Search Results for: scene headings

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name’s Craig Mazin.

John August: This is Episode 531 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’re looking at how you move from scene to scene. That’s right, transitions. It’s a clip show where we listen back to past John and past Craig as they offer their advice, which for all we know, is better than our current advice, because we were younger then, and fresher.

Craig Mazin: So much younger than today.

John August: Now we actually got an email in from a listener recently saying like, “Oh, I went back and listened to your early episodes, expecting it to be different, that John and Craig would’ve grown and changed a lot.” She said, “No, actually, you know what? It was the same. Your microphones weren’t as good, but it was the same show,” which I was heartened by.

Craig Mazin: Yes, I think it might’ve been a man.

John August: Oh. It could’ve been either one.

Craig Mazin: I think based on that name I think it’s a guy, but either way, I wanted to say to that fellow that no, of course we weren’t great at that then, and we have gotten better. Maybe it’s just that we found something where we weren’t accountable to anybody at all. Sometimes the key is that if you have something where you’re completely free within it to do whatever you want, how you want to do it, without any accountability whatsoever, and no expectation or ambition or anything, then there is a purity to it, and people who are going to like that purity are going to like it. If you dig Scriptnotes Episode 500, yeah, you’ll probably like 1 through 10. If you hate Episode 500, I guarantee you’ll hate 1 through 10. We’ve said a lot.

Don’t get fooled by the way things look on the other side of stuff. Here, hopefully you just listen to me talk about how ashamed I am all the time and how I feel bad about myself, and I try and work on that really, really hard. Don’t compare yourself to anybody. Basically in your letter you said, “To be honest, I was hoping that you guys weren’t as good at the beginning. It would’ve given me hope to get better myself at my stuff.” You have plenty of hope. You’re doing a hard thing. You’re trying to do a hard thing. You’re going to move at the speed you move.

John August: Yeah, and I always also say at the beginning we were new to podcasting, but we weren’t necessarily new to screenwriting and offering advice to screenwriters. That was a not a new thing for us to do. It was just sticking a mic in front of us was the new aspect of it.

Let’s travel back in time and look at transitions. These are three conversations we’ve had over the years. We’re going to start with Episode 446: Back To Basics, where we talk about the origin of screenwriting, opening scenes, what a scene is, what it means, and the difference between formatting and transition versus the psychology of what a transition actually does, like how you’re moving from scene to scene versus the actual words you’re using.

In 493 on our Opening Scenes conversation, we talk about how you begin a screenplay, the process for thinking about opening scenes, the rules and expectations. We talk about Chernobyl some. It feels like a lot of what we’re talking about in this is really relevant to transitions, basically how are we going to get the story started and how are we going to get the audience moving with us into the plot.

Finally, we’re going to go back to Episode 89, which is probably, wow, eight years ago?

Craig Mazin: Peesh.

John August: Yeah. We’re looking at technical approaches to different types of transitions, so literally what are the words on a page that is signaling to the reader that this is how we are going to be moving from this scene to that scene. Literally it’s the right-hand margin stuff we’ll get into in that last
segment.

Three segments here. We’ll also put a link in the show notes to some blog posts where we talk about transitions. If you’re a Premium member stick around, because when we come back at the end, we are going to be discussing how to get out of a conversation, so it’s really the transition between I am talking with you right now and I don’t want to be talking with you any longer. We’ll be discussing how to end conversations, both in person and online.

Now let me make a transition out of this opening segment into our three pre-recorded bits. Craig, can you help me out with this transition?

Craig Mazin: No.

John August: Perfect.

All right. This is a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, and so I thought we might actually take this time in Episode 446 to define screenwriting and what screenwriting actually is, because I don’t know if we’ve actually talked about it in actually that much depth, weirdly, over the course of this, because Craig, you did your solo episode about how to write a screenplay. That was really fundamentally 101 the things about writing a screenplay, but I wanted to do some backstory about the origin of screenwriting and how screenwriting began to what it’s become now and what those transitions were.

I have three things I want to keep in mind as we talk about what a screenwriter does and what screenwriting is, and maybe tease them apart a little bit, because I think especially newer people who are approaching screenwriting, which we have a bunch of new people listening, just because they watched Ryan Reynolds and Phoebe Waller-Bridge last week, really talk about what the screenwriter does and what screenwriting is about.

Craig Mazin: I hope that my understanding of it is correct. I’ll be very embarrassed if I’m wrong.

John August: I think you will probably be very, very correct. Let’s talk about the origin of screenwriting, because screenwriting as an art form is only about a century old, because movies are only about a century old. When the first motion picture cameras were aimed at things and it went beyond just photographing a train coming into a station, to actually trying to tell a story with a camera, at some point people recognized, oh, you know what, it would help if we wrote down the plan for what we’re going to do before we actually shot this stuff. Those initial things that would become screenplays were just a list of shots, or a plan for how you’re going to do the things. When we talk about screenwriting being like architecture, that’s what we’re getting to is that sense of like it’s a plan for the thing you’re going to make. It is a blueprint for what the ultimate finished product is going to be, which is the finished film, the thing that a person is going to watch, which is not the literary document or not the paper document that we’re starting off with. Craig, I don’t know if you’ve seen any of those first screenplays, but they don’t closely resemble what we do now.

Craig Mazin: No. I think that when people say a screenplay is a blueprint, I always get a little fussy about it, but in this aspect of it, that’s exactly what it is. Part of a screenplay, a screenplay is many, many things at once, one of the things a screenplay is and has always been, going back to those first ones, is essentially a business plan. It is an outline of where you need to be and how long you need to be there and what needs to be seen. There’s not a lot of art to it. It really is more of an organizational thing, and the modern counterpart to it I guess would just be sometimes a director will come in and make a little shot list for the day. That is appropriate to blueprint.

John August: Yeah, or agenda. It’s basically these are the steps. This is how we’re going to do it. Because it’s written on eight and a half by 11 paper and it’s done with words rather than a flowchart, it feels somewhat literary. The words you pick matter a little bit, but not a tremendous amount. It’s basically as long as you’re going to be able to communicate what your intention is to the other people who need to see this document, that’s all that really matters.

Craig Mazin: That tradition carries through to this day when a screenplay still uses interior, exterior. Every scene must give you blueprint information that is not literary information. There is nothing literary about exterior, house, day, rain, or whatever you say there. The literary part comes in this other stuff that started to emerge as our craft of filmmaking and writing evolved.

John August: Now, that evolution, I’m not enough of a student of the history of cinema to tell you exactly when the screenplay became more what we talk about today, but often you’ll hear Casablanca referenced as a turning point between this list of shots to something that’s more like a modern screenplay in the sense of it’s a document that you can read, and in reading this document, you get a sense of what the actual film is supposed to feel like. It’s not just the pure blueprint. It’s more like this gives you a sense of where you are, what’s going on. It gives you a preview of what the film is actually going to look and feel like, versus just a straightforward list of these are the things you’re seeing.

Craig Mazin: This is not necessarily historically … You can’t call me a professor here, by any stretch of the imagination, but my understanding when I look at the early stuff is that it was the American movie business that was very blueprint-y and shot list-y. There is a pretty famous … You’ve probably seen the silent film A Trip to the Moon.

John August: Oh yes, yeah.

Craig Mazin: Yes, remember where the moon gets shot in the eye.

John August: The Brothers Lumière.

Craig Mazin: Exactly. George Méliès. Méliès? Méliès? Méliès? If you look at the script for that, it actually feels quite modern. There is a literary aspect to it. It’s more descriptive. I think in Europe probably there was a little bit more of a literary aspect to this much earlier than there was in the United States, but eventually by the time you get to films like Casablanca you’re fully in the swing of a literary screenplay that is combining two things at once, a non-literary production plan and art.

John August: Now, in both the literary form and in the blueprint-y construction plan form, the fundamental unit that you come back to is the scene. Even novels have scenes, that sense of there is a moment in space and time when generally characters are saying something or doing something. It’s one carved out moment of a place and a time where things are happening. That idea of a scene you see in both the really clinical early versions of screenplays and you see them in modern screenplays. That sense of like this is a chunk of time in which these things are happening.

I want to suss out three different kinds of things we mean by scene. First is that moment of space and time where characters are doing a thing. That’s scene version A. Scene version B is the writing of that scene. By the writing I mean this is what the characters are saying and doing. It’s where we’re coming into that moment. It’s how we’re getting out of that moment. It is the words we’re using to describe the world in which the characters are happening, the actions they’re taking, basically everything we call scene description, which you compare to stage plays, which is the other natural version of this, the scene description in stage plays tends to be incredibly minimalist. It’s much more robust in screenplays, because you are trying to really visually describe this world in which the characters are inhabiting. That’s an important transition. That’s version B is really the writing.

The third version of a scene I want to distinguish between is all the formatting stuff. All the basically the grammar of screenplays that we use that make them, the conventions that make it easier for people who read a lot of screenplays to understand what’s actually happening. The same way that commas and periods become invisible to a reader, people who are used to reading screenplays, they don’t even see INT and EXT and DAYS. Your brain just skips over those things and is able to concentrate on the meat of those. All that other information is there, but it’s invisible to a person who is used to reading them. Being able to understand those conventions and use them properly really does affect how a person perceives a screenplay. That formatting, that syntax choices and all that stuff, is really a different thing I would say than the words you’re using to describe stuff. It’s really grammar versus the actual creative act of writing.

Craig Mazin: Yeah, and that grammar is eventually going to be analyzed by a grammar specialist known as the First AD, who along with the production managers, are going to be taking those scene headings and asking, “Okay, are these scene headings accurate to what we think we’re going to be actually doing in terms of the locations we found? How can we group them together? We need to make a timeline, night, day.” All those things have huge production implications. None of them have to do specifically with art. You’re guessing at what you think the ultimate grammar will be, but then you make adjustments once you get into production. Individual first ADs will have different ways of adjusting that grammar.

You’re right that for most people reading it, those things serve weirdly as just paragraph breaks. They’re paragraph breaks, which are incredibly helpful. It’s one of the reasons why my formatting preference is to put two lines before a new scene, because the scene, the EXTERIOR or the INTERIOR, is serving as a break in the visual flow of the reading, so I make it one, because I agree with you. I think that that’s really what it’s doing. If you took out all the interiors and exteriors and just mentioned those things in action lines, the script would become a book and it would be harder to read.

John August: Yeah. In thinking about scenes in three different waves, so there’s the visualization, the imagination of what’s happening with those characters in space and time, that is a thing that a screenwriter does, but it’s also the kind of thing a director does. It’s a thing that other creative people can do. It’s a thing an author does, is envision people in a place and a time doing a thing or saying a thing. Directors often do that scene version A a lot. They’re really imagining what that scene is like. They’re thinking about it through their own specialties. They’re imagining it’s like, “Okay, so I’m envisioning this scene, this moment happening,” and then they’re thinking, “Okay, where would I put the camera? What are the opportunities I have here? How would I use my tool set to make this happen best? What am I going to tell the cinematographer about what I’m looking at? What am I going to tell the editor about how I imagine this being paced? What are the costumes? What are all the things that I will need to be able to describe to other people about this moment?” That’s a version of crafting the scene.

The screenwriter has to do all that stuff, but then take a second level abstraction, thinking, “Okay, having thought through all that stuff, what are the words I’m going to use to describe what’s most important about this moment? Because I could describe everything, but that would be exhausting, and it would actually hurt the process of being able to understand what’s important. How am I’m going to synthesize that down to the most important things for people to understand if they’re reading this scene about what it’s going to feel like, what’s important, what they need to focus on?”

Most of what Craig and I really are talking about on the podcast is this second level, is the B version of that scene, which is how do we find the best way to describe and tell the reader what they would be seeing if they were seated in a theater watching this on a screen, how are we going to convey that experience, what it feels like to be watching that moment on the big screen. That’s mostly what we talk about on this podcast.

Craig Mazin: Yeah. There’s a weird kind of psychological game we’re playing with scene work, in the way that Walter Murch wrote this book about editing, I think it’s called In the Blink of an Eye, where he says we’re cutting in the pattern of people’s blinks, that we blink in normal moments. We’re kind of predictable this way. We have a rhythm. We’re editing slightly on that basis. Editing feels like music. It’s all about timing. You just know, there, cut there, that’s the spot.
It’s kind of the same thing with scenes. What you’re doing is feeling a psychological impact and then there’s a blink, a story blink, that just needs to happen. We have reached a point where something should happen and the story should blink and reset, and in a different place or a different time or with a different person, a different perspective. That to me is where the scene begins and ends.

Inside of the scene, we may have additional slug lines or scene headers, because we’re giving that blueprint information, that nonliterary blueprint information, to our production friends. For the purpose of being artistic and literary, the scene is the psychological unit. I don’t know how else to describe it other than something blinks and the story moves.

John August: Here’s an example. Imagine you could take a real life thing that’s happening. We’re in a room. There are people talking. Imagine we’re at a cocktail party. There’s a cocktail party happening. It’s maybe six people in this room. There’s discussions happening. We could invite three screenwriters in and have them see all of this, and then each of them goes off and writes their own version of this scene. There would be three very different scenes, because those screenwriters would be choosing to focus on different things.

Even though we all encountered the same moment, we’re writing different scenes, because we are choosing to focus on different things and we want to direct the reader’s attention to different moments. It’s what snippets of conversations we’re using. It is who we’re choosing to focus on. The same way the director is choosing where to put the camera, we are choosing where to put the reader’s attention. That is mostly what we talk about on this podcast is how as a writer you make the decisions about what you’re going to emphasize and what you’re going to ignore about a moment that is happening in front of us as an audience.

