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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has some strong language. It also has some mild spoilers for Mr. Robot so head’s up before you listen.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 449 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is off on a secret mission but luckily I have another New Jersey born writer to fill his shoes. Sam Esmail is the creator of Mr. Robot and executive producer of many shows, including Homecoming and the upcoming Angelyne.

Sam Esmail: Hi. I didn’t know Craig was from Jersey.

John: He’s from New Jersey as well. I forget which city he’s from, but he’s New Jersey born, went to Princeton. All of that.

Sam: OK. Cool.

John: Thank you for hopping on the show with me. This is a Friday afternoon we’re recording this and you had just gotten off another call. How’s it going for you?

Sam: You know, it’s weird. I get asked this question a lot, but I think you would understand this. As a writer, I mean, I was in the middle of working on my script before this whole thing went down. And guess what I do every day? I lock myself in this room that I’m in right now in my little office in the house and I spent all day in here and walked around and took little breaks, little walks, and came back in here. So, my life personally hasn’t been as impacted as others. But obviously, you know, what’s going on is pretty disturbing and the sort of deluge of upsetting news every day is obviously taking its toll and my concern is for everyone out there.

But, yeah, like being a writer weirdly we’re kind of built for this kind of moment.

John: Yeah. It’s been really strange. I’ve felt guilty at times that my life has not been more impacted and that like – obviously there are things that are profoundly different but a lot of things are sort of exactly the same.

Sam: Yeah.

John: The last time we spoke was in front of a big crowd at the WGA Theater, so most of this episode is actually going to be the interview we recorded at the WGA Theater as part of the Writers Guild Foundation. And that was pre-pandemic, so that was February 25. And it’s only, you know, six weeks ago but it feels just a lifetime ago. To be in a crowded space. To shaking hands.

Sam: I know. And afterwards the fans coming up and being able to talk to them. I mean, that would be a surreal scene right now. It’s so crazy that that was only six weeks ago. It does feel like decades ago. It’s crazy.

John: I’ve been thinking about you a fair amount during this time because I want to imagine what Elliot is thinking about this type of situation. If you were still making Mr. Robot this is an opportunity – it’s the kind of chaos that you feel like he might be seeking. But also technology has impacted this is in such a huge way right now. So you and I are talking on Skype because you’re not a fan of Zoom.

Sam: Yes. By the way, John, you still use Zoom. I don’t understand it. All your listeners should know do not use Zoom. It is not secure. Even if you make the settings private it’s still not secure. There are plenty of other more secure platforms out there to do your video conferencing.

John: I’ve been using a variety of them. It’s been interesting how Zoom has become the default despite–

Sam: Weird, yeah.

John: Despite many concerns. But also privacy in the sense of we’re about to start contract tracing.

Sam: Yeah. Apple and Google are doing that. Yep. We’re there phoning you and GPS coordinates.

John: Headed for interesting times. So there’s definitely another season that you could write out of this if you wanted to. But, you were in the middle of shooting something else right now, too. So I want to talk about production also.

Sam: Yeah. So we were in the middle of – my wife is starring in this show called Angelyne, which is about the true story of this person Angelyne, sort of an LA icon. I think anybody in LA would know who she is. She sort of like invented social media before the Internet. She’s basically the first person famous for being famous, for being on billboards.

John: She was sort of like an Instagram star before there was Instagram.

Sam: Exactly.

John: I mean, instead of on your phone she had these giant billboards.

Sam: She had these giant billboards and she was able to convince people to get those billboards for basically no money. And she was essentially advertising herself as a personality. But that was it. That was it. It was those billboards. That was what she was promoting.

And so weirdly, you know, obviously that’s interesting in and of itself, but this article came out in the Hollywood Reporter and when you actually hear her life’s journey it’s so fascinating and has so many layers and goes into so many interesting places. It was adapted into a television limited series for Peacock, directed by the great Lucy Tcherniak. We were I think about two months into production. We have about two months left, or thereabout. And I remember the day I went to set and it was raining and it was during lunch and we just shut down in the middle of the day. Just because it was like that Thursday before things just started going down and you could just see the domino effect.

I had closed our production company’s offices the day before. And then just in the middle of that day as the news just started to break that this thing was spreading we called Universal and they completely supported us and we just shut down for the day. And we’re sort of in this weird limbo right now, right, because productions have this consistency, you know, day to day. Emmy was in a grove. I mean, her performance is so nuanced and so specific and she trained so hard for it in the months leading up to production. To then all of it kind of coming to a grinding halt is crazy. Just crazy.

But the stuff we have is great. We released a trailer a week ago. And we’re excited to hopefully – when it’s safe – to get back into it.

John: Now, here’s a question for you. A lot of limited series and shows that know that they are only doing ten episodes, they will block shoot. That is where you’ve written all the scripts and then you plan it so you’re shooting part of episode and part of episode three and part of episode five, which can save you a tremendous amount of money in terms of locations and actor availabilities. There’s lots of really good reasons to do that.

But I can also imagine that it’s a real challenge in something like this. If you were block shooting this you may not have any finished episodes.

Sam: No. That’s exactly where we’re at. We believe that now – so Lucy is directing all the episodes. And we did have all the scripts written ahead of time, so we were block shooting. And, yeah, now we’re kind of – we have footage, we have scenes, but no completed episodes. Really nothing to put together except for a really awesome trailer which I urge everyone to check out.

Yeah, it’s strange. I mean, there are probably some plusses, right? You can kind of look and see where you want to add or subtract. But ultimately, yeah, it’s just a really awkward place to be in right now. But, you know, look, it’s low on the priority list of things we’re concerned about because of everything else that’s going on.

John: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Finishing a limited series is not the highest.

Sam: Exactly.

John: So let’s time travel back to February, back when we can remember when we could just happily talk about your great show Mr. Robot. We talked a little bit about Homecoming as well which I have now finished and really loved.

Sam: Oh thank you.

John: At some point off-camera I’ll ask questions about Homecoming because I really just thought it was remarkable. If you have not seen Homecoming and you’re looking for a show to watch during this quarantine time I highly recommend Homecoming.

Sam: By the way, the second season of that is coming. Just to peddle that really quickly. And that’s coming in about a month, May 22. And the trailer is dropping pretty soon starring Janelle Monáe. I did not direct it. The great Kyle Patrick Alvarez did. And he did a fantastic job. It does not disappoint.

John: I’m very excited to see that. So we will travel back in time and listen to what life was like in February and then we’ll come back at the end and do our One Cool Things.

[February Interview begins]

Thank you so much. It is a pleasure to be here. Craig Mazin is usually next to me, but we’ll just pretend Craig is here with little bits of umbrage.

Sam: Wow. Those are big shoes to fill. Craig.

John: They are. Sam, it’s a pleasure to actually finally meet you.

Sam: Oh yeah. Likewise.

John: I was saying in the green room I’d seen you at cocktail parties and wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed your show, but it was always a cocktail party for some For Your Consideration something and I never got to.

Sam: Well that’s a shame because, I mean, by the way, do you ever invite people onto the pod?

John: Yes. We do. You’re in town you’re saying.

Sam: I’m inviting myself is what I’m saying.

John: Fantastic. We would love. We will follow up this conversation with a future conversation.

Sam: OK, cool. Wait, by the way, is this – do we know?

John: This will ultimately be on the podcast at some point.

Sam: Cool. All right.

John: We might save it for some moment where like Craig is in rehab or something.

Sam: Got it. Shouldn’t be too long. OK.

John: Sam, I just want a little survey of the audience here, because I have a hunch that we have a lot of writers and directors. Who here is a writer? All right. Who here is a writer-director? All right. So you can speak very well to these things. So unlike most things you go to where they are asking general questions about Mr. Robot or like inspirations, I really want to get very specific and granular and try to get some advice that’s useful for these people in this room here tonight.

So, I thought we might start with how you got started as a writer and a filmmaker? You grew up in New Jersey?

Sam: I grew up in New Jersey. Yes. Oh wow. Hoboken. Any – oh wow, OK. Hoboken-a-joking. I grew up in New Jersey. I never wanted to be a writer. I was kind of scared to write. I knew I wanted to make movies and that’s as far as I took it. And then eventually I knew I wanted to direct. And I went to NYU Film School. Wow, OK. We’re doing well tonight.

John: And so you went into NYU Film School as an undergraduate with the intention of learning how to direct?

Sam: Yes.

John: Great.

Sam: And then I left NYU and this is when I had the spark of trying to write because I would read the scripts of my fellow students and it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do. And I had a very specific thing that I wanted to do. So I figured I’d go to school to learn how to write. So I went to Dartmouth. Oh, nobody from – OK.

John: Silence. Crickets. We’ll put crickets in post.

Sam: Well I was only there for two semesters.

John: OK. So you’re at NYU for film school and you finish film school.

Sam: Correct.

John: And then you went to Dartmouth for a writing program to learn–?

Sam: Correct.

John: And it wasn’t screenwriting, it was just writing-writing, right?

Sam: It was writing-writing. And it was not for me. It was like haikus and essays on Bob Dylan. I lasted two semesters. And also there was snow. Lots of snow. All the time. And they have a trimester. It was so confusing. So I left after two semesters and decided I needed to go back into film school. Spend more student loan money and go deeper into debt.

And came out here. I went to AFI.

John: Some applause there.

Sam: And I went into the directing program. Because, again, I just thought – I got scared of writing. I got to be honest with you. Writing is so intimidating to me. You’re staring at a blank page. It all has to kind of come out of your head. To me having now directed and written, it’s still the hardest thing to do. It’s pure creation, you know?

And directing I’m not saying that’s a walk in the park, but directing you’re translating something. You’re taking this document. Actually Tarantino, the way he describes it is that he adapts the script into a visual medium. And I think that’s pretty accurate. You’re working off of something. Whereas with writing to me it’s you and a – I don’t know. Back in the day it was like a Word document with the terrible formatting and tabs. It was miserable. I didn’t want to do it.

So I went to AFI and I was in the directing program. Graduated. Was very broke. Started editing porn to pay rent, as one would do in Sherman Oaks. And I wanted to direct, but again I had that problem where I was getting scripts that were not exactly my cup of tea. But I would even say, you know what, fuck it. That’s OK, right? OK, cool. I was like, fuck it, let me just direct whatever. I would try and just make myself – force myself to like a script. I can do something here. I can maybe rewrite the scene.

But then the next problem was you’ve got to find the money to make the movie. And it was just so expensive. And, again, I was really broke. The porn money wasn’t that great. And honestly the cheapest art form in terms of making it was writing. So, it was literally my only pathway. There was just no other avenue to break into the industry.

So I wrote a feature. My first feature, it was called Sequels, Remakes, & Adaptations. It got on the Black List. This is 2008. This is like a year or two after the Black List. There was like, you know, it was pretty fairly new at the time.

John: Absolutely. So I want to talk about the Black List.

Sam: Yes.

John: But I want to make sure we finish up the conversation about film school because you spent a lot of time and a lot of money in film school both at NYU, and then the Dartmouth program, but really at AFI. Was it worth it? Were your film school studies worth it in terms of helping you get your career where it is? Do you look back at that time and say, oh, that’s where I learned how to do X, Y, or Z?

Sam: Are there any faculty members here? Film school is expensive. It’s very expensive. In fact, I think the tuition at AFI is almost double what I paid at the time, and it was a lot back then. And honestly it wasn’t until after the first season of Mr. Robot I was able to pay it all back. There’s a point where I was like, man, I’m either going to hit it big or die in debt. I didn’t really see a middle option there.

I don’t know. The answer is I don’t know. I think it’s obviously going to a day job, which I ended up doing, I mean, after the porn, which was a day job, thankfully. I then went on and was assistant editing reality shows which is basically porn without the sex. And I would write at night. And that was hard. I mean, I wrote Sequels at night till 2am and got up in the morning and went to work. And that sucked. And film school allowed me not to do that. I could do it during the day.

John: So film school was a chance to avoid that really hard work that you knew – you kind of sensed at some point that you needed to do it. That’s why you went to Dartmouth.

Sam: Right.

John: Because you recognized you needed to do it. And then you still went on to AFI and tried to say like, no, I can just direct and not have to do the writing.

Sam: Yeah. And that’s a hard thing to do. I mean, honestly, when I look at – a lot of the directors that I love it’s few and far between that they’re not writer-directors weirdly. I mean, Fincher is probably one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers who only directs. But if you are specific about what you want to say and how you see the film, I think it’s so ingrained in the writing, you know?

And it’s also – like I’m not necessarily – I didn’t want to be a director so I could adapt Peter Pan for the 20th time or anything like that. I really wanted to kind of come at it with some original storytelling or original twist on whatever. And a lot of that comes from the writing. It just became apparent after – especially after AFI – that writing was a necessary path for at least the way I want to make films.

John: Because you wanted to be able to tell an original story which is why you wrote a script called Sequels, Remakes, & Adaptations.

Sam: Exactly. Which, by the way, is all about the frustrations of trying to tell an original story in Hollywood. And by the way that was 12 years ago? I mean, I think it’s come down and gotten worse now. I mean, it’s almost to the point where I don’t even feel like – it’s like a dirty word to pitch an original film in the studio system right now. I mean, they need something. I don’t care if it’s an article or a blurb in the obits somewhere. They need some – IP is like the favorite word in town. And when you say it’s original it’s a little, you know, it’s scary. It’s scary to them. Scary times for original.

John: And I do want to talk about sort of the evolution of the industry and how streamers changed some of these equations. But let’s get back to, you write a script, it gets on the Black List. That wasn’t a magic leap. So what happened? You finish the script. What happens with the script?

Sam: So this is the good thing about AFI. Because I made friends, at least some of the people there liked me to call me a friend. And one of my friends, Vince D’Amato, was an assistant I believe at an agency. And I just sent it to him so he could read it and give me notes. And just sent it to his boss. He liked it and sent it to his boss. And I got signed by William Morris. It was honestly that fast. And then he sent it around. It never sold, but people around town liked it. And I remember initially that was a weird phenomenon, right?

John: And I had the same situation with Go. Like Go got passed around town.

Sam: Well that sold.

John: It ultimately sold. It got sold to a tiny company. But it got passed around. I was in a bunch of meetings with people saying like, “We really loved your script.” And I’m like, oh, do you want to buy it? “No, no, no. We would never make this movie.”

Sam: So weird. Yeah.

John: But you end up having the water bottle tour of Los Angeles.

Sam: Water bottle, yes. They want to sit down and talk to you just about where you’re from and who you are.

John: So how do you capitalize on those meetings? How did you capitalize on those meetings? So this was your first time really going in and talking to people who could employ you. So what did you do in those meetings as you were talking with those folks?

Sam: Didn’t really do much. I just – I was very confused initially. But I ended up, like honestly one of my first generals was at the time Paramount – Paramount Vantage. They don’t exist anymore, do they?

John: Paramount Pictures?

Sam: Vantage.

John: Oh, Vantage.

Sam: Remember, they were so cool at the time. They had done There Will Be Blood and I think No Country or something. And in that meeting is now my, I mean, we didn’t talk for years but now he’s my producing partner, Chad Hamilton. He was my manager at Anonymous and he became my producing partner. The second meeting I had was at DreamWorks. Jonathan Eirich who is now one of my good friends.

So I ended up making friends and socializing at these meetings. But I don’t know if I was any good at selling myself as a writer because the one thing I said in these meetings which was death was “I also want to direct this script.” Oof, that was like the fast ticket out of the office, you know. Nobody wanted to hear that. They either wanted to hear you’re going to write and then what’s your next, at the time I think The Hangover was like the big – and because Sequels was a little bit of a comedy, a little bit of a weird comedy, they wanted me to write Hangover, or come up with the next Hangover. That was kind of a recurring theme on that first water bottle tour.

John: So I think an important thing to take out of this is that you start getting these meetings but those meetings don’t pay you money.

Sam: No.

John: You’re not able to pay your rent off of general meetings.

Sam: No.

John: So what do you do? What were the next things you were writing?

Sam: I was still doing this day, you know, the reality shows, you know, porno without sex. And I was trying to do these meetings on my lunch hour. And here’s the thing. I kind of saw that Sequels was not going to sell. Everybody was doing the thing where “It’s really great, it’s really awesome. We’re not going to buy it. No, that’s not going to happen.” And also the other thing is I knew I wanted to direct it which was definitely not going to happen.

So, what I did was I just started writing something else. Because that’s the one thing, I mean, if we’re going to start going down the advice lane here. The one piece of advice is the minute you finish your great script, start writing a new one. It’s just keep going. That is the fastest way to get to where you want. I think I did that almost every time I finished a script. I literally would put it away and just at least wrote the shittiest first page of the next screenplay that I would write.

In this case it wasn’t that shitty. It was another script called [Norm the Movie] which then ended up on the Black List a year later. Also did not sell. But I took a lot, you know, took more meetings with different people. Very nice.

John: At very point did you consider yourself, OK, I am a screenwriter in the sense that I am getting it – both in the sense of like I’m OK designating myself as a writer and I’m a screenwriter in the sense that I get meetings as a screenwriter. People are considering hiring me as a screenwriter.

Sam: It’s weird though, because I had a day job. And I think that was – I would say that I wasn’t a writer because I was an assistant editor. And that’s what I did for most of my day. And the writing came at 2am because it was the only time I could afford to dedicate to that. Or weekends. And I really wanted it to be my fulltime job. So I did the plunge. After Norm didn’t sell I saved up some money and just quit. I said let me just give myself a year and just go for it.

And I pitched a movie to my friend at DreamWorks and got hired. Actually, I should say before that I did pitch a movie to at the time Mandate based on a graphic novel that they had by the great Lindsay Doran. I don’t know if you guys know who Lindsay Doran is.

John: A lot of people in this room knew. She’s a frequent Scriptnotes guest.

Sam: I mean, she was the first producer I worked on on a paid job. The money wasn’t – it was my first job, but the value I got from having her as a mentor and a producer. And you should listen to her, I think she’s had Ted Talks, or videos online. She knows more about story than anyone else. And she’s really smart and she gives really insightful notes. And she’s a fan.

That’s the other thing. And you’ll notice this. When you start working with people who are just doing the perfunctory job of giving you notes you can tell and it’s a drag. Because they’re just making shit up just to get you to do some busy work. She just cuts right through that and knows exactly how to shape everything. Anyway, I could go on about Lindsay. But anyway, watch Lindsay Doran videos.

And then I got the job at DreamWorks. I pitched an idea. They liked it. You know, a little bit more money than the Mandate job. And so that’s when I took the plunge and said, all right, I’ll quit. I’ll do this. And hope that that would last a year.

John: And so you quit your job. You’re hoping it’s going to last a year. And what point do things start to look like they are sustainable. That you can actually keep doing this. So you can actually get something made. What is the first thing that looks like, OK, this isn’t just a writing job that might lead to something. It actually is a thing I can see, I may have a career here?

