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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/were-back-baby).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 338 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we will tackle the massive backlog of listener questions that have piled up while we’ve been away, including the Oscars for Best Screenplay, songs in musicals, nuclear war, characters’ last names, and incorporating ad-libs into a script.

**Craig:** That’s serious. But I think we can do it because we have the original flavor right now. Me and you, buddy.

**John:** Oh, I’m so happy to back recording a podcast. It is delightful. When I saw this on my calendar it helped me get through the day to know that we were finally back doing this. So, thank you to our listeners for your patience while we cobbled together other episodes while we were out on the road. I was doing Arlo Finch book tour. You were overseas prepping for your show. But now we’re back. Well, not back. I’m in Milwaukee. But we’re still back on the air.

**Craig:** Now, you’re in Milwaukee because you’re still on your book tour?

**John:** Yes. So by the time this episode comes out I will be back in Los Angeles, but after two weeks of traveling from LA to San Francisco to Denver to Dallas to New York to Philadelphia to New Jersey to Chicago to Milwaukee, I will now have returned to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Wow. That is bananas.

**John:** 3,000 different students I met. And a lot of other Scriptnotes listeners I met at live events different places. And some Launch listeners, too. It has been great. It has been exhausting the way you think a multi-city tour would be exhausting. And I have learned so much. It’s been really cool.

**Craig:** Well that’s great. Excellent.

**John:** Yeah. Nice. So I think it’s time to introduce a brand new branded segment which is John’s WGA Corner.

This is the segment in which I talk through small issues that are only applicable to WGA members, and I try to plow through it quickly so it doesn’t distract from the rest of the show. If you are a WGA member, you are going to get a bunch of emails in the next few weeks. They will be emails talking about sexual harassment, screenwriter issues, other industry issues. I would urge you to not ignore these emails and to come to meetings if you are invited to meetings because there’s some big stuff a-brewing. And we want to make sure we hear from you basically what you do and how you respond will determine the next couple years of the WGA. So, I would just urge you to pay attention to those WGA emails as they come in. Don’t just ignore them because they actually really matter a lot these next couple of months.

The second thing. Writers have asked me about how does the WGA know that I am a diverse writer, that I am African American or that I am Latino or that I am a gay writer. And I didn’t really know. And it turns out you tell them yourself. And so if you are a member of the WGA I would urge you to go to mywga.org and click on the little tab that says Update My Diversity Attributes. And when you do that you see what the WGA knows about you and what your background is. And maybe you filled some stuff out when you joined the WGA, but maybe you didn’t. Like, the WGA had no idea that I was gay, which seems crazy.

So, you click the little boxes. And there’s also – this is kind of cool – a little tab that says “Publish” for each of these attributes. And why you might choose “Publish” is that way if an employer is calling and saying I really need a female Vietnamese writer for this project, they can call the WGA and say like who do you have who is a female and Vietnamese. And the WGA can give them names. But only if you click “Publish.” So, I’d urge you to update those attributes in your profile.

**Craig:** I think that’s a great idea. And, listen, I think it’s fair to assuage perhaps fears. Because people understand that there is – the reason that we are now so concerned about diversity and self-identification is because the business has operated in a way consistent with racism. How is that for diplomatic, right? OK.

So, you might think, well, I don’t know if I want to do that because then they’ll be like, nope, I don’t want to hire her because she says she’s African American. I think right now, just my theory, that there is a net positive. There is goodwill. There is a real desire to improve and get better. And I think there is a net positive to self-identification in any of these areas.

And for those of you who think is there some sort of net negative if you’re a straight white male, I don’t think so. I ticked off the boxes for me. Straight white male, over the age of 40. I got a little something.

**John:** I had to tick that, too. So we’re diverse in the sense that we’re older writers now. How does that feel Craig?

**Craig:** It feels good.

**John:** You’ve lived this long.

**Craig:** I’ve lived this long. And I don’t mind that. I actually think that 40 feels really young for diverse age reasons. I think they need to bump that number up.

**John:** I think there is a 50 and a 60. So, we got space to grow.

**Craig:** Good. Good. Well, 50 is coming.

**John:** All right, end of the WGA Corner. Let’s get to some follow up. Alan writes in about Episode 332. He asks, “What does Craig mean by ‘using a lot of whitespace on a suspenseful section of a script?’ Does this mean less talking and more action description or the opposite? Could he give an example?”

**Craig:** OK. So whitespace is the portions of the page where there is no ink. Less talking and more action description? No. The answer is less talking and less action description. The answer is less of everything.

So, by suspenseful release and using lots of whitespace what I mean to say is you write a line that says “The box opens.” And then just do, if you want, do three carriage returns. Shift return to not get into the next element. Shift return. Shift return. Shift return. “And now we see it.” Shift return, shift return, shift return. “It’s alive.”

You know what I mean? So everything just gets quieter on the page and more intense and really focused to give it massive emphasis. We’re implying that time in the movie slows down. And we’re using text on a page to simulate that feeling.

Now, you don’t have to go quite as overboard as I just suggested. But, what you don’t want to do is hit your main revelation and go on an eight-line verbose description of it. That would undercut the emotional value of what I’m supposed to feel there.

**John:** 100% agree. So, I think when we talked about this the original time you don’t want to overdo this. Like this thing where you’re putting a lot of white space on the page gets annoying if you’re making this a technique all the time. But in general you want some sense of space on the page. And you want more sense of space on the page when you’re really zooming in on something. Sometimes I’ll even do the thing where here’s an action line. The next action line right below it is shorter. Then shorter. Then shorter. Then shorter. It gets down to a single word.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s a technique. You’re literally funneling down to an idea. That can work. Don’t do that twice in a script. Do it once. But if it’s appropriate, do it. And just, again, remember that the screenplay is meant to evoke the feeling of watching the movie. So think about what the movie is going to feel like. How can you achieve the same ends on the page?

**Craig:** Correct. And sometimes another thing that I will do to imply this feeling, and I think it is part of the white space, is if someone is trying to convey something silently that is very significant in the story and emotional or important, for instance, I’m going to sacrifice myself for you John, which I would.

**John:** Great. Thank you so much, Craig.

**Craig:** I like that you’re like, “Oh great.”

**John:** I applaud that choice. Let me get back to you about whether I’d kill myself for you, but I really want to thank you for that. It’s like when someone says I love you and you’re like thank you.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That’s terrific.

**Craig:** That’s terrific. So I’m planning on sacrificing myself for you, and you are shocked and you’re terrified, and you want to stop me but I’ve already made the decision. What I may do – and I’ve done this sort of thing in a script – is Craig looks at John. And then I’ll just underneath in action, but in italics, it’s OK. And then a next line. It’s OK. And then the next line, it’s OK.

So, it’s like I get it. We’re watching that moment. And it’s not just one it’s OK and then I die. It’s a moment of back and forth, a connection, a silent conversation that’s boiled down to two words: it’s OK. And we feel these things more. We allow ourselves essentially on the page to be a little poetic. You’re absolutely right – you don’t want to do this throughout a screenplay. It would become exhausting. But every movie should have one or two moments that are poetic, unless it’s Scary Movie 4. So in a normal movie, where you’re looking for that moment, when you get there do it. Do it on the page.

**John:** Do it on the page. And I think it’s also fascinating how often you’ve written that scene where you’re saying that it’s OK that you’re going to die for me. I think the fact that you write so much John and Craig into your scripts I think is great.

**Craig:** I mean, almost every script I die for you. It’s really tragic.

**John:** I had the opportunity to go on Brian Koppelman’s show, which was tremendously fun, and good to talk about, and would Brian Koppelman die for you? I don’t know. We’ll have to ask him.

**Craig:** I think Brian would, actually. I’ve always said the thing about Brian is not only – if I called Brian and I said I need the shirt off your back, not only would he give it to me, he would fly here and give it to me. That’s Brian. He really is that good of a guy. But, you know, for the two of us, I understand it’s a one-way street. Basically what I’m doing is I’m reinforcing the anti-trope of that tragic straight guy that keeps dying for his gay friend. [laughs] You know, that thing we’ve never seen in movies.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** That’s all I do.

**John:** I like it. Well, as we talk through tropes, let’s get to our next question. This is a question from our listener Becki, back to Episode 333. She recorded her question, so let’s take a listen to it.

**Becki:** Last week you answered a question about Act One structure. And John you mentioned how musicals kind of spell out the structure through the songs. So for act one there’s the welcome to the world song and the I Want song. Could you guys expand on that and list out the other type songs that tell the rest of the story? Thanks.

**John:** Becki, thank you so much for inviting us to talk about musicals for several long minutes. Craig, kick it off for us.

**Craig:** Even though we hate talking about musicals. So–

**John:** Oh my god. Musicals are the worst.

**Craig:** Musicals are incredibly instructive to us because, as John has pointed out many, many times, the best songs in musicals are ones that combine a moment and an interior feeling with an advancement of plot.

So, we have talked before about the I Want song, which is obviously really translatable to screenplays. But there are lots of other ones. For instance, there’s a kind of song called an Argument Song, which is typically a duet, as you might imagine, although occasionally people can have an argument with themselves. And in an argument song two characters kind of face off and have an argument. And the argument can be an explanation of the conflict between them. It can also sort of be the beginning of a flirtation between them. But what it’s doing is it’s defining a relationship that is not yet resolved within song.

So for instance “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better,” or “Sue Me” from Guys and Dolls, or “People Will Say We’re in Love” from Oklahoma, which is two characters basically trying to convince the other person that they should stop acting like they’re in love with the other person, even though they’re both in love with each other. Very sort of typical thing.

**John:** So that’s a classic musical trope. But we see equivalent kind of things happen in some of our movies. Like romantic comedies, even if they’re not musicals, will have this kind of song in it where the two characters are having the argument that is progressing the story forward but they’re actually kind of on the same side.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so there’s the we’re having a fight, we’re yelling at each other and breaking up, and then there’s also the kind of well you know that flirtatious argument. And so songs can present that very well.

There’s also just real nuts and bolts plot stuff. There are good scheme songs where a villain or a hero outlines a very clear plan of what they’re going to do. So, for instance, in Sweeney Todd there’s the song “A Little Priest” where Mrs. Lovett outlines very clearly with Sweeney Todd what they intend to do which is get people into the shop, murder them, and then cook them into pies.

**John:** Obviously. I mean, why wouldn’t you do that?

**Craig:** Why wouldn’t you?

**John:** It’s just laying out a clear logical plan for cannibalism and profit.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in a sense “A Little Priest” or a song like “I Want the Good Times Back” from the Broadway version of A Little Mermaid, and “I Want the Good Times Back” is an amazing song, these songs are the musical theater equivalent of the scene in an action movie where the team leader pulls up a hologram of the building that you’re going to enter and starts showing you – or like in Star Wars where they’re like “This exhaust shaft leads to the reactor.” It’s kind of the same thing. It’s sort of laying out the plan.