Craig Mazin: It’s one of the reasons I stress transitions so much. We have a podcast we’ve done about transitions. I can’t remember offhand the number, but we’ll put it in the show notes. Transitions help the audience demarcate the blink, the beginning and end of the scene, because inside of scenes, once you get away from the page and you’re just watching a television show or a movie, there is the montage effect, which is essentially, in the old sense of the word, not the, “We’re doing a montage,” but rather when you show something and then you cut to something else, we understand that time is continuing even though we have moved the camera and cut. These things are constantly happening. So how do you know when one thing begins and one thing ends? Since it’s all cut cut cut cut cut, why does one cut signal the beginning of something, and why does one cut signal the end, and why do others feel like they’re just part of a continuity? Transitions. They let you know when the scene has begun, and they let you know when it’s over.

John August: Absolutely. That’s a great segue to really this third version of what I’m describing. It’s this scene which is all of the formatting and the standard conventions and grammar that we’ve come to expect out of screenplays. It’s different from the transition that Craig is talking about, because Craig is really talking psychologically what are we trying to do by ending the scene there and getting to the next scene. That will also have a reflection in literally the words and how we’re formatting that moment to get us from one scene to the next scene. All the stuff that your screenwriting software does for you, that is the technical details that makes screenplays look so strange and different.

As I was reading through all these entries for the Three Page Challenge, picking them for the episode we’re recording tomorrow, I was struck by many of our listeners really get it, they know exactly what they’re doing, but some of them are actually still struggling with that third kind of scene writing, which is basically understanding how standard screenplay conventions are so helpful in letting the reader understand what’s important in this moment. Some of them are still struggling with that stuff. That’s the kind of thing I think you can actually teach and be taught. The best way to do it is to read a ton of screenplays and see just how it is, just so it becomes really natural. You read a bunch, you write a bunch to try to match up to that thing, but you will very quickly get a sense of how screenplays are formatted and how to make that feel effortless, make it feel like it’s not in your way but it’s actually helping you. What’s much harder for us to try to teach you is that second part, that part of how to very naturally convey what a moment feels like. I want to make sure we keep that distinction clear, because being able to type “cut to” and understand how to get down a page is a different thing than being able to really shape what a scene is going to feel like for the reader.

Craig Mazin: Yeah. Literally anyone can put something into a screenplay format. It’s never been easier. saying “cut to” and then “exterior such-and-such” will make something look like a scene has ended and a new scene has begun on the page, but it actually will not translate whatsoever to the actual viewing experience. The only thing that you have in your arsenal to demarcate that for the viewer is creativity. A sense of rhythm. A sense of conclusion. A sense of propulsion. A sense of surprise. Contrast. All the things that we talk about when we think of transitions that have nothing to do with formatting, because alas, there is no sign flashing in the movie or on your television set that says, “New scene has begun.” This is the craft part. Man, if I were teaching a screenwriting class at USC or UCLA or one of those places, I think honestly I would just begin with that. I would just begin with please let’s just talk about the art of letting people know something has begun and something has ended.

John August: Yeah, because “cut to” is not when a scene ends. The scene ends when the scene is ending. So often you feel like, okay, that scene is over, but there’s a couple more lines. When you actually film that you’re going to realize you don’t need this extra. You recognize that that moment is over and therefore the scene should be over. It’s a hard thing to learn until you’ve gone through it.

Craig Mazin: That is where the talent and instinct is. Obviously experience helps as you go on, as it does with everything, but there is an innate sense that something has concluded. Even for those of us who have been doing this for a while and we’re professionals, we will often make a mistake of going a little bit too far or not far enough, and then somebody will come and say, “I feel like maybe the scene ended here.” The key is that when somebody says that, you can look at it and go, “No, it hasn’t, and here’s why,” or, “Yeah, you’re right. That’s where it ended.” There is a sense.

John August: Having written the Arlo Finch books, one of the great advantages to traditional literary fiction is that if you’re lucky, you have a publisher, and that publisher provides an editor, who is going through that work and doing some of this actual checking with you. Whereas I might send Craig a script and he can say like, “Oh, I think your scene really ended here,” the editor’s job is much more clinical, saying, “Okay, now I’m … ” She’s actually cutting some stuff, saying, “No, you’re done here.” Sometimes you’ll get to a line editor or a copy editor who is going through and actually fixing your mistakes.

Screenwriters generally don’t have anybody like that, so we are responsible for doing all of that ourselves. I do sometimes wonder if sometimes there are people who are really pretty good at that stage A of writing a scene and stage B of writing a scene, but are really kind of terrible at stage three, that stage C of writing a scene and doing the actual making it work right as a screenplay kind of thing, would just be so helped out by having someone who could just go through and make it read better, make it read more conventionally on the page, so that we can really see what the intention is, versus being hung up on the strange mistakes they’re making.

Craig Mazin: I was a guest for a webinar, a Zoominar. A Zoominar through Princeton University. I did it yesterday. They open it up to members of that community. I don’t know, there was 100 people or something like that watching, which is kind of fun to see all the little Zoom faces. Someone asked a question and it essentially went to this, which was, when you look at how screenplays work as opposed to a novel, there are so many other things that you have to be thinking about. In a novel you’re just thinking about what people are saying and doing and thinking. In a screenplay you’re managing all this other stuff, like time and the camera and the visual space and how it will be structured and when things move from one place to another. Unfortunately, that’s true. If you want to be a good screenwriter, you’re going to have to be a little bit of a Swiss Army knife. It’s very hard to be a good screenwriter but only be good at one thing.

Every now and then you’ll hear somebody say, “Oh, we’re bringing them in, but they’re doing a character pass.” I’m like, what the hell does that mean? What’s the difference between character and story? They’re exactly the same thing to me. They’re interwoven. I don’t know how to separate these things. Or sometimes they’ll say, “We’re bringing somebody in to do a comedy pass.” Okay, so is that just like somebody’s going to stop in the middle of the movie and do some standup? The comedy has to come out of who they are and what the situations are. We have to do all of it at the same time, which is why it’s so hard. It’s really, really hard. There are, I don’t know, 4,000 times as many successful novelists as there are screenwriters.

John August: That is true. What I will say though about the Princeton question is the things that student was asking about, like, oh, you have to do all these other things, those become really automatic and much simpler with experience, so you stop having to worry about them so much. The same way like once you really learn how to use a semicolon, you can just use a semicolon. A lot of the detritus and the weird things about our modern screenplay format, once you get used to it, you stop thinking about it, it becomes less of an obstacle. I’m never, as a screenwriter, frustrated by like, “Oh, I don’t know how I’m going to do this in a screenplay format.” It just becomes really straightforward after a time.

Craig Mazin: It does take time, but eventually … It’s like touch typing. I don’t think about where the W is. My finger just goes there.

John August: What we can do is talk about really specific crafty things, which I feel like you and I are much better in our element to discuss. This actually comes from a question that Martin in Sandringham, Australia wrote in to ask. “I’m curious about the process to decide on the beginning point of your screenplays. Have you noticed a pattern of thinking that you tend to follow when choosing that first line of the script to be in the story, or is it purely driven by the unique nature of the story that you’re telling?”

Craig, it occurs to me that often we do a Three Page Challenge, and we’re looking at the first three pages of a script, so we’re really looking at these opening scenes, and yet because we’re only looking at that scene, we don’t really have a sense of what that scene is doing for the telling of the rest of the movie. We’re really just focused on what is the experience reading these scenes, what are the words on the page, but not what is that scene doing to establish the bigger picture of the movie. I thought today we’d spend some time really looking at opening scenes and our process as we go into thinking about an opening scene for a movie, or writing one.

Craig Mazin: It’s a great question, Martin. It I think has changed over time stylistically, which is no surprise. When we were kids and we saw movies from 30 years earlier, meaning the ’50s, the opening scenes seemed a lot different than the opening scenes we were used to. We’re sitting at home watching a VHS tape of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and we see how that opening goes. Then maybe dad shows us a movie from 1955 and it’s much slower and more expository in a flat sort of way. Perhaps there’s jaunty music happening or sweeping violins. These days as time has gone on it seems like opening scenes more and more are about a strange kind of disorientation, a giving to you of a puzzle that the implied contract is this will all make sense. I think of maybe the most influential opening sequence or scene in recent television history was the opening sequence of Breaking Bad, which was designed specifically to be what the hell is going on? What is that? Why are there pants there? Why is there an RV? What is happening? Why are there bullet holes? Then the puzzle gets solved.

John August: I like that you’re bringing up the change from earlier movies to present day movies in how openings work, because I think you could make the same observation about how teasers and trailers for movies from a previous time worked versus how they work now. You look at those old trailers and you’re like, “Oh my god, this is just so boring. This is not selling me on the movie at all.” In many ways we now look for these opening scenes and opening sequences to really be like a trailer for the movie you’re about to see. They’re really setting stuff up and getting you excited to watch this movie you’re about to watch and to reward you for like, thank you for sitting down in your seat and giving me your attention, because this is what’s going to happen.

Let’s maybe start by talking about what are the story elements that need to happen in these opening scenes or opening sequences, they don’t have to happen, but tend to happen in these opening sequences. What are we trying to do story-wise, plot-wise, or character-wise in these scenes?

Craig Mazin: You have choices. You don’t actually have to do anything. Sometimes the opening is just about meeting a person. You are accentuating the lack of story. They’re happy. They’re carefree. Everything’s fine. I agree with you. More and more there is a kind of trailerification of the opening of a movie or a television show. There is the indication of a thing, and it’s often a thing that the characters don’t even see, or if they do see it, they’re looking at it from a different time, this is later, or this is earlier, whatever it is, but there is an indication of something, that there is a crack in reality that needs to be healed somehow.

John August: Yeah. From a story perspective you’re generally meeting characters. If you’re not meeting your central character, you’re meeting another character who is important or a character who represents an important part of the story. In that opening scene you might be meeting a character who ends up dying at the end of that scene or sequence, but it’s setting up an important thing about what’s going to happen in the course of your story, the course of your movie. You’re hopefully learning about the tone of this piece and what it feels like to be watching this movie, the setting of this world, how the movie kind of works, and some of the rules of this world. If you’re in a fantasy universe, is there magic, how does gravity work, what are the edges of what this kind of movie can be, because in that opening scene you want to have a sense of like this is the general kind of movie that we’re watching, so that you can benefit from all the expectations that an audience brings into that, because of the genre, because of the type of movie that you’re setting up.

Craig Mazin: Yeah. I think about openings that have always stuck with me as being confusing and challenging, which I’ve always loved. I often look at the very curious opening to Blade Runner, which was not the original opening that they had planned, but it’s the opening they ended up with. Neither of the characters in that scene are main characters. There is an unknown investigator, and there is a replicant who we don’t know is a replicant. He’s not the important one. He’s not the head villain. He’s a henchman, essentially. You have no idea what the hell is going on. There’s one man in a very strange device that might be futuristic or antique, asking strange questions of this guy and seemingly zeroing in on something important. Then the man, feeling somewhat trapped by the series of very abstract questions, kills the investigator.

What happens there is a challenge to you to try and keep up, and a promise that it will make sense later. In addition, I know that this world looks a certain way. I know people are going to dress a certain way. I also know that it is going to expect some things of me. It’s good if the first scene gives the audience a difficulty level. It doesn’t have to be high difficulty. Sometimes your first scene says this is going to be an easy play. Let people know what the difficulty is with that first scene.

John August: As you’re talking about that, I’m now recalling that scene. It works really well and it’s setting up that this is a mystery story, that there’s going to be questions of identity and existential issues here. Even though you don’t know that it’s necessarily a science-fiction world it’s a pretty grounded science-fiction, if it is a science-fiction world, so all these things are really important.
Now Craig, an experience I’ve had sometimes reading a friend’s script or someone I’m working with’s script is that I will really enjoy the movie that they’ve written, but I’ll come back and say, “This is not your first scene. You have written a first scene that does not actually match your movie and does not actually help your movie.” It’s a weird thing to run into, but I often find that some scripts I really like, they just don’t start right, they start on the wrong beat, or as you dig deeper, you find that the writer wrote that scene first, but then they kind of wrote a different movie, and they need to write a new first scene that actually helps set up the movie they actually really wrote. Is that a common experience you’ve had?

Craig Mazin: I’ve noticed this. I think sometimes it’s hard to hit that mark, because nothing else has been written yet, so it’s your first swing. Sometimes the first scene suffers from a sense of, oh, you’ve been thinking about this as a short film for about seven years and you finally got the nerve worked up to finish it, but the problem is this thing feels like it’s a seven-year-long thoughtful short film, and then the rest of it is just a movie. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes there’s a sense that the opening is fine, but it is not special. The opening is our chance to be brave. I think that we have two moments in movies, or in any particular episode of television, where the audience will forgive us a lot. It’s at the very beginning and it’s at the very end. In the middle you’ve got to stay in between the lines on the road, but in the beginning and the end you get to have fun.

John August: Let’s talk about why you have that special relationship with the audience at the start, because they’ve deliberately sat down to watch the thing that you’ve created. If they’re going into a movie theater to watch it there, they’ve put forth a lot of effort. They bought a ticket. They’ve driven themselves to that theater. They’re going to probably watch your whole movie, whether they love it or they don’t love it. In those first minutes, they really, really, really want to love what you’re giving them. Their guards are down. In TV they could flip away more easily, so there’s some issues there, but their expectations are very malleable at that start. You really can take them anywhere. You get a lot of things for free. They come in with a bit of trust. If you can honor that trust and honor that expectation and get them to keep trusting you, they’re going to go on your story. If you don’t set that hook well, they may just wander off and they may never really fully engage with the story you’re trying to tell.