Sam: It was – and this is no fault of DreamWorks because I everybody there I love. Again, Jonathan is one of my dear friends. And Holly who I still think is at DreamWorks, she was amazing. I just remembered after that experience then my heart tugged the other way. And I said wait a minute, I’m in this thing to write things for me to direct. And there was just something about the process of begging and scraping and fighting to get these jobs to write a script to hand off to somebody else.

You know, the philosophy about screenplays is that the screenplay is the thing and then the movie is a different thing. And then the other philosophy which is the screenplay is the blueprint for the movie. And because I started off wanting to be a director I’ve always looked at it that way. I don’t know if I necessarily believe that now, because there are screenplays that you can read and that are beautiful to read on their own. And then the movie is like a whole other thing. And then there are screenplays you can just tell it is just to make the movie. And I think I’m just more of the latter. And so how can I make a living knowing I’m only doing 50% of what I want to do with this idea, or this story that I want to tell?

And so after the DreamWorks job I decided to just, again, as soon as I finished I started writing Comet. I wanted to write a contained indie film that I could direct. And I was like the next thing I write is the thing I’m going to direct.

John: So this is a script that you’re setting out from the very beginning thinking like these are the limitations I have. I don’t have very much money. I need to be like one location, really tight, small, that I can – with people I know and the skills I have I can make this movie?

Sam: Correct. And I wrote it. At the time I was – they really wanted me to be a certain kind of writer who came up with ideas like The Hangover.

John: Your team meaning your representatives?

Sam: Yes. My agents and managers. They wanted me to write high concept comedies. And I just – they’re great and I’m a huge fan, but that wasn’t who I was. So I decided to leave them and I was essentially – I didn’t have any representatives. And that’s when I circled back with Chad. So now this is like five years later since I met him in one meeting, my first general meeting, my first meeting ever in the industry, and now he’s a manager at Anonymous. And he has always been a fan and wanted to sign me. I said well here’s Comet and I was very clear. I was like this the script that I want to make next. I’m not going up for pitches. I’m not doing any other jobs. I want to direct this movie. Will you help me do this?

This is it. And he read the script, liked the script, said let’s do it. And so we went on this long, arduous journey of trying to get the money, which we did. And got a great cast and I finally went out and directed my first film.

John: Now, all the time that you spent in film school at NYU and at AFI, then it was actually useful. Because you had production experience. So it wasn’t like you were the first time on a set. You had actually shot stuff before. So it wasn’t brand new to you to be making a film.

Sam: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, when you’re doing a student film it’s not the, you know.

John: It’s not the highest [crosstalk].

Sam: Yeah. I think I was like booming one of the films I was directing. Yeah, it’s different. It’s different. And the pressure is so different, right? Because I think with student films – and you want to retain that as much as possible, because with student films you’re experimenting a lot. I remember at AFI, I mean, I fucking did the weirdest shots, like the actors would be here, I’d be over there in the corner shooting a closet or something and thought I was artsy.

You can’t do that. You can’t play. And it’s sad because I think you need some of that. And thankfully I was able because I had such a great cast and crew on Comet and people really believed in it. We were able to play a lot but the one thing I knew – like I think it was the second or third day I was like I got this. This is what I enjoy. Like all the pain of writing scripts and handing them off, or writing treatments, and writing pitches, and going to pitches. Like all of that sort of paid off when I got onto the set.

John: What is it that you like? Do you like that you have a team of people around you? Do you like the decision-making? Do you like that it’s this or that and not the 50,000 choices that you have with words on the page? What are the things about directing that you prefer to writing?

Sam: It’s not necessarily a preference. It’s that idea I had when I was sitting in the office and I was like, oh, this might be cool, and then I’m there on set and Emmy Rossum is saying it to Justin and I’m like, oh, that’s fucking cool. You know?

John: So it’s going from this thing you have in your head to having to express into words which are sort of an imperfect way of expressing idea to when you see it on the monitor, when you see it in front of you, it’s real.

Sam: Right. You know how when you write, you know parenthetical? Right? You know, I try not to get too parenthetical happy. I don’t know how many actors love the parenthetical. I’ve seen some actors just–

John: Cross them all out. Yeah.

Sam: Cross them all out. But to me I love the parenthetical. I wonder if Rami crosses them out? No. I think Rami, no, he doesn’t cross them out.

John: Ask your wife.

Sam: I’ll ask Emmy. Yeah, that’s a good point. But I love the parenthetical because I don’t know about you but when I write I am picturing it. And I change the parenthetical. I’ll be like, OK, she’s said when she says this line. And then I walk away and just changing that to, no, she is happy when she says this fucked up line and it totally changes the scene. It makes you rewrite the rest of the scene. Those are powerful things. And then when you are on set and you get to see like a real actor who has got real chops do that, the intention that you had, that very small detailed intention that you have, that to me is worth everything.

John: So there are many writer-directors who when I interview them they feel like the process of production is just the hell they have to go through in order to have–

Sam: It is. No, production is miserable. Go ahead.

John: It’s both delightful and miserable.

Sam: No, no, it’s pretty all miserable. But, but, it is, it is. Look, all of your dreams for the most part fall apart and you have to fix everything in post. The moments that I am talking about are few and far between and they make everything – yeah. That’s what I mean. Let me be clear. It is not Disneyland every day on set.

John: All right. So you’re shooting Comet. You’re deciding, oh you know what? I actually do love directing. This is what I want to do.

Sam: Yes.

John: You finish the film. What happens with the film and how do we connect the dots between that and Mr. Robot? What is the trajectory between those two projects?

Sam: Well, so before I started shooting Comet, the minute I finished Comet I started writing Mr. Robot. And it was going to be my follow up magnum opus to Comet as a feature film. And I had to stop writing Mr. Robot because I was going in prep in Comet and I was also, I mean, I’ve said this in countless interviews and I’ll say it again, but I was 90 pages into the script and I wasn’t even close to finishing act one.

John: Yeah.

Sam: And that’s a problem, John.

John: Yeah, you’ve built a big world there. So I’m guessing you didn’t outline carefully?

Sam: I never outline. I should listen to your podcast more.

John: Craig can talk about outlining. Craig is a big outliner. So, I was looking through your script preparing for this, for the pilot, and so on your dedication page you have two quotes, and one of the quotes I really love and it’s from an Internet meme apparently circa 2011. “Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world,” which is a great quote.

Sam: Yes.

John: Is that a real quote or did you make that up just for the script?

Sam: I have no idea.

John: Yeah.

Sam: But it’s cool.

John: It’s cool. And it definitely informs the idea and the tone of Mr. Robot. So, let’s talk about intent. So, as you start to write this feature film, Mr. Robot, what are the influences but also what is it that you’re hoping to be able to say that – what is the movie you wish you could see as you start writing it?

Sam: Wow. OK. How do I start? Well, there were three things. I had the idea of doing a movie about Hackers when Hackers – remember the movie Hackers? Yeah. And I was like why does it have – I mean, I watched Hackers religiously, but I did not necessarily know if I liked it. But I was like why do we have to – there was a good way to make a movie about hackers and so that was like the first seed. And this is like ‘90s, right? I don’t remember. ’96 or ’97.

So anyway I kind of let that go. You know, I’d do a bunch of things. I did porn, reality shows. And then 2008 happened, right? And the financial crisis. And I am enraged. And I think back – this is by the way just as we’re doing the advice checklist, those ideas that hang around, those are the ones. I really think – I believe this – I think David Lynch said this when he came to AFI when he screened Mullholland Drive which was like this mind-blowing experience. And he believes that ideas that are like – I’m going to butcher what he said. But they’re in the ether somewhere and you sort of catch it.

Well I kind of believe that. But I believe it in this way which is I think your mind tells you what you want to write. Because this idea kept coming to me. When the financial crisis happened it told me. I mean, I was angry about it, but it told me the hacker that’s in your movie is mad about this. He is furious about this.

And then, again, I was broke and student debt, blah, blah, blah. And then the Arab Spring happened. And I’m Egyptian. And I saw it with my father and my mother. We literally watched it on the news. And I saw how technology could bring this confounding – having been to Egypt never thought anything like this could happen where people rose up and actually fought for their freedom. And so it was a way of using technology to harness that power and bring people together. And that was the kind of – that’s when I knew. And I always start with characters. That’s when I understood Elliot.

So, all of those ingredients led up to that first day of writing Mr. Robot. And so when I start with the character, I start with Elliot, right. I’m like, OK, who is he, what’s his story, what does he want? So he wants to, OK, so he wants to cause a revolution. What does that mean and what does that look like? What does he specifically want? And I start getting into it.

And I really do a lot of thinking. A lot of thinking. And I don’t write any of it down. I should write that down. That’s bad advice. Write stuff down. I try and use Evernote now. You have a notebook. Do you use that?

John: I do use that.

Sam: You’re analog.

John: Yeah.

Sam: OK. God, I would lose that all the time.

John: I have a software company but I do sort of also write stuff down, especially the ideas that you get at 11 o’clock at night. Do I get out of bed or do I not get out of bed to write it down? I will write it down in the notebook.

But I want to get back to – so your idea is floating. This idea of I want to do something about hackers is sort of floating out there. And then you see Arab Spring and that’s a thing. And then you see the financial crisis. A lot of times as we talk – in my experience but also as I talk to other filmmakers, it’s like there’s ideas sort of competing for attention in your head. They’re sort of going, hey, pay attention to be again. And eventually like they can gang up together. What if we all got together? We could be a super group. And we could make him write about us.

And so it sounds like these are all things that sort of just demanded your attention. They came together to form one super group.

Sam: I mean, it did. And honestly now having done that I realize I think that was my frustration – and I don’t know how you do it, because like then there are these amazing writers that can find a way just to do it more on demand, like you do. Like a lot of great writers do. And that was my struggle trying to just be a writer in the business. I just didn’t know if I could, all right, do this comedy about X, Y, and Z and they’re going to, and now go.

There was a part of me that needs it to come to me in the way that it did.

John: So as things were coming to you, you said you had Elliot. But did you have Elliot as our voiceover, as our narrator, that we’re inside his head?

Sam: Yes.

John: And that he knew that we could see what he was doing and hear his thought?

Sam: No. Then the DID of it came after that. And that was a tricky thing. When I thought of that, when I was like well I want to explore the idea and I want to explore mental illness, I was worried. A lot of that stuff can get gimmicky, right? A lot of people, you know, they use mental illness as a gimmicky storytelling device. And I was really scared to death of that.

I think that’s part of the reason why I got super long-winded, because I just want – I was like really wanted it to feel like this authentic person who is really struggling with something very serious and very internal. So, I did all this research on DID. You know, I also suffered from OCD and social anxiety disorder. I also did a lot of morphine. And those disorders a lot of what I was personally going through. And there were times where I would spend my therapy sessions not talking about me at all, talking about Elliot. Mind you, I was broke. So I really shouldn’t have been doing that. I probably should have taken it myself.

But anyway, I look at Elliot. I mean, Elliot started to be a real person to me. You know what I mean? And to me that was important. Unlike you, maybe not unlike you. I don’t know how you do it. But before I write I figure out everything. I need to know the ending. Do you need to know the ending?

John: I don’t always need to know the ending. I need to know a general destination I’m headed for. But I don’t need to know specific stuff about the ending necessarily.

Sam: Wow.

John: But when you say the ending, so you knew the ending of the feature that you were trying to write?

Sam: Which is the ending of the show.

John: OK. Oh, the ending of four seasons of the show?

Sam: Yeah. That’s how long–

John: I think that really wasn’t maybe a feature you were writing. I think it was longer than that. So, you ultimately were able to get there.

Sam: But think about that as a feature. I still think it could have been a cool feature if I just shut up a little bit.

John: The Matrix is an amazing movie, but it could have also have been a series as well. All the journey that Neo goes through and everything he discovers, we can totally imagine that as a series as well.

Sam: That’s true. And I think there are stories that probably can go both ways. But I have to say like I ended up because I was paranoid about the gimmicky mental illness shtick, like to me this was the only way I was going to be able to tell Mr. Robot. And it just so happened – so after I finished Comet I came back to this 90-page not even first act and was scratching my head, not knowing what to do, and Steve Golin, rest in peace, he at the time was making this little show called True Detective. He was all about TV.

And the guy was like a genius. This was before TV like – yes, I think Breaking Bad had just finished and Mad Men was on the air. But I mean what that first season taught me in True Detective was that TV was traditionally just supposed to be a writer’s medium, but that was to me an amazing marriage of writing and filmmaking.

John: Yeah. It’s incredibly cinematic. It has really big movie kind of things. And it trusts that the viewer is going to be comfortable being confused for quite a long time.

Sam: Yes.

John: Which is very helpful for your show.

Sam: Yes. Yes.

John: I want to talk about mystery versus confusion. Because mystery gets us sort of coming back for me and at a certain point people will say like I’m just so confused I can’t even follow what’s going on here.

Sam: I’m familiar.

John: So, tell me about as you’re now looking at this thing you’ve written as being a pilot and therefore we have to plan out what the season looks like, what were the decisions about how to lay out the mystery of stuff and how – who is that woman that Elliot’s talking with? Oh, wait, that’s his sister. How do you make those decisions as you’re laying stuff out?

In the second season where the point of view you realize late in the season was not at all what you thought. How are you balancing those decisions? How early are you deciding what you’re going to put in what episode?

Sam: I’m never like, OK, so what’s the big mystery this season and work backwards from there. I always tried to stay with Elliot. And in terms of like surprising the audience, I like that. I think it’s great when you get to a moment, any moment, any scene, and you’re surprised and something unexpected happens. That’s what you should be going for all the time, whether you’re doing a twisty mystery movie or just a comedy. You want people to continually be surprised. The problem is you don’t want to build stuff around the surprise.

And I think that’s the trap that – you know, especially with a movie where there are going to be these big twists, if you start making it an exercise as opposed to an emotional journey with the character it’s going to end up feeling like that. An exercise. And that was another thing – I remembered just doing Comet and then going into Mr. Robot, I remember when Mr. Robot came out. Yeah, it’ll be a little small show. Maybe just a few of my nerdy homies will watch it and that will be that.

And I was shocked that more people watched it. But I think it’s attributed to the fact that I really cared about it. I mean, I really cared about this guy and I really cared about his story. And that to me – that always trumped the mysteries or the reveals. And honestly when people, because people did figure it out. I went to Reddit and people figured out the twists ahead of time. I wasn’t that bothered by that. That wasn’t my point.

John: Because you weren’t making it for the twists. You were making it for the character moments along the way. And Elliot’s relationship with the other characters in the show is emotionally meaningful in the moments. It’s not all about the big reveals later on.

Sam: Yeah. I honestly thought at the end of episode two when he meets Darlene I was like, oh, well people will figure it out. That’s his sister. And weirdly everyone was just so fixated on the robot, from the first episode. They were like, oh. And I remember the network was like, “You know, I think people figured it out.” And I was like, cool. OK. Sure.

John: So, I want to talk about, Mr. Robot was made for USA. It was released a week at a time and big gaps between seasons. So you have the advantage of building up expectation over the course of the week. That people see an episode and they see it in real time and there’s time to discuss. There’s watercooler moments that can happen. And it can build over the course of the season.

How different would Mr. Robot have been if that entire first season had dropped in one moment? In like a Netflix model where it all comes out at once? How would it have played differently do you think?

Sam: I just think you wouldn’t have the community. I remember when I used to – I was obsessed with Lost. And to me the joy of Lost was I went over to my friend’s house and we all watched it. And not even at the end of the episode, in the commercial breaks we would be fucking yelling at each other theories. And like you’re fucking wrong. Oh my god. Wait, wait, wait, wait, we’re going to come back.

John: The smoke monster is actually the…yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam: Oh yeah. The whole thing, we’d go online. We had the laptop up with the message boards. Because I don’t think, Twitter didn’t really exist in the early years. It was message boards. And I loved that. That was a communal experience. Actually that’s akin to going to the movies and then having that conversation afterwards. That’s part of the experience for me. And so when you do the binge model, which we did on Homecoming – you know what’s good about that, but this is strictly just a selfish thing, is you get it all over with, right? I mean, like if you’re airing every week the critics are shitting on you one week, and then the next week they’re not. And then they’re like, well fuck, what’s the point of this. And I’m like just wait. Next. Just give me a week guys. Jesus fucking Christ.

John: As if you’re making the next episode. Oh no, we’ll change it based on this.

Sam: Oh, this is pointless. They’re setting this up and it’s not going to go anywhere? Really? What are you going to say next week when we pay that off and then they’re on to some other? So that was like, you know, and whatever. So that’s a selfish dumb thing. Who cares about that?

To me it’s the communal experience and that weekly – like right now I’m obsessed with The Outsider. I love that show. I think the other day I had lunch with Julia and she likes that show too and we just talked – and we had our theories and myths. And that was great. And I don’t feel like I do that a lot with the binge mode.

John: So you come into Mr. Robot not having worked on a TV show. Suddenly running a TV show. What was the learning curve like for you going in just as a person who has written stuff and directed stuff but suddenly you’re running a show? How did you get up to speed with that?

Sam: So, I started dating this girl Emmy, and she was on a show, Shameless. And that showrunner, his name is John Wells.

John: He’s had a successful career. A little show called ER.

Sam: West Wing. China Beach. I went up to him and I said please tell me everything, because I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing. And he’s like, “You know what?” I’ve got to tell this story, even though the WGA is going to hate me for telling this story.

So, John Wells is the nicest man on the planet. It’s like, “You know I’m doing a talk about the WGA Foundation. It’s a showrunner’s talk. You’ll be my guest. Come.” So, I’m like this is fucking great. Because literally my room opened in a weeks and I have no clue what I’m doing. So, I go and I’m John Wells’ guest. And he’s up there and he gives this great speech and it’s awesome. And I’m sitting in the corner. And I think there’s like, I don’t know how many people they pick for that, like 20 or 30 people. And I’m taking notes. John Wells has this meticulous schedule. Even his dinner plans.

John: The trains run on time in a John Wells [crosstalk].

Sam: Oh yes, they do. And I’m like writing it down and I’m like, oh, this is great. And then John Wells finishes his speech and is like OK, thank you guys. And he leaves. And so the next speaker goes up. And I’m like, great. And they start talking. And I’m writing notes. And then it’s WGA members, one of the people who is working at the WGA giving me dirty looks and the minute John Wells was gone walks up to me and asks me to get the fuck out of there.

John: Yeah, you’re not in the showrunner training program.

Sam: No. Which is fair. Because I didn’t earn the right to be there. But that was honestly the few notes I could scribble in that one hour was what I had to go into it. And what’s great about what John does is there’s a structure that he maintains in his writers room and just all of production. And that really helped me. Went in and the first thing I said to the network is here is my writers room schedule. I mean, I literally just ripped off John and said here is my schedule and here is when every episode is going to be due for the whole season, which they said you’re the first showrunner who has ever done that and we’re going to hold you to it.