**John:** Great. So, you’re discussing the scheme as being something that either a hero or a villain could do, but there’s also basically the hero laying out their vision of the world. Like how things work from the villain’s point of view. So, you brought up The Little Mermaid. “Poor Unfortunate Souls” is a fantastic song that lays out the universe as seen by Ursula. And this is how things go. And that she is the benefactor of all these poor people.

So, classically a villain will get a song early on in the story which basically lays out their I Want as well. Sometimes it’s disguised a bit, like they may be lying in the I Want song, but it’s the story from their point of view.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you could sort of call that a Philosophy Song. And in movies we come across these characters who lay out a particular worldview which is fascinating hopefully and helps explain their actions. There are these moments in movies where a character finally in a moment of breaking down – this is a classic sort of low point kind of moment – that character expresses some profound remorse and sense of personal failure. This is a moment of honesty and of regret and it is a moment that needs to happen before they can finally unburden themselves of their pain and rise to attest and become a better person.

And these songs occur in musicals all the time. They’re songs of what could have been if only. They’re songs of regret. “On My Own,” from Les Mis. “Memory” from Cats. “Send in the Clowns.” These are all songs where people stop and basically deliver a heavy sigh of reflection on their life.

**John:** Yep. So the non-musical movie equivalent of this tends to be that moment where the character stops and either looks in through the window as that happy life is happening over there and they don’t have that. They might be expressing this to another character. Even a character who is not part of the main story, like that taxi driver who actually hears the story about what’s happened. It’s some ability to externalize this internal feeling.

And you have to think about all songs in musicals as externalizations of things that would normally be internal thought processes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, in a romantic comedy you have just lost the guy. And you’re walking down the street. And you’re remembering what it was like. And now we’re into a montage where we see the stuff that happened in the movie before. This is in Annie Hall. So suddenly Woody Allen, I know it’s a little problematic now but let’s just go with it for cinema’s sake, is remembering having fun with Diane Keaton and the lobsters and the pot. That’s the equivalent of this song. It’s a reflection back. A remorseful reflection back.

And then the most famous category of a Broadway show tune is the 11 o’clock number. John, talk us through the 11 o’clocker.

**John:** This is the moment which is the pinnacle, it is the great sort of breakthrough. It happens very late in the story. Classically I think it’s called the 11 o’clock number because it’s near the end of the show. Like if the show starts at eight, this would be at 11 o’clock back when the shows were longer. This is the sort of centerpiece moment where the character is breaking through. So this is “Rose’s Turn.” This is “Being Alive.” This is a character finally achieving an internal breakthrough in their experience. Is that fair?

**Craig:** That is fair. And in movies we tend to see these things not so much in the framework of talking, but rather a character finally standing up and saying I’m not going to do this anymore. I’m going to fight. And I’m getting right back in there. And this is something that musicals do with song, but they do it in a way where you understand this character at the beginning of this song is this person and at the end of the song is who they’re supposed to be.

And sometimes it’s sort of a sad downward thing, like for instance “Rose’s Turn” which is tragic. But that notion of a transformation or sometimes a collapse. That is something that we do all the time in movies. And it’s actually as I think about this and I talk this through, Becki, you know what’s interesting is a lot of the equivalents to these songs in movies are kind of montage-y things. I never really thought of that before, but there’s a rough equivalent.

**John:** When Oprah Winfrey’s character finally stands up at the end of The Color Purple, is that an 11 o’clock moment in your head?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it is. I think it is. And I actually haven’t seen – I’m not familiar with the musical Color Purple, but I bet there’s a big 11 o’clock number right around that moment.

**John:** Yeah. That would feel right.

The other type of song I want to bring up is the sidekick song. Musicals very often have sidekicks, basically humorous sidekicks who do a thing and they do a bit. Oftentimes that song is a slightly different style. It can be a little bit more like a wink, like an acknowledgment that we’re in a musical and that these two characters are singing this rat-a-tat song.

Often these sidekick songs exist in part so that the lead actors can take a break, make a costume change, do something else. Or there could be a giant set change happening behind the scenes. We literally have our sidekicks way up front. The curtain is closed behind them and we’re changing the set behind them. But sometimes these songs are just delightful and they just give you a different sense of the world, the characters, what’s going on.

So, I think of Timon and Pumbaa in The Lion King. Other things where these minor characters get to sing for themselves for just a moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. And “Hakuna Matata” is a great example of that philosophy song we were talking about earlier. You know, again, in the movie versions what you find is those songs always have some greater purpose. They are integral to the storyline. Whereas on stage you will get things like for instance in Shrek the Musical, which I am obsessed with, there’s ‘The Travel Song,” which is Shrek and Donkey walking. And it very much does feel like a – OK, behind the curtain we’re switching around. We’ve got a lot of stuff to do here, so let’s just do a quick song about traveling along and our relationship roughly.

You tend to not see those things in movies. There are certain stage-specific songs that happen and stage musicals generally are much longer than typical films. So, there are some areas where it’s not necessarily a direct line. But hopefully, Becki, by talking about our favorite topic–

**John:** Ha-ha.

**Craig:** Thank you for letting us indulge. We have helped somehow.

**John:** Yeah, Craig, I’ve got to say it felt really good just to be able to geek out about musicals with you for – it’s been a month since we’ve done this.

**Craig:** I know. This and D&D. Why don’t we just do a musical and D&D podcast? You know what I mean?

**John:** Enough of the screenwriting stuff.

**Craig:** Enough.

**John:** We should focus on what we actually genuinely love.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like what brings us joy.

**John:** What brings us joy. Craig, would you like to take our next bit of follow up?

**Craig:** Yes. This is from Steve regarding Episode 332. He says he enjoyed Episode 332 – Wait For It – “and your analysis of suspense and film, specifically the victory lap.

“I totally agree with John’s endorsement of how important it is to give the hero a moment to enjoy overcoming a challenge before moving onto the next challenge. My favorite of this is in Back to the Future. Marty McFly spends all of act two trying to get his parents to fall in love. He finally succeeds at the high school dance by getting them to kiss. Once he achieves that, thereby ensuring that he will be born, he still has to get back to 1985. He should immediately drive over to the clock tower and lightning storm because he has a literal clock to beat. If he misses the lightning bolt he’ll be stuck in the past.

“Instead, the writers give Marty a victory lap. A full scene of him on guitar practically inventing rock-n-roll. What I love about this lap is it serves two purposes. One, it gives Marty and the audience a chance to celebrate and catch their breath before the next big suspense scene. Two, it pays off Marty’s act one dream of playing in the high school band. He fails the audition in 1985 but gets a second chance in 1955.”

**John:** I agree with Steve. So, follow up doesn’t have to technically be a question. This wasn’t a question. It was just pointing out another example of victory laps but also setups and payoffs. And that moment only works because we set it up as a thing that could happen that we wanted to see happen. We weren’t sure how it was going to happen. And this is how he does it.

And I think Steve is right. That if we followed real story logic, yes, the character should just get onto the next thing. But emotional logic says we need to stay there for a beat and actually revel in what’s been achieved.

**Craig:** And this is another good example of that all-important need of irony. We talk about this all the time. If you have a character that’s failing an audition for a crummy band in the beginning of the movie, the most ironic outcome for him would be to literally invent rock-n-roll by the end of the movie. So it’s smart. There’s just a smart coming full circle.

But think about how unsatisfying it would have been if there wasn’t that victory lap. It’s just kiss, great, I got to go. It would feel a bit breathless at that point. And there are times when you want to feel breathless. And then there are times when you want to just enjoy the victory.

So, very good analysis there from Steve.

**John:** Great. Next up, Mark. “In Episode 334 you guys took a question about if you should use the real brand or Twitter or a made up knockoff version in a screenplay. You guys stated that you like to see the actual brand used in films and TV. However, in a previous episode someone asked about using a late night talk show host in your script and you guys said you hated to see real news anchors/show hosts in movies. They seem like very similar concepts. Basically to you use real-life brands and not in your screenplay. So, why the difference in opinion on the two questions?”

**Craig:** Well, this one is pretty clear to me. There’s a huge difference between objects and people. I don’t believe human beings who are real when they’re put in situations that clearly aren’t real. There’s a disconnection there. But objects – well we see objects all the time in movies. It’s not like I question whether or not a car in a movie is actually a car. Right?

So, people are driving a Cadillac in a movie and, yes, because that’s fine. But when you tell that’s the David Letterman show in the movie and a fake character is talking to the real David Letterman there’s a disconnect. So there you go. That’s the difference for me.

**John:** That’s the difference for me, too. I think where you fall into this murky gray line is are we creating a fake news network for this person to be on? Yes, then I’m seeing – where I should be a seeing a CNN logo then I’m seeing something else. But I try to write around those situations so I wouldn’t necessarily need to see the brand of whatever the news network is. I try to sort of keep news anchors and that kind of stuff out of my scripts as much as possible anyway.

Just the degree to which you cannot be using real people or having to create a fake network to make this all work, that to me is great. Unless the whole premise of the thing is like that you are at a news network. I say then you actually build a news network.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because that’s a fundamental premise thing that you’re doing. You’re creating a whole news network for this. You’re doing Broadcast News where this is not NBC, CBS, or ABC. This is some other network. We are fine with that because that’s a fundamental premise you’re establishing.

**Craig:** What was the magazine called in Devil Wears Prada?

**John:** Exactly. I don’t remember, but I believed it. I saw what kind of magazine it was and that’s what mattered.

**Craig:** You knew it was supposed to be, what is it, Cosmopolitan? Is that what it was supposed to be?

**John:** I don’t know. Aline is going to be so upset with us.

**Craig:** I know. What was it supposed to be? I don’t know. But, you know, it was supposed to be one of those, and it was its own thing because obviously it needed to be its own thing. But you believed it because you understood what the point was.

**John:** Yep. Do you want to take our last bit of follow up?

**Craig:** This is the best question. This is a bummer. So Nick from Los Angeles, Re: 334 Worst Case Scenarios, one of my favorite episodes. He writes, “What if there were,” now he didn’t write that. He said, “What if there was–?” But, Nick, let’s talk about the subjunctive for a second Nick. Nick, if we use if then we need to go into the subjunctive.

**John:** Yes. Subjunctive is an important mood. And we don’t use it very often in English, but this is a case where really you do need the subjunctive. There are situations like if he was at the store at that time then that was crucial. Like there are situations where you could use was. This is a were situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a were situation. So you don’t want to say what if there was a. You want to say what if there were “a cataclysmic event that only affected,” oh Nick also misspelled affected. “Only affected the City of Los Angeles. For example, North Korea attacks the City of LA. The US retaliates and neutralizes North Korea. The US wins but LA is wiped off the map Hiroshima style.” OK.