Craig Mazin: Yeah. They’re hungry at the beginning. They’re hungry. Don’t just immediately shove all the food down their throat. You can have some fun here. You know that they want to feel that anticipation. When you go to a concert and there’s the opening act, and then they’re done and they leave, and then the PA system is playing just songs and you’re waiting, and then the lights go down. It’s not like the lights go down and then the band comes out, “Here we are! Let’s go!” and then they immediately start a song. There’s usually some sort of wah.

They get you ready. That can go on for a while, because everybody knows, oh my god it’s happening. Let it be happening, don’t let it just happen, if that makes sense.

John August: Yeah. Let’s talk about some of our own writing and our own opening scenes and what our experience was for this. I’m going back, thinking back to Chernobyl. Chernobyl, if I recall correctly, opens with an old woman and a cow.

Craig Mazin: That is how Episode Four or Three opens.

John August: That’s right. It was later on. It’s not the very first image of it. What is the first image of the first episode?

Craig Mazin: The first image of the first episode is a couch with an afghan type thing of a deer, and we hear a man talking. We actually hear his voice before we ever see anything.

John August: Yeah. We don’t realize at the time it’s going to be a Stuart Special, that we are setting up a thing, the past, and that we’re going to be jumping back and forth. I think the reason why I was remembering that cow scene is that it’s an example of we don’t have context for who these characters are, why what’s happening is happening. Are these characters going to be important? No, not really. You were just setting up the question of that episode and that world and what kind of story this episode is going to be. I thought it just worked really well.

Craig Mazin: Thank you. Every episode needs its own beginning. I’m pretty sure that’s beginning of Episode Four. It’s sad that it’s all mushing together now. That was designed to be a bit confusing, because we don’t know what exactly this guy is doing there, and we’re not sure what his orders are, and we definitely aren’t sure what her deal is, and we don’t know he’s just standing there, and so this goes on. Then at the end of it we know. We know a lot. That is a standalone intro, which we didn’t do much of, and generally I don’t. Sometimes it’s okay to make this opening its own thing that announces something about the world, and then we catch up to the people that we know and care about. We think, oh, do they know that they’re in a world where that other thing is happening? Certainly one way to go.

John August: Completely analogous situation is the opening of the Charlie’s Angels movie. Of course, again, you’re establishing a place and a time and a world, except that it’s in a very candy-colored … We’re in a plane and we see all these characters. We see LL Cool J is the first recognizable star that we see. There’s clearly some sort of heist thing happening. It’s only as the sequence plays on that we realize, oh, the Angels were actually part of this the entire time and this is this elaborate sequence to get this guy, this terrorist off this plane before he does something dastardly. That sequence was important to establish the tone and feeling of this movie and what the rules are of this movie and the heightened gravity-optional nature of this movie and what it’s going to feel like to watch this movie. Nothing that actually happens in that becomes important for the plot. It’s just introducing you to who the Angels are in a very general sense, the fact that they could go into slow motion at any point if it’s glamorous, and just how it feels. It was one of the only sequences that made it all the way through from very early, before I came onboard to the movie, through to the end, because it just felt like a good, goofy, fun start to this franchise.

Craig Mazin: With a punchline. I always feel like your openings need punchlines. It’s weird to say, okay, the punchline of the opening of the first episode of Chernobyl is a man hangs himself, but that’s the punchline in the sense of there’s a surprise end. Similarly, the old woman and the cow, you’re pretty sure that soldier is going to shoot her and he doesn’t shoot her. He shoots the cow. Punchline. You need to land something surprising. If you can, then the additional benefit you get from your opening is you’re putting the audience on alert that you are one step ahead of them so far. This is a good thing. Now they’re leaning in. They’re trying to see what comes next, but also they are aware that you’re not just going to feed them straight up stuff, which is good.

John August: The most difficult opening sequence I ever did was Big Fish. I’m trying to establish so many things. I’m establishing two different worlds, a real world and a story world, that there are two protagonists, and that both of them have storytelling power. Getting through those first eight pages of Big Fish and setting up the storytelling dynamic of Big Fish was really, really tough, yet crucial. That was the case where if I didn’t have that opening sequence, the movie just couldn’t have worked, because you wouldn’t know what to follow and what to pay attention to.

Craig Mazin: This is kind of high anxiety time. I like that you care. I think sometimes when I read these scripts, and we’ve said I think the word precious real estate about, or phrase, a thousand times, you need to nail it. You’ve got to make that opening fascinating so that the audience says, “I will keep watching.” If it’s just kind of meh, then you could’ve done anything there. The moment you have an opening, you have limited what can come next. There’s a narrow possibility for what comes next.

John August: You build a funnel.

Craig Mazin: You make a funnel, a logical funnel, but not in the beginning. In the beginning there’s no funnel. You can do anything. If you don’t do anything interesting I don’t see why people would think, “This will get better.” It won’t.

John August: No. Weirdly, it is probably the scene or sequence that as writers we spend the most time looking at, just because by nature we’re going to end up rereading it and tweaking it a zillion times. I do wonder if sometimes, let’s just talk process here, at what point do you figure out that opening scene versus figuring out everything else in your story? Sometimes I think the best approach would be to figure out where your story overall wants to go before you write that opening scene, because so often you can be trapped in that opening scene and love that opening scene, but it’s not actually doing the best job possible establishing the rest of the things you want to do in your story.

Craig Mazin: 100%. If you do know what your end is, it would be lovely if you had that in mind when you wrote your beginning. Certainly I did when I did Chernobyl, because it works like Pink Floyd’s The Wall album. It begins with, I think it’s maybe David Gilmore saying, “Where we came in,” and then the song starts and then that album happens, and at the very end you hear him say, “Isn’t this where?” You go, “Ah, aha!” in a very Pink Floyd cool way. I see what you did there, Pink Floyd. I like that. I like the sense that you catch up and you complete the circle. It doesn’t have to be temporal like that. It can just be commentary. It can be somebody’s face ending in a similar position to how it began.

Here’s an example. Social Network. Opening scene, fantastic, and down to nothing but dialogue and performance, two people sitting and talking. That’s it. Excellently written and excellently performed and excellently shot. At the very, very end of the movie, he goes back to looking at that girl’s profile on Facebook. She is not mentioned or referred to at any other time. It’s just the beginning and then the end, and you go, “Oh man, this guy.” That’s how you can think about these things. The beginning is the end. The end is the beginning. Know them both. It will help you define that opening scene much, much more sharply.

John August: Cool. Now as we look at Three Page Challenges going forward, let’s also try to remember to ask that question in terms of like what movie do we think this opening scene is setting up, because that’s really a fundamental question. We’ve talked so much about how those first three pages, that first opening scene is so crucial to getting people to read more of your script, but let’s also be thinking about what movie we think it’s actually establishing because we have strong expectations off the start of that. Just a note for ourselves. We will start, try to think about how those opening scenes are setting our expectation for the rest of the movie that we’re not reading.

Let’s talk about transitions, because it’s an important part of screenwriting that we really haven’t touched on so much over our 88 episodes.

Craig Mazin: One thing that we should probably say right off the bat is that there are people out there in the screenwriting advice world who spread this nonsense that writers shouldn’t direct on the page, “Don’t tell the director what to do.” Oh, please! We’re not selling screenplays to directors. Directors aren’t hiring us to write. We’re writing screenplays for people to read, so that they can see a movie. Part of our intention when we write screenplays is to show what the movie should look like. The director doesn’t have to do what you say on the page, but you know what? I find that they tend to appreciate that you’ve written with transitions in mind, because it’s really important to them. Frankly, if you don’t write with transitions in mind, some directors aren’t going to notice and they’re just going to shoot what you wrote and then it won’t connect. Transitions are a super important part of moving from one scene to the next so you don’t feel like you’re just dragging your feet through a swamp of story, but rather being propelled forward through it.

John August: Let’s clarify some terms. There’s two things we mean when we talk about transitions. One is literally just the all uppercase on the right hand margin of the page, CUT TO or TRANSITION TO or FADE TO or CROSS-FADE TO. That is the element of transition. That is a physical thing that exists in the syntax of screenwriting. We’re only half talking about that. That’s a way of indicating that you are moving to something new. Most modern screenplays don’t use CUT TOs after every scene. That’s a thing that you were originally taught to do. You can tell first-time screenwriters because they will always use a CUT TO. In most cases you won’t really use a CUT TO. In personal life, I only use CUT TO if I have to really show that it’s a hard cut from something to another thing, to really show that I’m breaking time and space to go to this next thing. Usually you won’t do that. Usually what you’ll do is … You want a scene to flow into the next scene. That’s really what I think we should talk about today is how do you get that feeling of we’re in this scene, and now we’re moving into the next scene, and there’s a reason why we left that scene at this moment, why we’re coming into this scene at this moment.

Craig Mazin: Yeah. This is a very nuts and bolts craft thing. They’re techniques. I wrote down a few techniques, which I’ll run through, and you tell me what you think.

John August: Great.

Craig Mazin: The first and the easiest one is size. A size transition is to go from a very tight shot to a super wide shot, or to go from a very wide shot to a super close shot. Sometimes you can even be in a medium shot where two people are talking, and then the next thing you see is a close-up of a watch, and then we’re into a scene where somebody is checking the time. Just using the juxtaposition of size in and of itself helps feel like things are happening and they’re connected in their own way.

John August: Let’s talk about what that actually looks like on the page, because you’re not describing every shot in a movie, obviously. If you were in a dialogue situation where it was two characters talking, and they’d been talking for awhile, the assumption is that you are going to get into some fairly close coverage there. If it’s just it’s about those two people, then if your next shot is described as a giant panorama of something something something, that is a big size transition. Similarly, if you were to cut to the close-up of the watch, or some fine little detailed thing, then we’d see, okay, that’s a huge size transition. Even if you’re not describing what that shot was on the outside, we have a sense of relative scales there. You don’t have to necessarily draw our attention to it, because we’ll notice that something different has happened.

Craig Mazin: It will help your reader see your movie instead of read it. It’s just real simple things like that. Another simple one is music or sound. There’s nothing wrong with calling out a piece of music. It doesn’t have to even be a specific song. You may just say, okay, like we’re looking at two cops and they’re in the break room, they’re chitchatting, and then over the sound of hip-hop we are, and now we’re South Central LA, rolling down Crenshaw, just to help the reader understand there’s a connection here. Similarly, you can use sounds. Two people are talking quietly about what needs to happen, and the next thing we hear is a siren. By the way, you can pre-lap that audio, or you can have it just be a hard cut. Something that jolts us. In a weird way, the funny thing about transitions is they’re almost anti-transitional at times, because the point is you want people to understand I’m in a new place at a new time. If it all just flows together like mush, it’s almost too transitional.

John August: Absolutely. There are times where we want that really smooth, legato flow from one thing to the next thing, and there’s times where you want big, giant, abrupt things, like that cliché flashbulb, to tell us we are at a new place at a new time, and there’s brand new information going to be coming your way.

Craig Mazin: Exactly. One cool thing you can do, I wouldn’t overdo it, but it’s fun here and there, is what I call a misdirect transition. A guy says, “They’ll never see us coming,” or whatever, and he’s got a gun. We go to a close-up, bullets going into the gun. Pull back to reveal, interior, it’s another character loading a gun.

John August: Exactly.

Craig Mazin: Little tricks, basically.

John August: Yeah. Again, that’s a thing where if you did that three times in a movie, you’d be golden. If you did that 10 times in a movie, we would want to strangle you.

Craig Mazin: Probably, unless it was just like everything was so clever and it’s like a, I don’t know, a Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels kind of movie or something.

John August: Yeah. I was going to say the Asian action films might do that more often. Yeah, if that’s your style, then it’s going to work, but otherwise it’s going to probably feel too much. A similar related thing is Archer does these amazing transitions from scene to scene where a character will, they’ll pre-lap the character. They will pull a line of dialogue up above the cut, that seems to be about the scene that you’re in, but it’s actually about a completely different moment that’s happening on the other side of the scene. It’s very clever how they do it. That’s a way of misdirecting you comedically from what you thought you were talking about to something completely different.

Craig Mazin: Exactly. Exactly. I suppose the most conventional transition is the pre-lapped audio. Two people say, “That didn’t go very well.” The next shot is a courthouse. Over the courthouse we see, “Everyone please come to order.” It’s the most standard TV-ish thing, but it helps you move at least inside and outside in ways that are not so clunky. Another tricky dialogue method is the question-and-answer transition.

John August: Exactly.

Craig Mazin: Where someone will say, “Someone isn’t telling us the truth,” and the next shot is a woman smiling. It doesn’t even have to be a dialogue answer, in other words, but just that the transition itself is giving us information.

John August: That’s very much a TV procedural kind of thing. That’s a thing you would see in Law & Order where the, “We need to find a witness who can,” and then the next shot is going to be the witness who can do that, or like, “This is the question we need to have answered.” You ask a question on one side of the cut and you come to a possible answer on the other side of the cut.

Craig Mazin: Right. “Does anyone know where Luke is?” Cut. A guy on a boat, drunk.

John August: In a very general sense, what you’re trying to do as you end a scene is you’re trying to put the reader’s head, and really the viewer’s head, in a place where they have a certain image in their head, and so when you come to the far side of that cut, that is changed or that is addressed in some meaningful way. Thematic cuts are another common way of doing this. A classic is Lawrence of Arabia, the match that transitions to the sunset. That is a fire. There’s fire on both sides of the cut. You’re thinking fire, and then you see this giant image of a fiery sun. That is a natural transition. Sometimes you’ll do that with imagery. Sometimes you’ll do that with a word that matches. Sometimes you’ll do it with a question that seems to be answered on the far side. Those are natural ways to get people across the bridge there.