But I actually like that. You know, it just kept me–

John: So how far ahead were scripts supposed to be from production?

Sam: So typically on a television show, especially back in those days, I mean, five years ago–

John: But really a different universe.

Sam: It is so different. But back in those days you’d get the first few episodes written and you’d start shooting and you’re writing while you’re editing while you’re shooting. And I just couldn’t do – I was planning on directing. I wanted to be on set even when I wasn’t directing. I just felt that part of it, the filmmaking part of it, was so important and I wanted to be as involved in that as the writing. So, I told the network I really wanted to write all the scripts. Which, again, in those days is fucking crazy. That’s just not done.

John: So you wanted to go into production with the scripts done and locked-ish. Like ready to shoot.

Sam: Yes.

John: And was the intention of cross-boarding, so you’re shooting things in different episodes at the same time?

Sam: No. Because that was the first season, so we had a different director every episode. So we just went in order. And USA, I don’t know why they were nice. I’m just like this nobody who came out of nowhere and said these are my demands. I didn’t say it like that. But they just believed in the script and they believed in what we were doing. And they said OK. And so we wrote all the scripts. We were in prep in New York, so I was flying back and forth. Every Thursday night I’d get on the flight back here to LA to work in the writer’s room over the weekend and go back to New York.

John: So scripts were written but you still had your writers–

Sam: Well this is prep.

John: So this is just your prep.

Sam: So then by the end of prep then all the scripts had been written and then we started shooting. And I directed the first episode. Because we had shot the pilot already, which was episode two, so I could not be in the room obviously. So, I had to get it all done before we started shooting.

John: But now a lot – in these five years there’s a lot more shows that are done the way you’re describing in terms of there’s a room that gets together and things are written well before there is – stuff is happening. Sometimes it’s because they are going to cross board it, so an elaborate production schedule. But sometimes it is so that they can really sign off and approve on the whole series before things start shooting.

How much change from that first season, how much in the scripts changed while you were shooting the first season?

Sam: Oh, all the time. Yeah. And that’s like the nimble part of being the showrunner and the director is that on set – and I had this great partner, Kyle Bradstreet who is an EP on the show, who would sit on set with me and we would talk about the next day’s scenes. Is this right? This is bugging me. And he’d bring up. And then we’d be shooting a scene that would pay off in that scene. That’s the great thing, again, this is the great thing about block shooting is you can continually start to see the mosaic. Because it is s a mosaic. I mean, even the one thing that I learned about Mr. Robot in terms of the way I think of storytelling, it’s like if you’re looking at a picture and you’re standing this close to it and then each time you go to the next scene you take a step back. And what you’re seeing around the thing you just thought it was now gets re-contextualized. And you keep taking a step back until you start to see this whole picture. I think that is what showrunning is.

Because you are talking. Craig did five hours on Chernobyl. And, you know, Mr. Robot, we’re doing 10 hours.

John: You are twice the show he did.

Sam: Yeah, exactly. Yes. You tell him, John. But you’re like painting this one dot. And then you continue to step back. Pretty good. And then you go back. And that’s the way writing was on a TV show. Kyle and I would sit there and, “Is this, OK, I’m going to add this one line in. But four episodes later you’ve got to rewrite that and we’ll compare notes.” And it was a continual – in that way it was a way different art form than feature screenwriting, you know what I mean?

John: So you alluded to the fact that part of the challenge of the week by week schedule is that you as a showrunner have to respond to the show coming out each week. And so with the first season was the whole season done before the first episode aired?

Sam: No. That was the other thing. Because I’m a crazy person, I was on set. We’re airing shows, so I’m having to fly out from New York on Thursday, edit all weekend till Sunday night. I remember I got the 2am flight Sunday night back to New York so I can be on set Monday morning. And I just did that. And I had to because I was locking episodes. Of course, most showrunners they wouldn’t, like OK we’re not going to go to set then. And I mean I was so crazy I think at one point, I actually remember this, there was an important scene and I couldn’t be there because it was Friday. They were shooting it on Friday and I had to be here in LA. So they FaceTimed me and they put the laptop on my director’s chair. And I looked at the – don’t do that, by the way. Bad advice.

John: You got it done. But so what lessons did you take from that and apply to seasons two, three, and four? An example would be like could you just move the whole thing to New York and not be going back and forth? Did you get more stuff done ahead of time? Like what changes were you able to make so that you could have the process be a little saner for you and for–?

Sam: Well, I don’t know about saner. But the big change was I directed every episode after that. So the entire second, third, and fourth season I directed. We block shot the entire thing. That mean that the strategy behind that a little bit was showrunners like John Wells, he walks from the writer’s room to the edit bay to set and he does that trip every day. I can’t fucking do that. I just don’t have the mental capacity. I need to write and dream big and just sky’s the limit. Then I need to go to set, have all those dreams come crumbling down. And then after I wash that away I go into the edit bay and then you do the final rewrite.

I need to have them. And I knew that about myself after the first season. And so that’s the biggest takeaway was going into–

John: You’re not having a tone meeting with each new director coming onboard to talk through what the thing is because you are – you know what the intention is behind things.

Sam: Right. Right. And those are fucking hard anyway. How do you do that? I mean, I tried to play music for certain directors. By the way, all the directors in the first season were fucking great. I mean, Deborah Chow who is doing amazing and I can’t wait to see what she does in her career, but all the episodes she did for Mandalorian. It was great.

But to me it was an inability of mine to be able to communicate this weird, specific thing that I was going for in tone. And tone is such a hard indescribable thing to me. So, that is primarily one of the reasons why – one of my shortcomings in terms of why I felt like I needed to be on set. Because it was just sort of a trial and error thing for me. You know?

John: So let’s talk about the switch over to Homecoming. So Homecoming is based on a really successful podcast. What was your first exposure to Homecoming, to that as a property, as a story, as an idea?

Sam: My agent, Joe Cohen, I think the first episode may have dropped, but he had all of them. And he said you’ve got to listen to this podcast. I think you’d really dig it. I said great. Oh, he actually said, “I think you’ll really dig it.” I’m like, yeah, OK, I will, but why are you giving it to me? And he’s like, “We should adapt it into a TV show.” And I immediately like, no, come on. If it’s great it shouldn’t be adapted. It’s probably just a great podcast and that’s OK. It doesn’t need to be a movie or a TV show.

And he’s like, “Just listen to it.” So I listened to it and the first, I binged it all the way through like in one sitting. And I was like this is great. Shouldn’t be anything but what this is. This is great. Then I listened to the whole thing again. I think I listened to it the second time with Emmy and I was like this is really good. And then I listened to it the third time. Just was like let me just close my eyes and picture this thing. And that’s when I was like, OK, there’s a TV show here.

It’s different as a TV show. It’s not going to be what the podcast is, which is fucking great. But it could be a great separate thing as a TV show.

John: So it doesn’t have the limitations that a podcast naturally has an audio-only.

Sam: But the limitations on the podcast were great.

John: Yeah. They were. [Unintelligible], but you wouldn’t just try to duplicate those same limitations.

Sam: No.

John: You’d apply new things. So, what is your first meeting like with those writers? Is it all awkward that you’re coming in here as a multi-award-winning writer of a really successful show talking with them about this this thing they made? What is that conversation like?

Sam: I never thought about it that way. Honestly I just talked to them as a fan, which by the way is another thing that I would say. I want to be a fan of the things that I do. I’m such a movie/TV show fan myself. I just want to be able to geek out on it. So I talked to Eli and Micah, and I geeked out on it. I said I’m a huge fan. And they were like how would you adapt it? And I’m like I wouldn’t really change what you guys wrote necessarily, but this is the tone and this is the vibe that I want. And I started just doing that. I started just talking about vibe and gave them all my references. This is what I’m feeling when I hear the podcast.

And, you know, this was interesting and this happened when we were pitching the show, too. There was this weird knee-jerk reaction of, OK, we’re going to turn it into an hour-long drama and we’re going to make it more cinematic, you know, car chases, action set pieces, things like that. There was just this automatic we’re going to undo what you did in the podcast because it’s just a podcast. And we’re going to now make it cinematic, which means we’re going to show cars and stuff. I don’t know.

It was a very weird like – I think that was the instinct was that because it was two people talking it could not be cinematic. Or because it was two people talking that wouldn’t sustain anyone’s attention. And I was thinking to myself, well wait a minute, I listen to a podcast with two people talking and that completely sustained my – why on earth would I see them then all of a sudden, you know, that wouldn’t work?

And also why did we need it to be an hour-long drama? Because honestly that was one of those things where I think that is probably how a lot of adaptations get screwed up is there’s this weird expectation that it has to completely change and turn into this weird, I don’t know–

John: The hour-long drama is sort of an arbitrary format that we pick. And so a half-hour is actually really great. It’s not Quibi. It’s not 10 minutes. But it’s this nice size feel for sort of what the episodes are.

Sam: And also it fucking worked in the podcast. Why would we change that? And so this was all sort of I think music to Eli and Micah’s ears. Because I think they, look, the podcast was pretty popular. Everyone really loved it and they were taking a lot of meetings. But I think I was probably – I don’t know, I wasn’t in those other meetings – but I think they were excited by the fact that I really wanted to stay as true to the podcast as possible. But I wasn’t – in terms of that I wasn’t willing to change the story much. That it just meant when I adapted it to TV that there was going to be a tonal shift there. And they were totally onboard with that.

John: You’re involved with other podcasts. And you’re working on a narrative podcast?

Sam: Oh yeah. Yeah. The End Up. Look at you, John. OK. All right. We’re going to talk about that.

John: Well I’m just curious. Are there any things out there that you’re envious that newer people get to do? That basically sometimes I look out there and I see people who are just starting their careers. They can sort of do anything and things are a free-for-all. So what advice would you have for these people out here who are looking at things? What do you think is really interesting that you might steer them towards trying to do?

You know, podcasts are kind of a brand new format. The narrative podcasts. What else?

Sam: I would, honestly, well it depends. It’s all up to your means, right? I mean, if you want to be a filmmaker and you have money, go make a film. Go make a short. Go make an indie. You know, I just read because Leigh Whannell is one of my new favorite–

John: Yeah, he’s remarkable.

Sam: Did you see Invisible Man?

John: I haven’t seen it yet. Friday.

Sam: But what about Upgrade?

John: Oh, I loved Upgrade.

Sam: Fucking great. Do you know what the budget–?

John: Nothing. So Leigh came on Scriptnotes. It was nothing.

Sam: It was like $3 million.

John: Well, it was a Blumhouse movie but as an action movie.

Sam: Fucking great. Anyway, if you have $3 million…or if you can get $3 million, go make something like Upgrade. If you don’t have $3 million, or can’t get $3 million – to me then my other option was write, which is what I did. That doesn’t cost that much, right?

John: I think implicit in what you’re saying about your early start is you kept delaying writing for a very long time because you were scared of it. And if you actually started writing earlier you might have gotten some stuff written earlier.

Sam: That’s true. That’s true. Yes.

John: Yes.

[February interview ends]

John: All right, we’re back. So we’re back here in the present time, or at least this is April as we’re talking through right now. We are both in our home offices. What we do normally on the show at this point is our One Cool Things where we talk about things we want to recommend to our listeners. So, something that was really helpful for me the past couple weeks has been this iPad stand which I used, but I found I’ve had to use a lot more recently.

The one I really like is called AboveTek. And what I like about it is it’s fully articulated. You can rotate it in any direction. We were talking earlier about having to video conference and sort of software for that, but I find the cameras on the iPads are so much better than the cameras on any MacBook that it really is helpful sometimes to just do the video stuff on that. So this is a really good stand for that. Or just any time you’re using your iPad to look at but not to be the main thing you’re touching, I recommend this.

So it’s just a really good inexpensive stand that I probably will get a second one because I’m always hauling it between the office and the house. So, if you’re looking for something even just for FaceTime I’ll recommend this AboveTek iPad Stand.

Sam: Interesting. OK. I’ll have to check that out.

John: Do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

Sam: I do. You know, it’s tough. Obviously I think the easy thing would be to recommend movies. And I would recommend movies over TV shows for now because I do think oftentimes it’s easier to binge television shows when we don’t have as much time, because those are shorter episodes. But now that we have a little bit more time, we have that extra half-hour, 45 minutes I would urge people to really – and what I do is finish filmographies, right? Like for whatever reason I had never seen Alien 3 which is David Fincher’s first film. I had seen all of his other movies. Never saw Alien 3. Finally crossed that one off the list.

And now I’m attacking Cronenberg and basically almost done. I’ve never seen Scanners. I’m going to check that out soon.

But the one thing I’d recommend is this app/website called JustWatch.com. It’s really easy to use. You essentially put in whatever title you’re interested in, or filmmaker, and it will come up with those titles and it will tell you what platforms they’re available on. So for the most part a lot of the titles is either on HBO or Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu or whatever and you don’t have to rent or pay extra for it. So it’s actually just a good resource for that.

But they also have a thing called The Watchlist. And so I just started all those movies that just kind of, you know, like for example I’ve never seen Tootsie. I don’t know why. But it’s considered one of the classics. I’ve never seen it. I threw it on my Watchlist. Now it’s going to kind of come up in my queue.

But again I would encourage this sort of director binges to me is like a really fun way to just get into a filmmaker’s vibe and style. And as you watch their movies, whether it’s chronologically or not, you start to just get – especially for filmmakers out there, you start to get a feel for how they sense tone, how they’ve evolved as a storyteller. Sometimes if the writer-directors do the movies that they’ve written work better than the movies that they didn’t. That’s always an interesting thing.

But anyway, regardless, JustWatch.com. You can put it on your phone or you can do it on the web. And it syncs up your Watchlist. And best of all it tells you where they’re available for free so that way you don’t have to spend the money.

John: Excellent. Although I will say spend the money if you want to see the thing, because we get residuals for those things, too.

Sam: That’s true. That’s true.

John: All right. If you are a Premium member stick around after the credits because we have some Q&A that we did at the live show. And so people asked questions. A lot of them are Mr. Robot questions and Sam was very generous to answer the Mr. Robot questions.

Sam: There are spoilers, just FYI, for this whole–

John: Absolutely. So extra spoiler warning for the Q&A part of that. Also, for listeners we have some questions for you. We do the Three Page Challenge often on the show and Megana was asking I wonder what happened to the people who sent in the first three pages of their scripts and we talked about them. Wondering what happened. Some follow up. So, if you are a person who sent in the three pages and we talked about your pages on the air and there’s an update for us, write in to ask@johnaugust.com and give us that update.

The other thing is we’re trying to do an episode about how writer’s rooms are working during this time where writers can’t get together. And so if you have experience in a virtual writer’s room, we’re going to bring in some showrunners to talk about that. But if you are a staff member in a virtual writer’s room or an assistant in a virtual writer’s room, we’re just trying to figure out best practices and what people are using and what’s working for people. Because this is all new territory.

So, write in because that’s probably going to be our next episode is talking about how writer’s rooms are working in this time.

That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced my Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions, but for short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Sam is…

Sam: @samesmail.

John: @samesmail. Excellent.

Sam: Pretty straightforward.

John: You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We’ll put in a trailer for Angelyne so you can see what Sam has been working on. Looking forward to that. You can also find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. Sam, thank you for coming back and doing this little wraparound on the show. It was great talking to you that first time. It’s great talking to you again.

Sam: Awesome. Thanks man.

John: Cool. Thanks.

[Bonus segment]

John: Let’s turn it out to our audience and see what kind of questions the audience might have. So we have two microphones out there. So you can line up at either microphone and we will just ping pong back and forth between your microphones.

Male Audience Member: So with Mr. Robot you made a really engaging, entertaining show, as is your goal. It’s also really thematically consistent. And you’ve done that through four seasons with a team of writers and producers and art design. How do you convey those themes to those people and get that across on screen?

Sam: This I did write down. So, there were three things for Mr. Robot and it’s personal, so I’m not going to share it. But that I wrote down in my phone.

John: This is a show about these three things?

Sam: Yeah. But there were three things that I just said to myself. And whenever I got asked a question, and it didn’t matter if it was the color of this purse that Darlene was going to wear, or what the set should look like, I would remember those three things. It’s still in my notepad. I wrote that down like seven years ago. Anyway, so I remembered those three things and I would just always make sure and went up against that.

Sometimes I got lazy. I’m not going to say I was perfect. So colors of carpets probably slipped by me. But you’ve got to – look, at the beginning of anything you do, whether you’re writing or directing or whatever it is, you got to have something to say. It is not a product. I don’t care what anybody tells you. Let other people call it product or call it content or whatever the fuck they want to call it. You are not selling something. You are saying something. Write down what you are saying and make sure that with every decision you’re saying that.

Male Audience Member: Thank you.

Male Audience Member: Hey, so I’m actually transitioning and I wanted to remark upon how much I love White Rose as a character and how I feel how fresh it is for a character to be informed by their transition but not completely encompassed by it. So I was curious for you in a sort of chicken/egg scenario whether you thought about her being transgender first or whether that ended up coming in your conceptualization of that character?

Sam: No. That was her journey was identity. And honestly everyone’s journey in Mr. Robot was about identity. And she really needed to be sort of Elliot’s sort of polar. And, you know, for White Rose, I mean, no other character outside of Elliot spoke to the theme of what I wanted to say. And that has something to do with one of the words I wrote.

But this idea of someone in a crisis of identity and then knowing deep down who that person is and with every inch and second and moment of their life moving towards it despite what everyone around her is saying. That’s Elliot’s journey. No, no, that was very much from the beginning how I conceived of White Rose.

Male Audience Member: Thank you so much.

Male Audience Member: Hi, I have a couple things to say. I really enjoyed what you said about the parentheticals. I found that very fascinating how just that small little detail can totally just change the whole scene.

Sam: By the way, I’m sorry to interrupt you, but really quickly do it. Just do it for fun. I mean, honestly it will open up – just in whatever scripts you have right now, just go the opposite of the emotion you think that person should have in that scene. And see what happens. It can get really exciting results. Do you ever do that John?

John: Oh yeah. Yeah. Very inspiring.

Sam: He knows more than me, so.

Male Audience Member: It really reminded me about one scene in Mr. Robot when Jonah is going into her closet and it kind of alludes to American Psycho and even like Kingpin and Daredevil when they’re selecting their wardrobe and usually there’s this orchestral music that’s always beautiful. But you decided to play this really heavy rock music. And I was just kind of like wondering when do you decide to use juxtaposition like that? I thought that was insanely brilliant.

Sam: Oh, I wish I could say I invented that. But, you know, look at the masters. Look at Scorsese. Look at Tarantino during the ear cutting off scene, what’s the song?

John: Stuck in the Middle with You.