“This is simplistic, I know, but stay with me,” says Nick. “What becomes of the American film industry if everyone in LA is dead? Would the NYC branches of Hollywood companies – studios, agencies, unions, etc. – and production heavy places like Atlanta be able to carry the torch of the entire film and television industry? How much of our business is dependent on this town and the people who live in it?”

Ooh, so a grim but interesting–

**John:** I think it’s a grim but very fascinating question. So, here’s what I will say. If Los Angeles were obliterated in a nuclear strike the biggest concern, of course, would not be, “Oh no, our film and our television.” The world would be profoundly different if this thing had happened. So, we have to acknowledge that we’re in a different universe when LA gets wiped off the map.

All that said, thinking about it just from our film and our television, I suspect it would recover surprisingly quickly. And it would recover because there are people in New York who write movies and who write television. There are folks in Atlanta. There are folks in Austin. There are other folks who could make this stuff. And eventually it would find its way back onto the air. We’d be making movies again. We’d be bringing in movies from overseas. It would eventually get back to something resembling what we currently have.

A nuclear strike would be horrible, but it would not be – understatement of the year. [laughs] It would be obviously tremendously devastating, but I think within five years you’d be back to something that resembled what we currently have.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** I’m less optimistic than you are about that. I mean, yes, inevitably, eventually things return. But, I think the biggest issue is not so much for instance – like Atlanta is a very production-heavy place, but it’s a production-heavy place in the sense of the personnel are crew. You can’t start without the writing. And I would be worried about how many writers would be dead. Now, I’m not just saying that because I’m a fussy writer chauvinist. But ultimately all the content comes from writers.

So, pretty much most of your big shows that you love, all those people are gone. All the people behind those people are gone. When you work in movies, the people who work in this business are always looking for good people to write stuff and they’re always complaining that they can’t find them. And that’s in Los Angeles where there are 1,000 people per block who want to do this. You eliminate all the people that do do it and all that institutional wisdom, all that stuff is gone and out the door. It’s going to take a long time. I think it’s going to take a long time to replace a lost generation of talent like that.

And, yes, for better or worse, most of it is located in Los Angeles.

**John:** Yeah. I do think you would import talent from overseas. I think you would take things that are sort of adjacent to what we’re doing and bring it into our broadcast networks and other places. It would be different. It would be different for a while. But, five years from now will be different regardless. So, there are so many hypotheticals on top of hypotheticals.

The only thing I can say with certainty is that “were” was the correct form of “to be” in that sentence.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** No question.

**Craig:** I mean, no question.

**John:** All right. That was all just follow up. Now we have actual brand new questions.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We’re going to start with Ash from Adelaide, Australia. I don’t know that we’ve ever had a question from Adelaide, but I’m excited to answer Ash’s question.

**Craig:** Go for it.

**John:** “I’ve always been curious how is the Academy Award for the two screenplays categories voted on.” That again is not grammatical. How are the Academy Awards for the two screenplays voted on. So the two categories are Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Screenplay.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Ash asks, “In that I mean is everyone voting based on the script alone, or are they voting based on the final film?” Craig, talk us through this.

**Craig:** [laughs] You bastard. You bloody bastard. Well, one of us is a member of the Academy and sits on the committee that deals with these rules and things and the other one of us could not even work at the event as a caterer. So, I think you should answer this question.

**John:** I will answer the question. The rules are that you are voting based on which you believe is the best screenplay. And there’s not requirement that you’ve actually read all the screenplays. That said, I would say over the last ten years it has gotten incredibly better about making sure that those scripts actually go out for the nominated films. And so of the ten nominated films I probably have received screenplays for a lot of them either as PDFs or as like physical printed bound copies.

Every screenplay that we’ve gotten online is also available right now in Weekend Read so everyone can download the scripts and read those scripts. That said, I will vote for Best Screenplay on some scripts that I have not read. I think it is great to have the ability to read the scripts because sometimes a script is vastly different than the movie. In some ways I feel like I’m voting for Best Original Screenplay or Best Adapted Screenplay based on, “Well, you know what, that was probably a good script and the director didn’t mess it up so I guess that was a good script.” Because you don’t honestly know exactly what was in the script, even when you get the script handed to you. Well, is that reflecting what the intention was of the script going into it, or is this more reflecting what the final film is? Has it basically been sort of reverse engineered from the final screenplay? You don’t know.

So, as I vote for these awards for the WGA awards and the Academy Awards I’m basing it on sort of in my experience as a screenwriter and knowing what it takes to go from the page to the screen what do I suspect the screenwriter’s contribution was to that film that was terrific. And that is honestly how I’m basing my vote.

Craig, as you’re voting on these awards, like WGA awards, what are you doing? Are you reading the scripts?

**Craig:** I don’t really vote on those things. I just don’t understand the whole thing. The whole awarding thing for this, I just don’t understand it. [laughs] I just don’t get it. I’ve never gotten it. I mean, it’s not that I would ever be not grateful if I got an award for something, but I just – it’s not – like I know people get really excited about it. I’ve never quite gotten it. It’s just not in my – I love what I love. I don’t know how else to put it. I love what I love.

You know, and usually when I look at the lists of like, “Well, here are the five things you’re allowed to vote on for best movie I think well the movie I loved the most isn’t here.”

**John:** Yeah. I get that.

**Craig:** So what’s the point?

**John:** I will say that I take nominations very seriously in the sense of like as a person who gets to nominate movies I take that really seriously because I want sometimes to call out well these five movies are fantastic. And they’re fantastic because the writing is really good. And so I want to commend those movies.

I love for a great movie to win the awards, too, but I think the nominations are incredibly important. I’ve not been nominated for an Academy Award. I got nominated for a BAFTA. That was great. But the whole award season stuff is crazy and exhausting. And as crazy and exhausting as it is to read about it and watch it, it’s like 15 times more exhausting to be in the middle of it. And you end up spending months of your life just going to different lunches and sitting around with different reporters to talk about your movie for the 15,000th time.

The only really good thing I got out of it is I got to talk to some other really great filmmakers and hang out with them because we were always doing the same panels together. So, if it gets some filmmakers together working that’s great.

A thing I think people would not understand is they always say like these movies are pitted against each other. The experience on the ground isn’t really being pitted against each other because you’re hanging out with these other nominees all the time. And they’re mostly great. And so that is a nice thing that comes out of award season is you get to hang out with other really talented filmmakers who are making something good, who made something good and are hopefully making good things in the future.

So, that’s a nice part of it. But, back to Ash’s question. We get the screenplays. There’s no requirement to have read them. We are voting based on our guesses in terms of what we think is probably the best movie based on the writing.

**Craig:** All right. Our next question is from Tommy Lastname. We’ve gotten a question from Tommy Lastname before.

**John:** Yeah. He’s going to be big. I mean, with a name like Tommy Lastname you’re destined for greatness.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there’s not too many Tommy Lastnames out there.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Tommy Lastname from LA writes, “A little background. I’ve been given a chance to write something for money. Not much money, but the producers have a movie coming out this year that I expect will do well and I feel I’m taking a chance on them as much as they’re taking a chance on me. My problem is that I feel like the script is not living up to the kind of work I’m used to writing.

“Frankly, I think it might be a bad script and I have a due date coming up. Is there any advice either of you can offer on the subject of turning a less than stellar situation like this around? I would like the ability to reach out to them in the future and possibly work on other things that are more in my wheelhouse, but I’m afraid a bad script might burn this bridge.”

Uh-oh.

**John:** Uh-oh. Craig, start us off with some advice for Tommy Lastname. Like, do you turn in the bad script? Do you email these producers to say these are the problems I’m having? What should Tommy do?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know anything about the situation other than what he’s told us. So I don’t know if he took this job because he just needed money. It sounds like it since he describes it as a chance to write something for money. That means, my guess, that he did this because he needs cash and so – and this happens. You don’t always get to write the things you want to write. The problem is when you are writing something, he describes it as out of his wheelhouse, but maybe we could also just describe it as something that he normally would never, ever write. The odds of you doing your best work are fairly slim.

In fact, let’s just go out on a limb here and say it’s not possible to do your best work or to live up to the kind of work you’re used to writing because you would never write this. In that sense I think Tommy you have to make peace with what you actually are writing. And you have to acknowledge that you may not be necessarily aware of whether or not this is or is not good because this isn’t something that you normally deal with. Your ability to judge it may be a little off.

That said, if there is anyone that you can have a discussion about this with, a producer, I think it’s fair for you to sit down and say, “Listen, I have some questions of things I’m not necessarily in love with and I just wanted to bounce some thoughts off of you and see if you had any ideas just to keep going and be able to revise as I go.” And see if maybe just talking it through might help you solve a few of the problems.

But, if there is an overall problem of, “Ooh, I may have been miscast in this part,” that’s not going to change from anything and you will face the music one way or another. It’s not a question of a bad script burning this bridge. It’s a question of you may not supposed to be writing this movie.

**John:** Yeah. I like your metaphor of being miscast. I would say that there’s a step before you turn it in that could be really helpful. So continuing with this miscast metaphor, let’s say you got cast in this part and you’re like I just don’t know if I can do this.

A thing you might try is to actually attempt the performance for somebody who is not the director, who is not the producer, and see like does this make sense at all. Like, am I being a crazy person? Should I try to get out of this? So you would actually – you perform the scene for some actor friends of yours to see like does this make any sense. And the equivalent for you would be as a writer is show some people what you’re writing. Show some people who actually this kind of is in their wheelhouse. And does this make sense? Is this actually bad? Because it’s entirely possible that you just don’t know whether it’s good or it’s bad. And you may be feeling it’s bad because as Craig said it’s just not your taste. It’s not your kind of movie.

If it really isn’t working then I think you have the conversation with the producers about this is what I’m doing and this is where we’re at.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But what I will say is that sometimes writing outside of your wheelhouse, writing a thing you’re not comfortable about writing, you’re doing this for the money. You’re doing this for the job, for the chance to do this. But part of doing the job is learning how to write for people. And this is something you’re getting out of this is basically “How do I do what I know how to do, which is to tell a story with words on a page, for somebody else.”

And this might be one of your very first jobs doing that. If the project isn’t great, if your writing isn’t the best it could possibly be, you’re at least learning how to do this part of the job. And that is an incredibly important part of everything you’re going to be doing for hopefully the next 30 years of your career. So suffering through this and figuring out how to make the best of a not great situation is a really valuable lesson you’re having a chance to learn right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. The one thing you don’t want to do is quit.