Craig Mazin: Yeah. The ones we’ve gone through here are very rudimentary. They’re generic, because we’re discussing them in generic terms. Find your own and find ones that are meaningful to you and your story, but really do make sure as you’re writing that you’re not just bone-on-bone here, that there’s something that helps move us through, little tiny things. It makes an enormous difference. It really, really does. Frankly, it puts you in greater control over the movie that will eventually exist.

John August: I would agree. Another thing I would stress is that you probably want to save your powder a bit, and use those big transitional moments for big transitional moments. Don’t paint a big, giant landscape of something if it’s not an important moment that we’re going to something new. Don’t always give us those big transitions. Some things should be straight, simple cuts, where we’re just getting from one thing to the next, so that when we do the bigger thing, we as the reader will notice, okay, something big and different has changed here.

When you’re reading through scripts, after awhile … The first couple scripts you read, you probably read every word, because it’s all a new form to you, but after you’ve read like 30 scripts, you recognize that you stop actually reading the INT/EXT lines basically. They just skip past you. You can sometimes jump back to them if you’re curious, but you’re really just looking for the flow of things, and so most times you’re just jumping over that. You don’t really know or care where you are. Even though we tell people to be very specific in those things and give us those details, a lot of times people aren’t going to read those. They’re just going to read the first line of action that happens after the scene header, if you’re lucky. Save those bigger moments for the bigger moments that you really need that reader to stop and slow down and pay attention to the fact that we are in a new place, a new time, this is a new section of the movie.

Craig Mazin: Well said. Well said.

John August: Great.

All right, we are back in the present, which in our case is 2021, but by the time you’re listening to this it’s 2022. It’s time for our One Cool Things.

Craig forgot to do a One Cool Thing. He forgot to have a One Cool Thing, so he’s hopping on a phone call while Megana and I are going to do our One Cool Things.

My One Cool Thing is the Texas sharpshooter fallacy. I love me a good fallacy. I think I’d heard of this fallacy, but never had it described to me before. Basically it’s why, when you have a whole bunch of data and you are looking for patterns in the data, you can find things that really aren’t there. The actual description of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy is like, “Oh wow, look, this person hits the bullseye every time.” If you’re shooting at a barn, basically if you shoot first and then paint the target afterwards, you’re going to find patterns there that aren’t really there. I just really like that as an idea.

It reminded me of, this is something that Megana knows what I’m talking about, but I’m going to be a little vague here, I went in to pitch a project at a studio or a streamer, and they said, “Oh, we decided looking at the data we no longer do that genre of project, because it’s not successful.” I’m 100% convinced it’s really a Texas sharpshooter fallacy, that basically they looked at all their data and said, “Oh, this thing doesn’t work for us,” but I think they’re really after the fact trying to find a pattern for a couple failures that really don’t make sense.

Megana Rao: Just so I’m clear, because I haven’t heard of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy, so it’s that you paint the target after you already have …

John August: Yeah, basically you’ve taken all the shots. Basically you have all the data there, and then you are trying to paint the target after the fact. You’re basically picking a small subset of the data to describe what the bigger thing is, and you’re saying, “Oh, this is the finding, the conclusion we’ve had,” but you didn’t actually have a hypothesis, a thesis going into it, so you weren’t really looking for anything. You noticed something and said, “This must be significant.” It’s a problem whenever you have a large big batch of data, it’s very likely that you’re going to some subset of the data that indicates a certain thing, but if you weren’t actually systematically looking for that thing, it’s not probably a valid result.

Megana Rao: It’s how you guys talk about screenwriting structure, screenwriting books.

John August: Oh yeah, absolutely, because if you’re looking at all these things and you’re trying to say, “These are the patterns that are in there,” it’s like, are they really the patterns that are in there or are you basically just deciding that’s a thing you’re going to look for, describe being in there, but that was never the intention, that was never the actual goal behind it. When this studio or streamer says, “Oh, this genre does not perform well for us,” it’s like, okay, did you go through and systematically say, “Okay, let’s take a look at all of the examples of this genre we’ve ever done,” and then seeing how they performed, or you’re just saying, “Of the five biggest disappointments of movies we’ve made in the last couple years, were they in the genre?” You’re being choosy with what data you’re letting in and letting out of that criteria.

Megana Rao: Very cool.

John August: Now since Craig doesn’t have a One Cool Thing, Megana, can you pinch hit for him?

Megana Rao: Yes. In our last bonus segment where we talked about New Years Resolutions, I talked about data privacy and data rights and trying to be more digitally hygienic. My One Cool Thing is this movie Ron’s Gone Wrong, which is delightful and funny and has a lot of themes about data privacy that I think are accessible and rendered in a family-fun way.

John August: Cool. I saw that mostly [inaudible 00:57:26] bus board advertisements. I never actually saw a trailer for it. When I actually looked at the trailer for it, it looks delightful and definitely worth checking out. Now I see it’s on all the … I got a screener for it, so I know that they’re going for the typical awards for it.

Megana Rao: Yeah. It felt really fresh. Zach Galifianakis voices the robot, and he has this really flat affect that is so funny. I was just watching it by myself and chortling, laughing, chuckling. It’s a fun movie.

John August: Cool. Ron’s Gone Wrong.

Megana Rao: Yep, Ron’s Gone Wrong. I think it’s on Disney Plus and some other places too.

John August: Fantastic. That was our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with one segment produced by Stuart Friedel, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig Mazin: Of course.

John August: Our outro’s by Henry Adler. 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 sometimes @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. We have T-shirts and hoodies and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for the episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net. You’ll get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on getting out of a conversation. Craig and Megana, thank you so much.

Craig Mazin: Thank you guys.

Megana Rao: Thank you.

John August: All right, Craig, thinking back to times when you were at a party with actual people around you … Actually that last time I think I saw you in a party situation was at a fundraiser for Mark Kelly, who was running at that time for Senate in Arizona. That was a party filled with people I knew and some people I was just getting to know, but it was a lot of small conversations, and I needed to get into and out of those conversations. Is that an experience you recall from that night?

Craig Mazin: Sure. That’s a pretty common thing. You’re at a party and you start talking to people, and then sometimes it gets boring or it gets awkward or you run out of things to say. I try the best I can to not think about who else I should be talking to. I try as best I can to be as present as possible for the person I’m talking to, no matter who they are, because the notion of, “Oh I should be talking to that person,” or, “That person would be more fun to talk to,” oftentimes turns into utter disappointment anyway. My general rule is if I’m enjoying a conversation with somebody, whether it’s the most important person at the party or a waiter, I’m going to keep talking to them because it’s rare enough to enjoy a conversation.

If things are going a bit boring or slow or sluggish and it seems like the other person doesn’t feel the same, or maybe does, either way, that’s a great time to just simply say, “You know what? I’m going to go grab myself a drink, but I’ll be back around,” or I’ll say, “I’m going to run to the restroom,” or I’ll say, “I just got to go find my wife.” That’s always a good thing if your spouse, partner is there, or I’ll somebody and be like, “Oh my gosh, I promised that person I would catch up with them. I do have to, but this was so much fun talking to you.” I’ll say something like that. Of all the things I have shame on, and there are so many, that’s not one of them, and I try not to calculate how to have conversations at parties.

John August: I would say I’ve gotten much better at this over the years and I’ve done all the techniques that you described, and certainly having someone that you can use an excuse to go on to the next thing is great. The other technique is the handoff, which is basically someone who’s passed, who you’ve already had a conversation with or you know, you can say, “Oh hey, have you met Bill?” Then you introduce the two of them and then you can make your exit out of there. That can be a very useful way out of it. I will say this, honestly doing a lot of the WGA stuff where I’d be in these rooms where I’d have to have 50 conversations over the course of an evening, I got much better at basically being very present in a conversation and giving 100% full attention. It was clear I’d addressed that issue. I could just really make a clean exit, like, “It was great talking with you. Thanks for coming out,” and move on to the next thing. That’s more of a work function than a social function. It feels honest that I’m not looking for an excuse and basically saying, “This was great. I value our conversation. Now I’m taking two steps over this direction.”

Megana Rao: Are you guys sure that you want to be giving away all of your secrets for-

Craig Mazin: It’s not really a secret. I’ll tell people. I’m just like, “Yeah.” Look, it’s not like if I say I have to go to the bathroom at a party, I don’t want people to think, “Oh, he hates me now.” Sometimes I really have to pee. If they don’t see me go, if I don’t leave and go to the … By the way, when I say I have to go to the bathroom, I always go. I don’t not go. That would be horrible.

John August: Yeah, even if it’s just to shut the door and check his phone for a few minutes, he will go to the bathroom.

Craig Mazin: By the way, I’ll do that sometimes anyway. When I’m at a party, at some point I’ll hit a little bit of an overload. I’ll go to the restroom, close the door. It’s like when I’m on a plane. Sometimes I’ll do that, just to be alone. Just for one lovely minute I’m alone. It’s so nice. I try and be as honest as I can. When there are situations like when we would do live shows, after the show is over, there’d be a lineup of people that want to talk to us. They all have comments or questions, or sometimes they want a selfie or whatever it is. We’ll do those things, and I have no problem at some point saying, “I want to answer some of their questions too, but thank you for coming up. I really appreciate it,” so that I can just say the truth, which is I have a limited amount of time and I have to talk to these people too. The same thing would happen if I were on a panel at the Writers Guild, which occasionally I have done. Same deal. Afterwards you talk to people. At large parties, honestly I have no problem, if I get cornered by somebody and they’re awesome, I’ll talk to them all night. I don’t care. All night. I do not care. I have no FOMO when it comes to party conversations. 99% of them are just air.
What about you, Megana? It sounds like you don’t want to give away your secrets, but how do you handle let’s just say the mixing, the mixing around?

Megana Rao: Yeah, I think the same bathroom, drink technique. What I’m more curious to hear about is, I don’t want to shame anyone else or give away too many details, but the situation if you’re at a dinner party or a place where you’re more fixed, and the conversation is just unbearably boring, like you’re hearing about somebody’s pandemic hobbies that are just … I’m sorry, I don’t want to hear about anybody making sourdough starter. I don’t care. I have no interest in it. How do I transition out of that conversation where I can’t easily move around?

John August: It’s tough when you’re locked in place and you didn’t actually have a choice or you just made a wrong choice about who you sat down next to. It’s always tough, because you don’t know if it’s the kind of situation where there’s going to be one conversation for the table or if it’s going to be like there’s a conversation on your left and a conversation on your right, and if you turn to your left, then you’re shutting out the person on your right. It’s tough. I find myself trying to ask a question that will just get us off the horrible track, if possible.

Craig Mazin: Some people are nothing but horrible track generators. It doesn’t matter what you say to them. They will ruin everything with their monotonous, banal point of view, their rambling stories that go nowhere. This is why if there’s something where I’m fixed in position, a dinner party for example, I need to know that I know enough people there where I can’t get stuck alone with somebody that’s not doing it for me. Ideally there’s somebody I know will sit next to me. You have to protect yourself going into those situations. If you are single, you still need a friend. That friend can be somebody that you’re interested in. It can be somebody that’s just friend friend. It doesn’t matter. You need somebody you can anchor yourself to, who can help you and rescue you. Also if I get invited to a dinner party and I get stuck next to a super boring person, that goes into my ledger, and I’m not going back there ever again. Life is too short.

By the way, I will also just leave. I’ll leave. I don’t care. I’ll leave, because here’s the thing, everybody’s got limited time. I’m not saying because we’re all busy. I’m saying we’re going to die. Sitting next to boring people all night while other people are having fun five feet away from you, it’s brutal. No, I’ll just fucking go. I don’t care, because if I go home, I can do all sorts of things that are wonderful. I have video games and puzzles and television that I can catch up on. You know I’m really down to it if I’m doing that. I don’t have to stay there. Why? You know what? Shame on the party host, the dinner party host, for putting anyone at that table that that’s boring. The only time that I honestly get stuck is if sometimes if Melissa says in advance to me, “You need to do the following thing.” I’ll say, “Okay,” but she’ll be there, so I’ll be fine.

John August: Many dinner parties will separate spouses so that you have-

Craig Mazin: Nope. I don’t do that. I don’t do it. By the way, everyone knows. I’m sort of famous in my little town for not showing up, for leaving early, for going, “I don’t do crap like that,” because I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I don’t like small talk. I like big talk. I like to really get into it with people. I don’t just bland-

John August: Two things that I really respect about my husband is first off he’s the only person I’ve seen who can in real life click the ignore button, where someone is trying to engage with him, and I see this floating ignore button, he’s hitting that button, it’s like, “You don’t exist to me.” I love that he’s able to do that. The other thing is he’s very honest about, “We don’t want to go to your dinner for this charity we support. We will write a check. We’re delighted to write you a check. I have no interest in actually going to the event.” Where I can happily go to the political fundraisers all the time, he’s just like, “No, I don’t want to do it. I’m not going to do it.” I respect that. He is the Craig Mazin of our relationship on that whole-

Craig Mazin: By the way, they don’t want you at the dinner anyway. They just want your money. If you give them money and don’t show up to the dinner, you’ve given them extra money, the money that they would’ve had to spend to feed you. No one cares. I’ve been a host of multiple political fundraisers that I did not show up to.

John August: Yeah. There was one at your house, which was great, but it did feel like a rare exception for us to be at your house to do this thing.

