeing as it relates to a slasher movie, where you’re running from the killer. But realistically, our characters are often running from something, running from a danger that they may not even be able to say is the danger they’re running from. Characters are always running from something, some version of something that scares them, something about themselves, something about their situation. Characters are running.

Think about on a primal level what happens when you are fleeing. What is that elevated heart rate? What does that adrenaline feel like? What is it like to maintain that state? If you look at an antelope fleeing a predator, they go into panic mode. But they also get out of the panic mode when it stops, because they have to just do all the other Fs. For our human characters, sometimes they’re always running. They’re always running from something. That’s an interesting dynamic to start a character or to find a character at in the middle of the story.

**Craig:** When you think about heist movies or any movie where you’re supposed to root for the criminal, feeding is a part of it, because they want something. They need money so that they can feed themselves, metaphorically. But fleeing becomes a fun part of it. How do I get away with this? Getting away with murder is exciting.

When we watch movies where James Bond has a mission, half of the mission is get inside somewhere and get a thing. The other half is, and get out. That’s fun to watch. That’s where a lot of tension comes from. Fleeing is suspenseful. We all know that terror of being caught, and so it is relatable.

**John:** We think about fighting in terms of action movies, but even a movie like Erin Brockovich, she’s fighting against these corporations. What is the nature of that fighting? How is that fighting like the primal version of fighting? I think it actually does tie in, because fighting is often about status, maintaining your control over your situation, driving off enemies so that you can maintain your terrain. There’s lots of reasons why animals fight. I think the same reasons apply to humans, why they’re fighting. We’re not fighting with our claws and our jaws. But we’re still using the tools we have at our disposal to drive off others. That’s still fighting.

**Craig:** If you want to watch feeding, fighting, and fleeing all at the highest level, no fucking as far as I can tell, in a movie where no one does anything other than talk, watch Glengarry Glen Ross. It is incredible. There is a scene at the end between Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey where Jack Lemmon goes from fighting to realizing he’s been caught and then begins fleeing. It is the most squirmy, uncomfortable, sad thing possible. Jack Lemmon does such a beautiful job of expressing what Dave Mamet did such a beautiful job writing, which is a man desperate to avoid the jaws that are squeezing down on his head, and there’s nothing he can… He keeps trying. For actors, that’s a wonderful thing to give them.

**John:** Oh, god.

**Craig:** Tactics, strategies. Everything comes out of what you want. I need to not die here. I need to get away. What do I say? What do I do? How does it work? He tries to bribe his way out. He tries to smooth talk his way out. He tries to lie his way out. And eventually, he tries to beg his way out. And none of it works. And it’s remarkable to watch.

**John:** I’m glad you brought up actors, because of course they are the other ones who are always thinking about motivation. The classic director advice is, don’t direct with adjectives, direct with verbs. Directing with these four F verbs is actually really useful. Think about, “Fight back against that. Run away from him metaphorically.” Those are things an actor can play. An actor can’t play, “Be joyful.” That’s not a thing. The fucking, like, “Take pleasure in this. Really have fun. Enjoy this moment.” That’s a thing an actor can do. Looking at the primal, playable emotions underneath that is good advice for actors and writers and directors.

**Craig:** Actors are a lot like us as writers. Obviously, I am an actor, John. You know that.

**John:** I know that’s been well established.

**Craig:** Pretty impressive actor. A lot of times, they need to figure out how to get what you want in their own way or reorient their mind so that it makes sense to them, so that they can do it. Even if you do give them certain verbs, it may not necessarily connect to one of their instincts that are all connected to the Fs until they can make it connect to their instincts. You can see them searching or hunting. Sometimes the back and forth is about that. It’s about them finally going, “Okay. Wait. I know how to do this as me.”

Similarly, we’ve been in situations where someone said, “I understand why you did this, but what I think it should be is this.” You think to yourself, “Okay, I understand that, but how do I do that as a writer? How do I do that in a way that isn’t just giving you what you just asked for in the dumbest, most surface sense, but actually getting inside of it and making it good and making it something that I believe in and actually want to be there?”

That’s something where, I don’t know how many Ps we’ll need to use for directing, but patience certainly is one of them. I think it’s important for directors to be patient with actors, especially when actors are struggling with what to say. Sometimes you’ll say, “Hey, look, I would like you to do this,” and they’re struggling. You can think to yourself, “Oh, no, I’ve given a bad direction,” or you can just feel bad. Don’t. Just wait. Just be patient. Give them time. They just heard it. Give them time to process. Be patient. Then lo and behold, they generally will get there. You just don’t have to push. I’m going to keep doing Ps. I’m on the P theme now.

**John:** It’s tough. As I was pasting this together, I was also looking up the prey drive, which is another P there. The prey drive is really fascinating. The stages of the prey drive, and we think about it with dogs, but other animals do it too: searching, stalking, chasing, biting to grab, and biting to kill.

Most of the dog behaviors we see, like dogs love to play fetch or dogs are good guard dogs or they love to do a certain kind of thing, it’s because we’ve emphasized and trained them on one part of the prey drive and discouraged other parts of the prey drive. Our herding animals, we emphasize their stalking, but we take away their desire to bite and kill things. I think it’s fascinating to think back to how does that apply to humans.

When I look at the prey drive, it also feels like dating. It feels like how we can think about relationships and how we get to… Men especially tend to think about how to go out and date. A man at a bar with his buddies is very much like that dog and his prey drive.

**Craig:** The cops and robbers genre is a wonderful combination of feeding and fleeing and then this notion of prey, which is a different kind of feeding. Hunting people down. Very excited when we watch our heroes. You ever seen the movie Commando?

**John:** I have seen Commando, yeah. I loved it.

**Craig:** Schwarzenegger movie. It’s a pretty standard concept from the ‘80s. Arnold Schwarzenegger is an impossibly jacked human being who lives in a weird mountain shack with his daughter. There is no mother, because who needs them? It’s the ‘80s. Bad guys come and steal his daughter. He goes into his shed, where he has all of his hidden armaments, as one does, and he begins to hunt them all down and kill them one by one. Oh my god, so much fun, because we like watching predators do what they do when we’re rooting for them. It’s exciting. It’s exciting because it’s empowering. \

Superhero movies where they’re hunting down the bad guys, those scenes where they finally master their powers and kick ass, those are prey scenes, where we are enjoying rooting for a killer to kill. It satisfies us, because it satisfies the part of us that wants to be a predator. It makes us feel powerful and safe to be the predator.

**John:** Craig, do you think any of your puzzling comes… Or solving. I’m sorry if I’m using the wrong term.

**Craig:** Solving.

**John:** Does it apply to prey drive? Is the desire to solve a problem and to look for an answer and come to the answer, do you think that ties into the desire to hunt?

**Craig:** I don’t think so. There is a survival aspect to it, I think. It’s definitely triggering some weird pleasure circuit to make sense of things. The interesting thing about solving puzzles is I think it’s so separate from the base purpose of what drives it that it almost doesn’t matter. It’s a little bit like what we do. We are compelled to write stories. That compulsion is certainly related to one of these Fs or multiples of these Fs, because it is so disconnected from its base purpose that it’s hard to distinguish where it came from at all.

**John:** It’s abstractions on top of abstractions.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. It’s something that you can only do when you feel safe because you aren’t worried about that first or second level of the four Fs. You’re now on the 10th level above it. As you said, abstractions of abstractions.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s move on to our next and final topic, impermanence. On this show before, we’ve talked about how once upon a time it felt like there were video tapes and you go to the video store and find a thing and now it’s hard to find certain movies.

On Episode 364, we had Kate Hagen on. We were talking about how Netflix killed the video store and this assumption that you’d be able to find things forever, because of first Netflix on DVD, then Netflix as a streaming service. Oh, we’ll always be able to get those things, and now it turns out that’s not true. Things are actually harder to find than ever in some cases. I was talking about this with Drew yesterday. Drew, do you even remember or did you ever experience Netflix as a DVD delivery service?

**Drew:** Only vaguely. In high school, I remember some people were getting Netflix DVDs in the mail.

**John:** Already, that generation doesn’t have that assumption of like, oh, that movie’s always going to be there, sitting on a shelf somewhere for me to watch it. It’s also important to remember we’ve always lost things. We’ve always lost media. We’ve always lost culture. Euripides, ancient Greek playwright, probably wrote 80 to 90 plays, but we only have 18 of them. We only know the four most famous Greek playwrights. The rest of them are lost to history.