**John:** Yep. Just don’t quit.

**Craig:** No. Don’t quit. Get yourself through it. There is some pain ahead, but you get through it and you learn from it and, you know, helps you identify this particular bugaboo the next time it’s coming at you.

**John:** Cool. Our next question comes from Casey and Casey sent in some audio so let’s take a listen.

**Casey:** Yo. Hey, kiddo, I got to ask a question to Scriptnotes. Can you let me just do that? Yo. Robot John, Sexy Craig, my writing partner and I have a feature script we’re super stoked about with an eye on hopefully someday directing it, co-directing it. That is not happening anytime soon. So the next step for us, we plan on heisting the Whiplash blueprint and writing a short based on the feature script, making sure that short is something we’re confident that we can self-fund and produce on our own.

We’ve got a little bit of experience doing that, so we just need to figure out what that short script is. So any suggestions as to how best condense, abbreviate, or otherwise shortify a feature screenplay? The goal, of course, is not to just pick our favorite scene and shoot it. We want the short to standalone as a narrative and also tease the feature and the bigger arcs of our favorite characters.

So, what is a lonely, miserable writer clinging to his fading dreams to do?

**John:** So, what Casey is talking about is this idea where you have a plan for making a feature script so you make a little short film first as sort of a proof of concept in many ways. This is the world, the universe, the characters. And someone who sees the short, which wins awards, and then you get the money to make your feature script.

That’s actually a viable model. And you go to Sundance Film Festival every year, there will be a couple of shorts which get acclaim. Those filmmakers will go off and make the feature versions of those shorts and sometimes they’re terrific. So what Casey is describing isn’t just Whiplash. There are other films you can point to that had this as a template.

**Craig:** Yes. And I think – I mean, it’s a very good question. And I think the best advice I could offer you, Casey, is to think of your short film as a film. So, you have a feature film script and you’re right to say, OK, I don’t want to just lift my favorite scene, but there might be a temptation to say why don’t I just take the beginning of this scene and stick it onto the end of that one. Or, you know, and you don’t want to do that.

You want to be cinematic. I mean, short films tend to be very evocative and you can be a little more lyrical about things. You may be able, for instance, to take a scene where your character is saying something really heartfelt and beautiful and you show some other things from the movie and you play around with time a little bit.

You have to be a little inventive and the purpose of it is to give people a sense that you guys know what you’re doing. Not to advertise the movie you want to make, but rather to say we’ve made a film that – forget this other thing. It’s as if we always intended to make this short film. It is in and of itself for itself. And then if you really like it, guess what, we have a feature-length movie that is in the same world with the same characters as this.

**John:** Craig is exactly right on this topic. So, do not shoot this as a trailer for your feature. Shoot this as one complete thought, one full idea, one short film. Ideally, someone should see your short and say like, “Hey, have you ever thought about making that into a feature?” And you just say like, you know what, we’ve thought about that. But don’t pitch this as like here’s a short version of our feature. That’s not what you want to do. You’ve got to make the absolute best short film that you can do.

And it’s worth studying really good short films to see how they work, because they tend to be really one idea. Craig says lyrical, I’d say they’re asking one question and the character is answering that one question and we get out. And they don’t have the same expectations of hitting all those beats. Sometimes they can be really short and it’s just like it’s following almost in real time through one thing.

But ideally you’re setting up a fascinating world, an interesting character, a simple conflict that you’re going to get through in the course of that thing. So that’s why you’re not going to introduce all your characters from your feature. You’re going to introduce probably your hero and one supporting person. And sequences or scenes might not even be in your movie. Think about it like you might take that character and wind them back a few months. Or look at a sequence in the middle of your story and how could you do it simpler with different characters or different obstacles to get the feeling of that. But don’t just try to copy and paste out moments from your script to do it because you’re unlikely to get what you really want.

**Craig:** Exactly. You want to start a new file. You know what I mean? Like on your computer, whatever program you use, start a new file. And I think you have to at least be somewhat inquisitive about your feature script and ask what is the ultimate purpose of this movie. Where is the beating heart of this thing? What is an image or a moment that gets me? That is meaningful.

Maybe start there as an inspiration. But begin a new document. I think you will be so much freer at that moment. You will feel so much freer. And you will be able to design something that was always meant to be short.

**John:** Agreed. Another way to think about it is imagine that your screenplay is like the novel and now you’re making a short film based on that novel. You wouldn’t take things directly. You would take a characteristic of it and use that. Don’t use that whole document. That’s not how you should start.

All right, Craig, let’s do one more question then. Do you want to take Nate?

**Craig:** Yeah, this is a little quickie. Nate writes, “Do we need last names?” Not us, you know, in life, but in our scripts. “Somewhere way back in my junior college screenwriting classes I seem to recall being told to always give both first and last names for any character who has dialogue. I know we hate rules, but is there a rule on this?”

John?

**John:** Oh, Nate, your junior college writing class steered you wrong. So here is what I would say about last names in scripts. Last names are useful to signal sometimes that a character is important enough that they need a first name and a last name. Last names can be useful in making a character more specific. It gives us a clue to their ethnic background, some other characteristic of that person. But, no, you can have characters with dialogue in your script who do not have last names. It’s fine. You can have characters in your script who sort of only have last names. That’s fine, too. There is no hard and fast rule about this. It should be what works best for your script and your story.

**Craig:** I feel like we could sell a little buzzer and we would sell it at cost, you know, because obviously I make too much money on this show. And people in junior college screenwriting classes could just hit the buzzer when their professor delivered a rule. This would be a great example of a silly rule. So, Nate, John is absolutely correct. And, you know, look, there are certain things like – let’s say you’re writing a show about a team, teammates, right. Like cheerleaders. Baseball players. Cops in a precinct. Generally speaking they kind of do the whole last name thing, you know. And that’s normal. And that’s what you would do. And, yeah, you don’t need last names. You don’t need first names.

You could call people by colors.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Tarantino did it.

**John:** And we’ve talked about a lot of times where characters are just identified by their job, like Clerk. And so these are characters with dialogue but especially if they’re only showing up in one scene it’s kind of better not to give them a real name because once a character has an actual real name you’re signaling to the audience this person is crucial. You have to pay attention to them. Whereas if you call them Clerk or Hairdresser, we know subconsciously it’s OK. We don’t have to focus on them so much.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like if it was good enough for Beckett to just say Vladimir and Estragon, then it’s probably good enough for us, right? You don’t need last names.

**John:** Yeah, again, Craig quoting the Beckett rule.

**Craig:** [laughs] The good old Beckett rule.

**John:** Ding.

**Craig:** Ding.

**John:** It is time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article I read this week. It is “The Bittersweet Beauty of Adam Rippon” by Richard Lawson writing for Vanity Fair. It is a great article. It’s about Adam Rippon the figure skater, but it’s not really about him. It’s about the sort of the experience of watching this openly gay figure skater out there in the world and Richard Lawson thinking back to his own childhood and how much he loved figure skating, and a friend of his, and their relationship, and finding out later on that that guy was gay, too. It’s really great. I won’t spoil stuff in it, but I thought it very much captured this really unique and interesting moment that happened this past week and things going forward.

And so these last two weeks I’ve been talking to so many school kids and some schools I’ve been talking to seventh graders and like well that’s clearly the gay kid. Like that is the gay kid. And it’s the gay kid in ways that I think when Craig and I were going through school you wouldn’t want to point and say like that’s the gay kid, but I think these kids are out. And that is so interesting and so fascinating. And so Richard Lawson’s article made me think of that as well as sort of my own youth. I thought it was just a great synthesis of this really interesting time that we’re at right now.

**Craig:** It is. And you’re absolutely right that kids are out now, which is really encouraging and lovely. I read this article, too, before you had listed it here. And I agree it was really, really well done. And from my point of view as coming from the outside of being straight, one of the things that I never really thought about but I thought this article did a really good job of pointing out was the value of the outness itself. Because, you know, growing up and even into my 20s and 30s and stuff, to me figure skating always seemed like, well, there were a lot of gay figure skaters.

So when they were talking about Adam Rippon I was like, really, he’s the first kind of one? Because, you know, Brian Boitano, what about Brian Boitano? What about Rudy Galindo? What about Johnny Weir for god’s sakes? Well they weren’t out. And it’s one thing to say, “Well Brian Boitano, he’s probably gay, right?” But it’s another thing for him to say, “That’s right. I am.”

It’s different. And I thought that was a really interesting point to make and why Adam Rippon is – I can see really important compared to say just somebody who else who is probably gay but isn’t saying it. That not saying it thing is a symptom of something bad, I think, in the world. And so it was great to see.

**John:** So these last two weeks I’ve been talking to all of these school kids, and at the end of my presentation we open for questions. And so they’re asking about the book. They’re asking about movies. Sometimes the questions just go far afield. And so this one boy raised his hand and he goes, “Are you married?” And so I said, “I am married. And my daughter is 12 and she really loves middle grade fiction.” And I transferred out of it so quickly.

And I had that moment of hesitation like do I out myself. Because in general in real life I will proactively out myself to just sort of make it clear that there’s a gay person out there in the world. But I hesitated and I didn’t say anything because these are fourth graders and it was a giant crowd. We were in like the cafetorium and there’s like a hundred kids. And I just knew it was going to be the moment where like, “Oh, it’s going to be about that now. Like that is going to be the headline that sort of comes home from this.” And I didn’t want that to happen.

At the same time, I felt bad ending myself there. So, it’s never easy. I sort of assume that I’m always out, but of course you’re never always out to everybody.

**Craig:** No, that’s absolutely true. And I immediately empathize with that situation as you’re describing it because I can do all the math in my head in the same way and you just think, “Well, you know, now there’s going to be a bunch of murmuring.” [laughs] Especially in fourth grade. Just some murmuring might happen.

Whereas if you were in a high school setting, no problem. Today, zero problem.

**John:** Easily. So, yeah, you’re always making choices. So, that was the choice I made there and I still feel kind of weird about it.

**Craig:** I get it. I get it. Sometimes life does sort of put those moments at you and – I mean, at least I don’t think in that moment you didn’t compromise who you were. I don’t think that happened.

**John:** Yeah. But it was sort of a lie of omission. And I’m always mindful of when I’m doing that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Listen, I’ve had moments in my past where I’ve compromised myself and I feel terrible about it where someone has said something – they didn’t know I was Jewish. And someone said something about Jewish people in front of me and I didn’t say anything. I mean, it was when I was a kid. But because I was kind of paralyzed and embarrassed and didn’t know what to do.

And, you know, there’s that thing we’re more terrified of offending people than we are of being hurt ourselves. And I think about it to this very day.

**John:** Yeah. What you’re describing is that same symptom of like a person is choking and they will run out of a room because they don’t want to embarrass or inconvenience people where they need to actually get the attention and become the center of attention. So, in many ways I think I’m applauding Adam Rippon for letting himself be the center of attention on this moment.