Craig Mazin: Definitely, yeah. That was Beto O’Rourke. That was way, way early in his run, so early that indeed he was showing up to the likes of my house. It was smallish, but it was nice and we had fun people there. It was an interesting conversation. That was that. As things have gotten bigger and larger and so on and so forth, I just … God bless Billy Ray, our colleague Billy Ray, that does a lot of fundraising and is always collaring me for that stuff. Sometimes I’ll end up with my name on the hosting … By the way, so-

John August: You’re not going.

Craig Mazin: No. People, if you ever get an invitation to a political fundraiser and it lists a bunch of hosts, that doesn’t mean that they’re all sitting there figuring out who’s going to cook what. It means they all gave a certain amount of money. That’s what that means. That’s all it means.

John August: All right. Let’s transition to talking about not in-person gatherings, but text threads and text messages and that stuff, and how you end a text conversation, because I’ve found myself sometimes where we’ve been texting back and forth for half an hour, and sometimes it can be awkward, it’s like who’s going to end the conversation? My default move is the tap back, which is basically the thumbs up, the whatever, saying that’s it and it’s mentioned, and this conversation is done here. Is that what everyone else is doing? Megana, what are you doing when a text conversation has run its course and you need to make it clear that I’m not going to be answering your next text?

Megana Rao: I feel like either that or sometimes, “Hey, I’m about to hop in the shower, but I’ll answer when I’m back out.” I think the cadence with millennials is a little bit different. It’s fine if somebody doesn’t respond to my text for days or hours. I don’t know, it just doesn’t bother me and it’s fine if the conversation fades.

John August: Being left on read doesn’t kill you?

Megana Rao: If it’s just a friend, a close friend that I’m texting or a friend that I’m catching up with, no.

Craig Mazin: Maybe I’m a millennial, because I feel like that’s the whole point of text is … Mostly. Sometimes I will think, “Oh, I feel like I’ve run out of things to say here,” but I don’t want to send some sort of formal, “It was lovely chatting.” Then I’ll think, “Will they be upset?” Then I remember, no, no one gives a shit, because if I send you a text in a conversation, and the thing doesn’t ping back, I’m not upset. I’m relieved. It’s over. We can all move on.

Megana Rao: It’s almost more awkward if … The example that I even gave before is not something that I do. It’s something that some friends will do to me. It’s more awkward if you acknowledge that the conversation is ending.

Craig Mazin: Yeah, like can’t we just be cas and just talk to each other and not have to worry about that? Text to me, sometimes for fun, what I will do is I’ll just go, “Byee.”

John August: Yeah, I’ve gotten a byee.

Craig Mazin: I love byeeee. That’s fun. I like to do that. Basically every text conversation I have at some point will devolve into GIFs and then it’s over.

John August: Yeah. Fair choices.

Megana Rao: I do feel that I have acquired a very specific skill of knowing exactly when John is done talking, in person, via email, or via text.

John August: My sentences do get shorter. It goes down from three sentences to one sentence to two words and then the conversation’s done. Even in emails I do find it sometimes there’s a bounce back and forth, and I thank you, you thank me, and then it’s all resolved, because in text it’s not quite a conversation, it’s not quite an email conversation, it’s just this weird middle ground and you don’t quite know whether you’re done talking. Megana, do you find it happens in Slack? I don’t as much, but what are you finding?

Megana Rao: You and I aren’t casually texting that much. I only text you when I really need your attention. We casually Slack sometimes. That’s the same thing where-

Craig Mazin: Sounds gross.

Megana Rao: I’m in communication with John all the time, so I don’t really think of us having a cadence there, because I’m talking to you at all times of the day.

John August: Basically.

Craig Mazin: I feel like even though Bo and I are together every day, I probably text with her more than talk. We text all the time. Oh yeah. We’re besties. We’re texties. We’re like beep beep beep beep beep GIF lol. Yeah, we’re two 12-year-old girls. It’s wonderful.

John August: The advantage of texting or Slack or whatever is that you can also scroll back and get to that thing. If I said something to Megana in person, she’d have to remember it, but if I text it to her, then it’s there for her to be able to look back at and confirm.

Megana Rao: I do remember everything you say, but yes, I hear your point.

John August: You consult with everyone else about, “What did John actually mean when he said that thing?” Now if you don’t mind, I got to go to the bathroom. It’s been great talking with you both.

Craig Mazin: Byee.

John August: Byee.

Megana Rao: Bye.

Links:

• Blog post on Transitions
• Scriptnotes Episode, 446: Back to Basics at 03:57 of this episode
• Scriptnotes Episode, 493: Opening Scenes at 26:06 of this episode
• Scriptnotes Episode, 89: Writing Effective Transitions at 44:12 of this episode
• A Trip to the Moon the 1902 Science Fiction Film by Georges Méliès
• The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy
• Ron’s Gone Wrong
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Henry Adler (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, (with a segment produced by Stuart Friedel!) and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is episode 730 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

This week, Craig and I are still both off on our adventures, but fingers crossed we should be back in person with a normal episode next week. Today I’m here with producer Drew Marquardt. Hey, Drew.

Drew Marquardt: Hey, John.

John: I also haven’t seen you for a bit either because I’ve been in negotiations with the Writers Guild and then on vacation before that, so it is nice to see your face again.

Drew: It’s really good to see you too. I’m excited for this episode too.

John: This episode reminds me of, you know that feeling where you haven’t been to the grocery store in a while and so you open the fridge and you’re like, “What can I actually eat in here?”

Drew: Yes.

John: That’s the feeling today because we were trying to assemble a meal from leftovers. Sometimes those turn out really tasty.

Drew: Oh, those leftover sandwiches that are just weird things that you don’t think go together, but they’re great.

John: Looking through the big folder, a thing which we had in that folder was this interview I did with the Northwest Screenwriters Guild. This was an event to promote the Scriptnotes book and do a Q&A with their members. It ended up being really great.

The Northwest Screenwriters Guild, we should say, isn’t a union, but rather a screenwriting community based out of the Pacific Northwest. It was just me. Craig wasn’t able to join for that one. What I remember about it is it started out as a standard promotional stop, but actually became a really good conversation about process and career. We asked them and they said yes, that we could take the audio from that and share it with our listeners.

Drew: I feel like I’ve heard you talk about the Scriptnotes book and tell your career story 4 billion times at this point. This is the first time I felt like I heard new things and really frank things. It was really exciting to listen to.

John: There were a lot of good questions, and so we’re putting this in here. It’s a little bit of a strange episode because it’s just people asking me questions, but it is about the thing that Scriptnotes is about, which is screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. It was also a good reminder that there’s folks out there for whom all of this is new, and they’re asking these questions for the first time. I enjoyed this conversation. Hopefully, you’ll still learn something new even if you listened to 729 episodes of Scriptnotes. Then we’re back at the end for a boilerplate and wrap up.

In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about sketch comedy writing because one of the real joys of being on the negotiating committee for the Writers Guild is we get a chance to talk with members who work across all sorts of different fields. Especially, we get a lot of writers from the East who work in sketch comedy and work right for shows like Last Week Tonight or the other big late night shows, SNL.

I had a great conversation over lunch with them about sketch comedy writing. I want to have them on the show to actually talk about it. I want to have a chat with you, Drew, about just the nature of sketch and, again, a segment of John didn’t know about how the process works and what the lingo is behind sketch comedy.

Drew: I’m into it.

John: Cool. Enjoy this conversation with the Northwest Screenwriters Guild. We’re back at the end and we’ll be back with a normal episode next week.

[music]

Mike Johnston: Hi. I’m Mike Johnston. I’m the vice president of the Northwest Screenwriters Guild, someone absolutely no one wants to listen to, so let me introduce our very special guest tonight so he can talk, the co-host of the podcast Scriptnotes, Mr. John August. Welcome, sir.

John: Hello. It’s really nice to be here.

Mike: Great.

John: I usually say hello and welcome. That’s my default greeting on Scriptnotes, but it’s nice to see a bunch of either faces or list names in boxes here for this. Mike, Lynelle, Scott, thank you so much for having me here at the Northwest Screenwriters Guild. I think what you’re setting up to do here is a lot of why I got involved in answering questions about screenwriting. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, was a journalism major in Iowa, and it wasn’t until I was in college that I actually found out there was such a thing as screenwriting. Everyone on the Zoom is ahead of where I was at.

When I was first finding out that there was such a thing called screenwriting, the only opportunity I had to read scripts was books would sometimes publish the screenplay that went with a movie. The first thing I read was Steven Soderbergh had a script for Sex, Lies, and Videotape along with a production diary. I was able to read through that and say, “Oh my gosh, this is everything they’re saying in the movie.” I was watching the videotape. Everything they’re saying in the movie is written down there on paper beforehand. It seems so obvious because we’ve all grown up reading plays in high school.

Of course, a movie is like a play, but with more stuff in it. I just didn’t know it until I actually saw it and read it for the first time. In discovering that there was such a thing as a screenplay and someone had to write that screenplay, I was like, “That’s a job I think I want to do.” I went to the library because this is pre-internet, and read as much as I could. I found out there were film programs.

I went to a summer program at Stanford where I learned the basics of shooting film and a little bit about cinematic storytelling. Then I applied to and got into USC for film school. For grad school, I did a two-year producing program. That’s where I read a thousand scripts and really got to understand what screenwriting was and how it worked.

I always remembered what it was like not to know these things. As the internet came up, IMDb asked me to write a weekly column about screenwriting. I was answering listener questions about screenwriting. I read a question about screenwriting. I started my own blog where I answered more of those questions and talked about what it was I was doing. Then almost 15 years ago, I started a podcast with Craig Mazin about screenwriting, and that was Scriptnotes.

Our imagined listener is the person who, maybe they’re working in the industry, but maybe they’re just the kid I was in Iowa who wants to know about screenwriting and wants to have good information about it. Since there weren’t other online communities for it, we were just trying to provide that answer for people with those questions and really talk about what the experience was like. For 15 years, we had a weekly podcast about it, talking everything from the craft to the business. That’s the instinct behind Scriptnotes, the book, the podcast, and why I like to talk to people online about what screenwriting is like.

Mike: Absolutely. I stopped screenwriting because the feedback I was getting, it was all these rules. Then I discovered your podcast. I’m like, “These guys get it.” It’s been a whole summer. I went back to the earliest episode I could get. I can easily say that I have listened to every single one of your podcasts.

John: Holy cow.

Mike: I highly recommend.

John: 714 or so episodes of Scriptnotes to listen to, plus some bonus segments along the way. It’s good you talk about the rules of screenwriting because one of the things when we set out to write a screenwriting book is that every book of screenwriting is basically, “Here are the rules, and follow these rules, and you will write a good screenplay.” We felt like we had to start with an introductory chapter that was just like, “Here are the rules of screenwriting. We came down to 20. I’ll just read you this 20, and then I’ll tell you why they’re all bullshit. These are the kind of rules you’re going to see all the time.

Your script must be 120 pages or fewer, 12-point career only. The inciting incident must happen by page 15. The first act break must be by page 30. The midpoint is really important. The second act break must be on page 90. No scene can be longer than three pages. You can only use day or night in scene headings. Never use cut to. It’s unnecessary filler. No camera directions unless you’re also the director. Don’t use “we see” or “we hear.” Use uppercase only for sound effects and character introductions.

No bold, italics, or asterisks. No punctuation in parentheticals. Don’t make asides to the reader in actual descriptions. If it can’t be seen or heard, cut it. Don’t use the words “is” or “walks.” Don’t use passive voice. No adverbs ending in -ly. No -ing verbs. No VoiceOver. Those are the 20. Those are the kinds of things we kept being forced at us as we were starting off as screenwriters.

These were like the shibboleths, like “Don’t do these things.” The truth is in reading good screenplays, you will find all these things in abundance. You’ll find a bunch of different ways and styles that writers write. There’s conventions, but there really aren’t rules to screenwriting. There’s just a way of conjuring the experience of watching a movie just with the words on the page. That’s all screenwriting is, but it’s a lot. That’s why it’s been 15 years of podcasting and a book.

Mike: Absolutely. Of all the guests that you have in there, writers, directors, who would you say was the best on theme?

John: On theme. I’m going to define theme loosely as the underlying thing about what a movie is really about and that it’s not about the plot. What is the question, the dramatic question that it’s trying to answer? Listen, Christopher Nolan was a fantasy guest. We were excited to have him on board, have him coming onto the podcast.

It was really interesting seeing his approach to writing something like Oppenheimer, which is basically, he had to do just a lot of digging to figure out what did the movie mean to him? What was it about Oppenheimer’s life that was so fascinating that he could key into that to keep coming back to? For him, it was sometimes really imagery to keep coming back to in the movie in terms of his discovery process that got us back into it.

Greta Gerwig talking about Lady Bird and what it meant to be a young woman who is both rebelling and also finding her place, and In Little Women, how she approached this book that she knew so deeply and so intimately, but she knew she needed to explore it differently on screen. Those are the kind of conversations that were so exciting to me to talk through.

Yes, on theme because you need to know what the movie is really about before you start writing it, but sometimes it’s also a discovery process. You write a draft and then you read it and other people read it and realize, “Oh, I thought it was about this, but it’s actually about that.” That becomes the unifying goal for the next draft.

Mike: Thank you. Was there a section that you wish you had more pages on structure, outlining, rewriting? Was there a section you really wanted to expand?

John: Yes. The initial draft of the book was 600 pages, and we were committed to 300 pages, so we bargained our way up to 333. One of the chapters that didn’t make the cut was called Getting Stuff Written. It was really about the process and procrastination and all the psychology of what it takes to actually get words on the paper. What I’m proud about with the chapter is that we were able to balance that.