Sam: Stuck in the Middle with You. It couldn’t be a happier, go-luckier song. And he’s doing this awful, brutal thing. The contrast. And it’s also alchemy. I see my friend here, Sean Schuyler, who sits in the edit bay with me and picks out music with me. He’s fucking brilliant at it. And that’s what you do. You find – you don’t want to restate what you’ve already stated, which is what I think when music is poorly used is what I think is happening. You’re just sort of underlining what the audience is already experiencing.

What you want to do is you want to create a new experience. That’s what you kind of want to try and do with every moment of everything you do, right? And so the best way is taking a good song and contrasting with what is happening on screen, but not just for superficial reasons. Not just because you think it’s cool. But because it feels right and it reimagines the moment or the scene in a really new and exciting way. So yeah.

Male Audience Member: Hi. First things first. I’m the one who woo’d when you said NYU. But I was wondering what do you do when you have a script or at least an act that you know is too long, but it has everything that you want in it? And also how do you know when you’re done with a script?

Sam: Jesus. You are asking the wrong person, my friend. I turned a movie into a four-season television show. Well, look, I’ll answer the first question. How do you know if a scene is too long? You know, again, reference a master. Try and read it out loud to a friend. And then be honest with yourself. Do I really need all this dialogue to get to that point? And the answer might be yes. And then if it’s yes, you’re good, and you move on. But I think there’s a lot of preciousness when it’s just you and the monitor. When you start including other people, and when you start – even sometimes I’ll let a person read it. if I’m just sitting there watching them read it and they’re flipping the pages, I’m like oh fuck, this scene is way too fucking long. They should be moving on. I can see them yawn.

Like I start to get the [osmosis]. So I just honestly try and just be as honest with myself as possible. But honestly reading it out loud tells you right. When you write do ever just do a pass where you just read it, even just to yourself, not to a friend? Do you ever just read the dialogue out loud?

Male Audience Member: It’s something I’ve started to do because my acting friends tell me to do it.

Sam: It’s a good exercise. Because then you’ll be like, oof, you will start to feel some lines are cringey. Or some lines that are there just to be showy. And you just start cutting it.

Male Audience Member: Cool. Thank you.

Female Audience Member: Hi Sam. Thanks for being here with us.

Sam: Hi.

Female Audience Member: Hi. I really liked some of the things you shared about earlier in your career when you said, you know, you could have started writing sooner and you kind of just didn’t because you were intimidated or you were scared. And I liked when you shared about you just quit your day job and took the plunge. I’m thinking about doing something very similar. I’m a professional copywriter, but it doesn’t really – it’s tangential to what I want to do, but it’s not what I actually what to do. So I guess I wanted to ask you what would your advice be for escaping my Alderson Loop of just being stuck in my job. And how do I–?

Sam: Do you have money in the bank?

Female Audience Member: I have a little bit of money in the bank. Yes, I do.

Sam: God. I can’t…hmm.

Female Audience Member: You can tell me to quit. Just do it. [laughs]

John: I think you want permission to quit. So, tell me if this was your experience. When I quit my assistant job, so I was working as an assistant for these producers and I was happy to quit working as an assistant to these producers because even back then being an assistant was not a fantastic job. And I made myself of a spreadsheet of like this is how much money I have. This is what my monthly costs are. I can afford six months of this. And I quit for six months. It was good motivation to be getting stuff done inn those six months because I could see it all dwindling away.

Sam: That’s kind of what I did. I mean, I kind of figured out how much I could last on ramen and whatever. And then I had credit cards. Credit cards help. Especially like Discover.

John: Discover is great.

Sam: Yeah. Because they just give it to you. But all this to say I don’t know how great any of this advice is. Let me ask you one question. Do you have something that you really want to write right now?

Female Audience Member: I have several ideas, but not like one singular thing.

John: So I will say some of my most productive writing time though was when I had a mindless job. So like copywriting might be a really tough job because you’re using your writing time all the time. But if you had a job like at Starbucks, then you’re not using that writing brain. And so you might come back from that shift with the ability saved up – with brain space left to write.

So when I was doing a terrible clerk job actually I got a lot written because I wasn’t using my brain all day.

Sam: So yes. So you should quit and go to Starbucks.

Female Audience Member: [laughs] Cool.

Sam: This is the–

John: This is the advice we gave you here tonight.

Sam: This is the lesson you’ve learned.

John: So let us know how it turns out.

Male Audience Member: Hi guys. Thank you Mr. August. Thank you Mr. Esmail for coming out and talking to us and educating us. So one thing that really struck me about Mr. Robot is the level of technical – not only the level of technical detail vis-à-vis hacking and computers and all that you went into, but you were able to spin it with such literary panache and just really dressed it up, which is fantastic writing. And I was just wondering if there’s anything you kind of say about that when you’re really on the blank page is really just spinning that magic. Is there any insight you got–?

Sam: Well, I think, you know the weird thing, and this goes to the point of like when I remember when I saw Hackers and just every movie, at least a lot of the movies that I saw about hacking, they tried to make weird graphics and dumb visual effects, the flies through the screen, to dramatize hacking. And to me it was just like why is that drama to throw CGI in your face. That makes no fucking sense.

Drama is what the person is going through. Emotionally what they want. It’s all the same things that you would do in a scene between two people. And I looked at those scenes the same way. Elliot really wanted this and he was going after it with tenacity, or sometimes he was super tired and he was forcing himself to go at it. And then he would fail sometimes. Or he would succeed. These are words that you can apply to anything.

So you have to look at every scene like that. You’re telling a story about a person that wants something and he either fails or succeeds at it. And he feels something about that. And I think that’s – because I got a lot of pushback when I first wrote it that no one is going to watch a person on a keyboard. What I think people didn’t realize is but people want to watch people go through an emotional experience. And that can happen with anything.

So, yeah, I wrote those scenes like the way I write any other scene.

Male Audience Member: Cool. Thank you.

Sam: Thanks.

John: Thanks.

Male Audience Member: Hi. Thank you Sam for being here. Birthday gift for me today.

Sam: Happy Birthday.

John: Happy Birthday.

Male Audience Member: So, I have a two-parter question. So, for the music of Mr. Robot, Briar Patch, Homecoming, so for Mac Quayle’s score, I heard you say in interviews that you would send the footage over to him and then he’ll just start going at it. But for the license soundtrack, like for example M83’s Gone in Season 1 and then Intro in Season 3 and then Outro at the tail-end of the series, how would you differentiate when to use Mac’s score and then use the license soundtrack?

Sam: This is a little bit like the song speaks to me. I mean, I listen to a lot – I don’t know how you guys do it. And it’s different for everyone. I listen to a lot of music when I write. But then when we watch the scene- by the way, Sean was the one that suggested M83 in Season 3. I think I did Season 4. But whatever. That’s probably debatable. Oh Justin. Justin, the editor.

But it’s ultimately something that speaks to us. It’s something that we – me, Sean, the editors, we’re constantly playing music as we’re figuring out scenes. As I’m just day-dreaming. Even going to set I listen to the song that I think I might use in this scene.

Music to me it’s like an injection of tone. You know? I think movies can be sort of a little more kind of elusive to convey tone. That’s why when it’s done so well it’s fucking. I mean, Wes Anderson, right? You know when you’re watching a Wes Anderson. That’s like a song to me. And he obviously uses music really well.

So to me it’s like if I know a song so speaks to the tone of this scene, then I just go ahead and license the music. But oftentimes because Mac is so brilliant and amazing, I mean, he was so part of the DNA from the beginning that he’s create cues. I remember he created a music cue for the recap of one of the episodes. It was for the recap. And I listened to it and I’m like this is fucking awesome. And I took it and told him this is going in the episode. And it was like the big Fuck Me speech in the Season 3 premiere.

So, it’s always like a kind of improvised. Because music is all emotion. And it’s a trial and error, see how it feels. So I don’t think there’s a binary decision. I think it’s just a feeling that you have in the moment.

John: Back over here.

Male Audience Member: So, in the transition from movie to TV series, besides Elliot’s DID which you touched on already, what were some of the characters and plot threads you were most excited to expand on that you got to do in the series that really made you decide I’m going to stick with this.

Sam: It was two characters. It was actually really one. It started with Darlene. I feel in love with Darlene. I mean, I stopped writing around the shower – like when I went off and did Comet, I think it was in Episode 2 when Elliot catches Darlene in his shower. If you remember that. And then I was like, OK, how do I cut this down. But honestly Tyrell. I fucking love Tyrell. I loved writing him. He was one of my favorite characters. And I would have had to completely cut him out of the movie to even have any shot of making maybe a three-hour movie.

And I didn’t want to do that. I was like, no, I like this guy. And I came up with Joanna and I liked his relationship with Joanna. And I was just like – and that’s one of the big motivations for me to turn it into a series.

Male Audience Member: Thanks.

John: Back over here.

Male Audience Member: The voiceover in your show is like it’s done something nothing has ever done. And a lot of that is because of the DID. But it also has so many levels and especially the very end, obviously, the reveal. All of that – was that all sort of in that original idea? Or did that start to unfold as the show grew?

Sam: The VO specifically or the DID reveal?

Male Audience Member: Well, the idea of what the VO is and how that plays out throughout the whole four years.

Sam: “Hello friend” was always the first line of the script.

Male Audience Member: But that said what the ending was going to be in your head?

Sam: The ending was figured out before I wrote “Hello friend.” I knew what the last line was going to be when I started writing the script.

John: A process question. For all of his voiceover, at what point was the actor recording his voiceover? Was it as you were filming each episode or was it independent of all that stuff? Because it feels like as you’re editing episodes you need to have that voiceover just to get a sense of feel for where things are.

Sam: No, we had some rough temp VO in there.

John: Little editor voiceover there.

Sam: Yeah, because it was too important. And Rami and I wanted to do it – Rami couldn’t just go – eventually he did, because he had it down. But that first season he and I needed to really be in a room and just go through it together. Because it’s so important. It was a character onto itself.

John: Back over here.

Male Audience Member: I was hoping you could expand a little bit upon that time when you quit your job in reality, not necessarily so much as how did you support yourself financially, but how did you make the most out of that time? And how did you structure that all of a sudden you had all this free time?

Sam: You mean after I quit you mean?

Male Audience Member: Yeah.

Sam: Well, OK, I’m kind of curious what you do. But, OK, so while I was working I would come home. I’m a night owl. I like to write at night. So I would come home. I actually did a little bit like what John did. I sort of day dreamed during the day and I kind of wrote little things on my phone. And then I’d go home and I’d write until 2am. And then I’d write on weekends and tried to piece together – those first two features were written on weekends, vacations, any spare time outside of the office.

Now, what I do – and I know this is like, this is like against every rule of writing from what I understand, because apparently you’re the most creative in the morning. But not this person. I cannot write in the morning. I’ve tried. Do you write in the morning?

John: I can write in the morning. But I think naturally I probably am a night owl. So I was writing all those times at night. But once you have a kid, your night just goes away.

Sam: Oh. Right.

John: Yeah.

Sam: I don’t know what I’m going to do.

John: So you are still writing at night?

Sam: So now what I do is I wake up. This is my – when I write this is my day. I wake up in the morning. I get angry at the news for two or three hours. I usually try and go to a diner, because I love diners. And I listen to a great podcast. Sometimes Scriptnotes. Really helps.

And I think about what I want to write that day. So mornings for me are thinking. Thinking is like most of it, right? When you’re writing how much is that actual typing? To me, it’s a small percentage. Most of it is what am I going to write? What is the scene? What’s my way in? Who are these people? Is that – like have I seen that person a million times? Is there anything interesting? You know, the great thing, and I’m going to say this about diversity. Diversity to me, and being Egyptian I maybe have a closer relationship to this than other people, but to me diversity is an opportunity to really think about characters in a very different way.

I feel like sometimes write it like it’s a homework assignment. Like we got to avoid cancel culture and like fucking stack race and gender and orientation in there. No. It’s a fucking exciting opportunity to come up with really interesting people that have never been in films and television shows. And they can give you all new stories and take your stories in all new exciting directions that the scene wouldn’t have ever had without that.

So, to me I do all of that. You know, I get angry at the news. And then I go to lunch. And I do all of that. And I think about the people and I think about the people in my scene. I like those people. I want to like them, even the villains. I want to like them. Be a fan of them. And then you’re armed with all that. You go in in the afternoon and I write. Take a dinner break. And then I write some more until–

John: So you can manage a couple hours of actual writing a day? Because if I get–

Sam: With a lot of breaks.

John: OK. If I get three hours of writing in a day that’s a lot for me.

Sam: Well, when you say writing you mean like typing?

John: Typing at a keyboard.

Sam: Yeah. That’s probably right.

John: Great. Sam Esmail, thank you very much for this conversation.

Sam: Thank you. Guys, this was so much fun.

John: You’re welcome. This was great. Thank you for being a great audience. Thank you to [Enid], to the Writers Guild Foundation for this. Thank you the Writers Guild Theater. And have a good night.

Links:

• Angelyne Trailer
• Watch Homecoming
• Mr. Robot
• Three Page Challenge participants — please share your updates and stories! We’d love to hear what happened to your story or career after the segment.
• Please reach out with your experiences working in a virtual writer’s room during Covid-19, email ask@johnaugust.com.
• AboveTek iPad Stand
• Just Watch
• Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium here.
• Sam Esmail on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

 

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 448 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. One of our favorite recurring segments on the show is How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at stories in the news and discuss how to turn them into features. Today we’re going to take a look at the outcome of that process with a new HBO movie Bad Education which is based on actual events and written by our guest, Mike Makowsky.

And in our bonus segment for Premium members Craig and I will talk about our own first Three Page Challenges and why those early pages are so important.

But first we have some follow up. Craig, do you want to start us off?

Craig: Yeah. We got some feedback here from a different Craig, because there are others.

John: There’s one or two more.

Craig: I’m sort of the premier Craig. A different Craig writes, “Last week Craig,” that’s me, “said that the brain is very plastic. He is incredibly correct.” John, I kind of want to just stop there. I feel like that’s the best bit of follow up we could imagine. But I will continue.

John: Not only is Craig correct, he is incredibly correct.

Craig: Incredibly correct. But, you know what? I’ll continue.

John: Although if you think about incredibly, incredible comes from like it’s not believable.

Craig: Like he’s correct in a way that is not credible.

John: Is not believable. Yeah.

Craig: Correct. The different Craig continues. He says, “I suffered a brain injury when I was three and this prevented me from learning how to read and left me with dyslexia. I got through school with a good memory and a basic handle of English. The ability for a PC, meaning a computer, to read text changed the world for me. I spend most of my working day with headphones on. My team knows that’s just me. As you can imagine movies were my life as books weren’t an option. At 50 I decided to give writing screenplays a go. I wasn’t after a career, but I knew how films worked as I had spent years watching them.

“I have sold two specs in the last year. Small indies. Mostly because of the assistance of you both. If people doubt that they can do it, well, they should only see themselves as a barrier. There has never been a time in human history that has allowed for the leveling of so many playing fields. I am not saying that every hurdle can be removed, but effort can be recognized and rewarded. There are mechanisms that can be used. Thank you both again.”

Well that’s lovely.

John: That’s great. So congratulations to other Craig for all the hard work he’s been doing and the ability to use the tools that are out there to sort of move past some barriers that are being put in your way. So that’s very encouraging.

Craig: Yeah. And it’s also good for people who are later on in years. Sounds like the other Craig is about the same age as you and me. You know, if you want to start something there is no time limit on starting. And if you’re not ready right now that’s OK, too, because there’s more time later.

In general, very encouraging note from Craig. So thank you other Craig.

John: Excellent. So another bit of follow up. Last week we spoke about what screenwriting actually is. And after stipulating that you and I are not film historians we said that early screenplays don’t closely resemble what we now think of as screenplays. Elizabeth on Twitter wrote to steer my attention to the book When Women Wrote Hollywood, Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry. I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. And I just started reading it and it is a good overview of sort of those early days of the film industry and early days of screenwriting.

And one of the realities is that a lot of people who were writing the initial screenplays were women. And that history has sort of been erased. Kara Green-Epstein also wrote in. She said, “The idea that screenwriting was just short lists until Casablanca is really a narrative that was created originally to discredit the work that female screenwriters were doing and pushed them out of the business once men realized that filmmaking had legs and that it was a money-making industry.”

Craig: Not sure about that one.

John: I’m not entirely sure about every part of that, but what I do think is that as we were very quickly describing the initial things that became screenwriting I think it is important to acknowledge that there were people who were writing those early screenplays and those early screenwriters were often women. And it’s a thing that you see discussed in sort of the history of Hollywood but I don’t think it sort of makes it out into the broader industry awareness too often. So I think it’s good for us to focus on this for a moment.

Craig: Yeah. I think that’s absolutely true. It’s a great point. I’m glad that Elizabeth brought that up. What I would say to Kara Green-Epstein is that she is right that there are a number of things that film historians do to overlook the contributions of women. And for our lapse in not bringing that up in our last conversation I do feel regret. I don’t think you or I really meant to imply that screenwriting was just short lists until Casablanca. That’s clearly not the case.

Casablanca comes out after World War II. There are god knows how many brilliant movies that are written in the ‘20s, but really the ‘30s. I mean, Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz. These obviously had full featured screenplays. They weren’t merely lists. So, I don’t want anyone to think that we think that until Casablanca there weren’t fully featured screenplays. There were tons of them.

John: Yeah. So a thing I want to throw in the show notes is a link to the History of the Screenplay Format by Andrew Gay which really talks through the various kind of formats that were built along the way. The reason why Casablanca is often put down as a dividing line is not because there’s something remarkable about the Casablanca script, although I will put a link to the Casablanca script in there was well. It’s that from that point forward screenplays tended to look very, very similar in terms of what they were describing and they were much less about the continuity. They were much less about the like “this shot and then this shot and then this shot.” They were much more of a literary document.

So it wasn’t that Casablanca was the one that made it a literary document. It’s that pretty much all the scripts you see moving forward after that point were really much more written to be read than to be a shot plan for these are the exact shots that are going to be in the film.

Craig: Yeah. And I just – because now I’m all like, I’m sitting here rather sensitive about the things that I’m saying. I don’t want anyone to think that I think that Casablanca came out in the 1950s. It came out after World War II commenced. Now I’m getting worried that we’re going to get more letters.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Those film historians will come after us. All right, let’s get to our feature topic here which is about features themselves. About how we take things that exist in the real world and turn them into features. It’s a thing we talk about a lot on the show. And our guest today has done just that. His new movie, Bad Education, opens very soon on HBO. And he’s here to talk about the process of getting from true story to movie, to a movie that is now streaming everywhere. Mike Makowsky, welcome to Scriptnotes.

Mike Makowsky: Thank you guys so much for having me. This is so cool.

Craig: It is so cool. I agree. I agree. It’s so cool.

John: Mike, are you actually a Scriptnotes listener?

Mike: I am. Yes.

Craig: Spectacular.

John: So you have listened to us talk through the How Would This Be a Movie segment before. For people who haven’t seen the movie yet talk us through the very generalities of what happened in the real world – what is the true life event that inspired this movie?