**Craig:** I completely agree. Good on him.

Well, I have a far less interesting but so satisfying One Cool Thing. And, of course, how could it not be The Room: Old Sins. This is the fourth Room game for iOS.

**John:** So excited for you.

**Craig:** Did you play it?

**John:** I haven’t played it yet. But when I saw that it was out I was like well that is clearly Craig’s One Cool Thing. There is no question that that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Look, slam dunk. And I have a bunch saved up. So I’ll actually have some One Cool Things for a while. But The Room: Old Sins was terrific. It was beautifully done, as always, and I liked also they kind of changed it up a bit in the way that they did things. But overall just as always brilliantly done. I think it’s Fireproof. Fireproof Games.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** Wonderful stuff. I hope that they continue to make The Room games forever.

**John:** We will all hope that. And I hope we get to make our show forever. It’s nice to be back doing this with you. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Matthew Chilelli. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can ask questions like the ones we answered today.

On Twitter, short questions are great. So Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you like to get podcasts. Leave us some ratings. Leave us some reviews. Those are very, very helpful. And thank you to everybody who left reviews and ratings on Launch. I guess I haven’t talked to Craig since we did the first episode, but I hit number eight on the charts which was nuts.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** So thank you to all the listeners who clicked over to Launch and I’ve gotten some great feedback on that so thank you so much for that.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. We get those up a few days after the show goes up. We’re trying to find a way to get the transcripts for Launch up as well, because transcripts are very helpful and they help people find stuff in there. Also, people who can’t listen to the show can read them, which is always good.

You can find the back episodes of this show at Scriptnotes.net. It’s $2 a month for all the back episodes. You can also get the USB drives that have the first 300 episodes if you’d like to have them on a small USB drive. Just in case LA is hit by a nuclear device and you will have to carry on the tradition wherever you have your USB drive.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the most important thing. [laughs]

**John:** That is the most important thing. You’re making a show about Chernobyl. I mean, who knows how much screenwriting knowledge was lost in the disaster of Chernobyl.

**Craig:** I do. And the answer is none.

**John:** [laughs] OK. That’s fine. If any place is going to have a nuclear disaster and not affect the film industry, it’s Chernobyl, except now does impact the film and television industry because you get to make a TV show about it.

**Craig:** Good point. Good point.

**John:** I’m all optimism now.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** All right. See you.

Links:

* WGA members, you can update your diversity details at [my.wga.org](https://my.wga.org/home/Login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fhome%2f). Don’t forget to “publish.”
* John on Brian Koppelman’s podcast, [The Moment](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-moment-with-brian-koppelman/id814550071?mt=2)
* Common musical number types include the argument song ([“Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO23WBji_Z0) from Annie Get Your Gun, [“Sue Me”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlqCfesfoYs) from Guys & Dolls, [“People Will Say We’re in Love”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEwVAV3VPw4) from Oklahoma!), the scheme song ([“A Little Priest”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=atSbk0vLuRw) from Sweeney Todd, [“I Want the Good Times Back”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eNnHxFqXqs) from The Little Mermaid stage play), the philosophy song ([“Poor Unfortunate Souls”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfkkMHieqcI) from The Little Mermaid), the If Only song ([“On My Own”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFEkErGUjCU) from Les Miserables, [“Memory”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-L6rEm0rnY) from Cats, [“Send in the Clowns”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNwnrA8EshM) from A Little Night Music), and the Eleven O’Clock Number ([“Rose’s Turn”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsgVIr3LNbU) from Gypsy, [“Being Alive”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjrA93_O6Dw) from Company) and the sidekick song ([“Hakuna Matata”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xB5ceAruYrI) from the Lion King, [“The Travel Song”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikwSTF0O06k)).
* Marty McFly’s [victory lap](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1i5coU-0_Q)
* Awards scripts are available on [Weekend Read](https://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* [“The Bittersweet Beauty of Adam Rippon”](https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2018/02/adam-rippon-gay-olympic-athletes/amp?__twitter_impression=true) by Richard Lawson for Vanity Fair
* [The Room: Old Sins](http://www.fireproofgames.com/games/theroomoldsins)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_338.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/the-one-with-stephen-schiff).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August. I’m the host of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is either in Lithuania or somewhere in Los Angeles. He’s hidden away someplace, but I’m here in New York City. I’m at a bookstore on Prince Street called McNally Jackson. And this is a special little mini episode and we have a very special guest.

Our special guest is Stephen Schiff. He is the executive producer, or an executive producer, on The Americans, one of my very favorite TV shows. I’ve seen every episode.

**Stephen Schiff:** Yay.

**John:** I have so many questions for you. So we’re going to talk about TV. We’re going to talk about writing characters on an ongoing basis. We’re going to talk about writing in general. And then I’m going to sign a bunch of copies of Arlo Finch, which has nothing to do with any of that. So, Stephen Schiff, welcome.

**Stephen:** Thank you. Thank you.

**John:** So, Stephen, I saw the entire run of The Americans just last year. I had not seen it as it was coming out. We streamed the entire thing through Apple TV while we were living in Paris. And it was amazing. If people have not seen it – show of hands out here, who has seen The Americans? OK, it is an incredible show.

**Stephen:** Yay. Thank you.

**John:** And it’s remarkably well done. What I want to ask you about is we’re living with this family for so long. You’re living with this family for so long. And when I was watching the first season I was asking myself how can they sustain this premise. This premise of like this is a family that is living undercover. Those secrets are eventually going to come out. They’re living across the street from an FBI agent. That’s eventually going to be – it was sort of like this Chekhov’s gun, literally kind of Chekhov’s gun right across the street. And yet–

**Stephen:** Guns.

**John:** Guns pointed in every direction. And they’re still not going off. Well, they’re going off in ways we don’t expect. So what is it like living with the Jennings family for so many years?

**Stephen:** I’ve strangely been thinking about this recently because the years have accumulated, and I’ve sort of been thinking this show which I’m so deeply involved in and have been living for all these years, and you know, it starts from so many weird premises. The engine of it is so absurd, right? The absurdities are these people who really can pass as Americans. The show sort of began to have its inspiration with this gang of spies that were arrested by the FBI in an operation called Operation Ghost Stories in 2010. People think of them as illegals like our illegals, but no, they had Russian accents. They would not have appeared to be Americans. These people appear to be Americans. So that’s the first thing that’s – I mean, they speak perfect American English. They live perfect American lives seamlessly.

And so if you were to pitch that to me I’d say, oh yeah right. And then what happens when an FBI agent moves in next door. Oh yeah, great. This is the most ridiculous thing ever so far. And finally on top of that they wear hundreds of disguises all of which work.

**John:** Yeah.

**Stephen:** So, it’s like, really? And yet I think we have managed somehow to put aside all of that – to suspend disbelief enough so that you can have watching this show what I hope is a profound experience.

**John:** Well let’s talk about that. The progress from a pitch. So, even though it was based on some real things that happened and even though there was some underlying material or things that you’ve worked on before, it is essentially a pitch. You’re going in there saying I have this idea about a family that seems like an American family but they’re actually Russian spies. And what?

So you pitch this story, but there’s so much more to figure out after that point about, like, what is the show really about. And so when you guys are in the writing room, what is the show really about? Because clearly you’re talking about, you know, there’s the international issues. There’s the issues of what secrets you keep from your family. What secrets you keep from your spouse. You’re looking at the struggle of being a parent and not knowing what your kids are doing.

Is there a big list on the whiteboard of like these are themes, these are the interesting questions we’re asking? Or is it just internalized at this point?

**Stephen:** Well, of course, by this point it is internalized. But really your question is perfectly germane in that it’s a spy thing, but it’s also a story about a family. And maybe I shouldn’t even say also. Maybe it’s first and foremost a family drama that happens to be about a family that kills people and has hunting traps and is actually working against America. But we are always constantly aware of basically sort of having a family in a test tube. And you subject the test tube to these extraordinary conditions and yet what you’re seeing is still a family. And subjecting the family to those conditions reveals things about all of our families, we like to think and hope.

And, you know, to the degree that we are spies – all of us spies within our own lives. You know, the show addresses that and speaks to what the complications might be and might feel like. At the same time, we’re completely tethered to the facts of our premise. And so weapons must be used and concealments opened. And people pursued. And danger is skirted.

**John:** I want to dig into something you just said there. We are all spies within our own lives. So, I hear two things packed into that. That sense of as spies we are always concealing something that we don’t want other people to find out about us. And at the same time we’re always trying to scrape away and find information about the people around us. We’re always fundamentally distrusting the folks around us. Are there other layers to that that I’m not catching in terms of spies in our own lives?

**Stephen:** No, I think that’s part of it, but also another thing about a spy is that a spy has a cover. And maybe many covers as our spies do. And you’re presenting that cover to the world. And maybe we are all – we all have a cover. And we are all sort of presenting our cover. And I think something that we really try to feel in our show is what’s it like to be inside the cover. What’s it like – for instance, I did an episode two seasons ago I think it was, maybe three, in which the idea of the sexual operations that they undergo was explored a little bit. And Philip was remembering his training, his sex training. And yet he was doing it in the family master bedroom next to his wife. And they were exploring – these people are not very psychologically sophisticated. They are not – I mean, he’s gotten into EST now but they’re not analysans and they’re not people who understand that kind of language or wish to address things in that kind of way, in the way that we might be more used to in western drama.

But they do have questions. And they do want to find out things about themselves to a certain degree. And they’re trying to figure out how do I do this. How do I get into these situations where I’m in bed with someone pretending to, you know, love them or have a relationship with them and make love to them and I’m completely false in every respect?

And then how do I take that and shed it and go into my life and perform the same actions but from someplace that if I can’t find any sincerity I’m going to be lost.

**John:** Well that’s the same question that writers often ask in terms of their ability to create a completely fictitious world and make it feel real, but also your actors are doing that on a daily basis. They are like how am I supposed to be in love with this other actor while the cameras are rolling and not be in love with this person when the cameras stop rolling.

**Stephen:** Completely right. Exactly.

**John:** So I wanted to take another step back and look at this idea that everyone has a cover. That all characters have covers. And so in a show like The Americans that’s really clear. That’s the premise of the show that they’re always under cover. But all characters, everything that we’ve ever written, has a cover. They have a façade they’re putting out. There’s a real thing that’s underneath it. And that’s often the source of conflict within a scene or conflict within a character. We see the journey of them coming to terms with their façade and who they really are.

What have you learned in writing these characters and writing Philip and Elizabeth for The Americans that you think you can apply to characters who are not literally spies but have to present themselves a certain way? Are there any lessons we can take from that split?