Sometimes you need tough love and sometimes you need self-care. We talk you through what is the balance and how are you productive but not self-destructive? How are you finding ways to make writing rewarding and not just an absolute exhausting chore? That’s a chapter I’m really happy with.

Mike: Thank you. When you went through this whole process, did you find your opinions maybe evolved over time, and what might those be?

John: I think our opinions over the 15 years of listening to the podcast, some stuff has progressed. An example would be, I think 15 years ago, I believed in meritocracy more than I do now. I believed that, oh, if you’re a really good writer, it will work out and people will notice you and things will happen. I’ve just seen so often really great writers who the dots just don’t connect. I think I’m much more aware that there’s other factors that play there and some variables you can predict and some variables you can’t predict. That’s an example of how I’ve evolved over time.

I think it’s only because of talking with a bunch of other writers and, honestly, a bunch of listeners who are facing real challenges. I also think I had a very US bias in terms of screenwriting. I think I’m much more aware of the fact, if I’m answering a question, that the question might pertain to the US film and TV industry, but other industries just work a lot differently.

Even though the fundamentals of craft are going to be universal across all experiences, any answer I’m giving about the business itself is very going to be US-based, because that’s just the world I know. I also know very much a Hollywood world. I’ve done a lot of work with Sundance Institute and some other independent films, but I’m always surprised about hometown filmmaking that sometimes can be great and this was outside of my wheelhouse. I think I’m much more aware of the stuff I don’t know now. I’m very capable of saying, “but I don’t know, and there’s other good answers out there.”

Mike: Sure. Speaking of the business, a lot of people assume I write a great script, I get an agent, and then people pay me to write scripts for them. What’s the reality of what you do as a successful professional screenwriter? What’s your day like? What’s the stuff you’re doing besides screenwriting? How much hustle do you need to be a screenwriter?

John: I think that’s a great day to be asking that question because the episode we just put out today is by the two writers of KPop Demon Hunters, who are recent college graduates. There’s the prototype of just like, “I came out of college with a film degree and I hustled really hard and I made it and now I’m still working.” It’s good if you’re someone who’s in that cohort.

Great lessons in terms of just they made the most of their ramen days where they were broke and they just knew they were broke and that’s okay and they were scrambling. They were saying yes to everything they possibly could. They just worked and worked and worked and worked. They’re a great example of that kind of very classic story, which is that eventually people start passing around your scripts without you knowing they’re passing them around, and suddenly the heat just builds and it’s great. They made a lot of opportunities for themselves. They took advantage of it. That’s not universal.

There’s people who are entering into the business, switching from a different career, they’re coming in later, they’re doing different things. In those situations, there’s no one with classic way that it happens. I was talking to a guy at the Austin Film Festival who realized that he got tired of trying to pitch on things. It’s like, “I’m just going to write everything as a spec and I’m going to just sell specs.” He sold three comedy specs over the course of 18 months and got started and got things going. That does still happen.

I think my frustration has always been, even before I started the podcast, is there’s a lottery ticket mentality sometimes with screenwriting. It’s like, “I’m going to write this thing and they’re going to buy it for $1 million and then I’ll be set and then I’ll be working constantly.” That’s just not the experience. It’s amazing if you have a first sale, but more importantly is that you write something that people want to hire you to write other things because that’s the sustainable way that you keep going in this business for most writers.

Mike: You also mentioned pitches. I’m hearing and reading more pitches are getting bought. Is that something that entry-level people can take advantage of or is that really for established writers?

John: I think it can happen across the gamut. Listen, I think pitches are a good bellwether that there’s the businesses picking up some, which is great, and that people are excited to start developing new stuff and get things going. There are ideas that are very pitchable. There are ideas that you can see, like, “Oh, I get why that is a movie. I can see what the trailer would be for that. I can understand what the concept is there.” If you’re writing a thing that’s like that, then being able to pitch it is really important.

Is it a little tougher to get in the door to do that pitch if no one knows who the hell you are? Yes. Yet every day there’s examples of people who do that. That pitch might get you in to meet with a manager or to meet with other people. Again, they’re excited to hear the idea, but they’re only excited if the idea is matched with samples that they’re excited to read. Very few of these pitches are selling from people no one knows who didn’t also read a really great screenplay. It ultimately comes down to that.

Again, this episode that was dropped with the KPop Demon Hunters’ writers, they had a good, funny script. With that good, funny script, they could get in and pitch on KPop Demon Hunters. They weren’t just taking a random person off the street and hoping that they could do it.

Mike: Sure. You gave me a piece of advice once.

John: Oh, great.

Mike: It really stuck with me. I was hoping you could expand upon it. Getting notes is just part of the business. You told me, when I asked about getting notes, you said, “Everybody has an agenda.” Could you expand on that?

John: Absolutely. There’s actually a whole chapter we did expand on it in the book called Notes on Notes. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that’s just like the Mike Johnson perfect pitch for that. Whenever you get a note about a script, keep in mind that the note has an intention behind it. There’s something that was not working for the reader, and they wanted to let you know about it. Honor that. That’s great. It’s good that they’re giving you the note. Hear that they had an issue. Don’t take their solution as the solution.

If something isn’t working for them, your job is to figure out what it actually is. Sometimes they’re saying, “Oh, it’s this thing on page 15,” but is it really about the thing on page 15, or is it something that actually happened on page 12 that was knocking them off the track? Your job is to figure out what that is. Thank them for the note, and then see if you can explore and figure out what’s actually really happening there behind the note.

Some notes you just disagree with, or sometimes the person is not reading the same movie that you’re intending to make. You can have a good conversation where you can figure out what movie it is that they think they want to make. If they’re not the decision-maker, they’re not the person who’s writing the check, you don’t have to do their note.

If you get a consistent note, though, from several people, it’s especially worth paying attention to because something is not clicking right about the script. They’re not seeing the same movie that you’re seeing. That’s a good sign to dig in and figure out, is there a movie that matches their expectation that also meets what you are setting out to do?

Mike: Sometimes it comes out as a feedback. There’s three different pieces of feedback, and it’s all the same underlying problem.

John: Exactly.

Mike: They don’t know what it is, but they see the effect it’s having on your story.

John: Especially if you get notes like, “I got a little bored here. I got lost. I didn’t know what I was doing here. I found this repetitive,” those are signs that something before that was just not working right. You didn’t click and engage with them right because you’ll find that viewers and listeners and readers will forgive you a lot if they’re engaged and curious, but if you lose that engagement and that curiosity, they may keep flipping pages, but they’re not really reading it.

Mike: Sure. On the craft itself, think about earlier in your career: Go, Big Fish, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory; you’ve worked on a lot of stuff for a very long time. What are some lessons you wish you had learned earlier in your career?

John: This is probably not as much a craft thing as a business thing, but I’m really happy with the movies I’ve gotten made. Love them to death. There are a lot of movies that I did just as much work on that didn’t get made. Some of the frustration I feel is that there’s a whole bunch of my work and the movies I wrote in my head that don’t exist out there. I think some of that is my own fault because I made some bad choices.

I think I chased and pursued some projects that were interesting but weren’t really my passion. Sometimes they were paydays, but sometimes they were a chance to improve myself in certain ways. I know I wish I would have spent a little more time focusing on writing the things that I could do myself, that I could direct myself, that were very specific and that only I could do.

I think in some cases, I was writing movies that lots of people could have done, and I was happy to do it, but it wasn’t my calling in life to do it. Big Fish was a movie that I feel like only I could have done. It was very specific to my experience. I got to do the Broadway musical version of Big Fish, which was, again, very true to my experience and took 15 years of my life. It was a lot.

I don’t regret that, but there’s other small projects along the way, including some that made that were not the best use of my words and my time and my attention. That’s a thing as a professional writer, but even as someone on Zoom who’s an aspiring writer who’s aspiring to become a professional writer, think about what movie you most want to see exist in the world, and that’s the one you should be focusing your time and your attention on, not just the one you think like, “I could sell it maybe.” It’s not going to be good for you.

Mike: I have a couple of those. [laughs] I could describe your writing style because I’ve read your screenplays. It’s just clean, Hemingway-esque, short, muscular sentences, but voice. How would you describe your voice? I think a lot of writers struggle with what a voice is, so how would you describe yours?

John: It’s friendly. It’s not crazy, smart, intellectual. I want it to feel like I’m sitting right next to you in the theater watching it on a screen. That’s what I want it to feel like. If I say we see and we hear, that’s because I’m right there with you and this is what we’re watching together, and so we’re on this ride together. I’m never going to refer to the second person. I’m not going to say you see this, but we do this thing as an audience together. We see and feel this thing. It’s warm. It’s not especially cold and clinical.

I can go back to scripts I wrote to see if I could 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and I will have forgotten every single thing about it, but it will still read like me. Essentially, you do develop a voice at a certain point. There’s a fingerprint to it, and it does feel like me. The thing I was writing this afternoon versus 15 years ago, they’re very similar in terms of the words I’m choosing and what it looks like on the page. You develop a style.

I should say, if you want to read any of my stuff, at my website, johnaugust.com, there’s a library there. Basically, everything I’ve written, all the scripts I’ve written are there. If you’re curious to read Big Fish or Charlie and the Chocolate Factory or any of those things, that’s there.

Mike: Are you an outliner or right-by-the-seat-of-you-pants kind of guy?

John: Classically, I’m more of the pantser. I’m more figuring stuff out as I go and feeling my way through it. I do have a sense of what the overall shape of the story is, but I will write whatever scene is appealing to me right in the day. I’ll write out a sequence. I’ll do all that kind of stuff. Increasingly, I’ve been doing stuff where I’ve had to turn in an outline first, sometimes in animation or other projects. I resented it, but it is really handy when I can say, “Oh, actually, the story problems are solved, and now it’s just about the scene work.” I do appreciate that.

This project I’m working on right now, I turned in a 45-page outline. At that level, you really do know the story. There’s no mysteries. It was required stuff for this project, but it was really nice to be able to have conversations with the studio. They knew exactly what movie I was writing and so when I delivered them that movie, they weren’t surprised. They weren’t shocked. It was just a better version of what they had in the outline, and that felt good.

Mike: You’ve done original features, adaptations, big budget films. Is there crossovers or certain tips that you could give us on working with those different types of stories?

John: I do a lot of adaptations. Crucially, an adaptation, the idea is coming from someplace else, but it has to be a movie first and foremost. You really have to look at what does this story want to look like on a screen. That can mean radical transformation of the underlying narrative to make it fit in that two-hour block and with just what an audience approaches with expectation for a movie.

Big Fish is a collection of tiny little short stories. The book is very different from the movie, and yet it tracks, it makes sense. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory has every single word I could keep from the original book and get onto the big screen is there, but it’s actually structured a lot differently. In the movie version of it, Charlie is the antagonist and Willy Wonka is the protagonist. Willy Wonka is the character who changes throughout the course of it because I needed somebody to actually have an arc over the course of the movie.

Charlie Bucket starts the movie as a really good kid and ends as a really good kid. I needed to have him be the one who created the change and created the nervous breakdown that was happening for Willy Wonka. It’s incredibly close to the book and yet also incredibly different in terms of the character dynamics you’re seeing there in the story. It really depends on the needs of what it is.

The movies I’m writing as originals, let’s say that I’m writing them in original right now, and it’s great. It’s liberating. It’s sometimes a little scary not to have the backstop of the material you’re adapting.

Mike: Sure. What’s a piece of advice that you just keep giving writers again and again and again they keep ignoring?

John: I alluded to it first, which is basically write the movie you would pay money to see. I said the pay money to see is, I think, important because it distinguishes between commercial, like big C commercial, like, oh, everyone is going to go see that movie. What’s the movie that you actually would want to see? If you love low-budget grisly horror, you should write that because that’s a movie that you wish you could see, that you’d actually pay your money to see.

By the same token, don’t write a football movie if you don’t like football movies. So often, I see people who have spent a year of their life writing movies you would never go see this. There have been a couple times in my life where I’ve come in and done a couple weeks on a movie, it’s like, “I’m never going to see this movie. It’s just not my movie at all,” but as a craftsman, I was just coming in to help them out. I think most of the movies I’ve worked on are movies that I’m genuinely excited to plunk down my money on a Friday night to go see, and that is an important distinction.

Mike: Good advice. After all these years, what do you love about screenwriting?

John: I love the adventure. I love just the chance to just build out a whole new space in a world I’ve never seen before. My experience of writing is, I close my eyes, I put myself in the scene, I see everything, I hear everything, I let it loop through, and then I quickly scribble down what I saw and then go back through and do a clean version.

I’ve always been just very good at just imagining and imagining myself in a place. I love going to that place and imagining it. There’s a series I’m hoping to do next. If it happens, the good part of that part is I look at being in a place for years at a time writing those episodes, and that’s really exciting to me. It’s a little terrifying, but exciting to me to get that chance to stay in a place and watch it grow and develop and change and interact with the realities of production.

Mike: Fantastic. Good answer. You mind if we take a few questions?

John: Sure. Let’s go for it.

Mike: Lynelle, are you still with us?

Lynelle Souleiel: I’m still with you. We have a number of questions, but this one has stood out to me. This is from Luke Rankin. He says, “We’ve talked to good routines, but what bad habits were you able to kick that helped you become a better writer?”