Mike: So basically in 2004 at a public school district on Long Island in New York called Roslyn there was an $11.2 million embezzlement scandal perpetrated by the superintendent and a couple of other administrators and was thought to be at the time the largest public school embezzlement scandal in history. And it happened at my school while I was a student there.

John: Great. So you had a very personal connection to it because this was literally the school district that you were going through. But if someone didn’t have that sort of special flash of insight what was the media coverage of this event that a person could have latched onto? What were the stories that were out there that a person could have found out about this event?

Mike: Yeah. So the New York Times was covering it week-to-week as the case went into trial. And the different administrators were arrested and ultimately five people went to prison. It was covered pretty perennially for probably two or three years by media outlets across the country.

John: And when did you first have the decision to like, OK, I’m going to try to make a movie out of this? What was your way into this?

Mike: That came much later. In 2004 I was in 7th grade and was far more concerned about my impending Bar Mitzvah. So, it was not the first thing on my mind. But it was very clear to me even as a 13-year-old who couldn’t kind of fully process the ramifications of what was happening as it was happening that this was a really, really big thing. It’s the biggest thing that had ever happened in my town. And after graduating from college and moving out to LA and making a couple of smaller independent films I had always wanted to try to write a true story. I always wanted to write something that took place on Long Island because it’s a very specific kind of region and upbringing.

Craig: Yeah.

Mike: I was thinking about stories that were close to me or were stories that I knew that other people might not necessarily be aware of. And this came back into my consciousness. And I went back to my hometown to do all the research in 2016. And I spoke with a bunch of my old teachers and parents of friends who were on the PTA and went through all of our local news archives and yearbooks and essentially outlined the whole script out of my high school cafeteria. So it was a really, really insane, cool, surreal experience.

Craig: I mean, that’s amazing that first of all you have the benefit of having lived in the milieu of this movie. So you know the people. You know the places. You’re soaking in all of that. So that’s research you don’t even have to do. It’s also a gift to be able to write something inside of a place, sort of be in a place when you’re referring to it in your own little fictional sub-world of it. But one of the things that we talk about all the time when we do these How Would This Be a Movie segments is, OK, so here are the facts. And, yes, it’s the biggest thing that ever happened in Roslyn, Long Island, but in the end it’s a thing about crime. Right? This lady and this guy stole a bunch of money.

So, at some point you as a writer go, OK, but what’s this really about. And where were you in the process when you kind of landed on what it is about? And if you can articulate for folks listening what you think this is really about?

Mike: Sure. So I think that one of the things that was really, really interesting to me going through the research process and specifically talking about kind of like the primary subject who was this superintendent, a man named Frank Tassone, who had built our school up to this point of national prominence. The year that he was arrested we were ranked the number four public school district in the country by the Wall Street Journal. Because he was such a really, really passionate educator who made a lot of inroads in our community and a lot of kids were getting into Ivy League schools and doing really, really well on their SATs because he was placing this real premium on their higher education and learning.

And the parents were really happy. And the health of the public school district, especially on Long Island, is directly tethered to the property values in the community. So there was a lot actually at stake in our town. A real, real direct relationship between the schools and the continued prosperity of our little suburb on Long Island.

John: Let me jump in here for a sec to explain, because international listeners may be puzzled by why there would be that connection. But in US public schools it’s very often the schools are funded by property taxes, taxes paid by land owners in that area. So it’s a very local kind of thing. And so the more the land is worth the more that school district has. And therefore it becomes this weird cycle where the richer school districts also attract wealthier families which brings up property values and becomes a sort of strange cycle.

So, if you’re listening to this in France you’re like that doesn’t make any sense. But this is a really common way things are structured here in the US.

Mike: Yeah. What the film at least tries to interrogate is this dichotomy between our superintendent who seemingly cared so deeply about the community and the town and the students. And really had a one-to-one relationship with so many – I mean, he ran a Dickens book club on weekends for parents. He was the Roslyn Rotary Club Man of the Year. Like the idea that then he could just sort of turn around and victimize that entire community and steal from the students’ pockets was something that struck a lot of my community as very, very upsetting and maddening. It was a huge betrayal that still has really, really deep-seeded tension to it, even today.

So I was just fundamentally curious about how can good intentions pave the way for something I think a lot more insidious. When I wrote the script in 2016 the college admission scandal had not happened yet.

Craig: Right.

Mike: But I think that this is something that we saw at least a year ago play out on a much broader scale. Just what would bring these parents to compromise their integrity so thoroughly for their children’s benefits. I mean, it just seems to perpetuate itself over and over again. You see these stories every couple of years.

Craig: As a culture we clearly struggle with the notion of assigning value to children based on outcome. And the ultimate outcome for so many people in the United States is where does your child go to college. And it was certainly that way with my parents and me. It’s not that way with me and my kids. But it is with a lot of people.

So, this theme keeps burbling forth throughout this kind of pressure. The idea of education as a function rather than something of value in and of itself. But it does seem to me that you took a surprising angle on this that I don’t think I would have thought of and I’m glad you did, because I appreciated it. And it comes out most clearly in the end really when Hugh Jackman, who does a wonderful job playing Tassone, is sitting there with Ray Romano who plays the head of the school board, and what comes out is a question of class. That there is a wealthy community that expects this man and all of the staff and teachers below him to provide a service that increases the value of their children and the value of their homes, but he’s not one of them. He works for them.

And he is I think in an interesting way as a character who seems fueled by some small amount of resentment or a large amount of resentment. He’s starting to feel like he is underappreciated and underpaid and maybe just nothing more than a glorified janitor to them. And I thought that examination, as the child of public school teachers in the New York City Board of Education system, this is not a foreign thing to me. I’ve heard this kind of resentment over and over and over as a kid at the dinner table. And I thought that was a really interesting angle. The notion that we expect this service class to benefit us but they’re not allowed to actually live well. And that’s seemingly what’s behind his crimes more than anything else.

Mike: It was something that I found very much by accident, and I’m so glad that you remarked on it. I think that the title Bad Education is a bit of a misnomer. I received such a great education at my middle school and high school. Teachers who believed in me and were the first people to really foster my interest in writing. I mean, I remember I had a teacher in 7th grade which was the year that Tassone was arrested. Every day during recess I would just go to his classroom because he was an aspiring novelist and we would just write together and give each other notes. And I think he was just humoring me at the time. But it just meant the world to me that a real adult believed in me and encouraged me.

And it was then sort of cool to be able to go back in the research process and reconnect with a lot of these old teachers that I hadn’t seen in years. And see them more as people and not just these functionaries. Some of them were even my first readers on the script. So you have your English teacher in high school, you know, you’re used to him scrawling notes in the margins of your essays, but it’s a whole other thing when he’s doing it in like a Final Draft document. So it was just a really unexpected outcome of this in that I was able to both reestablish those relationships but also kind of see Tassone more through that lens.

These people saw me through the most formative years of my life and years where I was kind of the worst. And they saw me through it. And it was nice to sort of just be able to go back and in some small way be able to thank them.

Craig: Well, and I think you did. I mean, there’s that moment again near the end where Tassone is talking to an unreasonably complaining mom who is trying to get her child into an accelerated program when it is quite clear that the child does not belong in the accelerated program because the child cannot even read the word accelerated. And what he says in his kind of final breakdown moment is essentially, “You all just use us, get what you want, and then you’re gone. We give you things. We care about things. You expect us to care about all of your kids individually, and we do, and then you leave when you’re done with us. You just toss us aside like a husk and you’re gone forever. And you never come back.”

And, again, it’s that feeling of class, you know.

Mike: These teachers not only remembered like surprising small details about me, but remembered the names and the seating charts of every student that they had. It was something that I felt like it would be irresponsible not to put in the script at least in some form. And it was a way for me to find some sort of window of empathy with Tassone himself, the superintendent, who really, really did care I believe ultimately about the students despite what he did and didn’t do.

John: So Mike let’s get back to the How Would This Be a Movie. So you have your setting, which you know the setting, you grew up in that setting. You have the basic plot. You know that it’s ultimately going to lead to his being found out and being arrested and the consequences of that. How early on in the process and how did come upon the decisions about which characters to feature, which real life people are making it into your story, and which characters you may need to create or do composites? What was the process in terms of figuring out which characters would be in the story and which ones would have storytelling power?

Tassone is a real person. Pam Gluckin is a real person. Is the Ray Romano character an actual person or is that a composite?

Mike: Mostly a composite. I mean, Ray Romano plays the head of the school board. And the school board are basically just parents in the community that have taken a leadership role within the management of the school as well. And ultimately what had happened in real life and in the film was that the school board caught wind of the embezzlement scandal about a year and a half before it was reported and they agreed to sweep it under the rug rather than to report it to the authorities or to the community, partially because they were compromised by not wanting to invite any sort of blight or scandal on the school district that they were directly benefiting from, that their children were benefiting from.

John: Now in the film you establish stakes that there’s going to be an upcoming vote and they don’t want to jeopardize things before the vote. Is that an invention of your story or is that a thing that would have happened in that same timeline?

Mike: It would have happened. Yes, it did. What we do in the film itself is we consolidated to kind of fit one school year just for, you know, simplicity sake. And I don’t think that it compromises the chronology to a [unintelligible]. Every year, every May, the school budget vote is the thing that administrators prepare for and steal the community for. And at the time of the scandal because the school district was doing so well and the students were doing so well the tax payers, the parents in our community, were all too happy to basically give Tassone and his cohorts whatever they asked for every year. So we had one of the highest operating budgets in the country.

We had, in 2004 I believe an $82 or $83 million a year operating budget.

Craig: Wow.

Mike: That was being inflated year by year with very, very little oversight.

Craig: As you’re writing you need to assume I think who a hero is. Who is the protagonist of this movie?

Mike: I like characters that exist in moral gray areas. And I think that there are, you know, some people that are going to watch the movie and root for characters like Tassone and Pam Gluckin who is Allison Janney’s character, two of the let’s call them conspirators in the embezzlement scheme, if only partly because it’s fun and you almost identify I think as a viewer with characters who are trying desperately to bail water out of a leaking boat. One of my big comps was Shattered Glass, which I think that Billy Ray does that so well with Hayden Christensen’s character in that film.

Craig: I mean, just as a side note, the end of your movie feels like a direct homage to Shattered Glass.

Mike: Thank you for calling it an homage and not an outright steal. I appreciate that.

Craig: We’re nothing if not kind.

Mike: But there is also a clear-cut protagonist and audience surrogate in the student reporter character. Her name is Rachel in the script. And in real life another really, really crazy facet of the story is that our high school newspaper was the first to break it. It was then picked up by Newsday and the New York Times but only because the newspaper reporter’s son was a Roslyn student who brought home his copy of the school paper and his dad read it and then reported on it the next day.

With Rachel we really tried to unpack the entire breadth of the crime through her eyes and kind of see each of the different cards fall really through her and kind of have her carry us through the different machinations in the story as best as possible.

John: All right. So you have your central characters here. You have Frank Tassone is arguably a protagonist. He’s the character who we actually see sort of change the most over the course of the story because he’s trying to bail water of this sinking ship. But an interesting thing that you decided to do is to conceal information from us as an audience about this character. And so we’re discovering over the course of the story things that he’s doing and lies that he’s been telling that go beyond the surface scandal of the embezzlement.

Talk about your decision process for that and sort of I suspect in your different drafts you probably made some different choices about when to reveal certain things about this central character.

Mike: Yeah, for sure. Even in the first draft I think I definitely tipped my hand a lot quicker to this guy might not be what he seems and that he is somehow complicit. And it was something to the credit of my director, Cory, that I think we needed to kind of find going through the drafts and how to disseminate information in a way that constantly felt surprising, but also organic. Ultimately the sense of structure that we landed on very much mirrored really the process by which our community in 2004 found out information about both Tassone and the scandal at large through media reportage.

It seemed like almost every week there was some new tidbit or some new salacious detail either about the extent of the grift itself or frankly about Tassone’s own personal life which got kind of really unfortunately ensnared in the reportage in a way that I don’t think was wholly positive or beneficial to anyone.

John: I want to play a clip here. So this is a clip that happens a little past the midpoint of the film. Something that has already been in the trailer so it’s not a huge spoiler here. But this is a group of the school board and Tassone coming in to talk with the Allison Janney character. They decide to label what she’s going through is that she’s a sociopath. And I thought it was such a fascinating term to apply to her. So, let’s take a listen to this clip.

[Clip plays]

Hugh Jackman: You stole from the schools and from the taxpayers, from the kids we’re supposed to serve. I think this kind of behavior goes beyond the bounds of immoral. It’s cruel. It’s heinous. It’s sociopathic even.

Allison Janney: Sociopathic? What?

Hugh: Shameless self-interest. The unstable personality. The parade of rotten marriages.

Allison: Frank—

Hugh: You need help, Pam. Real medical help. You’re a sick woman.

Female Voice: We’re concerned about you, Pam.

[Clip ends]

John: So, Mike, what I love about this scene is that it’s really funny but it also gets to again that thematic question you’re trying to wrestle with. What is their actual motivation? And these characters are performing the script, you can kind of see them as sociopaths. You can read them as they actually have no sort of moral underpinning underneath this. They are just doing whatever they can do to make that money.

Where do you as the writer of the story come down on Tassone being a sociopath, on Pam being a sociopath? What’s your judgment on these characters?

Mike: I don’t think that they’re sociopaths at all. And obviously I think that was what happened in real life, too. It was easy enough to just sort of chalk it up to “oh these people are just mentally disturbed.” I don’t think that that’s the case. I think that these kinds of situations are very complicated. I think as we also saw in the college admissions scandal, right? I don’t think that these are just a matter of good versus evil. I think that that really doesn’t do the complexity of it justice.

There’s another scene in the film, Tassone sort of expounds to Ray Romano’s character on how all of this really began. And I think it was something that I really identified with. He basically says that it started – he went out to a pizza place and ordered a slice of pizza and a coke and he used the wrong expense card by mistake. He used the district credit card instead of his personal card. And he said to himself, OK, Monday morning I’m going to go back into the office, I’m going to reconcile everything. I feel so guilty about it. And then Monday comes and goes, nobody calls him on it, and then on Tuesday he buys a $0.60 bagel. And then before you know it you’re at this $11.2 million price tag in the blink of an eye.

It’s like this frog in boiling water kind of dynamic.

Craig: But he’s saying this to a guy that he also points out lives in this beautiful house. He’s saying in so many words like you all look at this school as a machine to get your kids into the right college so they can be rich. It’s all about being rich. And so why am I not allowed to be rich when I’m doing the best job making everyone rich? It’s just that resentment underneath it. I mean, that’s what I found fascinating about the character and the way you portrayed him was that it wasn’t like he mistakenly became, you know, there was a choice he made on that Monday to not pay back the slice of pizza. And then to go further and further and further.

And obviously his cohort, Pam Gluckin, felt precisely the same. It’s amazing to me that he – I mean, look, it’s always amazing to me that these people think they can get away with stuff. The level of self-delusion there is remarkable. It was the same thing in Shattered Glass. They always remind me of Wile E. Coyote after he runs off the edge of a cliff. For a moment there if you just keep running you’ll be fine. But the moment you stop and look down, that’s it.

Mike: Yeah.

John: Now, so generally in this segment we talk about How Would This Be a Movie and we’re thinking about just the creative decisions. But in this case it’s like how do we get from you’ve written this script to this becoming a movie. So talk us through, you’ve written this script, what are the steps that happen that got us to this movie debuting on HBO?

Mike: So I wrote the script on spec sort of without a net. I thought if I had to ask someone for permission that the person just wouldn’t give me permission, or they would be like, you know, if I brought it up to my agent or manager they’d be like, “Well, it feels like kind of a tiny story.” And fortunately I went ahead and I wrote the story. Sent it first to a producer that I had previously partnered with on one of my independent films, a guy named Fred Berger who is great. And he really believed in it. And together we just sort of started going out and submitting it around.

And I was very fortunate in that the script was received well initially and was on the Black List that year.

John: So this is Black List 20–?

Mike: 2016. Yeah.

John: 2016, great.

Mike: But really what ended up making the difference was finding Cory Finley, our director. The script has a very, very specific tone that I think ultimately on the screen is very execution dependent. So pairing it with a director who could really navigate that darkly comedic tone was really, really important. And in 2017, soon after I wrote the script, you know, Cory’s film Thoroughbreds premiered at Sundance and just had a very, very unique view of the world and depiction of its characters and questionable morality. It felt like a real kind of one-to-one match for him to come onboard.

And suddenly I think people saw it a lot more clearly. And this is crazy, this never happens, but within like a month or two Hugh Jackman had come aboard and we were suddenly in the throes of preproduction.

Craig: That worked nicely.

John: That’s great. And so at this point the film is kind of a classic indie. So there’s money being raised from outside. You have a star, you have a director, you have a script. You’re bringing in Allison Janney. You’re bringing in this cast and you’re making this movie. But you don’t have a place that’s going to – you don’t have a buyer yet. So this is the kind of thing that is made for price and then you’re going to go to a festival and sell it. That’s the plan at this point?

Mike: That was the plan. And, yeah, so we premiered the film at Toronto last year in 2019 but nobody really knew if there was going to be a market. And we were, of course, incredibly nervous. I mean, I was just crawling out of my skin. I also just wanted people to like the movie. And I also felt this tremendous debt to my hometown where I wanted to make sure that I got everything right because if I didn’t and I made this sort of turd then my town would be like, oh, and then he made this bad movie about us.

Ultimately, I mean, HBO has been this incredible partner. And it wasn’t necessarily the way that I thought that all of this was going to go down. But ultimately what you really want is a distributor that cares very, very deeply about your film, that’s passionate about it, and that’s willing to get as many eyeballs on it as possible.

And we found just really like the ideal partner in them. There is a version of the movie that gets perceived as this very small, tiny, secular story about bureaucratic nonsense on Long Island. And frankly, I mean, who knows if people go out to see movies in the movie theater unless they have that sort of four-quadrant appeal anymore. There’s been a lot of skepticism about it. And there certainly was. I think even within the market in Toronto. HBO believed from the outset that this had a bigger appeal. And I’m so, so thankful for them.

John: That’s great. So like an I, Tonya which sold at Toronto this could have been a thing that went that route and it’s billboards and award season campaign and it’s all that. Going to HBO you miss all that, but also you get to miss all that, which is a lovely thing, too. Craig can talk you through the award season stuff for HBO. He’s been through all of that. But it is a different scale of crazy than trying to get Oscar nominations for your two lead actors there would certainly be in the conversation for those things and they will still be in the conversation for Emmys down the road.

So, Mike, what are you working on right now? What’s your next project?