**Stephen:** When I’m watching our actors – our actors are just the loveliest people to work with. That’s not always the case in television or movies as you well know. But they’re just wonderful lovely people. The man who plays Philip, who of course has an American accent, is Welsh but doesn’t talk like that at all. Keri Russell who plays his wife Elizabeth is this bubbly, funny, bright, sweet, and then she turns into a murderer and a scary person. And they both do that instantaneously. They’re not method-y in the least.

It is rather like what the show is about. They are spies on our show. They’re spies on our show in so many different ways. We all are doing that. I guess, you know, are there lessons that I can articulate that I draw from this that I can sort of bring into my own life and our lives and say I have learned that this is the way to do it and this is not? Not really. But watching this process and exploring this process over and over and over again and seeing what lies are, what their nature is, what they do, the damage they do, the reasons we tell them. You know, that’s something that we all deal with our lives every single day. And we all need to confront and face.

And we don’t because no one wants to say, “oh, I’m lying.” And no one wants to confront the liarness in yourself. You know, we have a TV show to do that with. But in a way it still requires an act of courage to bring that into your life and to confront it and admit to it.

**John:** Well, with Philip and Elizabeth you have professional liars. They’ve been trained in how to do this for a long time. And while we see the struggle sometimes, it’s not particularly hard for them. It has a long-term damage to them, but it’s not hard for them to flip that switch.

What’s so fascinating to see is the characters who are amateur liars, who are beginner liars. So, you see Paige trying to tell a lie. You see Nina trying to figure out, navigate those worlds where–

**Stephen:** She’s pretty good at it.

**John:** Yeah, but she gets better at it. And then you have Martha who, oh my god, Martha. We just love Martha so much. She’s not equipped for it. And that – watching the tension of someone trying to play a game that they’ve not played before. It’s like – it’s as if the NFL is happening and they’re suddenly on the field and they have to run with the ball.

**Stephen:** So what’s the difference – one difference is that for most of our series, and not entirely for all the characters, but for Philip and Elizabeth the lies are justifiable. The lies are subsumed to a greater cause. And the greater cause whether we think it’s worth subsuming anything to or not is to them a powerful overarching reason to lie no matter what. And you see them going through this. And you see the edges of a kind of agony. Maybe not the center of an agony that you or I might feel going through such a thing. But what they’re looking for to bolster themselves is the cause.

And they have the cause. And then maybe you see in Philip’s case especially a fraying of that belief in the cause. And you see what that does to him. And then he has to turn to other things. Elizabeth can always go back to that cause. In our lives, though, going back to your question, we are always creating causes that are higher causes that are worth lying for. Easy for anyone to say, well, I didn’t want to tell her that she looked fat in that dress. That’s a higher cause for us to lie in the service of. And I think most of us would agree that that’s OK. But that’s what we’re always doing. We’re justifying. We’re trying to find the cause.

It’s very interesting again as a thought experiment, which this whole show is, to look at what happens when you have this rock hard completely mistaken – because I think we all agree that the Soviet Union was not a wonderful place – cause with which to justify all the damage you do all the time.

**John:** So, with Philip and Elizabeth they’re the center of our show and most of the action circles around them. I think what I was surprised to see in the show, and it’s particularly as seasons go on, is how point of view changes, or the degree to which you stop limiting POVs so clearly. In early seasons, POV was limited to the Jennings family, sometimes their handlers were allowed to have scenes by themselves, and then Stan Beeman across the street which could take us into the FBI. But over time you decided to let other characters run with the ball basically. We can go off with Oleg and to see Oleg’s family for extended periods of time. What are those decisions like and what is the negotiations when you’re figuring out internally like do we let this character drive scenes without one of our other leads in it?

**Stephen:** I think this is something that happens with most TV shows. That you discover as the audience is discovering that you feel differently about the characters from the way you thought you were going to feel when you were first writing and pitching and all that. That almost always is an expansion. So for instance, Martha was a character who was kind of a joke in the first season. We came in and we looked at Martha and looked at Martha and we were loving Martha. We had a wonderful, wonderful actress, Alison Wright, playing her. And we thought, you know, we thought of her as a plain Jane who was just going to be duped and ruined. And now we began to say wait a sec, wait a sec, it’s not only our duty but our pleasure to go inside this person.

Well, then we had to give her a point of view. And, you know, Oleg was someone who completely changed. He was kind of like this sort of gad about playboy wearing no socks and listening to American music. And he became I think a somewhat profound person, a haunted person, a person really torn between all of the loyalties and all of the moral decisions that he has to make. That’s just more interesting.

**John:** It’s more interesting, but it’s also – I think there’s an assumption out in popular culture that all those decisions have to be made before that character shows up on screen. Basically there had to be a plan right from the very start. What I hear you saying is that in the case of Martha and in the case of Oleg you created these characters with one intention and then you saw what was possible and you changed the trajectory of where they were going to go based on what you saw. Is that accurate? Is that fair?

**Stephen:** Yes. I think that is fair. I mean, I think you see shows where you look at the characters sort of a couple seasons down the line and you say wait a sec, wait a sec, this is not the same character. You know, and that can be – I mean, I look at a show like Downton Abbey where all the bad guys became good guys and I went with it. I was like, “OK, I hated this guy, now I love this guy. It’s hard to remember hating this guy.”

**John:** The Thomas problem, yeah.

**Stephen:** The Thomas problem as it is known in the business. And we do the same thing, I hope, in a quieter way. Our characters I don’t think contradict who they were, but certainly they’re much more alive and explored and present and multidimensional than they were. It’s a little like what happens in a writer’s room in a way. You come into a writer’s room and you have an idea. And it starts bouncing around and it starts bouncing around. And you and I are people who have done movies. Movies we’re all alone really. And we bounce things off producers and what not, but basically we’re all alone. And we in a way have to grow our own.

In this world of television and in this world of a multi-season series, they grow on their own without you to a certain degree. They start – you know, you always hear from any kind of writer, playwrights, novelists, anyone, the characters tell me what to do.

I don’t know to what degree that’s really true or to what degree that’s a metaphor, but it’s about as true as it gets when you’re doing a TV show because other people are seeing the characters differently and you’re bouncing off of that. And ideas come in and they might seem like not the right idea but they spark something and pretty soon – I mean, I think probably people here will remember a memorable tooth-pulling in our show. And that began as such a different thing. It just began as there was this action scene in which her tooth was hurt, what do we do about it? And then we turned it into this thing because it starts to grow and it’s not just one person growing it. It’s all this people growing it.

Our characters are like that, too. The actors bring something. The other writers bring something. The time brings something. The story demands something else. Our interests change. And so it’s an organic process.

**John:** So the TV show right now is on cable with commercial breaks. How do you think that show would be different if it were done for premium, for Netflix, for Amazon, for something streaming? Do you think you would make the same show? And to which degree are you writing towards act breaks? Because it feels like those act breaks matter in your writing.

**Stephen:** We do write towards act breaks, but we are being streamed.

**John:** Yeah, I watched it entirely streaming.

**Stephen:** You watched it streaming. I mean, how many people here watch it streamed? Two. OK. So not a large number, but yeah, basically we don’t make that differentiation. But we do use act breaks because they’re kind of fun to use. An act break is a place where you come to an emotional plateau. We don’t do the traditional network broadcast act break of “Oh my god bite your fingers through the commercials.” We sometimes will just come to a place where we’ve gone up a set of stairs and we’re on the landing and we’re catching our breath and we’re looking around and saying, “OK, where are we going from here?”

**John:** A character decision moment or resolution of an action that clearly the nature of the story is going to have to be different after that action has happened, but not the classic sort of like, oh no, there’s somebody outside the door. You’re not doing that kind of act break on your show.

**Stephen:** That’s right. And the nature might not be any different from how it changes after any other scene in the middle of an act, for instance, but there is a feeling of what we call an act out. Act out is the last scene before you’re done with that act. And so on our show we have a teaser and four acts. So it’s a five act show. And there’s a teaser out, act one out, act two out, etc. And there’s a feeling about it. There’s a nimbus around it. There’s a kind of – it either has the glow of an act out or it doesn’t have the glow of an act out. And it’s not something that’s defined by any set of rules. It’s defined by our shared feeling about it.

**John:** Can I make a guess that one of your internal rules for an act out is it can’t be a scene where people are speaking Russian? Is that actually true? Because your show has more than sort of any show on broadcast has a lot of people with subtitles. Where you can sort of – the degree to which we all watch TV sometimes, you’re checking something on the phone, but you’re listening to it. But then it gets to a Russian scene and you’re like, ugh, I have to do some reading. I have to really stare at the screen to do it.

My question for you is there’s quite a bit of Russian, and especially this last season I felt like I heard a lot and there’s Oleg. My hunch is that you will not go – an act out scene can’t be a Russian scene. Is that true or is that not true?

**Stephen:** That is as far as I know not true. I would have to go back and look, but it’s not something we carry around with us or consciously do.

Just something interesting about our Russian, because with very, very, very, very tiny exceptions all of our Russian speaking is done by native Russian speakers, people who really speak it.

**John:** My husband speaks Russian.

**Stephen:** Oh, is he a native Russian speaker?

**John:** He’s not. He learned Russian. But he would point out, I think in the first season he heard when people were trying to speak Russian and they’re not really Russian people.

**Stephen:** We’ve completely not done that for the last – and our translator is a woman named Masha Gessen, who just won the National Book Award, so she’s the most overqualified TV translator in the history of television.

And then we have translators on set. We have the actors sort of giving their views on the Russian they’re to speak because they’re native Russian speakers. And we also have an expert in Russia who is also looking at our translation. So all of that is a very careful process. But, of course, we write it in English.

And the way we write it in English is a little bit special only in that we try to make it so completely colloquial. We try to make it as conversational. So no one is ever saying, you know, “Yes my liege,” kind of dialogue. It’s as un-stiff as anything on our show, because we want it – for one thing that translates directly into the subtitles. And for another thing that’s the mood we want. We want it to be conversational every day Russian. But Russian remains to me a very mysterious language. And to all of us who write the show it’s this vast distant thing that we know we’ll never quite conquer.

**John:** So I think you just answered a question that I had which is when a character is speaking Russian in the script, what we see in subtitles is what you have in the script, not necessarily a direct translation of what those actors are saying?

**Stephen:** Yes, that’s right.

**John:** OK. Very, very cool. So it’s not a surprise to you and your editors don’t have to worry about like is that really the thing that goes at this moment.

**Stephen:** Well, we vet that, of course. We have basically three levels of vetting that and we want it to be true and we want it to be real. But we basically – we’ve written that dialogue. And so we’re not rewriting it because it’s turned into Russian in between. Also at our table reads, by the way, when all of our actors are there we sit there reading the script and the Russian-speaking actors have Russian to read. And so we’re sitting there, and some of these scenes as you’ve mentioned are long, and so we’re reading English, English, English, English, and then suddenly someone is speaking Russian for a couple pages. And we’re like, uh, are we done with that page yet?