John: It’s a great question. I’m going to fall back on a thing I’ve said other times before. Google it, and I’ve probably said it before. I used to have bad habits, and then I decided to label them habits and not define them as good or bad. They’re just the ways that I work. As I recognize myself falling into a less productive habit, that’s just me. I’m wasting time in the ways I’m wasting time, so I’m doing that thing again. I’m not as harsh on myself when I see myself doing it.

Bad habits are the classic procrastination or doing the New York Times crossword puzzle when I know I should really start first. If I don’t get work done in the morning, I’m not going to get as much work done over the course of the day. If I don’t start that first sprint, which is that first hour of really concentrated work, I’m not going to get as much done in the course of the day.

Also, stuff will eventually get done, and that’s okay too. I can ruminate too much. I can fixate too much on stupid things, but that’s also a part of my brain that’s involved with my imagination. That’s also the muscle I use for writing dialogue. I have bad habits, but I just choose not to label them as bad anymore.

Lynelle: Connor O’Farrell says, “What matters to you more when you write, the process of writing or the prospect of the finished script? Is it the journey or the destination that drives you?”

John: Honestly, it’s the destination. I love having a finished thing. I love reading through something that I really like the outcome of it. Getting there sometimes is bloody and messy along the way. There’s moments where you enter what we call flow, where it’s just like, oh my God, it’s natural and it’s easy, and you just lose time. You’re like, “Wow, this is going so great. It can be addictive. You can start to chase flow in a way that is unhelpful.

If you actually go back and look at artists’ best work, it didn’t always come while they were in their flow states, when everything was good and easy. Some of their best work came when they actually were grumpy and resentful. As long as you’re getting stuff done, that’s what really matters most. Getting stuff done and finishing things, I love it. Love it to death.

Lynelle: [chuckles] Hanif Bahati asks, “How do you think that Hollywood has changed in terms of non-Hollywood writers, the talent outside of America or Hollywood?”

John: There have always been international writers who’ve worked in the Hollywood system. Obviously, a great number of British writers and Australian writers as well who are writing in English, but writing from overseas. Sometimes they come here. I have friends, Kelly Marcel, who’s a terrific writer who came from the UK, but made her career really in the US.

What’s changed most over the course of 15 years is that with the rise of international streamers, there’s a lot more local language production that’s happening with approximating Hollywood budgets. Have been serious, but there have always been great features made overseas. That’s giving exposure to a lot of international writing that US audiences would never have seen before. The globalization on that front is terrific in terms of the ability for non-English language media in particular to be consumed as primary media in the US. It’s a great change.

Lynelle: Claire June asks, “You worked hard to be an in-demand industry insider. What draws you to a project to say yes or to say no?”

John: Great question. There’s the underlying material itself. The first question is it a movie I’d actually pay money to see? Is it something I feel like I could do and that I could do well? Are there good, interesting people associated with it? If they’re people I’ve always wanted to work with, fantastic, or I have worked with them before, great. I will also call around and find people to work with them for it and get the download like, are they an asshole? Life is too short to be working with a bunch of assholes sometimes. Sometimes it’s worth it, but most times it’s not worth it. Those are the things.

I’m also really mindful of the opportunity costs. As I said before, I think over parts of my career, I’ve been chasing a little too much and doing the thing that I feel like I should be doing rather than the thing I really want to be doing. I will ask myself, “Am I just chasing? Is this actually a thing I really do want to do?”

Lynelle: Here’s a question from Joe King about The Prince of Persia. You’re on IMDb page or in your library on your site. He doesn’t see it. There are things he admires about that script. Is there a version you wrote that could be available?

John: I never read Prince of Persia. I was an executive producer on Prince of Persia. Jordan Mechner wrote it, and so Jordan Mechner created the original game of Prince of Persia. We got partnered up through a friend. He said, “I really wanted to do a movie of Prince of Persia.” He and I went around town over the course of two days. We pitched it to every place. Disney bought it for Jerry Bruckheimer.

Jordan wrote it in a great, great script. It got Hollywood Studio’d a bit. I think the movie that Jordan wrote was better than the movie that came out. I’m happy that some people like the original movie, but I never wrote it. It was a good lesson for me in that producing a movie seems like it’s easier than writing a movie, but it’s also very frustrating as a writer because I love Jordan to death. Yet, as we were going through the draft, I kept wanting to just fix things myself rather than suggest how he could fix things.

I likened it to being an airline pilot, and you’re in the cockpit, but you’re not allowed to touch the controls. It was a little bit frustrating on that front. That’s a reason why I’ve not done producing of other people’s stuff over the years. It’s that I learned I’m not a great creative roommate when it comes to screenwriting.

Lynelle: Combining a couple of questions, I’ll just paraphrase. Does age matter? If you are, say, over 50 or 60, does that make you obsolete?

John: It doesn’t make you obsolete, but I think age does matter. Age matters to the degree that you have different possibilities at different moments in your life. If you are just graduating from undergrad and you can live on very little money and eat your ramen and scramble and do things, you’re going to start your screenwriting career differently than if you are a parent with two young kids. You’re going to just make different choices, and that’s understandable and right. Both ways can work, but I think it’s naive to assume that everyone is going to have the same opportunities at every moment in their career.

Screenwriting is about writing a screenplay that people can then use as the basis for making a movie, but it’s also about being able to sit across from somebody and convince them that you really can deliver what they need in order to shoot that movie. There’s a large psychological component, a social component to it, which is important. A 22-year-old is going to have a harder time doing that than a 30-year-old sometimes because it’s just hard to get people to trust you a little bit.

If you are a person who’s not living in Los Angeles, it can be harder still to do that stuff. The logistics and age and things like that do matter, but it’s not because there’s some hard, bright line that you can’t cross. It’s just the nature of physically doing the work with other people that’s a factor.

Lynelle: Here’s a loaded question from Jermaine Reed. “For writers building original films instead of IP, what’s the smartest way to make the script undeniable on the page?”

John: Undeniable on the page. If you’re writing an original thing and it’s going to be a calling card movie, a thing I would strongly encourage you to do is see if there’s a way that the main character, the protagonist, can read as a reflection of you, can read as a reflection of your own experience. As you’re picking through all the things you could possibly write, the thing that most speaks to–

Someone read this script and then they met you, like, “Of course, Mel is the person who wrote this script.” It makes so much sense because they talk to you about, “Oh, where did you come from?” “Oh, I see exactly why you and only you could have written this script.” That is incredibly useful and helpful because not only did they like the script, but they understand, they get a sense of who you are as a person. They can be thinking about, “Even if I don’t do this script, how can I get this very talented writer to write something else for me?” That’s incredibly useful.

Listen, if you want to sell that script, and it’s mostly going to be a sample, if that sample is not just of your writing talent but your voice, your personality, who you are, that is incredibly helpful. That undeniability is not just that it’s commercially viable, but that, “Oh, I get why only he or she could have written the script.”

Lynelle: Here’s one on, “What’s something in younger writers that you’re really excited to see in the future? Is it style or is it theme? Something that Gen X and Millennial aren’t quite doing.”

John: Listen, theme is a hard one. It’s too esoteric, but style and voice. If I’m writing a script, I want to have a sense like the characters are speaking with interesting voices, but also the storytelling style on the page is engaging. If I keep flipping pages and I’m excited to see what happens next, that is a great read and that is a person I want to meet. It’s really of any age. If I was looking for somebody who was specifically writing for younger characters or writing for people currently in their teens and 20s, that’s the kind of thing I would look for on the page.

Lynelle: You personally have a goal of how many pages for yourself you write a day?

John: Three pages is great. Three pages is about an hour or two of writing a day. That seems like that’s not actually a lot, but it’s diminishing returns after two hours of actual writing per day. Just the amount that you actually get done tends to decrease. There are days where you will just crank through 20 pages and they’re actually like a pretty good 20 pages. If you start to think like, “That’s the normal,” you are going to burn yourself out.

In the bonus chapter we put out with Getting Stuff Written, we really dive into that. It’s just basically find whatever is the sustainable amount of writing that you can get done in a day and aim for that. Don’t beat yourself up if you’re not hitting that because otherwise you’re going to start resenting writing, which is not the goal here.

When I was writing, I’ve written some books. I’ve written three. I have a three-book series called Arlo Finch, which is middle grades for Harry Potter age. For those, I had to write 1,000 words a day because I recognized that if I wasn’t hitting that target, you’re just never going to finish the book. 1,000 words seems like a lot, but when you actually look at the screen, as I scroll, it’s not that long. It’s a frustratingly small amount of actual page count, but it gets the job done.

Lynelle: Personally, I wrote a novel and did eight pages a day.

John: Great.

Lynelle: It was exhausting.

John: It is exhausting, yes.

Lynelle: It was tough. You think, “Only eight pages,” but it was exhausting. This is an interesting question from Hannah Lehman. She says, “What is the best time of the year to go out with a script realistically?” Meaning taking into account festivals and holidays, when is the best time to present your script?

John: I am not an agent or manager, and they would have much more experience with this. I would say back to school feels right. September feels right. Your instinct is correct that the holidays are just like, this is a terrible time of year for everything. January after Sundance can be good for a while. I think there’s a fear of the film festivals and stuff like that, overwhelming stuff.

The people who are reading scripts coming in aren’t quite the same audience for that. There’s some time in the spring. Stuff can happen in the summer. It’s just that people are gone more in the summer. It’s tough. I think that’s why you see so many things happening in the fall. Scripts sell every week of the year. There’s times you tend to avoid just because you know fewer people are going to be around.

Lynelle: Arthur asks, they’d love to hear about pushing through when working, when your world or your environment is not conducive to writing.

John: Oh, it’s tough. We have two episodes with a counselor, a psychotherapist named Dennis Palumbo; Episode 99, and there’s another episode. The second episode, I don’t remember the number, but the title of it is like Writing While the World Is On Fire, which was specifically this past January, which come after the elections and Los Angeles was burning. It felt incredibly hard to be thinking about doing meaningful or creative work while it just seemed like the world was crashing down around you. Sometimes it’s bigger outside factors.

Sometimes it’s personal factors. It’s your financial situation. It’s family. It’s illness. There’s other reasons why it’s harder to do. What I would encourage you to do is to think about, let writing be a time where you do have some control in this out-of-control world or life situation.

Can you take 20 minutes and write a scene? Put on your headphones and write a scene and just go off to the corner and do that? You will probably get some stuff done. You’ll probably feel a little bit better. Let writing be an opportunity to manifest some order and structure in a place that’s otherwise very tough to do. I’ve had to do some writing during some really difficult family times. It wasn’t always great or pleasant to be doing it, but in the end, if I were looking back on which pages I wrote during which time, I couldn’t tell you what I wrote when. It ultimately is still my writing.

Drew: Lina, let’s do two or three more.

Lynelle: Stacking your projects, what type of workload do you have? Just curious. Is it two specs and one assignment? They’re wondering about the workload of a professional writer.

John: Writers who are working pretty consistently– I don’t tend to write specs. I’ve written probably three specs over the last 10 years just because I’m generally moving from assignment to assignment with things I pitched to set up versus I wrote from scratch. Generally, I have one first draft that I’m working on. I’m doing that. Then if I hand that in and I have a rewrite or some other project I’m going to, very rarely are two things underneath my fingers at the same time that will happen.

There’s been situations where I’ve been on a first draft and a rewrite and a straw polish all at the same time. Based on the needs of what people needed to do, I was doing all three things. It’s not great for your brain to just be shifting back and forth between all these different things. You’re not going to get story confused, but there’s just a habituation time to put yourself back in the place of what that is and enter into that movie like, “Okay, what do I need to do in this space to make this make sense?”

I will rarely do more than one creative project over the course of the day. As I said earlier, I’m probably only writing two hours of script during the day, but I’m writing other stuff. I’m writing blog posts. I’m writing other initial draft things on stuff. There’s other writing that can be done, even if it’s not the all-consuming brain work of screenwriting.

Lynelle: One more question from David Pimentel. He’s writing and directing an animated movie, and they’ve screened and tested well, but the main character keeps getting the lowest scores. Any thoughts on the matter for that would be awesome.

John: David, sorry. It’s a really common thing, and so hopefully the other people involved in the project understand it’s a really common thing. You’re running into the sidekick problem, which is that the sidekicks in movies, especially animated movies, they’re just more fun because they’re more fun because they don’t have the burden of carrying the plot. People love them because they’re happy and free and get to do things and say crazy stuff.

If you have an opportunity to change things at this point, it may be looking for how can you get some of that sidekick energy into your hero. Are there moments where that hero could actually do a little bit more of that, especially in the very start of the story, so that we’re clicking and engaging with them more as not the responsible character, but as the wild character who is a little bit more unpredictable? What you’re running into is super common, particularly in animation, and that’s just the reality of it.

I’m sure if you actually were to test the characters in Inside Out, for example, Joy’s character probably tests low because she is responsible for carrying the movie on her shoulders, which is a great character. I don’t think everyone else probably scores higher in their boxes because they’re so jokey. That’s just the difference.

Lynelle: You’re getting lots of compliments on Scriptnotes, they’re all in the chat. Personally, I just wanted to say, I know last year, you all went through the fires in LA. I’m from LA, and so my heart’s there. I hope that you’re all pulling through well. It seems like the industry’s coming back after such a difficult time.

John: No, we’re in a much better place, but thank you for asking. It’s improved a lot.

Mike: Any closing thoughts?

John: These are all the right questions. It’s tough because it’s not like there’s one way to do anything, but I can hopefully just share my opinion on what works for me.

Mike: Thank you, John, for taking the time out of your schedule. Have a good night, everyone.

John: Thank you so much.

Lynelle: Thank you, John. Thank you, everybody.

Mike: Thank you so much.