I thought we’d check in in 2023 on what we’re holding onto, what we’re losing, how we’re doing in terms of the sense of the stuff that we make and our ability to find it 5 years from now or 10 years from now.

**Craig:** The phenomenon of disappearing stuff actively is relatively new. We used to lose things passively. There are great concerns in the film community that old movies are disappearing simply because the prints have become lost to time or damaged beyond repair. The negatives can’t be found.

There was a fire, I think at Paramount, in a film vault, and a whole bunch of movies that were just never copied were gone permanently. The film preservation concept has gathered a lot of interest. That’s a way to actively prevent a passive disappearance.

We also lost things passively through disinterest. There were shows that were on TV. Nobody cared about them. They were canceled after four episodes. Nobody bothered to make a videotape release or anything like that, and no one’s complaining about it anyway.

**John:** My TV show, DC, I think four episodes may have aired. I can’t find them anywhere. I don’t know if they exist anywhere for anybody to watch. We’ve accepted that.

**Craig:** People I guess aren’t clamoring for it. This concept of actively removing things now and throwing them down the black hole is fairly new. Started with the takeover of Warner Bros by Discovery, it seems. And now everyone’s doing it. Everyone’s getting into it.

What I think is going to happen in reaction is, as things now are streamed or released, people on their own are going to go about the business of preserving them. We will see far more bootlegged things made available. If corporations are going to disappear stuff off of their channel, people are going to reappear it now, because the costs of doing so are essentially $0 in terms of technological costs. There’s maybe some legal exposure you’d have to worry about, although honestly, kind of a hard time arguing in court that you have damaged me by showing a thing that I removed from my service, thereby claiming as a loss.

**John:** Yeah, I see that. David Streitfeld has this piece in the New York Times about Internet Archive, which is doing a similar kind of thing with books. Books you could not find anywhere, they were putting online. Then all the publishers sued them and won and got that whole service taken down. That’s the challenge is that we as a culture both want to protect creators and we want to ensure access to things. And those are contradictory goals at times.

**Craig:** Yes. If a publisher just stopped publishing a book, but the book’s existed out there, and then someone said, “I’m going to put this on Internet Archive, because there are not that many copies of this thing,” okay, I get it. You could say, “Look, people could buy that book. They could buy it for lots of money. They’re not. Screw you.”

If a company says, “I’m the only place you can get this thing. I am actively making it disappear,” the analogy would be, I’m a book publisher, I’ve pressed a button, every one of those books had a self-destruct in it. It is now blank paper. Harder to argue that people are harming you by reintroducing something that you have tried to make go away. But it’s sort of an academic discussion, because it’s going to happen regardless.

One of I guess the side effects of this current disappearing is that there’s going to be a lot more individual acts of preservation. These days, you can go and find some random, weird thing from your childhood on YouTube. I think there’s going to be a whole lot more of that. Note, YouTube is Google. Sorry, Alphabet. And Google does not have a streaming service like Amazon or Apple. Google’s not interested in that.

**John:** YouTube’s streaming service is YouTube.

**Craig:** It’s just YouTube.

**John:** You could pay for it, but yeah.

**Craig:** You’re just paying to get rid of ads. They don’t make the content. They used to try.

**John:** They tried. It didn’t work.

**Craig:** They tried. It just didn’t work. What Google is interested in is the opposite. What Google is interested in is content being everywhere, and basically they just suck it up and then spew it out across everything and eliminate themselves from any sort of exposure for that. You’re going to start seeing these things popping up all over the place. Even if there is a copyright take down, then it’ll just show up on a gabillion other torrent sites or whatever. Nothing, I think, soon enough will be disappearable. The only things that can be truly disappeared are things that never came out in the first place, like for instance the-

**John:** Batwoman movie.

**Craig:** … Batwoman movie. Even then, I gotta be honest, somebody’s going to leak that out someday.

**John:** Someone’s going to see it.

**Craig:** It’s inevitable.

**John:** Deadpool was a similar situation. They had a VFX thing, and they nixed the project. Somehow, that snuck out there.

**Craig:** I can’t imagine how.

**John:** How that happened.

**Craig:** Who could’ve done that?

**John:** Now it’s a franchise.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I want to go back to the film vault and the fire in the film vault problem, because I want to talk about two different needs for this preservation. There’s the preservation of at least one copy so that scholars can look at the thing and so that there’s an ability to go back to that source to actually see where the thing was. That’s very, very hard to argue against, that we need to have one master copy of a thing so we can look at what was and just for culture and for everything else that we have one copy saved there.

Anybody at any point can watch things at any time was never a guarantee. It’s something we took for granted as streaming came up, but that was never always really the case. I want to make sure we’re distinguishing between the two of those.

Even on Broadway, any show that opens on Broadway, they do go in and they film one version of it, so they can keep it in the master vault. The public can’t see that, but that way, other directors can go in and see what was this performance like. Scholars can go in and see that. I want to make sure we’re doing something like that for all of the film and TV that we’re making, just so that there’s at least a record, we just don’t fully lose something forever.

**Craig:** The companies will probably not be reliable for this. It is incredible to me how they still haven’t learned the lessons of all this. It also betrays a certain lack of respect for the material they make, but people are filling it in.

Also, AI, again, is going to help, because restoration of things, particularly stuff that was not made digitally but on film, is going to be improved dramatically over time, using AI, because it can go frame by frame to remove noise, scratches, artifacts, and try and get things back to what they used to be.

My feeling is that what has happened over the last really year or two is I think hopefully a strange kind of inoculation, and that everybody’s gone, “Oh, I didn’t know they could do that. Let us now react accordingly.”

**John:** Some of these shows disappearing was a business decision made by tax incentives and other things too. What I do take some solace in is these companies are not in the business of losing money, and so if they can make money off that show, they’ll find another place to put that show and have it make money. That’s what they used to do with things before.

If something disappears off a streaming service, but then it moves to a fast service, I don’t know that that’s a loss. I think that actually is maybe the right place for that show to exist, and those creators can get paid in that new venue.

I hope that is the transition that we see is that some of these things which are no longer on Netflix are now available someplace else. Grace and Frankie is apparently still on Netflix, but it’s also available on E right now. Great. You can watch it in two different places. That’s how things used to be, and it’s how things I think should be.

**Craig:** There’s two kinds of things that have happened. There are things where they’ve said to themselves, “Okay, just running this on our service isn’t making us any money at all. It’s not driving subscriptions, nor is it retaining subscriptions, and there are costs associated with keeping it on. So we’re going to go ahead and put it on a different channel and make some money off of it.”

Then there are things that just weren’t being watched at all, by anyone. That stuff, unless someone’s grabbed a copy of it, either it’s gone or it one day will be bundled into some sort of thing they could try and make 10 cents off of, but unlikely.

**John:** That’s also always happened. For most of broadcast history, the shows that never made it, you couldn’t see anywhere. There’s shows with tremendous actors in them who ran 13 episodes that you can’t find anywhere, or you’ll find them maybe on YouTube, and maybe that’s the right place for it.

**Craig:** Exactly. Jim Carrey’s first thing was, was it called the Duck Factory, I think? It was a sitcom about a guy working in a animation studio. You can’t watch that on Netflix as far as I know. But I think it might be on YouTube. There may be a episode. I don’t know.

**John:** Again, I want to make sure that the person who’s writing the Jim Carrey biography can find that episode, just because that’s a part of the whole story. That’s a part of culture.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Wahoo.

**John:** Craig, do yours first, because I’m excited about your One Cool Thing as well.

**Craig:** Obviously, my One Cool Thing is Baldur’s Gate 3. Baldur’s Gate 3 is-

**John:** The two things Craig loves.

**Craig:** D and D and video games smashed together. Baldur’s Gate is a role-playing video game that functions not like D and D, functions exactly like D and D. You are playing D and D. All of the classes, sub-classes, spells, but also, more importantly, all of the rules. There are few things that they had to change slightly because of the nature of video games, and I think they did it brilliantly.

For instance, when you’re playing regular D and D, your characters can take a long rest. That basically resets them. They get all their health back. They get all their spells back. They get everything. It’s like starting fresh. When you’re playing D and D, the rules basically are you can long rest once every 24 hours, basically, which keeps your characters from long resting every 2 minutes. In video games, you can’t really track time like that. So what they do instead is they use a resource system, where long resting uses up resources, and you have to keep finding resources to pay for a long rest.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** That was very smart. It’s beautiful.