Mike: I am moving definitely more and more into TV, kind of like this darkly comic true stories that can benefit from eight episodes of runway to really develop the subjects and paint a very sort of broad picture. So I’m writing – I’m adapting this series of Texas Monthly articles from the 1970s for Hulu right now. This crazy, crazy murder trial in Texas lore that is both like disturbing and disturbingly funny. It very much kind of I think builds on the tone of something like Bad Education. And I’m really, really excited about it.

Craig: Great.

John: Cool. Do you want to stick around with us while we answer some listener questions, because you may have some good answers yourself?

Mike: Sure. Yes.

John: Craig do you want to start us off with Stacy?

Craig: Yeah, sure. Stacy writes, “I recently began work on adapting a book I loved into a film. I didn’t have the rights nor ever expected someone to try and make my script. But I loved the book and wanted to try my hand at adapting. However, very soon after starting I found out that not only have the rights already been purchased but a very well-known writer-director is attached to make it. While this did validate my initial inclination to adapt this slightly plotless, absurdist book into a movie, I’m now wondering whether it makes sense for me to try and write it in the first place. Should I continue working at it or move on to another project?”

John?

John: My advice to Stacy is to move on. So, yeah.

Craig: This is pretty much an easy one, right? A layup to begin with.

John: Here’s what I’ll say though, Stacy. Yes, it should validate your feeling that there is something to be made there. Think back to what is it about that project that would appeal to you, about that book that appealed to you? What is it you have in your own life, in your own brain, that can sort of scratch that same itch? Get to work writing that thing because that will be a thing that you can take out on the town and sell and show as your own work. This thing that you’re doing as a labor of love, it’s going to have a hard time showing up as your work just because it’s based on that book and people know the other version of it. So stop and work on something else.

Mike, anything more to add to Stacy?

Mike; I think you said it beautifully. I think you really, really try to hone in and diagnose just what appealed about it to you in the first place and what feels really, really personal to you. And if you can distill that, build on that foundation but build something wholly original from it, or find a story that has some similarities but is also different enough you should do that. Of course.

John: Yeah. All right, Demi asks, “The thing I struggle with most in writing is theme. Specifically when am I being too explicit with it? Like is it ever OK for a character to directly state/discuss the theme in dialogue, or must it be demonstrated through what happens? If you can put it in dialogue how explicitly can you address it? Do you have any examples or suggestions?”

That feels right to our conversation here because in your film we are talking about these themes of class and who gets to do what. And so Mike what’s your first instinct for Demi here? Do you think stating the theme is OK?

Mike: Yeah. I do. As long as you’re not putting too much of a hat on it and kind of obliquely reference something without making it feel blunt, I guess, if that makes sense.

Craig: I think it depends a little bit on the genre, the kind of movie you’re doing. I mean, The Matrix didn’t need to beat around the bush about its theme. Believe in yourself and you can do anything. So, yeah, some movies you just want to hear it be said. Batman, the Nolan Batman movies were never shy about stating their themes completely. And those were morally complicated films, but still he was just like here it is. This is what it’s about.

And that’s fine. In other movies I think where maybe reality is not pushed in any way, shape, or form you do have to pull back a little bit on that because in movies where people have superpowers or the world is slightly technicolor it’s OK for people to say things like that. No one really talks like that in regular life. So if you’re movie is parroting regular life you probably want to ease off on the theme announcements.

John: I worry that we are mislearning a lesson about not speaking your subtext and trying to bring that over to not speaking the theme, because I think it’s probably a good instinct to actually try to have the character say the theme at some point. I’d say use it and then you can always pull it back, you can always move away from it if it feels like oh my god that’s a giant flashing light there.

Craig is right. Comic book movies, with great power comes great responsibility. They can just announce it there. And you can’t do that in most other movies. But if a character has a moment of discovery and realizes something and articulates that discovery that they’re having. That feels genuine. That feels earned. If they’re whispering it rather than shouting it that feels like the kind of thing that you want to see in movies.

And we’re talking about literary themes, but think about sort of musical themes. Like sometimes you are just actually literally playing the theme music of the film that we’re going to hear at these crucial moments. So think of your theme that way. It is the emotional music that’s underlying all these stuff and sometimes it needs to be in the foreground so don’t be afraid to foreground it at times.

Craig: Yeah, I mean, honestly I pretty said what the theme was of Chernobyl in the first line of dialogue. I wasn’t shy about it. I mean, sometimes it’s just about where it happens. You know, if you say your theme in a big climactic moment where someone turns to the camera and says, “Ahhh,” then you go oh my god it’s the theme moment. But sometimes you can just sort of like slide it on in there and people will kind of get it as they go.

John: Yep.

Craig: All right. We’ve got one more question here.

John: Go for it.

Craig: From Matthew. He writes, “I have a pending option agreement from a two-time Academy-Award winning actress-producer for a screenplay I wrote. And she wants to turn it into a TV series.” Yes please. “This will be my first option ever. Should I have her draw up the option agreement between me as an individual or under my S-corp?”

John: I love the easy questions. It’s your S-corp.

Mike: Oh yeah.

Craig: Yeah. Always. Always.

John: It’s your S-Corp. So we’ll explain very quickly for folks, and I think we’ve probably talked about loan-out corporations.

Craig: We have, yeah.

John: In previous episodes. But either S-corps or C-corps are common in this industry. They’re a way of sort of insulating yourself as the artist so that the studios or other people can hire your company rather than hiring you directly. It makes sense for tax reasons and also for liability reasons. This is an example where you would use that S-corp so that she would be hiring your loan-out corporation rather than hiring you directly. That’s totally appropriate.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t see why you wouldn’t. My guess is that you would realize that when you looked at the option agreement and noticed that she was also using her S-corp. So that’s probably a good sign.

John: Yes. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Craig, what is your One Cool Thing this week?

Craig: Well, you know, I have been struggling John at home with this printer. I’m not going to say which large corporation made it – it’s Hewlett-Packard. What I will say is this laser printer, it was like living with a very unstable girlfriend. There were times where she loved me and there were times where she wouldn’t pay any attention to me at all. There were times where she told me she would do something but didn’t. You’d hit print and just, well, who knows. You wouldn’t know.

And I just gave up. I was so tired of it. So I was looking for a new printer and I came across this Epson brand called EcoTank and honestly they had me at EcoTank. The brilliance of this thing is it doesn’t use the freaking toner cartridges. Oh, what a joy. You just – they give you ink like it’s a bottle of ink. And you just go glug-glug-glug into the little ink holder and that’s it. That alone is so – because the cost of those toner cartridges, it’s like they’re made of plutonium or something. And they’re terribly wasteful to the environment. And lo and behold I said, hey Epson, print. And it went, OK, no problem man. Here you go. That’s what I’m here for.

So, so far so good. Very pleased with the Epson EcoTank ET-4760.

John: All right. We’ll flag that for follow up two years from now and see if you still like that printer. Like, oh, curse this printer.

Craig: Turns out she was also an unstable girlfriend. Argh!

John: Oh, printers. My One Cool Thing is a program #StitchUsBackTogether. It is being run by my friend Jamarah Hayner. What Jamarah has done, she’s an organizer of people and things, she recognized that there is a shortage of gowns for hospitals. So basically – especially in the pandemic when you have healthcare workers interacting with patients they should in theory be changing out their gown between each of those visits so that they’re not spreading stuff around. There’s a shortage of gowns in Los Angeles and in New York and other places across the country.

She’s focusing right now on Los Angeles and she’s basically worked with a bunch of vendors. If you are a person who sews and has a sewing machine and would like to help make these gowns, basically people will show up at your house with the fabric. The patterns are already set. You sew them and other people come and pick up these gowns you’ve sewn and take them off to hospitals who need them.

So, it’s a thing that I’m doing. I’ve been sewing a bunch of masks here at the house for the past couple weeks. I’m going to try my hands sewing these gowns. I’m not great at sewing but I’m OK at sewing.

Craig: You know what? I bet you are great at it.

John: All right, I’m being a little modest. I’m pretty good at sewing.

Craig: I bet. I mean, can you imagine what my gowns would look like?

John: They would not be good. Craig has seen me duct tape a picket sign and he knows I have some pretty good craft skills there.

Craig: It was just these beautiful parallel/diagonal lines. Like he was making a candy cane. And then I was over here, you know, with just tape on a thing. I’ve always struggled with that. If I tried to sew a gown it would have either only one hole or six holes.

John: It would be really good for the three-armed doctors there.

Craig: Correct. Side note, seamster is a word.

John: Yeah. So as I was trying to set this up I was looking whether seamster was the matching word for seamstress and apparently it is.

Craig: It is.

John: So if you are a person who does sew, obviously if you work in this industry in the costume department you may have the ability to do this and actually have a sewing machine that’s sitting idle. There will be a link in the show notes. The hashtag is #StitchUsBackTogether. You may also just have parents or other people in your life are looking for a thing to do that can help. This is a thing that people can do that can help.

So right now in Los Angeles. They’re going to try to expand to New York if they have the capability.

Mike, do you have a One Cool Thing?

Mike: I do. When I wrote Bad Education I optioned the rights to a New York Magazine article that I felt at the time was the most sort of comprehensive and literary portrayal of the scandal. And it was written by a guy named Robert Kolker who released a book about two weeks ago called Hidden Valley Road that I’m in the middle of reading right now. And it is really, really amazing. So amazing in fact that it is now Oprah’s Book Club pick for the month.

John: Oh wow.

Mike: And I can’t recommend it more highly. It’s a nonfiction book about a family of 12 children in Colorado in the 1960s. Six of the 12 were diagnosed schizophrenics. Apparently I guess contributed in large part to how we understand from a medical perspective schizophrenia and mental illness today. I guess that their genes were mapped and studied.

But the book itself is harrowing. It’s probably not the most uplifting content to be recommending in the middle of a global pandemic, but it is just a very, very beautifully written, well researched, and human book. It’s like very, very emotional and cathartic in a way that I hadn’t necessarily expected when I first picked it up. He’s just a brilliant, brilliant writer. The book is awesome.

John: Cool. Excellent. That is our show for this week. So, if you’re a Premium member stick around after the credits because Craig and will be talking about our own three pages. But otherwise that’s the show.

It is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by James Llonch. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered on the show today. But for short questions on Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Mike, are you on Twitter?

Mike: I am. I’m @mike_makowsky I believe.

John: Fantastic. So you can tweet at him to tell him how much you enjoyed Bad Education which debuts I think the week that this episode drops, so check that out on HBO.

You can find the show notes for the episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and some bonus segments as well.

Mike, thank you so much for coming on the show and congratulations on your movie.

Craig: Thanks Mike.

Mike: Thank you guys so much for having me. This is so cool.

Craig: You got it.

[Bonus segment]

John: All right. So, we got a question in that I thought might be a good Premium topic. Aaron writes, “From watching your latest Scriptnotes Episode 447, the live Three Page Challenge, a question occurred to me that might also be of interest to your listeners. What’s your personal favorite first three pages of any screenplay you’ve written or worked on, produced or not?” Which was interesting for me to think about.

So I have a couple of choices, but I also want to spend some time thinking about why we talk about the three pages, the first three pages being so important, and why they’re important to me as a writer.

So, first three pages of stuff I’ve written that has been really meaningful to me. Big Fish, the opening of Big Fish was probably of anything I’ve written in my entire career was the most classically sort of like rip the page out of the typewriter, crumple it into a ball, and start over. It was just very hard to set up all the things I needed to set up in Big Fish about sort of that they’re moving between a fantasy world, a real world, who the characters are, who had voiceover power. All the stuff that had to happen. Once I got that working in those first three pages in really setting up the movie the whole movie became possible. So that was a case where those first three pages were not just to sort of get the audience on board, but they were kind of the key to unlocking here is how I’m going to actually make this movie work.

So, as I looked back on things I’ve written the Big Fish first three pages are probably the most important ones of my career. Craig, do you have anything in your work that you feel like those first three pages are so crucial? I mean, Chernobyl feels like it’s partly – we just talked about in this episode about how sort of speaking the theme of Chernobyl at the start was so important for you there.

Craig: Yeah. Although I’m struggling a little bit Aaron because here’s the funny thing, every first three pages of every script I write is something that I torture myself over repeatedly because I want to get them right. And there are so many things that can go wrong. And there’s also so many opportunities to do good work in those three pages, to establish tone and place and character. To establish a feeling, a kind of emotional truth, and to also create the beginning point of something that will ultimately be revealed to be a circle. It’s degree zero of a 360 degree circle, so therefore it’s degree zero. And it is degree 360.

And so all of them I feel this way about. I can’t look at any particular script and say, oh, this is my favorite first three pages. They’re all my least favorite. I feel like they are all – I failed every time to be perfect in those first three pages, but I do try. I try my best. And I think as time goes on I get a little bit better and a little bit better. And I suppose when I get to that place where I’m no longer getting a little bit better than I realize that the plateau has occurred, followed by the inevitable decline. But, if you’re listening to this and thinking, oh, this may explain why he gets so fussy sometimes when we are reading these three pages, because I beat myself up so furiously over the first three pages. So when we get somebody’s first three pages and there are typos or things that just don’t make much sense or the worst sin of all – wasteful writing.

It’s like being a starving person and looking at somebody throwing food out. I don’t know how else to describe it. The real estate is so precious. I’ve said it so many times. So, mostly my sense memory of writing the first three pages of screenplays is pain and self-recrimination.

John: So, a project I’ve been writing more recently, I’m looking through my Dropbox at more recent stuff, The Shadows which is this movie that has a blind central protagonist, which at some point I hope to go off and direct, but the first three pages of that I think about in two different ways. Because it’s a thriller that has scripted opening title moments that do not involve the central character. So, it basically just sets up the universe and the world. And so the first two pages are really just getting us through those opening titles and sort of setting up the universe a bit. And I think that it’s really good writing, but I don’t consider that really the start of the movie.

Obviously you’re reading those pages to get a sense of the feel, but it’s really I’m so happy with the first three pages in the actual story part of it because I think I do a nice job establishing who this character is and sort of why she is a uniquely interesting character to be following through this story.

So, those are pages that I spent a lot of time on trying to figure out the right way into it. That said, I could completely imagine six months from now recognizing the movie really wants to start a different way and those three pages would not be part of it at all. So those pages were key to me to be able to understand how to write the movie, but they don’t necessarily need to stay the first three pages of the movie that we’re shooting.

Craig: Yeah. There is a certain amount of flexibility that you always have to have. But in movies those first three pages, they’re such a load-bearing wall. That if you are going to change them you almost assuredly are going to have to change other things.

If you can just replace the first three pages without doing any other work like the way a magician pulls the tablecloth away and leaves all the stuff on it, then something is wrong. You have not essentially built this opening in an integral way. Ideally you can’t really pull that Jenga piece it. It is crucial to everything. So when I do look back at those first three pages and make changes I know that the second I’m done with that work I need to go ahead in the script and find the things that this has affected and impacted.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know, to kind of make sure that, again, it feels like a circle and not just like a line.

John: That’s fair. And I think back to sort of the idea of scripting opening titles versus just the movie starting. I remember Laura Ziskin, remarkable producer, she made the movie Hero with Dustin Hoffman. And when she showed it to us, we’d read the script and then she showed us the movie, and the script was better than the movie. It just was. And one of the things she pointed out was that they had built this opening title sequence that was not part of the actual script where they do all the opening titles and Dustin Hoffman’s name and basically all the opening credits. And then that first scene afterwards is really boring and slow because it was really intended to have those titles over it. It was intended to be sort of that placeholder thing that sort of got you introduced to the world. And the opening title sequence had really stepped over it in ways that you couldn’t have anticipated.

So even though the script document probably had a great first three pages, as a film they stuck something in front of it that actually hurt those first three pages.

Craig: Well that’s a great point. And this is why I find that television openings are so frequently more interesting and compelling than movie openings. Meaning the opening scenes. Because no one can mess with it. I mean, the writer pours an enormous amount of intention, hopefully, into what that opening scene means and is. And then someone comes along and goes [barfing noise] and they don’t always know that they’re stepping on something important but they do. They just trod on the grass and they step on the flowers and suddenly something is wrong. Because they think, oh my god, we got to open with something exciting and flashy, or whatever it is that they think. It doesn’t matter.

Whereas when you look at the beginnings of – I mean, look at the way Vince Gilligan routinely does his openings. They are little short film masterclasses. And they are above all else so carefully crafted and intentional. And that’s something that’s very rewarding about television that you know that your intention and the craft that you put into this. I mean, this is why with features it’s so – like I say, I beat myself up, I grind myself to a nub to try and make sure that the opening is just gorgeous and perfect and tight and then, you know, who knows. Someone goes, meh, or maybe not. Maybe we’ll do this instead. So anyway I work in TV now.

John: That is the clear explanation. There’s a project I’m working on which I may be able to talk about soon and it would be for TV. And I am very excited honestly about the first three pages and the first three minutes, anticipating, you know, what that is going to feel like and sort of the rocket sled of being able to launch people into the world.

So I do get very excited about those and I recognize from – I’m about to pitch it now, you really are pitching those initial first three pages to sort of get people hooked into the idea and excited to see where the story is going to take them. So, when I see – like you when I see the first three pages people are sending through and they don’t seem to have a clear intention, they just weren’t put together with care and real passion, I can feel it and it makes me less enthusiastic to read the stuff that’s going to happen afterwards.

Craig: No question. No question. And you’re right. If you have conceived of your first three pages correctly then they are exactly mimicking the feeling you want to impart when you’re pitching the beginning of something to somebody. You’re setting a stage. You’re creating a mood. You’re baiting a hook. All of those wonderful things to make people lean forward and you’re also doing a lot of hidden work that they don’t even see. Because we are magicians. So while we’re wowing them with what’s going on in our left hand, our right hand is casually in our pocket, setting something else up. So that’s the fun part of it. But it does require care and effort. So, as you do consider, you at home, sending in your first three pages, listen to what we’re saying here because if you’re not working as hard at them as we are, well, you know, it’s not going to go well.

John: In the cases where we have just really gone crazy over those first three pages it’s because they did show such real attention to what they were trying to do and made us so excited to keep reading that movie. So that’s what you’re always looking for.

Craig: Correct.

John: Craig, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Bad Education on HBO April 25th, 2020
• Elizabeth on Twitter wrote to steer my attention to the book When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry
• Casablance script
• History of the Screenplay Format by Andrew Gay
• Bad Education True Story
• #StitchUsBackTogether organized by Jamarah Hayner
• Epson EcoTank ET-4760
• Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker
• Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium here.
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• Mike Makowsky on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by James Llonch (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

 

The original post for this episode can be found [here.](https://johnaugust.com/2020/three-page-zoom)

**Craig Mazin:** Hi folks. This episode does contain some strong language so put in those ear buds, put on those headphones. Keep those children safe.

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

**Craig:** Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 447 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge where we take a look at the first three pages of listener’s scripts and look at what’s working and what could be improved. And because we are live on Zoom we will be talking to those writers in person. To help us out we have a very special guest. Dana Fox is a screenwriter and TV writer-producer whose credits include – Dana, I did not preapprove these with you, so let’s see.