**John:** That’s nice. Because it’s still English in the script, but they’re just–

**Stephen:** It’s English in the script, but they already have the translation. And they’re doing it and we want them to do it the way it’s going to be because that will give us a better idea of how it flows.

**John:** Talking about the table read process is one of my last questions. So you have the script for the episode that’s about to shoot, but you’re probably doing that table read while you’re – is it on a lunch break while you’re shooting?

**Stephen:** It’s on lunch break for the, yeah.

**John:** And so those actors have gotten the script but they haven’t had a lot of time to prepare. But this is a chance for everyone to sit around a table, speak it all aloud, hear what the whole thing is. What do you get out of a table read?

**Stephen:** I hear what’s not quite there. By the time we get to a table read we’re very much there. We’ve gone through many stages of – I mean, it is a script. So we’ve gone through all the stages that precede the script: beat sheets, outlines, the whiteboard before that, all that stuff. And then we’ve gone through many iterations of the script itself that have been brought to bear by the prep process, by preparation process. So we do location scouts. And that will change some things.

We bring in the director, because the directors are not there when we’re writing, and the directors come in basically for a couple weeks, do a show, and leave. So we have meetings with them. We hear what their questions are. We talk about what we feel the scenes mean. We go through it all that way. And sometimes the director will say, well wait, I was reading this and I didn’t get that at all, or that didn’t make sense to me, or this… So we change it that way.

By the time we have the table read, all that has been gone through. Plus props, you know, we can’t get this prop. We’ve got to do this. Everything like that. And then finally you just hear. Is it working? Does it sound the way people talk? Does it sound the way our characters talk? Does it hit the emotional notes that we’re trying to hit? And then we make little adjustments, but they’re usually quite small by then.

And we don’t – and above all, I mean, because I’ve heard about this happening at table reads, we’re not judging performance. We’re not saying, “Oh, that guy gave a funny read. Let’s fire them.” You know, we’re not doing that at all. And I think that’s an awful thing to do.

**John:** For a table read like this, do you bring in day players for that table read?

**Stephen:** Yes, if we can, when we can. Sometimes they’re not even cast by then, but sometimes they are.

**John:** Very good. What season are we coming up on?

**Stephen:** We’re coming up on sixth and last.

**John:** The sixth and final season starts at the end of March.

**Stephen:** March 28.

**John:** I’m very, very excited to see it. But I’ll have to watch it week by week, which is just going to kill me.

**Stephen:** It’s so painful.

**John:** It is so – how dare you do this to us. So, usually on Scriptnotes we do a One Cool Thing, and so even though Craig is not here, let’s do our One Cool Things. And you have a very One Cool Thing.

**Stephen:** I have a One Cool Thing that has really helped me. I discovered it when I was first starting work on the show, and I don’t remember how I discovered it. And I’d be interested to remember, but I don’t. And it’s called the Google Ngram Viewer. Do you know what the Google Ngram Viewer is? Right, nobody knows what this is.

Go to books.google.com/ngram. And what that is is a compilation that they have put together. So, one of the things that’s very important to me on the show and one of the things that’s very important to all of us on the show is that we avoid anachronism. And we want to – and I’m a stickler. I’m a crazy stickler. Everything I watch on TV I’m turning to my wife and saying, “They wouldn’t have said that in 1403.” And I’m very annoying that way. And I’m annoying on our show that way.

But I’ve got to check myself, too, because there are a lot of things that ring funny in my ear. And when they do, I go to the Google Ngram Viewer. Here’s what you can do with this. You plug in words and you plug in a range of dates, and it can go back to the 19th Century, but it goes up to – I think the latest it goes up to is 2010. You can plug in I think up to three words. And then you do all your parameters and you hit Search A Lot of Books I think is what the button says.

And it goes through all the books that are in the Google book app or whatever it is. And finds the occurrence of those words. And it graphs them.

And so if I think that reference to John August is too early, we wouldn’t be talking about John August until much later. We weren’t talking about him at all in 1983.

**John:** I’m a time-traveler you’ll find out.

**Stephen:** Oh, OK. Well I haven’t done it yet, but I’ll do it when I get home. You put John August in the Google Ngram Viewer and you see that it’s way down here in 1983, and then in 1994 it goes up there and you say, OK, we can’t be doing these John August references in 1983.

So, for anyone who has any interest in writing of any kind like this, it’s a really invaluable tool. And it’s free.

**John:** It’s free in the sense that all Google things are free.

**Stephen:** Meaning we’re paying for it every second of our lives.

**John:** Here is what – so it’s not just for historical things though. Here is where I use Google Ngram Viewer, and it’s so incredibly helpful. So, for Arlo Finch, I was going back and forth with the copy editor on certain words. And one of the choices was kneeled versus knelt. And I’m like, “Oh, they’re both words that are in the dictionary. Both are in use. But which one is more common and which one is on the upswing and which one is on the downswing?”

So Google Ngram Viewer can show you the trajectory of words.

**Stephen:** Nice.

**John:** And you can see that things like knelt is going away and kneeled is coming up. So, Arlo Finch kneeled rather than knelt because of Google Ngram Viewer. So it’s very, very helpful.

**Stephen:** Yes!

**John:** My One Cool Thing is – so we’re in a bookstore, and it’s bookstore staff picks, which are a very, very good thing. And so the book I’m specifically going to recommend is Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From. And I only know about this book because three days and a lifetime ago I was in San Francisco doing an event just like this and beforehand I was talking with one of the clerks about like talk me through what happens with staff picks.

And so she was talking about why she picked the books that were on the shelf that had her little tag on them. She described it and like this book sounds incredible. And so I would not have known about it except for an actual human being in a small, independent bookstore pointing me to it.

Megan Hunter’s book, The End We Start From, it’s written in this really spare style, and I’ll show it to you. The sentences – they’re just tiny little sentences and it feels almost more like a poem. I’ll read something.

“This is how it comes to be, H with his complicated knowledge again, untying ropes. Packing supplies. Making ready.“

The story actually follows some sort of global apocalypse and flood but it’s told from the point of view of this woman who has a newborn baby and basically kind of what happens next. It’s brilliantly done and it sort of feels like The Road if it was from a young mother’s point of view. Really well done. So I’d just encourage people to check out this book, but also while we’re here in a bookstore look at those staff picks. Read what they’re recommending, because those are smart people who like books. So, bookstore clerks and recommendations, that’s my One Cool Thing for this week.

**Stephen:** Very cool.

**John:** Very cool. Now is the time where we can do some questions from the audience. So this can be about The Americans, this can be about Arlo Finch, it can be about Scriptnotes. It can be about anything that we might be able to talk about. Who has a question? In the back I see.

I’m just going to repeat the question so everyone can hear it so we also have it on tape. Your question is how are you dealing with the fact that we know that they’re fighting a losing cause the whole time through in The Americans. Is that something you guys talk about as you’re plotting things out?

**Stephen:** We don’t, because that has hung over our heads from the beginning, and we know it as what we sleep with and live with and eat with. It does form an irony that arches over the show.

The other thing I hear behind your question and you could just say, “No, I don’t mean that all,” is the way – because we’re a period show, and I think it’s interesting to talk about period shows in general and you handle that. How you handle the artifacts. How you handle the references. And sometimes we’ve handled the references very, very directly and blatantly. I wrote an episode called The Magic of David Copperfield 5, the Statue of Liberty Disappears, which was the title of a TV show that we showed a piece of in the show.

In a case like that, we’re referring very directly and people can get all sort of warm and gooey and nostalgic about “Oh yeah I remember that, oh my god, I was there that night. I was on the couch with my parents.” Whatever it was.

I’ll give you an example though of the kind of thing we try not to do, because this just happened. Our new season, it’s not revealing anything that hasn’t been revealed to say, jumps three years and will take place in 1987. And we have a moment when Elizabeth is spying on someone and she’s in a hotel. And I had her in this scene reading a magazine. When it came time to figure out what the magazine was, and I looked at the timing and I went, “Oh, it should be Vanity Fair because I personally was a writer for Vanity Fair at the time. And it should be December because it’s taking place in December. It can be the December issue of Vanity Fair. I did the cover story of the December issue of Vanity Fair on Bette Midler.” And so we arranged everything. We were getting ready for it. We had a disguise that we call the Vanity Fair disguise to this day.

And then we got a copy of the cover, and in the corner there was a banner referring to an article inside and it was, of course, Trump. And then we said, oh, we can’t use this.

Now, a lot of shows, I think, or some people would have said, “Oh, great. That will be so cool because everybody will be…” That’s exactly what we don’t do and never do and avoid doing. And that’s part of our – that’s our taste. That’s the flavor of the show. You didn’t ask that question, but you got that answer.

**John:** Question right here sir. So a question about whether we would ever consider doing Scriptnotes as a book. And we’ve talked about it a couple of times. People have come to us with the idea of doing it. The closest we’ve come is we’ve taken all of the transcripts and asked our listeners to figure out which are the key episodes, like if you’re catching up on stuff right now. And so people have done recommendations. So at johnaugust.com/guide you can download the Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide, which basically highlights the best episodes of those.

We might end up packaging together those transcripts in some sort of form, but neither Craig nor I really have the bandwidth or the interest in sort of doing a physical book-book. And part of it is just because we have a bristling reaction against sort of like books on screenwriting.

**Stephen:** Me too.

**John:** Yeah. So I don’t think there’s going to be a Scriptnotes book per se, but now that I have said that aloud it will inevitably happen. So I will anti-manifest that.

**Stephen:** On our show we always say there are no joke pitches. Because every time someone throws out a pitch as a joke we wind up using it.

**John:** Yeah. Right here.

**Audience Member:** Hi, this is more of a craft question and I think it can apply to novel writing as well as screenwriting for both TV and features. Just sort of asking about the process of that first draft and whether that be a book or a pilot or something of the like. I guess in my own experience and I feel like this is alluded to in the show that rewriting and refining can be more satisfying than that first pass, but how do you both as writers like just get through that first hurdle of that first thing and like getting to the end for the first time and not – like I just feel like it can be so difficult to just shuffle through it for the first time. What does that look like for you guys?

**John:** Well, there’s always that conflict between just get it done and perfectionism. And perfectionism can be this trap where you just never actually make enough progress in something to actually get through it. And so you have to recognize that you can try your very best, but there’s going to be things you’re going to be rewriting and not be afraid to write this thing right now knowing that you’re going to have to go back and do it again.