**John:** Craig, what are you playing this on?

**Craig:** I’m playing it on, of all things, people are going to start screaming at me. I’m playing it on a Steam Deck. There’s something about just… Is it the most brilliant visual way to play it? No. But I don’t have a PC. It’s much easier. It’s portable. I can play it anywhere. I can play it on a plane. I can play it in a hotel. I can play it wherever I want. It actually plays quite well. It will burn through the Steam Deck’s battery in about an hour and a half. That’s the most. The heat that’s pouring out of the top of it could melt an icicle. But it plays really smoothly. Once you get a hold of the simple radial menus and stuff like that, combat function’s great. More importantly, the story is really good.

The concept of the story is you’ve been captured. This is where a lot of people are just turning off the episode. I’ll be real brief. You’ve been captured by the Illithid, mind flayers. Mind flayers will put this little thing in your brain to turn you into their slave and eventually turn you into an Illithid. You’ve gotten one implanted in your brain, but it somehow got interrupted. So you have certain Illithid powers and properties. You have been marked as a member of some weird cult that involves the absolute and true souls, so they kind of think you’re one of them, but you’re not one of them. You gotta get this thing out of your head before you turn into an Illithid. You have some fellow travelers in your party who also have these things in their head.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** It’s just been a joy. What it captures more than anything is just D and D-ness, entering some weird, decrepit chapel and finding a secret door that leads into a room where some weird cultish stuff was happening and digging into a mystery, all those little side quests and main quests and encounters and things like surprise. Just in general, the characters do what they’re supposed to do. Duergar, they larch. They got it right. What can I say? They got it right. It’s like playing D and D in your hands, and you can play D and D whenever you want, because it’s right there. Baldur’s Gate 3. They nailed it. What can I say? Absolutely nailed it.

**John:** I pre-bought it for PlayStation 5, so next week I’ll start it.

**Craig:** I’m really curious to see how it plays on the PS5.

**John:** Yeah, I am too.

**Craig:** You’re going to love it.

**John:** I’m going to love it. I have two One Cool Things. First is the word jamoke. This last week, I heard somebody say it, and I thought, wait, is that racist? Then our friend Chris Miller had a tweet this last week that said, “Calling people jamokes, like look at those two jamokes over there, is the most fun thing to call people that sounds like its origins are racist, but surprisingly and thankfully it’s not.” I looked it up, and it’s not. It’s just a word that kind of came into being. Jaboni, jamboni, jabroni, there’s lots of things that are like that. But it just spontaneously happened.

**Craig:** Jabronis. Jabroni.

**John:** Jabroni.

**Craig:** Jabroni feels like a very Philadelphia… My Philly friends have always said jabroni. I like the fact that we’re totally cool with calling somebody an asshole as long as we’re not being racist.

**John:** Totally. 100%.

**Craig:** It’s fine, guys. It’s totally cool. We’re just saying they are the human epitome of an anus.

**John:** I don’t know that I’m going to be using jamokes a lot, but I like that it’s out there as an option. If I needed to use it in a script and it felt right, I would do it, because it’s a word that exists in the world.

My other Cool Thing is something I just didn’t know existed until now. Hydrostatic life vests. These are life vests you wear over your clothing. They’re flat. If you fall into the water, they automatically inflate. They have a CO2 cartridge that automatically inflates if you fall into the water. They’re set up in a way that just getting sprayed with water, it isn’t going to happen, but you could be knocked off and knocked out, knocked off a boat, and you’d land in the water, and this will inflate, bring you up, and turn you to the right side. It’s just a really smart invention that I didn’t know existed until now.

**Craig:** They should put those on planes, because I’m so tired of using the inflatable tube.

**John:** How many plane crashes do I have to go through until they actually improve these? I wonder how many people have used the life vests in planes in the history of aviation.

**Craig:** Oh, it can’t be that many.

**John:** There’s the miracle on the Potomac.

**Craig:** The Hudson. The Hudson River crash, I assume some people put the life jackets on.

**John:** I said Potomac. It’s Hudson. You’re right.

**Craig:** The miracle on the Potomac was a miracle. There was a plane crash. Very few people survived. I don’t think they had life jackets on, because it was so sudden. The miracle part was that some people… People have studied this in psychology. There was a man who was driving over the bridge, sees this plane crash into the Potomac. It was cold as hell. People were going to freeze to death. He got out and just jumped in the water and saved somebody.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** For years, psychologists have been asking the question, but why? Literally, what is going on with us where some of us will just put our own lives in danger to save another person we do not know and have no connection to whatsoever?

**John:** That doesn’t tie into our four Fs, honestly.

**Craig:** It is a whole other topic of altruism and how it might function in a way that does tie in.

**John:** I guess you’re propagating your species. There’s a kin selection kind of thing.

**Craig:** I think it’s more about we’re programmed to be pro-social because it’s self-protective, but sometimes that leads us to do things in an abstracted way that make no sense. Very few people have had a chance to put the life vests on and pull the cord. Please, outside of the plane is the most important.

**John:** Outside the plane. Come on. We all know.

**Craig:** Everybody knows.

**John:** It’s going to be a mess if you do it inside the plane.

**Craig:** Listen, the one thing you gotta do when the plane’s going down, keep your head about you. Read that card as the plane is going down. Read the card to remind yourself where are the emergency exits.

**John:** This is a small rant, but I feel like we’ve gone too far on the clever videos to explain how to use all the stuff in a plane, like the clever onboard things. It’s just gone too far.

**Craig:** It’s annoying.

**John:** I’m ready for the boring, basic ones, because we are spending clearly millions of dollars to make these things, and I don’t care.

**Craig:** What if we just made one that said, “When mask falls, put on kid, then yourself. Here is life jacket. Do this. Don’t do that. Here are exits. Goodbye. Here’s where the seatbelt is.”

**John:** We’ve gotta have choreography. We’ve gotta have koala bears. We’ve gotta have everything.

**Craig:** Exactly. We have to have celebrities coming on. The first time I saw the British Airways one, I was like, “This is delightful.” The 4 millionth time, I’m like, “I hate all of you.”

**John:** My god.

**Craig:** All of you. I will destroy your careers.

**John:** And you have, quietly.

**Craig:** Yes. The last one that remains is Sir Ian McKellen, but I’ll get him too.

**John:** They’ll all go down.

**Craig:** They’ll all go down.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Whoop whoop.

**John:** Outro this week is by Bob Tibbing. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We’re a little thin on the outros, so please send those in. That’s also the place where you can send questions.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting. There’s lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and sweatshirts that are great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on swimming. The other thing you need to know if your plane crashes is how to swim. Craig and Drew, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, when did you learn how to swim?

**Craig:** I was very young. I was five.

**John:** I was younger. I was three.

**Craig:** Oh my god. I don’t even remember things from when I was three. It’s possible that I learned to swim when I was three, and I’ve just forgotten.

**John:** Where did you learn to swim?

**Craig:** My dad got a job over the summer working at a sleep-away camp in upstate New York, Camp Algonquin.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** If anyone has gone to Camp Algonquin in upstate New York, it’s near Argyle or Saratoga Springs, go ahead and write in and tell me your memories. I was there, I believe it was 1976. Camp Algonquin closed I think in the ‘80s. Then because it had closed, it was used as the setting for the horror movie Sleepaway Camp, which is considered a cult classic, in no small part because of the shocking ending. There was a lake there. I think it was called Mirror Lake. They had a little dock that pinned in some of the lake, so it wasn’t like you were going out in the open lake. That’s where I learned to swim. My dad took me out there.

**John:** In a lake?

**Craig:** In a lake. Again, I just want to be clear, they didn’t throw me in the open lake. This was a little, boarded-off area of the lake. It was a lake. I was in a cold fricking lake in upstate New York.

**John:** I learned in a heated pool-

**Craig:** Of course you did.

**John:** … in Boulder, Colorado with my mom. It was called Gym and Swim. There was little, not really gymnastics, but just this little balance stuff for half an hour, and then there’s a half an hour in the pool. I was with my mom. I learned how to swim and basically learned how to not drown. You don’t learn how to swim very, very well. I went through YMCA swimming lessons and made my way up to baby shark or whatever. I pretty much stayed at that level. I can swim competently, but I’m very much a swimming pool swimmer. I’m not a very good ocean swimmer. I’m not going to drown, but I’m not going to win any races swimming.