**Dana Fox:** You know what? Let’s not.

**John:** Her credits include Ben and Kate, Couples Retreat, What Happens in Vegas, and the brand new show on Apple TV+, Home Before Dark, which was co-created with another Scriptnotes producer, Dara Resnik. Dana Fox, welcome to the show.

**Dana:** Hi! I’m so happy to be here, mostly because I miss your faces.

**Craig:** Ooh. We were talking about your beautiful shade of lipstick and the fact that you put lipstick on because you read that people need to have lipstick on or else you can’t see your mouth moving on Zoom.

**Dana:** The fact that I somehow fell for this ad – I’m sure it was an ad.

**Craig:** It was an ad. It was the lipstick industry that put that rumor out. No question. Because otherwise if you’re not wearing lipstick it’s just like where is their voice coming from. Their ear?

**Dana:** I see their face moving, but what?

**John:** Yeah. The beauty industry must really be suffering in this time of staying in home, because people are not using as much makeup as they would otherwise be using.

**Dana:** You would think that. But I have so much more time. It used to be that I did not wear makeup at all because I had no time and now I’m just in my house, opening drawers, trying things on. I’m not buying new things, so yes you’re right. The beauty industry is not benefiting from it. Oh boy, guys.

**John:** Oh boy.

**Craig:** Yeah. Boy.

**John:** Dana, you were the first person we’ve talked to who has actually had to launch a show in the middle of a stay at home pandemic.

**Dana:** Super fun.

**John:** So talk to us about your show Home Before Dark. I was recalling this morning that I had a long conversation with you about this almost two years ago. It was summer. I was in New York. I was unpacking a bag and we had like a 45-minute conversation about the difficult deal-making you were going through on your show. So, it’s now finally here, but it’s been a very long road.

**Dana:** It’s been like 2.5 years or so, or three years. I can’t remember when I first started talking to Joy Gorman about it. She’s our amazing producer. But it was a very long time ago. Feels like 500 years at this point.

The show is a labor of love by a lot of awesome people, Joy Gorman, Dara Resnik as you said, John Chu, amazing. We wanted to try to do something that we had never seen before which is like a very sophisticated show that felt like a four-quadrant movie but that starred a young girl that took her really seriously, that gave her a stage as big as any Amblin movie would have given a young male character. And that was something that we had never seen before.

And it sounds like sort of obvious, but along the way it was very, very hard to convince people that it was going to work. Because everybody was like, “But who is it for?” And we just didn’t say–

**Craig:** What is that? Who is it for…?

**Dana:** We just kept saying it’s for everybody.

**Craig:** It’s for human beings. I don’t understand.

**Dana:** It’s for humans. Yeah. “But why will men care?” And I’m like, well, because it’s good. We’re hoping.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also do you need to have 50-year-old guys watching this show for it to be successful? I don’t understand.

**Dana:** I mean, you know that they’re the only ones whose attention I truly crave. [laughs] Dad?

**Craig:** Daddy.

**Dana:** Daddy, tell me I did it.

**Craig:** Daddy, I’m here. [Unintelligible] I’m here.

**John:** Now Dana when you were pitching the show did you say Amblin a lot because having watched the show like Amblin is a really good vibe for it. Because even though it’s present day it does feel like early Spielberg. It just has that kind of spirit. Was that a word you said a lot in pitching it?

**Dana:** It was. We said it a lot in pitching it. John Chu and I put together this crazy, incredibly visual presentation that had so much information in it and a lot of specific visual imagery because we wanted it to feel like an Amblin movie but we wanted it to be through the lens of today and who we are today so that it felt fresh, while at the same time feeling kind of timeless. I’m sort of obsessed in movies or TV not having people dressed or like have weird hair or things that are going to make things feel very dated. So, you know, on our show you’re like when is this? And, you know, that’s purposeful. It’s partly because I just want – god-willing we’re lucky enough to have people still like this show and want to watch it in five years you don’t want them to go, oh, that feels old. I mean, like for example I was just rewatching The West Wing and it’s like it could be today. Everybody is just wearing suits. It kind of looks like today.

And so it feels like it’s relevant still. So that was one of the things we really cared about. And I just wanted to get that feeling back honestly. I think TV is very much about a feeling. It’s what you want to feel. I don’t choose things based on who is in them. I don’t choose things to watch the way that I think executives think people choose things to watch. I just go what do I want to feel tonight and what is going to make me feel that?

**Craig:** Does anyone do anything the way that executives think they’re going to do it? I mean, does anyone behave that way?

**Dana:** It would be funny to get a camera in an executive’s house.

**Craig:** Right. Like they get home and they pull their human suit off and underneath is this “we are studying humanity.”

**Dana:** And they put three kinds of cereal in front of their children and investigate how their kids choose which cereal.

**John:** They turn the little knob. How much are you enjoying this cereal? Now, Dana, before the show even launched you got an order for a second season. So you were writing scripts, you were starting to shoot things, and then you all had to stop production because of everything that’s going on right now. So how far were you into your second season when you had to pull the plug?

**Dana:** We were so lucky to get the second season before anyone had even laid eyes on the show. So it’s so exciting that people actually like the show. I was like phew. And I’m sure Apple was feeling that was well. They were amazing to even give it to us. But we had written about eight of our episodes. We had a ninth one that I was sort of working on and hadn’t handed in yet. And we had just finished shooting our third episode. We were two days into our second episode. And I remember when it became very clear what was going to happen and we were sort of trying to figure out the exact moment. I didn’t really know that far in advance because we were on the pandemic’s timeline, as well we should be.

So nobody had information and wasn’t telling you. It was just kind of like when are these cities going to shut down. Sort of a city by city thing. And I remember finding out about an hour before we ended up telling people. And we were trying to figure out exactly when to say stuff because it’s like obviously no one was going to get coronavirus from an extra four minutes of shooting, so we were just trying to figure out when to do it.

**Craig:** Well, but they could.

**Dana:** There was a scene we were shooting and they finished the scene and they were going to start rehearsing the next scene but they were going to go to lunch and then start the other scene after lunch. And I was like maybe don’t make them rehearse the other scene. Because it’s going to be 42 years until they get to do that scene. So, we’ll rehearse it in 42 years. So we just said, “We’re done.”

**John:** You also have a young star who is probably growing every day.

**Dana:** She’s 142. I FaceTime with her all the time and I’m like she’s a full-blown adult. We’re going to have some really weird continuity issues in that one episode where we have the two days shot. It’s going to be like, oh, look at Brooklynn Prince, this extraordinary nine-year-old, and then it’s going to be in another scene she’s going to be 42, and then nine, and then 42, with the martini.

**John:** Yeah. Little CG action. Little Benjamin Button happening.

**Dana:** Haggard, gray-haired lady. I know. Ugh, she’s so incredible though. I’m really just–

**Craig:** She’s nine?

**Dana:** She was eight years old the whole first season that we shot. And, Craig, you know, and John I was talking to you about it, and I’m sure Dara was talking to you about it as well, John. Like while we were shooting I was just going I have to tell people about this girl. Like Craig I called you and I was like I’ve met the best actress on planet earth.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, The Florida Project was incredible. But you never know if somebody can replicate that or was that just a very specific thing. But I’ve just seen interviews with her where I just think – it’s that same thing with Millie Bobby Brown or Emily Watson had it where you’re like you seem like you were finished by eight.

**Dana:** When you came out. Yeah, when you came out of your mom’s vag. It was just done.

**Craig:** Can we say that? Are we allowed to say that? Yeah, we can say that.

**Dana:** Are we allowed to say that? I don’t know.

**John:** Sure, yeah.

**Dana:** Am I allowed to swear on YouTube? What’s that?

**John:** Yeah, you can.

**Craig:** We decided last time that you could.

**Dana:** OK. Because that would have been hard for me, because you know I swear like—

**Craig:** Vag is not a swear. That’s a perfectly good part of the body.

**Dana:** It’s a beautiful anatomical thing.

**Craig:** Delivery system.

**Dana:** [laughs] Both intake and output.

**Craig:** You have 12 kids we just want to remind everybody.

**Dana:** Yeah, Brooklynn, she has this incredibly empathetic soul. She’s so deeply feeling that when you talk to her about what her character would be going through or you sort of try and describe what you think she’s feeling in that moment you don’t even have to talk to her about what she’s feeling. I just say to her I don’t want you to cry on purpose. I don’t want you to do anything. I want you to just think about who Hilde is to you – to you, Brooklynn – and do the scene.

And she is so good that whatever the thing is that comes out of her it’s her real feelings. She’s feeling them on camera. And so you’re not watching, you know, an actress try to show you what a feeling would look like. You’re watching an actress feel a feeling in front of you. It’s a miracle to me that she can even memorize her lines. And her mom is so amazing.

**Craig:** I know. Memorizing is hard.

**Dana:** I think it’s so hard. It’s what I talk to you about, Craig, because you’re like a famous actor now.

**Craig:** Right.

**Dana:** And so I have to talk to you about how do you memorize the stuff. I think I’d be like—

**Craig:** It’s hard.

**Dana:** I’d be out there. I’d be trying to Tina Fey myself if I could memorize more than three things. I’d try. But I can’t.

**Craig:** No, but you could. You know you could.

**Dana:** No, I cannot. Thank you so much.

**Craig:** You know what? Jason Bateman has a great system.

**Dana:** What does he do?

**Craig:** It’s something like the first word, the last word. He’s got some system. I didn’t really study it that much.

**Dana:** You’re such a good listener, Craig.

**Craig:** I use my own system. He said something literally and then I fell asleep and when I woke up I remembered that he said something.

**Dana:** Is it weird to like plug another podcast on your podcast?

**Craig:** No, do it.

**Dana:** Because I started listening to the Oh Hello podcast. And if anybody needs to learn how to laugh again, like this pandemic made it very challenging for me to laugh. And I found the podcast. And they’re very short. And it’s Nick Kroll and John What’s-his-face?

**John:** Mulaney.

**Dana:** Oh, I love them so much. And please–

**Craig:** Not enough to know his name, but OK.

**Dana:** Not enough to learn how to say – this is what I’m saying, Craig. This is why I couldn’t be an actor.

**Craig:** You got a point. You know what? I take it back. You can’t be.

**Dana:** I’ve seen the name so many times written and I’m like that’s a read-only for me. I can’t say that.

**Craig:** Right. That’s different. Remembering is different than memorizing. You can’t do either of those which is sad.

**Dana:** I want to be out of my own skin right now. Yes. Can you tell that I haven’t been around humans much lately?

**Craig:** This is exciting.

**John:** You are the parent of three small children as well, so that’s got to be a factor in your mental state at this moment as well.

**Dana:** I have too many kids. Mistakes were made. I love them so much. They’re all so young. I have 7, 5, and 4. And as it turns out you would think – I’m so dorky, I went to college, I went to another college, I got all the degrees. You would think I’d be good at home schooling because I like school so much and I’m such a nerd and such a dork. I’m so bad at it. Because day one I was like, oh, this is the day I figure out my kids are a little dumb, or have no attention span. I can’t figure out how to get them to focus.

I’m like, you guys, back to the thing. We’ve got to do the thing. But then I remember they’re small children. So teachers are angels.

**Craig:** Well, it doesn’t help that you’ve got your three kids and you can’t get them to do anything and then you know this other nine-year-old who can do everything.

**Dana:** Literally.

**Craig:** Everything.

**Dana:** I’m like you guys can’t sit at the dinner table. This girl just memorized four pages of dialogue for me. Like you can’t sit?

**Craig:** Good dialogue.

**Dana:** And by the way hit her marks and crushed it. [laughs] Yeah, but these idiots, they can’t remember to watch their hands after they go to the bathroom.

**Craig:** Why can’t you be more like that television star that mommy loves more than you.

**Dana:** But by the way they love her so much. And that’s the other thing about Brooklynn is like during the pandemic she just FaceTime’s our children and tries to make them happy, because she’s such a good person. I love this human child.

**John:** Now Dana you are a good person as well because this last week you were helping to promote the It Takes Our Village campaign which is to raise money for crews that are out of work because of this pandemic. Can you briefly hype what It Takes Our Village is about?

**Dana:** Thank you so much, John. You’re an angel. Yes. So part of the way that I’m trying to deal with this weird time is to spend a lot of time trying to help other people because it takes me out of my own skin. So, if you can get on let’s say GoFundMe and look up It Takes Our Village. There is an amazing fundraising effort that we put together with a bunch of cool people. Bruno Papandrea is who – and yet that last name I can say. Not John Mulaney. Bruno Papandrea, no problem. So obviously I’m choosing to not say John’s last name.

So we put it together. We’re trying to raise money for crews. Crews are the people that are there the earliest. They’re out the latest. It’s like I show up. I’m a disaster because in my mind it’s early. I have coffee. I have been rolling out of bed. And I’m showing up and I look around me and there’s people who have been there for like two hours before the incredibly early time that I got there.

And then at the end of the day when I’m completely exhausted and I think I can’t stand up anymore, I can’t talk to anyone anymore, my back is killing me, I’m dying, I say good night to everybody. And then they pack up all of the stuff and they’re still there for more hours. So these are really the people that need to feel our love and support right now because they’re the ones that crush everything that anybody is watching right now on television to keep them from going completely insane. These are the people that actually make it possible and make it happen. And they will not have a job until we get back into production again.

There are people in the business who can make money during this time period. These people cannot. So, for me it’s sort of a moral imperative that we help them. And any amount that you can give would be amazing. Some people have given some really big donations which is really exciting. And we’re trying to get to $2.5 million so that we can give individual crew members $1,000 to help support them with their bills. And we’re going to try to keep it going as long as we can.

**John:** Cool.
**Dana:** So please help. That would be amazing.

**John:** It Takes Our Village is the GoFundMe and we’ll have a link to that in our show notes.

**Dana:** Ah, love you.

**Craig:** Good cause.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to our Three Page Challenge. So for folks who are new listeners we occasionally do this segment called Three Page Challenge where we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their script. It could be a pilot. It could be a screenplay. We look through of all of them. Megana and I went through 160 entries this week to pick four that we thought were really interesting that we could talk about.

This isn’t the four best things we read but probably the scripts that had the most interesting things for us to discuss and we can actually have these people join us here and we can talk to them about what they wrote and why they wrote it and it’s exciting. So we’re going to start off with one of these. Let’s begin with Hampton by Ali Imran Zaidi.

I’m going to give you a quick summary here. But if you want to read these things they’re already up at johnaugust.com. It’s the first post that you will see there. So you can download the PDF and read through them with us.

So we’re going to start with Hampton. Here’s a quick summary. We start with a phone call to 911. There’s been a major accident on the highway. We see scenes of the first responders mobilizing. We then cut to Kamal Shah. He’s sorting oxy in a dimly lit bedroom. He answers his radio and it’s clear that he works in emergency services. He’s talking with a woman named Mina who tells him there’s been this accident and he confirms his post.

We see that Nat is this woman lying next to Kamal. She runs his hand down his chest. Kamal says he’s going off to work. And he gives Nat a last bit of drugs.

We cut to the alleged accident but it turns out there really wasn’t an accident. It was all a hoax. And the firefighters and paramedics are packing up. We cut back to Kamal as he finds his way to his police car. But before Kamal can get the engine started a shadowy figure appears and shoots him through the dashboard. And then the car backs up into a mailbox and that’s where we’re at at the bottom of three pages.

Craig, could you start us off with your first take on Hampton by Ali Imran Zaidi?

**Craig:** It’s garbage! No. I thought this was really good. I had a good time reading it. And I thought it did a ton of stuff in three pages. So I’m a big fan of using the real estate of the first three pages, the first ten pages I think are the most precious real estate you have. And a lot of times we get these things and I just feel like people are squandering it. Like they don’t realize they’re wasting the most precious opportunity.

So in the first three pages you need to establish tone and you need to establish a certain kind of visual setting and a pace. And so the good news is that Ali does all of that. The dispatcher – there’s a bit of confusion in the beginning that I think is an easy confusion to solve. The very first person who speaks is Mina/Dispatcher. Our eyes will probably go past that. So what we’ll see is just Dispatcher and we’ll see, “911, what’s your emergency?” Because we’re not used to noticing or caring about what a dispatcher’s name is. But as it turns out the dispatcher is actually going to come back and be important.

So, one suggestion is to just have that be Mina (VO), “911, what’s your emergency.” Or say dispatcher and then when Mina calls in down the page say it’s the same voice as the dispatcher, or she was the dispatcher. Just make a point of that. But what I think is really good is when we meet – this is the way you meet somebody, right? It’s like introductions are important. And a lot of times we’ll meet people and they’re just sitting there, or they’re walking somewhere. This guy is crushing and snorting oxy. He’s high. Love these descriptions.

“Sexy hands glide down his chest, leading to a not-as-sexy face and dirty blonde hair.” There’s your hair. “He NUDGES her off to GRAB THE RADIO from a hanging, dark green POLICE SHIRT. She snags the leftover Oxy, spilling some on her Hulk Hogan Tee.” There’s your wardrobe. Love the Hulk Hogan tee. Says a lot about what’s going on there. Their relationship is interesting. And just a nice way to kind of introduce that Kamal is, A, a bad police officer, B, a drug addict, C, cheating on his girlfriend/wife who happens to be the dispatcher. All of this is happening without him making a point of telling us any of it. We’re just learning it as we go. He has this really interesting – Nat, who I hope stays in the picture as this drug-addicted girlfriend of his. Could just be a drug-addicted girlfriend number two. And, in fact, she’s really interesting.

She quotes Babe which is the weirdest thing to do.

**Dana:** The best thing ever. I love it.

**Craig:** So cool. And then there’s the surprise that it was a fake 911 call which I wasn’t expecting. And what a great contrast to go from fake 911 call to very real murder. I have nothing to complain about here. I thought these were really tight, really good pages. I liked the way they looked on the page. There was space between things. The way the gunshot happened was exciting and read viscerally.

I think it was really good. I’m disappointed in how happy I am with this.

**John:** I agree with Craig. I really did enjoy this and I felt like Imran did a lot of great stuff in these three pages. The three pages open with On Black and we hear this voiceover before we get to the first image. You see On Black in screenplays a lot. I think you don’t actually see it that often in movies and TV shows because I think we realize that like, wow, looking at nothing is actually not that interesting. And so I think you’re going to want to find some sort of image to open this, rather than just being on black. That’s my guess.

You know, obviously we don’t want to portray the caller because we don’t want to set up that this is a fake thing, but On Black is sometimes a problem.

I love how Imran’s scene description is short and punchy. “Sirens burst to life. An ambulance roars through a stop sign.” Everything is quick and there. There’s no extra adjectives that you don’t need there.