[music]

John: All right, we are back in the present. I have one cool thing that I want to share. Julia Turner is a guest who’s been on the show before. She was at our live show, and she interviewed us about the Scriptnotes book. She’s formerly editor-in-chief of Slate Magazine. She’s a person who knows her journalism. She has launched a new thing called LA Material. It’s a website. It is a podcast. It is a newsletter, and it’s great. Unsurprisingly, it’s terrific. It’s very specifically about Los Angeles.

Some of the articles you can read that are up there right now are about five days that changed the LA mayor’s race. A deep dive inquiry in how many cars should turn left on a red light, which is a very specifically LA thing. Drew, what’s your instinct? You’re at an intersection. There’s no left-turn signal. How many cars are allowed to creep across before, what’s the acceptable number of cars turning?

Drew: Maximum of three. Once the light turns, three is the maximum, and then any more than that is too much.

John: I would agree with you, but the article goes into the wide range of opinions of what that is. Three seems to be where people tend to stop. Four is incredibly aggressive. The idea is that, of course, one car has crossed pretty far into the intersection during the light still being green, and a second one is probably inched into that space, too. It’s a question of whether that third one can gun through. Four is crazy.

Drew: Four is crazy, but if that second one doesn’t go, that’s a problem.

John: Oh, it is a problem, yes, because you’ve blocked the crosswalk, you’ve made a bad situation. You can tell people who’ve only been in Los Angeles a short time because they don’t know that they have to actually clear that intersection.

Drew: Have you ever been in the car with someone who’s born and raised in LA and follows all the traffic lights to the T, is polite at left turns?

John: I haven’t met that person. Have you?

Drew: I’ve sat in the car with a few of those people, and it always blows my mind. I’m like, “I thought you were baked on this. I thought you knew what we were doing.”

John: The weird thing is, LA drivers are not particularly aggressive. They’re not particularly smart, but they’re not particularly aggressive. We will tend to stop for people at crosswalks and do that kind of stuff in ways that people in other cities might not, but you’ve got to learn how to make the left turns. You will see, when I go back to Boulder where I grew up, there was an influx of California people and native Boulder people were like, “Ah, they’re doing these crazy things on the left turns.” Because that’s where they came from. That’s the culture. You’ve got to understand the culture.

Drew: We don’t honk. That’s the whole thing.

John: No, we don’t. It’s not a honking in town.

Drew: I’m excited for Julia because I remember her mentioning– We teased this at the last live show.

John: Yes. Now it’s launched. It’s LA Material. I got to see the list of all of the beta names and other things they were considering. I think LA Material makes sense for what they’re doing. There’s Hollywood news, but it’s not mostly Hollywood. It’s really about just being in Los Angeles.

Drew: I love it.

John: That is our show for this week. Special thanks to Mike Johnston and everyone at the Northwest Screenwriters Guild for hosting this event. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today in this forum, but we usually answer your questions, so send those in to ask at johnaugust.com.

You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Of course, the Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. Thank you for continuing to buy the Scriptnotes book. We look every week to see how many we sell, and God bless us, we’re selling a lot of copies. You’ll find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware, you’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Again, thank you to our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you get all those backup episodes and bonus segments, like the one we are about to record on sketch comedy writing. Drew, it’s good to see you, and thanks again for putting together this episode.

Drew: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segement]

John: Drew, in addition to being a writer, you have also been an actor, you’ve taken acting classes, and you’ve done a sketch comedy class somewhere here in town?

Drew: Yes, I did a sketch writing class at UCB, God, probably 10 years ago, but yes, I did 101.

John: The two big schools in Los Angeles, the two big programs that people talk about are Groundlings and UCB, both have improv aspects, but they have sketch comedy as a big factor in it. Talk to me about the things you were doing in your 101 sketch class.

Drew: I remember the first week was just write a sketch and figure out what your voice is, and then we would try to do things out of the news. Every week was a different assignment that was specific. It felt like different types of SNL sketches, basically. You started realizing they were all in little buckets. Then on top of that UCB has a specific philosophy around the concept of game.

Characters have a game, which is hard to describe, but the best description I’ve heard is, an emotional reaction to an unusual thing. You figure out what that is, and then you just try and heighten that and heighten that and heighten that until it gets insane. You’re applying that and practicing that idea and putting characters through that lens. Is that even the right word? That’s not the right word.

John: Yes, but that’s a framework, a structure. Sketch writing was on my brain because an Instagram friend had DM me to say, “Hey, I’m writing a sketch for the first time.” It’s a person who’s a stand-up comedian, “I’m writing a sketch for the first time. Do you talk about that all in your book?” I said, “Not really. There’s no chapter in it and it’s not about sketch comedy writing.” On previous episodes, we’ve talked about, “Okay, here’s a comedic premise.” I think this was an episode with Mike Birbiglia. We talked about, “Here’s a comedic premise. What is the joke version of it? What is the sketch version of it? What is the movie version of it?”

This Instagram friend was asking me, “Tell me about sketch comedy writing.” I said, “I don’t genuinely know how people in that field talk about it, but I can tell you what, as an outside observer, I notice about how sketches work.” Is that there is a premise, a complication that is like, “Oh, we’ve established the normalcy. This is the complication.” Then there’s a series of escalations, and there has to be an out, a button, somewhere to blow out of this moment.

That’s what you see in most internet live sketches. That’s flow of it. It actually closely resembles what a short film would be, except that there has to be something that is so often so strange about what’s happening in this that it actually it feels like a sketch. What you’re describing it with UCB in terms of the game is what is the recurring mechanism that is generating, that is keeping the momentum going in it, correct?

Drew: Correct, and how do you come at it from different angles, too. That’s where the real surprises, I think, start to happen. They pointed a lot to the Kids in the Hall and Mr. Show, Sketches, and Key & Peele, where all those writers came up through the similar ranks, which I think started Second City in Chicago, too.

John: Second City is another important touchstone here. One of the writers I was talking to around the lunch table in negotiations, one came out of the Second City, and one came out of a more New York focus on things. The Second City writer was talking about how character becomes a much more important part of the Second City philosophy of sketch writing, is that a character is driving things. You have to have a character with a specific point of view who is creating the energy within the scene. That tracks.

It’s not just anyone could do the scene. No, it’s specific to these characters or the relationship between certain characters. You see this in a lot of sketches, but also other things out there in the world, where it only makes sense because this character is doing it. Matt Foley in a Van Down by the River. That is a big character who is driving that thing.

It’s not just normal people with a heightened situation around it, as opposed to starring a life sketch with Harry Styles for Pepperidge Farms, who’s doing inappropriate captions for Pepperidge Farm products. It’s more of a normal world, and it’s just the situation gets more absurd around it. It’s great to hear people who do this for a living talking about and thinking about how they’re doing this work.

Drew: Was there anything surprising that they sent to you?

John: Actually, two of the people around the table, they taught this. It was interesting hearing them describe their process of teaching students about this. One would say, was that a timer for three minutes or three and a half minutes, and she would call scene. You have to understand this is the audience’s attention. The audience’s attention is out here. This is the blackout. You have to get out by this moment. That some ideas lend themselves to that short period of time. Some need to be developed more fully, and some are really just a 30-second. It’s just a premise, and then you’re out. It’s really recognizing where is the comedic heart of that idea.

There’s also a conversation about how you think about a Saturday Live sketch or something produced for filmed content, there’s an establishing shot. You see that, “Okay, we’re at the beach, so we don’t have to say that we’re at a beach.” Anything that’s being done on a black box stage, there’s just this expectation. Some character needs to say, “It’s so great that we’re here at the beach,” because otherwise, you just have no idea where it is, where the context is.

There’s things we don’t think about as a feature writer or someone who’s doing television. It’s like, there’s always a visual to tell you that information. You can’t assume that with a sketch, you’re going to have that visual. You may need to communicate really directly with the audience about where we are, what this is, what your expectations should be, and that has to happen in the first 10 seconds. If you’re not getting to the joke premise quickly enough, everyone’s going to feel like they’re out in space.

Drew: That was the thing that they basically told us by line three, you need to know. Line three is what they said.
[crosstalk]

John: Setting up. In case of UCB language, what’s the game? Also, where are we? What’s going on here? Then knowing that you may have situations where you know that your audience knows what the thing is, and so then you may have some sketches that are deliberately messing with that. One of the regs was talking about a thing that he and his scene partners would do, which was basically, they’re both a straight man in the scene. They’re both delivering setups that have no punchline, and they just keep doing it again and again and again, “My wife is such a good cook.”

[laughter]

John: It was like, “Yes, I’m sorry.” It’s like nothing goes that way. It’s that frustration of unanswered things. Everyone comes in with the expectation of what’s going to happen next. The value you’re not delivering it is just like audience edging.

Drew: That is brilliant because they’re breaking the rules.

John: Exactly.

Drew: Yes, another thing that we were taught was don’t hide the ball. You need to get that premise out by line three because the longer you hide whatever the complication is or whatever this premise is, the more the audience is going to want– The more they’re going to expect. They’re going to expect it to be funnier, and you’re never going to live up to that expectation. Just start messy and get it out messy if you need to, and then get to the fun, which I feel like is a good lesson for all writing. We’ll forgive you a little bit of messy at the beginning if it’s worth it for them.

John: It is. Also, I can see why it’s a challenging thing for folks who are coming from a features or TV background, where we talk about those first three pages, which is basically the setting up of things. It’s like, you got to make those sparkly, wonderful, magical and stuff. The lesson from some sketch comedies, sometimes you just need a blunt, clear thing. It’s like, “This is where we are,” and then the magic happens. The engines are just different, and it’s important to recognize that.

Drew: One of my favorite sketches I saw used the stage. They just put a super title above it. It was Mary Holland, who’s an actress who’s great. She was a silent film actress who had Her Arms Were Asleep. They just put that title in front. You knew the premise, and then it’s her trying to go around, and her arms are just flopping and smashing everything. It was so funny. Yes, it’s all you needed. It’s just, now we know the premise, and she just took off. It was great.

John: Other things. There’s often the scrolling credits that are established in this documentary about this, or it’s a presenter saying, “Back in the seminal 1940s film, this, blah, blah, blah,” and setting up what this thing is. Without that, you wouldn’t know– You don’t know what the essential hook is and what the game is that you’re looking for. I did also hear that people get frustrated by the term game because it’s used to apply to anything. It’s one of those terms that’s set for everything and doesn’t mean a specific thing.

Drew: It is a little nebulous, which is why when I was like, “How do I define game?” It’s frustrating, too. I think a lot of these theaters, too, have their own dogma, for lack of a better word, and approach to things. It’s however you get to it. It’s whatever you get to. I think character is always where to ground in a smart way.

John: Absolutely. What is the unique point of view of these characters in this scene? What is specific and unique? Like I said, it’s specificity. This is the thing they’re trying to do. Ego Nwodim had a character on Saturday Live, and I can’t remember the character’s name, but she was this big character who would always– In a restaurant, she would be sawing her food. She was cutting her meat really aggressively.

It’s a hard character to repeat because basically, it’s just doing the same thing. What is the next escalation? We’re talking about, how would you do something else? We understand what her thing is, but what’s another character who could enter into that so that they could have interesting, conflicting contrasting styles? That’s the challenge. Otherwise, you’re just doing the same. It’s just the same beats, and it’s not a new sketch, it’s not a new idea. That’s got to be one of the great challenges, frustrations, and opportunities for shows with great recurring characters, is what to do next.

Drew: Did you talk to anyone who was in the more like a weekend update, last week, tonight, Daily Show people?

John: I did, yes. They talked about joke buckets, which joke buckets are desk bits where there doesn’t need to be an escalation. It’s just like, here’s a joke, here’s a joke, here’s a joke. They’re all in the same line and thread, but they don’t need to escalate up. Desk bits are often joke buckets where it’s just like, here’s one funny thing after another. That’s totally great and totally valid, but it’s a different thing than sketch writing. You can understand why people on a show might be assigned specifically to that task versus other tasks.

Drew: I’m always so impressed with comedy packets because they have to have it all. You have to be able to do sketch. You have to have all of those daily show jokes. It’s so much funny material that comedy writers have to pull together.

John: I was heartened to hear that one of the writers who was teaching said that they often go back to the chapter in the Scriptnotes book or the episode before it was a chapter on Craig’s how to write a movie and the specific Finding Nemo stuff from there about this is a relationship between these two characters and what they need from each other. So often comedy does come about by really understanding what characters want and how you’re communicating that to the audience, to the viewer.

Drew: It all comes back to that, doesn’t it? We can’t get away from it.

John: We will have some very smart sketch people on the show to talk through in actual knowledge rather than just secondhand knowledge like we did today. I just want to say one of the real joys of being on the negotiating committee is I’m surrounded by so many smart writers. Tom Fontana is in the room every day. Tom Fontana has created all of these shows. He can introduce himself by saying, “I’ve been a WGA member for 45 years.” I’m like, “Lord,” and a showrunner for 41 of those years, which is wild.

To recognize the long line of writers and how they have shaped this industry and how the things that they’ve created are why we have Hollywood that we have, which is incredible. Drew, great chatting with you.

Drew: Great talking to you too, John. Good luck with stuff.

John: Thanks.

Links:

• Northwest Screenwriters Guild
• Steven Soderbergh’s Sex Lies and Videotape book
• Our episode with KPop Demon Hunters writers Danya Jimenez & Hannah McMechan
• Notes on Notes
• John’s screenplay library
• Dennis Palumbo episodes, 99 – Psychotherapy for screenwriters and 676 – Writing while the World is on Fire
• LA Material
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.