**Craig:** I just looked it up. It’s Summit Lake.

**John:** Summit Lake.

**Craig:** Summit Lake. That’s where I learned how to swim, Summit Lake.

**John:** My point about swimming though is that if you’ve seen the videos, babies when they’re first born can totally swim, because they’ve been in water this whole time. It’s actually cool seeing newborns swim, because they actually are really good at it. At a certain point, they stop being able to instinctively swim, and they get afraid of the water and you have to get them back past that thing.

If you look at kids who are raised in boat culture and water culture, they’re really good swimmers, because they’re just always in the water. It’s so interesting that humans who don’t start swimming as children really have a hard time learning how to swim. It’s not one of those skills that immediately you get back.

**Craig:** I love swimming. I swam a lot. The one thing that I always noticed about myself, and this is true for some people, is I don’t float as easily as other people. Some people are slightly denser than water or about as dense. Most people are not, and so they float very easily. I am not an easy floater. It doesn’t take much to keep me floating. I always noticed that. I always wondered, huh, is something wrong with me? But no. Some people are just slightly denser than water.

**John:** I’m a very good floater on my back. I’ve always been a very good floater on my back. I can do the head up and Jesus sort of position. I can do all the survival kind of floating. I got my swimming merit badge. I can do all that stuff. But never got great at swimming to the point where like, oh, this is what I want to do for exercise for life. It’s more just I splash around and have fun, but I’m not great at it.

Some things that have helped me a lot though is, I always got frustrated by ears getting filled with water, and so I got really good earplugs. I’ll put a link in the show notes to those earplugs. Listen, it’s a hassle because you can’t hear people anymore, but it makes diving and everything else so much more pleasant, because you’re not dealing with getting water out of your ears half an hour later.

**Craig:** I not only didn’t mind water in my ears, I loved getting the water out later, because it was so warm. You would just hop on one foot with your head tilted, and then suddenly it would go puh, and then this wonderful warm water would come out of your ear. You’d be like, “Ah, this is a wonderful relief.”

**John:** It was always great when it happened, but it sometimes would get stuck behind stuff. Then I would have a day of water in my ear, which is never good.

**Craig:** Oh, god. That never happened to me. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, god.

**John:** That’s why I wear the earplugs.

**Craig:** When you were learning to swim, did you learn multiple strokes or just freestyle or…

**John:** Definitely learned freestyle, which at that point was called Australian crawl. They used to call that Australian crawl.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** I really loved backstroke. I loved elementary backstroke, where your two arms are going at the same time. I was always a really good backstroke swimmer. Of course, then you’re always worried you’re going to bang your head into the far side of the pool. I’m good on sidestroke, but only with my left shoulder up. If you dropped me in the water right now, I’d probably default to a sidestroke.

**Craig:** In that regard, you are like many older ladies.

**John:** I am an older lady, yeah.

**Craig:** That is such a classic older lady move.

**John:** What’s yours?

**Craig:** I was a big fan of the breaststroke myself. Freestyle was sort of like the dessert, because for a while there, I was going to the Y and actually in this swimming… I don’t know what you’d call it. It was like a club. It wasn’t competitive or anything. We had to just do like a thousand laps. You’d have to go through all of them. Freestyle was the dessert swim, because it was so simple to do.

Backstroke I didn’t mind, although I definitely didn’t enjoy the whole, am I going to smash my… It was my hand I was more worried about than my head. You’re going to smash your hand before anything else. Breaststroke, I don’t know, there was just something about it that, I don’t know, just worked for me. I was very fast with that one. I was quicker with that than I think any other stroke.

**John:** While we were living in Paris, my daughter competed on the swim team there. She’s a confident swimmer but was never a great swimmer. It was so interesting watching her versus actual kids who were really good at it. It’s just a whole different skill and scale, because it’s not like running. That gets faster. Swimmers, they get lapper. If you’re a good swimmer, it’s just such a difference between an ordinary swimmer.

**Craig:** Definitely. Did you see the video of, I don’t know if you would call her the poor woman or the wonderful woman from, I can’t remember what country it was. I believe it’s an African country. There was an Olympic level sprint. They sent her out there. She was not a competitive runner at all. It was startling, because for the first time in my life, I realized just how fast Olympic runners are, because it was like watching somebody moving in slow motion while these other people just went zoom, except you realize when you’re watching her run, you’re like, “That’s how I would run.”

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** That’s what a normal human looks like. Swimmers, it’s hard to tell, when they’re all moving at the same speed, just how fast they’re going. I think they should do this for all Olympic sports. Put one regular person in a race just so everyone can see, holy shit, how fast these people are at what they do.

**John:** Drew, before we leave, what’s your swimming experience?

**Drew:** I learned at a Y. I did swim team when I was a kid and then I stopped. Now as an adult, it’s interesting how much currents freak me out. If I’m in the ocean or a river, one of the four Fs pop up at me and I start getting anxiety in the water, which is really strange. It’s a new one.

When I was growing up too, I had trouble diving off the starting block to do these races, so the swim instructors would duct tape my legs together, and I would just plop off, and then they’d have to rescue me from the bottom of the pool basically, because I couldn’t…

**Craig:** I had to do stuff like that for studying to be a lifeguard. Oh my god, the worst is when they would throw you in a pool with all of your clothes on. Did you ever do that one?

**John:** Oh yeah, take them off, inflate your jeans.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh my god, the worst. You’d take off your clothes, get your shoes off, get your socks off, get your shirt off, get everything off, get your pants off, then come back up, tie the legs of your jeans together, empty them of water, blow air into your jeans and then wrap them around your neck and make a… You did the same.

**John:** I did the same thing.

**Craig:** Has anyone ever saved their life using the jean trick? Somebody write in, please, and tell me that you’re alive because of that.

**John:** I want to hear that.

**Craig:** Because it just feels like, how often does that come up?

**John:** Not very often. It didn’t save anybody on the Potomac, so it’s not going to save me.

**Craig:** In the Potomac, I think the-

**John:** The crashing was part of it.

**Craig:** The hypothermia was a real big issue there. It turns out water is really cold.

**John:** Things we learn. Craig, Drew, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Drew:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [Can’t Hear the Dialogue in Your Streaming Show? You’re Not Alone](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/17/technology/personaltech/subtitles-streaming-shows-speech-enhancers.html) by Brian X. Chen for the New York Times
* [No, You Do Not Have a Lizard Brain Inside Your Human Brain](https://mindmatters.ai/2021/03/no-you-do-not-have-a-lizard-brain-inside-your-human-brain/) from Mind Matters
* [Prey Drive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prey_drive)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 364 – Netflix Killed the Video Store](https://johnaugust.com/2018/netflix-killed-the-video-store)
* [The Dream Was Universal Access to Knowledge. The Result Was a Fiasco](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/13/business/media/internet-archive-emergency-lending-library.html) by David Streitfeld for the New York Times
* [Baldur’s Gate 3](https://baldursgate3.game/)
* [Tweet by Chris Miller](https://twitter.com/chrizmillr/status/1696276296337342585?s=46&t=xGDWKvLrNvj-hJqhgtqqlA)
* [Hydrostatic Life Vests](https://mustangsurvival.com/products/elite-28-inflatable-pfd-auto-hydrostatic-md5183)
* [British Airways safety video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCoQwZ9BQ9Q)
* [Highland 2](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/)
* [Writer Emergency Pack XL](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/writer-emergency-pack-xl)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Bob Tipping ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and is edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/611standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/magnetic-characters).

**John August:** Bonjour et bienvenue. Je m’appelle John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Je m’appelle Craig Mazin.

**John:** [French language]. Craig, we’re back. You’re back from Calgary. I’m back from France. We are back in our native home city of Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Correct. We were both in countries where things on wrappers are printed in French.

**John:** That’s true, yes, and French rappers rap in French.

**Craig:** French rappers are the best. I assume you were there for fun.

**John:** For fun, yes.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Spent some time touring the UK, looking at some schools for our daughter. Then we were just back in France for the first time since the pandemic. Longtime listeners will know that I used to live there. It was nice to be back and seeing my old haunts. The boulangerie which was our favorite place to get pastries every day was still there, but slightly less good than it was before.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** Something happened.

**Craig:** Life happens, John. Life happens. It must’ve been nice to return there. It must’ve been nice to be overseas and not working. I can’t say I was overseas. I was over-border. I was over over-border.

