Search Results for: scene headings

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

**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](https://johnaugust.com/2003/transitions)
* [Scriptnotes Episode, 446: Back to Basics](https://johnaugust.com/2020/back-to-basics) at 03:57 of this episode
* [Scriptnotes Episode, 493: Opening Scenes](https://johnaugust.com/2021/opening-scenes) at 26:06 of this episode
* [Scriptnotes Episode, 89: Writing Effective Transitions](https://johnaugust.com/2013/writing-effective-transitions) at 44:12 of this episode
* [A Trip to the Moon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLVChRVfZ74) the 1902 Science Fiction Film by Georges Méliès
* [The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy)
* [Ron’s Gone Wrong](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7504818/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Henry Adler ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao), (with a segment produced by [Stuart Friedel](https://thriftstoreprom.neocities.org/stuabout.html)!) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/531standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

[music]

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

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

Christina Hodson: Hello.

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

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

John: It’s so many episodes.

Christina: That’s so many.

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

Drew Marquardt: Ryan Reynolds, gone.

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

Christina: They pick you for me, Ryan.

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

Christina: Fuck.

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

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

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

Christina: You do it all the time?

John: Yes.

Christina: Who are you sending cold emails to?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: Totally.

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

Christina: Honestly, I can’t remember anything.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.

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

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

Christina: Also, it actually hangs over you forever.

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

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

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

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

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

John: They are terrible.

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: We could burn them all.

John: That’s a thing we could do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: They do.

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: Who doesn’t like that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Exactly.

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

John: Absolutely.

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

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

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

John: Really inelegant stuff.

Christina: Yes, really inelegant stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: Why not? Just keep referencing it.

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

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

Christina: I want to ask you a question.

John: Yes.

Christina: How do you feel about caps in action?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: Nice short sentences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: It does sound just absurd.

Christina: It’s fucking cool on the page.

John: Yes, absolutely.

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

John: Yes, totally.

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

John: You can’t.

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

John: No, impossible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: Nice.

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

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

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

Christina: You feel nothing.

John: Yes. Empty action is just–

Christina: Such a bummer.

John: It’s a huge bummer.

Christina: It’s a waste.

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

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

John: It is.

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

John: No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: Missing or just that wildly wrong?

John: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: It does happen a lot.

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

John: Please.

Christina: Specificity.

John: Yes.

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

John: Never do that.

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

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

Christina: Or, they’re just really cocky.

John: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: It’s cool. It’s very cool.

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

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

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

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

Christina: Is it very good?

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

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

John: Yes, isn’t it great?

Christina: Yes.

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

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

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

Christina: I love this article.

John: Yes.

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

John: Yes, I loved it.

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

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

Christina: Problematic, yes.

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

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

John: I’m not sure I found a way in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: He’s not.

John: He’s actually not.

Christina: He’s not. He’s awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: Yes, but it is a cinematic idea.

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

[laughter]

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

Christina: Everyone should read it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: No.

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

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

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

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

John: Still stuck in Ghana.

Christina: It’s harsh.

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

Christina: The judge said no.

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

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

John: All the seized knives, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: I’m going to say no.

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

Christina: Oh. Yes.

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

Christina: Do you end it happy or sad?

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

Christina: Crunch [laughs].

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

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

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

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

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

Drew: We don’t know.

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

Christina: Give me application fees.

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

[laughter]

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

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

Christina: Than the actual story [laughs].

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: They do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: They do, yes.

Christina: No dingly danglies.

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

John: Oh, Daryl, it’s all your fault.

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

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

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

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

Christina: Out loud with my mouth?

John: Yes [chuckles].

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

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

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

John: I’m excited to hear it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: We’re all selfish.

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

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

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

Christina: It looks so lovely in your hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: D-E-P-T.

John: dept.com. That is our show for this week. Scripted and produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chialelli. Our outro this week is by Vance Kotrla, who’s a first-timer. If you have an outro, please send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those all at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today on the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the Art of the Cold Email. Christina Hodson, so great to catch up with you.

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

John: Come back anytime and sooner, please.

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

[Bonus Segment]

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: We didn’t have email.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: It was cold calls.

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

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

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

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

John: Oh, the worst. The worst.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christina: No one’s mad about that.

John: No one’s mad about that.

Christina: No one’s mad about those.

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

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

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

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

John: No. I never want my brain picked.

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

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

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

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

Drew: Oh God, yes.

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

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

Christina: [laughs] You must get so much.

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

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

Christina: Congratulations house.

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

Christina: That’s so cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John: No.

Christina: No, I’m not.

John: Not a good strategy for you.

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

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

Christina: You probably have a very professional Instagram.

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

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

John: Absolutely.

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

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

Christina: Yes. Sometimes it’s a catfish.

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

Christina: I’m a real human.

John: -a real star.

Christina: [chuckles]

John: Thank you again for joining us on Scriptnotes.

Christina: Thank you so much for having me.

Links:

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

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.