I’ll say that when I’m writing a script for myself that doesn’t have a timeline or when I’m writing a book which had a timeline but not the same kind of timeline, I had to always just hold myself to I have to generate this amount of material. I have to sort of keep moving forward or else I’m never going to get done.

But I’m curious with you, because you have a real schedule and a timeline. You can’t be precious about this draft. Like this draft is going to take an extra two weeks for you to write, the whole train goes off the rails. So, what is that first draft like for you when it’s your script?

**Stephen:** Well, I have so many answers to that question, because my process is so different working on this TV show from the way it is when I’m writing a movie, for instance. I’ve worked on the TV show, we’ve gone through a group process and we’ve gone through beat sheets and more beat sheets. And we’ve gone through unblended and blended, because we have all these storylines. And we can follow individually and then they have to blend to make an episode. And we cut off the episode in different places and see how that works. And then we do outlines.

And the outlines are much more detailed and can vary a lot in how detailed they are. And so by the time you go to what we’re calling for this little thought experiment, a first draft, it doesn’t feel like my experience of a first draft at all.

**John:** So let’s say this is a script you’re going to write. How long is the document that you have before you start writing that script? Is it a ten-page outline?

**Stephen:** You mean for the show?

**John:** For your show.

**Stephen:** Well, everything about our show is a little odd that way because you always hear that, for instance, an hour-long TV is an hour’s worth of pages. Our scripts are now down to 40 pages or fewer. Very short. And sometimes a lot of scenes, sometimes not very many scenes. So that’s not a good measure of anything particularly. What I would say is that as we’ve learned our own show, we do a lot of freedoms within it. There’s going to be a scene, for instance, in one of our episodes this year that takes up an entire act, something like eight or nine pages, something we wouldn’t have considered doing because we weren’t brave enough four years ago. But now we know our people. We have the latitude to do that.

On the other hand, when I’m writing a movie script my process is completely different. And I am kind of perfectionistic. And I find myself going inside it every day and sort of going back, almost back to the beginning sometimes and going right through and then inching ahead a little bit, and then going back again. Because I need the sound of the story and the characters deep inside me before I can even make another utterance. So it’s like waves as the tide comes in. If the tide is not coming in, if it’s going out, you’re in trouble.

**John:** So that’s a classic thing writers describe where like the first thing they’ll do in the morning is rewrite the pages from the day before and it gets them back in the flow of things. And with screenplays, screenplays are short enough that you can kind of do that. It doesn’t take that long to sort of read through and do this.

What I realized with Arlo Finch is that the book is just so long, if I went back to chapter one every day to start working I would actually start writing again at 6pm. There’s so many words. And so for that I would write each chapter as a separate file and I don’t go back. And if I can’t remember the name of a character I’ll just bracket it and come back to it later on, so I couldn’t let myself keep getting sucked back into the past of it all.

**Stephen:** One thing that people describe to me very often is they do a vomit draft. It’s coming out, I don’t care how it looks, blah, blah, blah. I find that impossible. I don’t even know what that is.

**John:** And it’s a really bad term for it, too. Grant Faulkner, who does National Novel Writing Month, you know, that is a whole process where you’re trying to generate 1,667 words per day. But even he won’t say vomit draft because it just implies it should be shitty. It should be as good as you can make it realistically while constantly moving forward.

Another question?

I see a gentleman carrying a baby.

**Stephen:** The question was do we use consultants and experts and whether we ever have to stop ourselves from revealing something real. And the answer is yes we use a phalanx of consultants and experts and people who are – in fact, we have one guy named Keith Milton who is one of the founders of the Spy Museum in Washington and has the most formidable, maybe the largest collection of spy paraphernalia in the world and has written many books, including – I’m sure there are books here – including this beautiful illustrated book about spy stuff. And it has pictures from his collection.

And when you see – a couple seasons ago, for instance, I wrote a scene in which Elizabeth is about to kill a Pakistani diplomat. And he’s swimming in a hotel swimming pool. And he’s swimming alone as he does every night and this beautiful woman, Elizabeth, slips in and starts swimming. And she has something wrapped in a towel. And that something is a cyanide gun. And the cyanide gun mixes cyanide with some vapor to form cyanide gas. And then she can push him under the water and when he comes up for a gulp she can shoot the cyanide gun. Well, that cyanide gun is a real KGB cyanide gun provided to us by Keith Milton.

So we do have these consultants. We also have, however, the peculiar situation that our show’s creator, Joe Weisberg, was in the CIA. So he knows a lot of stuff and he has to, by agreement with the CIA, vet the stuff through the CIA so that we know that we’re not endangering national security.

At the same time, that means we have his fountain of knowledge which is extraordinary. And we’ve always had this thing that we call the spy card, which is we can imagine Joe holding up the spy card, meaning “I was a spy.” What that means is we might come up with the most incredible, wonderful idea for a storyline. Oh my god, then this happens, then this happens, then he does this. And if Joe goes like that, it means OK but actually that wouldn’t happen in the real world of spying as he experienced.

So that’s very helpful to us and helps make our show very, very realistic.

**John:** We talked at the start about suspension of disbelief. And so you get a couple of those in any project that you’re doing. And the suspension of disbelief in your show is the wigs and the makeup. That somehow they are remarkably talented and fast at being able to do wigs and makeup. But there’s not a lot of other cheating in your show which I think is why it feels real and genuine while the stakes feel real. Basically this could all happen except for how good their makeup is.

**Stephen:** I think that’s exactly the point. I think those four things that I mentioned at the start of our broadcast are our four cheats. And once you say, all right, I’ll give you that, then you’re inside the show and everything else is very real. As real as we can possibly make it. And double-checked and back-stopped and everything else.

**John:** Cool. Another question?

**Stephen:** The question was is it hard to be a writer on a TV show in New York and do we have to pull from LA, or go to LA, or get writers from LA. You know, New York is full of really, really, really great writers. And I think it’s time that our industry realized that and discovered that. We need many, many, many more writer’s rooms in New York. We need tax breaks for writer’s rooms in New York, which we’ve been trying to get through the Writers Guild of America. But it’s been very hard with our legislature. I can’t figure out why because it would be so good economically for the city and for the state in every way.

New York is teeming with writers. What it’s not teeming with is people who have been in a lot of other writer’s rooms because they haven’t been in a lot of other writer’s rooms. I’ve been in this business of writing scripts, mostly for movies, but recently for TV since the late ‘80s living in New York. Never moving, never having to move.

I’m not saying that’s an easy path and that everybody can get along that way. But I really think there’s no innate reason that we can’t have writer’s rooms in New York, and certainly we have the talent.

**John:** Great. One or two more questions. That’s a great question. So the question is to what degree do you wrestle with the fact that you’re going to be compared to other things and do you make choices based on knowing that you’re going to be compared to those things. Yes. I think you do make some choices. I often talk about expectations. And so there’s expectations of genre. There’s expectations of kind, basically like it’s this kind of show. It’s a procedural, it’s this. And if there aren’t a lot of examples about them that can hold you to the most notable example of that thing.

And so most people from middle grade fiction, they’ve heard of Harry Potter. They might have heard of Percy Jackson, but anything that’s kind of like that they’re going to compare it to that.

Your show, there aren’t great comps for it. I bet when they were first looking at this show, I think like Third Rock from the Sun in a weird way is a comparison because it’s this family living with a secret they don’t want to have exposed.

**Stephen:** I had not thought of that.

**John:** You know, we’ve had other spy shows, but never from that perspective. So, are there any things with The Americans or the other stuff you’ve written where you’re dealing with – and you’ve done sequels, too – where you’re dealing with comparisons to other examples that are out there?

**Stephen:** I think it is a great question because we live in an age of such an explosion of storytelling, of widely-available, publically-available storytelling. And you’re going to see stuff addressed over, and over, and over again. It’s very hard to come up with new stuff. It’s hard to come up with a new pitch. And I did a movie that came out last year called American Assassin that was basically a straight ahead action movie. And how many zillions of action scenes have there been?

One thing that we look at all the time, and I’m sure you look at it in your work, we all do: is this unexpected? Or is this the expected thing? And you’re dying to eliminate that which is expected. And yet keep it real. I mean, one way to eliminate that which is expected is to go way over the top. I think in the last Fast and Furious movie there was a chase between a car and a submarine. And that was like, “OK, that I have never seen before. It was very, very cool.” But we can’t have that in The Americans or we couldn’t have that in my movie.

So it’s a big – it’s a constant factor. It really is. There’s no two ways.

**John:** Yeah. And you’re always asking yourself am I making this choice because it’s the right choice for this story, or am I making this choice so I just don’t get compared to something else? And sometimes you’ll see movies doing things that are just – they’re not making probably the correct choice. They’re making the choice that makes them feel cool or new or original, but it’s the expected thing.

**Stephen:** Yeah. I have a semi-answer to it that just occurs to me as a possible approach which is when you’re in that bind and when you’re asking that question, return to character. Because you can have a situation that’s the same in many, many, many different – I mean, how many secret CIA organizations have there been out there? I’ve definitely written that. American Assassin was that. And others were that. And they’re going to be bound to be in certain of the same situations over and over again. And there’s going to be someone following them and they’re going to turn the tables on them. How do you make that new?

In some ways you can’t make that part of it new. You can’t make the outline of it new. The pitch of it new. Maybe not even the weapons or the circumstances. But if you think about your characters and go what’s my guy feeling? What would he do? What would he pick up around him? What would he do with his clothes? What would he do because last night he had a bad experience with this? Whatever it is, you can begin to find your way out and back into some kind of originality.

**John:** Great. That was the most Craig answer ever, so I think we’re going to leave it there. That was a really great answer. Our show, Scriptnotes, is produced by Megan McDonnell who is fantastic. Our music is done by Matthew Chilelli. He also did all the music for Launch, the podcast, and he is remarkable as well.

I’m @johnaugust on Twitter. Are you on Twitter?

**Stephen:** No.

**John:** No. He’s not on Twitter. Don’t ask him any questions about The Americans, but do tune in to see the Americans on FX starting–

**Stephen:** March 28th at, what is it, 10? Whenever you recorded it.

**John:** Whenever your DVR finds it. Stephen Schiff, thank you so, so much for coming on the show.

**Stephen:** Thank you. I had a great time. Thank you.

Links:

* [Stephen Schiff](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0771496/) currently works on [The Americans](http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/the-americans). Its final season premieres on March 28th.
* Thank you, [McNally Jackson Independent Booksellers](http://www.mcnallyjackson.com/event/scriptnotes-live-podcast-recording-author-john-august) for hosting our live show!
* [Google Ngram Viewer](https://books.google.com/ngrams)
* Bookstore staff recommendations, which led John to [The End We Start From](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0802126898/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Megan Hunter
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_337.mp3).