**John:** You were over-border, yeah. I did no Scriptnotes work at all.

**Craig:** That’s wonderful. That’s great. Look, wasn’t it nice?

**John:** It was so nice.

**Craig:** Let’s just say, without freaking anyone out, I will simply say sometimes it’s nice to not do Scriptnotes.

**John:** It really is.

**Craig:** It really is.

**John:** [inaudible 00:01:23] not be thinking about it.

**Craig:** If you don’t realize that you’ve got… Oh, it’s not a big deal. It’s just that there’s this splinter. It doesn’t hurt. Then one day 10 years later they take the splinter out and you’re like, “Oh, wow. It’s actually way better without that splinter.” Nobody should get nervous or anxious.

**John:** Don’t worry.

**Craig:** Don’t get anxious.

**John:** Everything’s fine.

**Megana Rao:** I am really anxious.

**Craig:** No no no. Megana, sleep.

**Megana:** I don’t like where this conversation is going.

**Craig:** Sleep.

**John:** Let’s get to today’s episode so that Megana gets less nervous. Today on the show, effing magnets, how do they work? More specifically, how do you create characters who both pull in the viewer and pull themselves through the story? We’ll look at techniques for adjusting the magnetic fields. We’ll also catch up on a lot of news on animation writing, the CW, and more. There’ll be no Bonus Segment at the end for Premium Members, because instead, they just get a whole Bonus Episode we just created, where we talk with the creator of Wordle and the author of 50 Years of Text Games about ways to use words for fun and profit. It was a good conversation, yes, Craig?

**Craig:** It was fantastic. I think everybody will enjoy it. Naturally, the two of us make sure that it is of interest to everyone, including people that don’t play word games, because there’s universal things that need to be examined, and they were.

**John:** Craig, I think we had one text exchange during my entire vacation, which was Craig writing, “Hell froze over.” I had no idea what the context was. We can now say that hell froze over because Craig Mazin was invited to join the Motion Picture Academy.

**Craig:** If you’re a longtime listener, you know that was something that was never going to happen, and it happened. I was invited to join the Motion Picture Academy. I am now in the Motion Picture Academy. I’m a part of a very exciting and interesting freshman class.

**John:** Craig, you are now an Academy member. I’m so excited to be attending Academy events with you and such and making fun of speakers and-

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** …doing all the Academy business.

**Craig:** I will say that the number of emails that I receive per day has shot up dramatically. I guess I’ll have to figure out how to manage the email influx from the Academy. It’s nice. I am excited to vote for the Oscars. That sounds like it would be a fun thing to do.

**John:** It’s fun to do. It’s actually a really well-designed voting system. Of course, you’ll be a part of the Academy app, which is where you’ll see all the screeners, which is actually really well-designed.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** It’s good stuff.

**Craig:** I think it’s wonderful. I think it was our own Aline Brosh McKenna, the living Joan Rivers of Scriptnotes, who may have put my name forward. I should thank her for that. It was also gratifying because you can become a member of the Academy simply by being nominated for something or you can become a member because people think you ought to be. In my case, it was the latter. That was nice. It’s always nice to be wanted. Yay, Academy.

**John:** Hooray. A bunch of news happened, Craig, while you were getting your Academy membership and I was overseas. The Animation Guild ratified their new three-year contract. We’ve talked about animation writing many times on the show. Animation Guild represents all folks who work in animation in different fields, a lot of artists, a lot of different people. They also represent some writers who work in animation.

There was a long and vocal campaign to try to improve the conditions of writers working under Animation Guild contracts. This contract did some things better. It established new job tiers for promotion. There’s a Level 1, Level 2, a supervising animation writer, all who got some pay bumps. There’s a new more junior level called associate animation writer, which is lower paid. It looks like some progress. It also looks like not very close to what an equivalent writer would be getting under a live-action WGA deal. It can both be significant progress and not what these writers should be receiving.

**Craig:** That’s right, nor will it ever be. Because of the circumstances surrounding the Animation Guild, specifically that it is part of IATSE and not a writer’s guild, they will not ever have the kind of bargaining power we do. They don’t have as many members by far. Also, their strike threat is essentially de minimis, because IATSE’s not striking so that animation writers do better. They will always struggle to do the best they can. They do, I honestly think, do the best they can. The people who work there care a lot. They are not defensive about the fact that their collective bargaining agreement is not as good as ours. They are aware of it. They don’t deny it. They do the best they can. That’s the most important thing. They did get a pretty decent turnout, which I think is really important. Member turnout apparently tripled compared to the last vote.

If there’s one thing that I guess we could look at as a decent thing, it’s just additional codification of what IATSE got, which was an enshrined 3% minimum wage increases annually over the course of the contract. That used to be the standard across the industry, and then suddenly it went down to two and a half. Hopefully, we can all return to the 3%. Anyway, I think all in all a successful negotiation for Animation Guild. Well done to the folks who run it and all the folks who voted.

**John:** I also just want to commend the animation writers who kept speaking up very vocally about how important it was and how their jobs are different than other folks who are working in the Animation Guild. They’re the first people on board in a project. They have very specific needs that are different from other folks. I think it’s great that they spoke up and were so insistent throughout this. This is not the last we’ve heard about animation writing and making sure that animation writers are paid what they should be paid.

**Craig:** I expect that we’ll be hearing about this every three years, as well we should.

**John:** Other news, so Craig, you and I have not talked very much about the CW, but we should probably explain for international listeners, because the CW is just a weird situation. Way back in the day, we had two different networks called the WB and UPN. Shows on the WB that were so famous were Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel.

**Craig:** The Buffyverse.

**John:** All the Buffyverse, but also Dawson’s Creek was a WB show. My own show, which lasted seven episodes, only four of which aired, called DC, was a WB show.

**Craig:** Great four episodes though.

**John:** It was really just a phenomenal four episodes. UPN, which was another Paramount-based network-

**Craig:** United Paramount Network.

**John:** Yeah, which had a bunch of shows. Those two merged, and they became the CW. The CW is the home to things like Supernatural, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. It’s owned jointly by Warner Bros and CBS. It’s always been a strange partnership. They are trying to sell the CW now. It looks like it’s going to be bought out by a group called Nexstar, which represents a bunch of the stations that actually broadcast CW shows.

**Craig:** This is the I guess natural fallout of the move to streaming, because basically Warner Bros is all in on HBO Max, and CBS is all in on Paramount Plus. Then the question is what exactly will the… By the way, what is with the the?

**John:** The CW?

**Craig:** Yeah. We don’t say the NBC, the CBS, the ABC, the HBO Max.

**John:** We don’t say the CBS.

**Craig:** It’s just there for whatever reason, the CW. I guess they started with the WB, because it wasn’t WB. It was the WB.

**John:** I guess, yeah.

**Craig:** The weirdly named the CW will try and fit into this forgotten, perhaps neglected spot, which is the independent network. It’s possible that it could work. I just don’t know what their programming exactly will be, because all the programming they had is owned by these other entities. They’re not buying the programs. They’re just buying the name.

**John:** They’re buying the name. They’re buying the network and the ability of the network to brand shows. Warner Bros and Paramount will still own a part of it. I think the reason why I want to talk about this on Scriptnotes is that the CW shows were an important birthplace for a lot of writers. They were shows that ran 20 episodes a season or 22 episodes a season. There was a lot of work there. The CW canceled a bunch of their shows. That’s a bunch of writers who don’t have jobs suddenly.

I think we forget about the nature of seasonal employment. These were shows that would start early fall and go through into the spring. In this streaming era, we see much less of that. Those were really good jobs for a bunch of people. I’m concerned that whatever this new network becomes, it’s not going to have scripted shows to the same degree. We’re going to lose out on a great training ground for a lot of writers.

**Craig:** It won’t be. Don’t be concerned. Just deal with it as reality, because they will not be making scripted television the way that the CW or the WB or UPN even did, because it’s too expensive and because you can make a lot of money with unscripted programming at lower margins. That’s how you compete. Look, ultimately, all of the networks are going to go away. They’ve been around forever or what we imagine forever to be. They’re going away. We’re not going to have NBC, CBS, and ABC at some point. They’re just going.

**John:** I agree with it.

**Craig:** Then it’s just going to be Disney Plus and Paramount Plus and Peacock and then all the other streamers we know, HBO Max and Apple TV and Amazon and so on and so forth, Hulu and etc. There’s not going to be network television anymore. There’s a redundancy there that everybody can see. Everybody. We all know it. At some point, I think NBC… Honestly, Derek Haas is keeping NBC on, as far as I can tell.

**John:** The Chicago shows?

**Craig:** Yes. When the Chicago shows run their run, which probably will be 40 years from now, then and only then will NBC finally be like, “Okay, we’ll just be Peacock.”

**John:** Some follow-up. On our bonus topic a couple weeks ago, we talked about adulting, basically what are the things that made you realize that you are now an adult and what those felt like. I proposed on Twitter, “Hey, what are some useful markers you found of adulthood?” Our listeners sent through some really good suggestions. I thought we would read through some of the listener suggestions for things that mark you as possibly an adult. “Getting excited about water filter speed.”

**Craig:** What? Water filter speed.

**John:** Yeah, like getting a home water filter or how fast your Brita pitcher filters.

**Craig:** I see. Yeah.

**John:** “Throwing out plastic cups and replacing them with glass.” Yeah, so getting permanent things rather than temporary things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “Hiring professional movers.” That is a real mark of it, when you’re not relying on your friends to drag you through. My friend Andrew Lippa said, “A mark of adulthood is initiating conversations that will likely invite conflict.” Recognizing I’m going to say this thing, I know this is going to make you mad, but I’m not going to actually avoid saying it because I know it’s going to make you mad.

**Craig:** I’d consider that also part of my adolescenting, to be honest, but that was me.

**John:** That was being provocative though.

**Craig:** I think that’s what “initiating conversations that likely invite conflict” is.

**John:** I think it’s recognizing that it’s not being afraid of conflict.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. You’re not starting something, but you’re not avoiding it either.

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** That’s how I took Andrew Lippa’s-

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** Knowing Andrew the way I do, that’s how I read that. Chuck Wendig, who’s a very smart writer, he said, “Being excited about things like showers and bedtime.”

**Craig:** Bedtime in particular has really become… I used to really dread it, and now lately I’m like, “Can I just get into bed? Can I get into bed now? Oh my god, no, it’s 8:15. I can’t.”

**John:** Along those lines, “Being excited when you have no plans for the weekend.” So good. “Wanting a low-key birthday.” “Seeking empty beaches.”

**Craig:** Empty beaches. I never wanted full beaches.

**John:** I never want to go to the beach. I hate the sun.

**Craig:** You really should not ever-

**John:** I should not be in the sun.

**Craig:** No. When you were an Eagle Scout, were you just in a full beekeeper costume?

**John:** For a variety of reason, I’ve pretty much always worn hats, which has helped a lot. I would say my one advice to people is just put on a hat, because it’ll help you out so much. I do remember on a horseback trip wearing a ball cap and having my ears get incredibly badly sunburned. That’s not a fun thing when you’re just peeling dead skin off your ears.

**Craig:** You need a brimmed hat.

**John:** I need a brimmed hat. That’s what I need.

**Craig:** For sure. That’s why I’m saying beekeeper. If you look into beekeeper costumes, I think you will-

**John:** I think I’ll be happy. We have some follow-up on our discussion about gun violence. Megana, do you want to help us out with this?

**Megana:** Nikolai brought up, “In Donald Glover’s brilliant show Atlanta, LaKeith Stanfield’s character Darius is at a shooting range. Around him, Second Amendment enthusiasts are shooting at human targets, which Darius shoots at a target of a dog. He’s approached, and the men tell him, ‘You can’t shoot dogs,’ to which Darius replies, ‘Why would I shoot a human target?’ I’m certainly not doing the scene justice, but I think the point still holds.”

**John:** I haven’t seen Atlanta, so I haven’t seen this beat. I think that’s a really clever idea for a moment. It’s also an interesting way to bring up the ideas of why are we using guns and what’s okay about guns and what’s not okay about guns.

**Craig:** It’s pretty setuppish. That’s my favorite word. I got that word from Hannibal Buress, setuppish.

**John:** Setuppish.

**Craig:** Isn’t that a great word?

**John:** It is. It’s pejorative but not dismissive completely.

**Craig:** It’s just saying you’re luring me into something. It’s setuppish. It is clever.

**John:** It is clever. I like it. Follow-up on remote writers’ rooms. Help us out.

**Megana:** Allison wrote in and said, “A follow-up to that great question about remote writers’ rooms. Why must writers’ rooms be in LA when so much production is remote? Wouldn’t it make sense for Disney to have writers’ rooms in Atlanta, for instance? I live and work in Portland, Oregon, where we have a thriving TV and film scene. The productions may hire local camera operators, directors, actors, etc, but the writers’ rooms are always based in LA. This above the line/below the line divide never made sense to me. Making writers’ rooms local to the locations could go a long way to bridging this divide.”

**Craig:** Interesting point.

**John:** I think I remember some anecdotes of a show that did actually put its writing staff in the place where it was shooting. It’s so unusual that I think it just stuck out because I’d never heard of that before.

**Craig:** There’s a really simple reason for this, Allison. Money. When you take people from where they live and ask them to live somewhere else, it costs money. You have to pay them a per diem. There’s a weekly fee that they get just for living expenses. You have to put them up somewhere. You have to feed them. You have to take care of their travel back and forth and all of that stuff. It’s just money. Now if it were me and I had a writers’ room, which I don’t, but if I did, yeah, I probably would’ve wanted them with me. Then I’m sure HBO would’ve said, “No, we’re not spending all this money for people to be up there and be there when you need them during production, but when they’re not needed during production, then… ”

Ideally, a lot of this stuff is written before you get into production. We do hire below-the-line folks and then bring them places and put them up and pay for them, because sometimes we need specific people. Cinematographers, camera operators are a good example, and obviously actors. Basically, bottom line, Allison, dough.

**John:** Yeah, dough. Also, I think it’s understanding the timeline of when you’re shooting these things. Craig’s right to say ideally you’ve written all the episodes before you start shooting, or you’re getting close to that. The exception would be if you were doing a traditional network show like one of the Baltimore shows like Homicide. I think Homicide may have actually had its writers’ room there in Baltimore, because they were right there on set doing all the stuff. You basically needed to have those writers be right there on set to do the things. It was great. That is a possibility there for a network show where you’re not writing so far ahead of what production is. For most shows, it’s not going to work. I think Allison also may be thinking that they’ll hire local writers to do that thing. No, they won’t. No showrunner’s going to find the six writers they want for that show in Portland. They’re just not going to find that. It’s not going to be a thing that works out.

**Craig:** Even if they were there, it doesn’t matter, because you need writers where you are before you get to Portland. You can’t get to Portland unless you’ve written a lot.

**John:** When we had Liz Meriwether and Liz Hannah on the show talking about their productions, they did have writers on set, but they had to bring in one writer at a time, because that’s what they can afford to bring. That was great and helpful for them. That’s what they could actually do.

**Craig:** That is industry standard.

**John:** We have some follow-up on disclaimers. Megana.

**Megana:** Frank from LA wrote in and said, “I wrote a pilot that’s a Real Housewives style reality show spoof about plus-size male models. When I was first taking it out, execs who read it blind without meeting me or without seeing the web series it was based on thought I was making fun of fat people. It was so frustrating, because I was doing the exact opposite. The feedback was largely tepid and/or cautionary, until I added a second page that said, ‘The author is loud, queer, and overweight. In their head they could be Naomi Campbell if only the world would let them.'”

**John:** Here’s an example of a preface page or an epigraph, still debating what those are going to be, that was helpful for Frank in getting his script read because people did not understand the context of who their writer was and how they should be reading the script without some sort of introduction there. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** It’s everything, so well done, Frank. The fact that maybe you didn’t think about doing that initially is not your fault. What I love is that you then thought of doing it. There’s nothing questionable about this. To me, context in the course of humor is incredibly important. We’re all grown up enough, especially now, to understand that some things are funny when certain people say them, and some things are not funny when certain people say them. You could boil it all down to the punch up/punch down thing, but I tend to think of it more as self-criticism versus outward criticism, self-awareness versus otherness.

If I write a comedy, and I suspect this is going to come up later when we get to our One Cool Things, and I am criticizing American Jewish culture, I’m doing it from inside my group, and that is different than if somebody else does it from outside. It just is. We don’t have to even get into why. We all know and understand this inherently. I think it’s actually brilliant and puts people at ease. It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re going to like the script. What they can’t do is say, “Oh, I don’t feel comfortable here, because I think somebody’s just teeing off on other people.”

**John:** Well done. I agree. I think it’s a good use of that preface page or epigraph. You can use either term.

**Craig:** Prologue, whatever.

**John:** Prologue.

**Craig:** Epigraph, I think that’s what we’ve settled on.

**John:** I think we settled on preface page. Let’s get to our marquee-

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** …topic here. It’s been a while since we’ve had a marquee topic. Craig, while I was on this vacation, I read a book. I read Jason Kander’s new book, Invisible Storm. If you don’t remember Jason Kander, he was a candidate for Senate in Missouri who lost but came really, really close and was just a phenomenon in Missouri. He was also then going to be running for president. He decided not to run for president, ran for mayor of Kansas City, pulled out of that to announce that he basically needed to stop because he had tremendous PTSD and basically could not function as a candidate. The book does a really good job of talking about those decisions and what he was trying to suppress but ultimately couldn’t suppress.

It got me thinking about, so often on Scriptnotes we’re talking about what characters want, what they’re driving towards, what they’re aspiring to become. That always feels like a pull. We’re being pulled in one direction. In the case of Jason Kander, he was really being pushed away from something. He was basically trying to escape from this PTSD. So much of his success was actually a fear-avoidance mechanism, trying to get away from this thing. Basically, as long as he was running really fast, it couldn’t catch up. He believed it couldn’t catch up. I like that push-pull dynamic that a magnet both can be drawing towards something but also repelling away from something else. I thought we might talk about what characters are trying to do looking at both what they’re being pulled towards but what they’re pushing against.

**Craig:** The pushing against part is probably a universal thing. I think everybody is afraid of something. Fear is a huge part of what it means to be human and therefore a huge part of writing human characters. What we find is if we simply write somebody as being afraid of something and moving away from something, the story isn’t very interesting, because they’re just hiding, and they’re hiding overtly, and we just are waiting for them to stop. It’s more interesting when we think what we’re seeing is the story of somebody driven toward something positive. It’s only then that we realize that their positive motion forward is really in lieu of what they’re afraid of doing.

**John:** As we look back to some of our deep dive discussions on Clueless or on Little Mermaid, these characters will express their wish, the thing that they’re trying to go towards. They’re also leaving home. Sometimes that leaving home is being pushed away from that too. Sometimes they are pushing off against the wall as they’re swimming away. Figuring out what that wall is can be really, really important. Figuring out what it is that they don’t want themselves to become, what it is that they are afraid of becoming, what it is that they are loathe to face again, can be what’s driving them. In really successful stories, and I think Kander’s real life story is successful in its way, it’s finally having to confront that monster, confront that thing that you were trying to escape, is part of the journey that gets you through to the end. It gets you into your third act. It’s finally facing this thing that you’ve been trying to avoid the whole time.

**Craig:** Exactly. This is very simpatico with the whole how do you write a movie podcast that we did. The revelation of what it is that terrifies you is something that should happen. It’s almost like a little horror movie inside of every movie, whether it’s a comedy or an adventure. There’s this daunting realization that the problem, the thing that you were not looking at is the following. You weren’t even aware of it necessarily. What a lot of first acts do well is give you all the clues as to what might be the problem. We notice early on in our stories that our characters are not merely pulling towards something, but they’re good at it. They’re often competent at it. It’s much more interesting if the thing you’re pulling towards is something that you’re good at, because then theoretically you can just keep going.

**John:** That’s a thing that we see with Jason Kander, who’s very good at being a politician and raising the money and doing the things and being on the phone constantly and doing all the things it took to be successful as that and was using those things to have this vision of where he was going to end up. Really, he was distracting himself from the work he needed to do. It reminds me of when we had Phoebe Waller-Bridge on the show. We talked about Fleabag. Fleabag is a character who is… Her forward momentum really comes from constantly pushing people away and basically building a distance between herself and other people. You don’t see her going after a thing as much as pushing people away and using the conventions of talking to the audience and other things to create a space around her. It’s only when she’s finally confronted about this that she can make the progress and growth she goes through at the end of the series.

**Craig:** It’s one of the ways that we connect with the quote unquote unlikable character, which is why this character isn’t likable is the worst note that anyone can get. Shame on everybody who gives it. Their unlikability is often about how they are pushing things away, and doing so in a way that allows them to get through life. It’s often very funny. Pushing people away is probably better presented through comedy than through drama. It gets very heavy very quickly when you’re just like, “Screw off,” constantly. The notion of, it was just misanthropy, I guess, it’s funny. They’re funny people, because we’re like, “Yeah, everybody does stink. That is stupid.” Then you realize, wait, that’s the part of me that is a bit afraid of things. I think it’s really important that we get to see people being repellent.

**John:** I think back to Melissa McCarthy’s character in Can You Ever Forgive Me. We had Marielle Heller on the show talking about that. That is a miscreant character. She does not like the outside world. She does not trust the outside world. We see her doing specific things to protect herself from exposing any vulnerability. Of course, for the movie to succeed, it has to introduce characters who can break through that armor and give her things that she actually wants to see and make her step outside of her comfort zone to let some people in. Of course, her whole scheme falls apart in the process. That’s an example of a movie that’s not a comedy and yet does do that job of I have a strong magnetic field that is pushing everyone away from me and succeeds.

**Craig:** There are obviously comic moments in that movie. Melissa McCarthy is a fascinating example, because I think basically every character she plays, with rare exception, is somebody that is pushing people away. Zach Galifianakis, also very, very famous for this. What makes them so good at it is more than just their talent, which is exceptional. They also just have this interesting humanity in their eyes. I’ve always said among comic character actors, or just comic actors I guess you’d call them, that some of them are a little scary, and some of them you want to just take home and hug. Jim Carrey, I think his characters always have this mania that’s a bit terrifying, and so it’s exciting.

**John:** You would not want to give him a sharp knife. I would not be comfortable.

**Craig:** Exactly. You don’t want to give him a sharp knife. There’s a danger about his… Sacha Baron Cohen, there’s a danger there. Then when you look at Steve Carrell or Zach or Melissa, it’s like… For whatever reason, there’s just something about Steve Carrell where I just want to take him home and hug him. Those characters tend to do really well when they’re pushing people away, because you know inherently they’re not being mean or cruel. They’re just hurt.

**John:** When you get the note about likability, I think the corollary note to that is relatability. Sometimes those characters who might seem unlikable, as long as they’re relatable, as long as we can see aspects of things we would ourselves do and protective mechanisms and defense shields they’re putting up in our own lives, we can relate to them, even if they’re not classically likable human beings, they’re not picking up and hugging puppies. We can see ourselves in them. I think that’s an example of something Melissa does so well is that in the characters she’s playing, you can see why she’s doing what she’s doing. You can understand she’s trying to push you away and she’s still letting you in.

**Craig:** I think that relatability is ultimately essential for every single character that is ever… The only characters that you can get away with being not relatable are I guess dispensable ones and very broad ones, so James Bond. The classic template for James Bond movies is that there’s a main villain who usually is somewhat relatable, but then that main villain has an interesting sidekick, so Oddjob or Jaws, Nick Nack. They are always very thin characters. By and large, everybody, villains, second bananas, leads, everyone at some point or another must be relatable, even in ways that are seemingly incompatible with their circumstances. For instance, Thor is a god, and yet really all those movies are asking us to relate to him on a very not godlike level.

**John:** I would say the most successful Thor movies are the ones that pierce the Thor character the most and reveal his inner flaws and his humor and his dissatisfaction with himself and his own situation. It’s not the ones where he’s awesome, it’s the ones where he’s flawed are the ones where you’re going to be most curious to follow along.

**Craig:** If you were Chris Hemsworth, do you think you would ever wake up in the morning being like, “Pretty flawed here.”

**John:** I think the success of one of these films though is showing beautiful people who are still flawed in relatable ways. That’s obviously one of the great challenges we face as writers is to have characters who are compelling and driven and feel like a movie can center around them, and yet we’re still seeing through to some of their vulnerability. I think the Iron Man character that Robert Downey Jr plays is a very good example of this, because he is an asshole. He’s fundamentally not a sympathetic character, and yet he is written with a specificity and with a vulnerability that lets you see behind the surface. He could be both. He could be pushing you away, literally pushing you away with his little magnetic jet hands, and at the same time letting you in to see what’s there.

**Craig:** We’re going to get so many angry emails. “Those are not jet hands. Those are Propulsors.”

**John:** Repulsors, yes, I’m sorry.

**Craig:** I don’t know what the hell they are. It’s really interesting. Separate topic we should talk about one day is the unfortunate phenomenon that no matter how much representation we talk about and the improvement of representation on film, the one area where human beings just seem to really struggle with is we want good-looking people on screen. We want them. Black, white, disabled, doesn’t matter, but all we ask is that their faces have symmetry. We are fascinated with the lives of people who have symmetrical faces. It is so weird to think of. When you really boil it down, it’s like, what is happening there? There’s not a chance that people’s facial symmetry is a statistical reflection of their actual interest value as humans. What are we doing? What is happening? Anyway, I just find that fascinating.

**John:** Yet facial symmetry doesn’t make you a movie star. Tom Cruise is a good-looking person and was a good-looking person growing up, but it was his actual charisma, which is not his physical body, that made him the star.

**Craig:** Yes. Really, what it comes down to is if you have this much talent and your face is this symmetrical, you can be a movie star. If you have even more talent than that, but your face is terribly not symmetrical-

**John:** You can be a voice actor.

**Craig:** You’re not going to be a movie star, because people just don’t… They don’t care. That’s what so strange. It’s so strange, because there are some incredible actors out there who don’t have whatever that is that’s the facial symmetry that we all demand. Then we miss them somehow. Then there are actors who we all know are famous because they’re very good-looking. A lot of the people who are now famous for being famous, I think a lot of that is just… Anyway, side topic. We’ll come back around to that on Episode 730.

**John:** The last little point I will make here, which we’ll reference again when we come back to this topic, is it reminds me of… There’s this phenomenon of hockey players who are born in a certain month are much more successful. I think it’s probably because of that. It’s because this actor was so beautiful and was so handsome and was cast in these roles, they learned how to become a much better film actor, and they kept getting the work. They improved as an actor because they kept getting more chances to play and more chances in front of the screen.

**Craig:** There is no question that… I can’t remember the comedian who said the secret to happiness is be good-looking. You laugh, and then he starts talking about it, and you realize, oh my god, yes. Yes, apparently, that is the secret. Everything gets a lot easier. Everything. Everything. All of your successes are over-praised. Your failures are ignored. Everybody is interested in you and wants to be around you and are attracted to you. It’s this interesting magnetic thing we’re talking about.

**John:** Last bit on magnetism I would just say is a lesson I learned as I’ve been thinking about this over the last few weeks is that obviously, always be looking for what a character wants, because what a character wants is going to be driving them in a lot of cases. Just never forget the corollary question is what are they trying to get away from. What are they pushing against? What are they trying to push away from themselves? You’ll find some really interesting details and maybe some interesting characters and situations by looking about what it is that they are repelled by and see whether that can be additional driving force for you in figuring out your story and basically your protagonist’s journey.

Cool. Let’s go into our One Cool Things. I have two recommendations for you, both things you can see on streaming. First off is Fire Island, written by Joel Kim Booster, which is a delightful retelling of Pride and Prejudice but all told on Fire Island. Really, really nicely done. Delightful. You can find it on Hulu. It matches very well with our Clueless episode, which we just aired last week, which is a retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma. This is Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, all set on Fire Island. Very much recommend you see that.

Also, if you’ve not seen Heartstopper, which is a really well-reviewed and popular show on Netflix, I would recommend it. It is a small gay British high school show that is just really smartly done. It’s weirdly chaste and based on these great graphic novels by Alice Oseman. If you are in the mood for something just light and delightful, I would recommend Heartstopper for you.

**Craig:** I have to watch the show. Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie in The Last of Us, and a guy named Steve Oben, who is one of our costume department geniuses, they were obsessed with this and would talk about it all the time. I have to watch Heartstopper. In a lovely way. They just said it puts a smile on your face.

**John:** I was describing it to Megana as being like M and M’s, where you eat an M and M and suddenly you’ve ate the whole bag. You’re like, “Wait, where’d the show go?” They’re very short episodes. It’s just delightfully done.

**Craig:** I’m in. How could my One Cool Thing this week not be the James Webb Space Telescope?

**John:** Pretty amazing images.

**Craig:** You and I are old enough to remember when Hubble blew our minds. By the way, I feel bad for Hubble. Hubble’s been out there killing it for decades, and then James Webb shows up. It’s not enough that James Webb is so much better than Hubble. Now it’s supposed to be like, “Look at this shit from Hubble. Look at this shit photo from Hubble. Now look how much better it is from James Webb.” It’s so mean.

Anyway, it is kind of incredible. The images that we’re seeing are startling. They are not of stars, but of galaxies. They are closeups of galaxies. They are sections of sky that show dozens or hundreds of galaxies, each of which, of course, contain countless stars and planets. All of this is just mind-blowing. Interestingly, most of them do look a little bit like… Remember when we were kids, John, you would go to the store and there were those little vending machines where you’d put a quarter in and you’d turn the dial and you’d get a little plastic egg?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Inside the egg was candy or a toy. One of the toys was this clear, super bouncy… The Super Ball. A super bouncy ball.

**John:** Super bouncy ball, yeah.

**Craig:** Inside a lot of them was a billion sparkly things.

**John:** It’s glitter. It’s glitter inside a rubber ball.

**Craig:** That’s what the universe is. It’s a glittery Super Ball. It’s mind-blowing, portrays a kind of vastness that our brains are simply incapable of processing fully. My One Cool Thing this week, James Webb Space Telescope, and you know what, also the Hubble. Hey, Hubble.

**John:** Hubble’s doing great.

**Craig:** You are the OG, Hubble.

**John:** 100%. I got to see the James Webb Space Telescope before it launched. We went down to Northrop Grumman and got to do a tour. I’ll talk through how you get to see it. You are going up three stories, up to this glass observation bay, and looking down at a bunch of people in beekeeper suits basically, that Craig would be happy with, just completely vacuum-sealed, because this whole thing, which has this giant gold mirror, a speck of dust on it could ruin everything. Years of years of construction for this. It felt impressive. I could not even imagine launching it into space. To see the results that they’re able to get off of it is just incredible.

**Craig:** NASA has been, I won’t say quietly, but not noisily, being amazing for a really long time, and particularly I think for the last 10 years or so, in terms of what they’ve been able to do with Mars and now with this telescope. I have to say the reorientation away from man space travel towards investigative space engineering is great.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** It’s great. I don’t need a guy on Mars. What’s he going to do? He’s going to walk around. Who cares? Show me more of it and analyze it.

**John:** Put some more robots there. Let them dig around and pull stuff up.

**Craig:** How about this? HD cameras are preferable to putting a person there, so that that person can be like, “Oh my god, I did it.” We’re like, “You did it.”

**John:** You look at this telescope or even the rovers we have on Mars, they can work for 10 years-

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** …and keep doing stuff, versus a guy who can be there for a week and you got to fly him back.

**Craig:** We get excited because we can watch it, and he’s walking on Mars. We’re like, “Oh my god, it happened.” Now what? The cost and the danger is extraordinary, and for not a great amount of information, not as much as you can get from diagnostic and investigative equipment like this. Hooray, NASA is what I’m saying.

**John:** There’s things that we’re able to do on the space station with humans there which seem great. We’re able to run experiments and really do stuff on the fly. Fantastic. I don’t feel a pressing need to send people back to the moon or back onto Mars. We’re good. We’re good.

**Craig:** We’re good.

**John:** We can focus on some things on Earth here that can be much more useful.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. Like making Scriptnotes, which is a-

**Craig:** Podcast.

**John:** … podcast produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless. Thank you to everyone who sent in outros. I put out a call for them, and now we have a whole bunch of new ones in, and they’re so, so good. We’re stocked, but we’re always looking for new outros. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you’ll get all the back-episodes, Bonus Segments, and Bonus Episodes, like the one we’re putting out this week on word games. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

Links:

* [Animation Guild Members Ratify New Three-Year Contract](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/animation-guild-ratifies-three-year-contract-1235174906/)
* [As Nexstar Deal For Control Of The CW Nears Finish, Ownership Structure Comes Into Focus](https://deadline.com/2022/06/nexstar-deal-to-acquire-control-of-the-cw-nears-finish-line-1235054433/)
* [John’s Adulting Twitter Thread](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1544347536366108673?s=21&t=gkZVGb4zyQhdj41RFy-4Cg)
* [Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD](https://www.harpercollins.com/products/invisible-storm-jason-kander?variant=39935556911138) by Jason Kander
* [Fire Island](https://www.hulu.com/movie/fire-island-c2abb64a-bf06-48fa-8465-c0958e2b8ecd) by Joel Kim Booster on Hulu
* [Heartstopper Series on Netflix](https://www.netflix.com/title/81059939) and [Graphic Novel](https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/heartstopper-alice-oseman/1133594836) by Alice Osman
* [James Webb Space Telescope](https://webb.nasa.gov/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Pineless ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/558standard.mp3).