Where I did think we had an opportunity here was between the hospital and the bedroom. We have all this like quick-paced stuff. We have vehicles moving and stuff like that. And then we’re cutting to “a scarf over a lamp bathes the room in red.” There’s nothing active there. It’s just scene description. I felt like if you were to start with crushing pills and lines and snorting, to have some action to start that thing could keep the momentum going. Keep this feel.

Move the scarf back a few lines so that then you’re setting up what the space is. But if we’re in action keep that action happening in parallel.

I got a little confused about Kamal, who he was talking to at the start. I just needed to have a parenthetical to say like “on radio” basically to tell us that he is not talking to the woman in the room, but that he’s talking on the radio. What I loved most about these three pages is I got a sense of what this world was like. I got a sense of who the characters I was supposed to be following. And then at the end of three pages I was really surprised that the guy I thought was going to be the protagonist is apparently dead. And so that’s exciting for me.

Dana, talk us through what you saw in these three pages.

**Dana:** So I thought all of your comments were great. I had similar ones. I think maybe one of the ways to solve the On Black, I would say Over Black, but then I don’t usually use it so I might be wrong. But I think maybe the way to solve it is to just have “911, what’s your emergency” be the only thing over black. Because that’s basically how much black time you’re going to want. And then I would get into this other bit and hearing this over this other bit.

I think that the introduction to Nat, you know, the fact that the “sexy hands glide down his chest leading to a not-as-sexy face” and that reveals Nat, that’s like the good version of giving camera direction, not the bad version. That showed me what I was going to be seeing in a way that I thought was filmic but not sort of hitting you over the head. So I really loved that about it. He nudges her off and grabs the radio from a hanging dark green police shirt. Full disclosure, I think I might be a little dyslexic and have like a little bit of a learning disability, so take this with a grain of salt. But I don’t like anything in scripts that stops my brain for one second, because it takes me a long time to restart my brain. So I would just say CB radio or police radio. Because I didn’t understand the word radio until I got to police shirt. And then I had to go back.

**John:** Yeah. And I got confused what I was actually seeing there. I’m just seeing the handset piece of that or the actual bulk of it. Because the handset piece I can see being attached to the shirt, but I got confused what I was looking at.

**Dana:** Then I’m like where is the bottom part? Where the thing or what’s it connected to? He took off his shirt. Where’s the radio? So, yeah, I think just a skosh more detail there. And then what I loved about this whole piece, you know, the oxy and the police shirt being the reveal and the girl and what not, I thought this told a much bigger story with really small details. I loved that about it. There’s like a Hemingway quote or something about showing the thing. You don’t have to show the whole shark. I forget what the thing is. But this is the perfect example of showing just enough that I felt like—

**Craig:** That was it. It was just you don’t have to show the whole shark. You don’t have to.

**Dana:** Yeah. [gives impression] If you just show the tip of the fin we know the shark is down there. You know, that famous quote.

**Craig:** Right. Hemingway is now an old Jew.

**Dana:** Somebody please look that up online.

**John:** Dana, can you do more Hemingway impersonations because I really think your Hemingway impression is ideal. I can really see him sitting in that café in Pamplona—

**Dana:** Welcome to my show about writing books in Havana.

No, that was really not an impression. It was a very bad impression. But if one of you guys could look up that quote just to–

**Craig:** I’ll do it right now.

**Dana:** Just to save me from myself. That would be great.

Yeah, so I loved that it told such an evocative longer story. I felt like I got both backstory and story out of just your lines of description there which I loved. I also really loved the line when he’s talking to her on the dispatch thing. He says, “I’m sorry Mina.” And then he says, “Code red.” And she replies, “I love you, too.” I also thought that was weirdly evocative. I didn’t totally understand it but I liked it. I thought maybe it implied that he was undercover so that kind of piqued my interest that he can’t say I love you maybe meant he was undercover. Maybe it didn’t. But I just liked that about it. And also I thought “That’ll do, pig” was amazing.

A vibrator kicks on behind him. I just wanted it to be like “clicks on” or something. Because again that was one of those moments my brain stopped and was like, wait, what is this saying? And I was like, oh, she’s turning on the vibrator. And I loved it but my brain went “kicks on?” What? And then I went back. So maybe clicks on, or just a different way of describing that.

And I got to the end and I was like, oh, end of page three and I would completely keep reading. I want to know what happened next. I don’t understand some of the stuff, but I’m totally intrigued by it. This feels like a very lean in and yet there’s a lot of momentum to it and yet I’m leaning in which is sometimes hard to do when things are kind of fast paced. You don’t lean in quite as much.

But this does both, so I loved it.

**Craig:** Yeah. This was really well orchestrated. It was well balanced. There was harmony between things. Things were feeding into each other.

I do have a quote from Hemingway.

**Dana:** Oh, OK.

**Craig:** It says show the readers everything, tell them nothing.

**Dana:** Yeah, fuck. That’s not it. Somebody else said the thing.

**Craig:** Show the readers everything. Tell them nothing.

**Dana:** And he talked with the cigar.

**Craig:** [makes cartoon noises]

**John:** I do want to show one thing on page three here. “Kamal walks out under flickering amber lamp light.” I think that lamplight should probably be a streetlight. But the amber gets used again about six lines later. So, amber is such a specific word. If amber light is being used twice – just you don’t need it the second time.

**Dana:** I think that’s important because it makes people feel – I always say I don’t want to feel the writing. You don’t want to be feeling somebody going like click-clack-click-clack. And so the repetitions of words you sometimes notice and go, oh, someone wrote this. Blech.

**Craig:** I mean, you can connect these things together if you want. You just have to be a little bit more purposeful about it so you can say Kamal walks out under the flickering street lamp, or the flickering amber streetlight. And then a shiny pistol and glove hand twinkles under the amber light of the street lamp, or under the street lamps. If you wanted to make a point of it. Because I don’t know if that’s important or not.

**John:** Yeah. I can’t imagine it’s – it doesn’t feel like it’s especially important or you’d underline it. You’d highlight in some other way if it really were important. I just feel like in both cases probably you’re feeling like, oh, this light should be this color and you forgot that you actually just a few lines above used that same color.

**Craig:** That may very well be the case.

**John:** Here’s an example of a recognition that’s so important is “Blood splatters on that CANVAS ZIP BAG now sitting shotgun.” Just using that rather than the canvas zip bag just reminded like, oh yeah, I did call that out a page before and this is a reward for having noticed that I called it out. So really nicely done.

Let’s invite Imran on to talk about this. Imran, if you could please join us here on stage.

**Ali Imran Zaidi:** Hello.

**John:** Hello.

**Craig:** Hey man, sorry about the way we just beat you up there. I mean, geez, did you enjoy that? God.

**Imran:** Man, I was sweating, but thank you so much.

**John:** So talk to us about who you are and how you came to write this.

**Craig:** Who are you?

**Imran:** So I used to – this is set in a real town called Hampton, Florida in North Florida. The pilot’s name is Got to Go North to Go South because that’s kind of the thing about Florida. You go north to go to the south. And I used to travel to a lot of these kinds of towns. And then at one point I read about this town and all the kind of underpinnings of the crime going on are real. They’re true. I read the state’s forensics report analysis about everything that this town was up to.

You know, it’s a story that in a weird way appealed to me as like a brown immigrant in Florida, the experiences I had I kind of in a way I’ve translated into what Kamal is going to go through in this place where he’s somewhere he really shouldn’t be. A South Asian guy in North Florida is not a common sight. And so it just personally really appealed to me.

And I love genre storytelling. You know, honestly when I take generals and stuff a lot of times I feel like I get the meeting where, you know, what’s the brown family story you can tell, which those are fine but I’m not really interested in family stories really. I’m interested in sci-fi and crime and things like that. So, I try to un-gentrify genre storytelling with what I do. So that’s basically why I wrote Hampton.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Talk to us about what happens in the rest of this pilot and sort of what is the franchise you’re sort of setting up out of here.

**Imran:** Essentially this town, Hampton, in a weird sort of way it’s sort of like that idea of Fargo, but it’s one specific town and one specific story. There’s a lot of people who are not very bright in this town. This is the kind of town, and we see it later, where the police department, the water, and like city hall are all like one small office building which is like a converted house. And so there’s a lot of this kind of – essentially Hampton created a speed trap that started out the money coming in, an illegal speed trap. They annexed a piece of land on a passing highway which is shown at the beginning. And they basically started taking in that money.

And then of course you need to funnel money which means you need to launder it somehow and you need to find other ways to bring in money into this system. And so they took control and they required cash payments from water because the city was providing water. So anyway it goes kind of deep.

So the idea of this is Kamal and his wife are basically helping them launder, because they themselves are not necessarily that good at this whole, you know, the numbers game of this whole thing. And so I follow Kamal and then also his wife gradually through the series who is really – his wife who is a dispatcher, because everybody has multiple jobs in this town. She’s actually helping launder this money. And, of course, they’re trying to get out of it and they’re also at the same time because of the racial implications of the town they’re essentially being scapegoated. And so what I’m trying to do in the version of this story is I’m kind of putting fiction in the dark corners of this story that don’t exist to tell the story of the people that – because a lot of money went missing. And I’m trying to show with my version of this story, this fictional aspect, of what happened to the million some dollars that kind of somehow disappeared out of the town.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool.

**Dana:** For you, what are the touchstones? What are the shows that you loved watching as just an audience member?

**Imran:** I mean lately, obviously, I love Ozark. I’m tearing through the new season that just dropped. I love the rural town kind of story. Like I just love that. I watch a lot of crime – I mean, whether it’s something like Fargo which I thought was amazing, like beyond amazing. As far as crime goes those are like my – whether it’s the old feature Fargo, the original Coen Fargo, or the new one.

What the Coen brothers do where they kind of somehow balance something that makes dramatic sense while at the same time you find yourself laughing at some of these idiot characters that kind of go along the way. And that’s the kind of thing that I really love. Because we’re all kind of geniuses and idiots depending on the day. And so that’s kind of what I like exploring. Like when are we at our best and when are we at our worst.

**Craig:** Great. Well thank you.

**John:** And Imran, where are you at in your career? So you say you’re taking generals and I also saw on IMDb that you’ve worked as a cinematographer. Where are you at right now?

**Imran:** I mean, essentially I’m at the place where I am taking staffing meetings now and then to try to get stuff, because I have not been staffed. I was writing features more before, but obviously because the way the world has turned, you know, it became more about television. So I’ve been working on more television pilots and I haven’t been staffed. That’s basically my next step. I’m trying to get there. Of course, there’s the Catch-22 of if you haven’t been in a room sometimes you can’t get in a room. So, I’m trying to work that as best I can.

**John:** Great. I think people will read your script. I think you’re going to get more of those meetings. So good luck.

**Imran:** Thank you.

**John:** Great. Thank you very much for sending in your pages.

**Craig:** Good work. Thanks Imran.

**Imran:** Thank you so much.

**Dana:** Thank you.

**John:** Thanks.

**Imran:** Bye.

**John:** All right. Let us go next to Sunbeam by Heidi Lewis. I’ll give you a quick summary for people who don’t have it in front of them. We hear a deep breath as we open on 12-year-old Mabel in Normanhurst House, Victorian England. She’s standing on a landing and Mabel watches as a horse-drawn carriage arrives with two doctors. The butler greets the doctors. As a child cries for air, the doctors rush up the stairs past the butler and Mabel. We watch the scene from Mabel’s point of view as she looks into a bedroom and watches an elegantly dressed couple, apparently her parents. Lady Anna and Lord Thomas tend to a feverish girl. The couple and the doctors debate whether Lady Anna should stay in the room and what is the best course of treatment for the girl. Cupping? Or arsenic and bleeding?

Meanwhile the little girl struggles for air until she’s finally propped up, just in time for the child to draw her last breath and for the audience to see the girl, Sunbeam, for the first time. That’s where we’re at at the bottom of three pages.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Dana, can you tell us your first impressions on this?

**Dana:** So, I really liked this. I’m big fan of sort of period pieces, especially in the world that we’re living in. I kind of want to think about other time periods.

**John:** Where people could touch each other?

**Dana:** Where everyone can touch each other and cough on each other. And open doors, you know, just with the handles. Just open them. Just go right for it.

**John:** No elbows required, yeah.

**Dana:** So I long for that. So I really love a period piece. I love a costume thing. This was just a fun kind of world to feel like I was in for – especially I loved the detail of the feeling of the snow falling and then you realize that that’s the feathers in the pillow. I thought that was really beautiful. Really evocative. I can imagine a filmmaker really wanting to make a meal out of that, which is good. And, you know, my only question was is there a way to a little earlier, you know, we started with the 12-year-old girl in a night dress. And I think this is a good lesson. I’m a really good reader and I skipped the first slug line somehow. Like I just didn’t read it.

So, I was like on the 12-year-old girl in the nightdress holding her breath. I’m like I’m in, I love this. And then there wasn’t a period detail in that first section. So I didn’t realize it was a period piece until the four black horses came and the coach came. So I was wondering if – in a way there’s an opportunity there to reveal the period in an interesting way.

You know, period pieces and costume dramas, they’ve been done so many times before that you sort of have to ask yourself what do you want to do that’s either different or if it’s the same as what’s been done before maybe that feels like something that won’t get you as much notice if you’re starting out your career. So I might sort of look at this and say, OK, what makes this different? Are the people talking in a way that I wasn’t expecting? Does it surprise me in that way that Hamilton did because it was a mashup of genres that I wasn’t expecting?

This feels a little bit more straightforward and so if it’s going to be straightforward I think it has to make itself known a little bit more clearly what it’s doing in these first three pages. Because I was just not quite sure what I was reading. But I liked it and I was like I’m on board. This person can clearly write. I’m excited. I want to read more. I feel like if there is a way to think more meta. I like to kind of step back from it a second and sort of go you know how to write, you’re a good writer, that’s great. Why do you want to do this? Why do you want to do this particularly? And let’s dig in maybe when we get to the talking directly to you part of it about what do you love about period pieces, why do you feel that you’re the person that has to tell the period piece story.

Just for me personally, you know, I am obsessed with World War II stuff. It’s like 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell psychotic reading of stories about that. But for me it’s very specific. I want a story about a woman who is a spy in like a very specific time period. I’m like, ooh, let me get my hands on that 1946. Oh yeah.

So, I have some stories that I’ve been toying around with doing and for me it’s not like, oh, I want to talk about World War II because it’s like, yeah, but why, everybody has talked about World War II. It’s like I want to talk about a time period when women were allowed to work and then could fall in love with something and fall in love and get passionate about their work. And then the minute the war is over everybody says, great, we fought for you to be able to go back to the kitchen and take your shoes off and be pregnant again. And I’m like but what about my work? I’m in love with my work. And they’re like, yeah, well you can’t do that anymore.

So, for me that’s why I’m interested in that particular story and that’s why I want to tell that particular story. And so I’m interested in talking to you about why you want to tell that particular story and then trying to help you kind of bring more of that into these pages.

**John:** Craig, what was your read on these three pages?

**Craig:** Well, I quite liked them.

**Dana:** Oh, oh, you quite like them?

**Craig:** I quite liked them.

**Dana:** Shall I light you a candle?

**Craig:** It’s 1946.

**Dana:** I quite like this Victorian story.

**Craig:** I got to go back into the kitchen and take my shoes off.

**Dana:** Where they can’t even just turn on the light switches. They got to light a candle.

**Craig:** I quite like – but it’s funny that you mention turn on light switches and light a candle, because that’s exactly what I want to talk about. It’s the very first thing. I had the same moment that you did where I was a little bit confused about period because like you I kind of sort of glided past Victorian England. But it’s night. Now it’s night in a mansion in Victorian England. I suspect that we’re dealing with candlelight here. The butler later is going to have a candle in hand.

A 12-year-old girl in a night dress stands in a shadowy landing holding her breath. How do I see her? Is she holding a candle? Is there a lit candle? Do we start on the candle?

**John:** Is there moonlight?

**Craig:** Is there moonlight? Do we see a match light a candle? I mean, somehow or another I think that’s a great way to kind of bring us in. Look, it’s a preference thing with me that I’m not a big fan of “right now she’s wondering what it’s like to have no more air in her lungs like a sailboat has gone flat.” It’s a little bit of a purple prose thing. And I can’t shoot it. And no one can act it. So, I’m not sure what the great value is of that kind of thing.

But I’m just kind of wondering what is she doing there. Is she just standing randomly on a balcony? She is thoughtful and curious and she is wondering about air, but why is she there? Is she waiting? That’s a different thing. If she’s waiting then–

**John:** I think she’s at the window. Because when she exhales her hot breath fogs the frosty pain. But I didn’t know she was at a window. So if she’s at a window waiting for the doctors to arrive and that actually tracks and makes sense. But I didn’t get that from the initial image.

**Craig:** Well, because she’s not doing what waiting people do. Because waiting people aren’t thinking about what it’s like to have no more air in their lungs. What waiting people are doing is looking and waiting and hoping. So that’s a different kind of anticipation. That’s the kind of thing where if you breathe you wipe it away because you need to see. They’re not there. You breathe again. You wipe it away again. These are things that you can do.

We get these doctors coming out. They come on in. Pearson, now, OK, just a general dialogue note. A lot of this fell into the category of this is how TV or movies make us think these people spoke. But then there are other examples. I’m thinking of Taboo for instance, the Tom Hardy series, where you go they didn’t talk like this. This all feels a little too Downton Abby. A little too precious and formal for these things.

“She seems so discomforted! Is there nothing you can do for her?” doesn’t seem like panic to me. It seems very rigid and formal. I love the down pillow snow thing, but I don’t know why the pillow has been exploded. Did the girl rip it apart in a feverish fit? I just didn’t understand why that was that way.

Similarly the doctors do this thing that I call bad man speech. So bad man speech is, “My dear woman, you are merely a woman. I am a man. Step aside for in this year women have no rights.” And there is a more interesting way to get across the kind of endemic sexism of a time. And it’s particularly important because you have Anna doing what I think is the “no, no, no, I am a woman and I will not take that crap, sir” speech. And similarly “yet I shall not set one foot from this chamber until I’ve seen her through the worst of it.” It’s like, ma’am, stop giving speeches. Grab somebody. Your child is literally a breath away from dying. Everybody is talking so much.

And I love, I am such a sucker for old medicine. Old failure medicine I call it. It’s wonderful. I love failure medicine. But that’s all anyone ever knew. So, she would be like where are the leeches? Or do the thing? Or do you have arsenic? And everyone is like scrambling and trying to do something because she’s literally dying in front of them.

A child dying in front of you is what I call an overwhelmer. When you have an overwhelmer in a scene everyone has to shut up and no one can talk about anything else. There’s no time to talk about what you want to do, how you feel about your rights as a woman. Your disagreement with another doctor. A child is dying. So there’s just panic. And when she does die, Thomas – who is Thomas? Oh, is the husband. I forgot the husband was there. And here’s why. Because the husband, by the way, he’s in a formal white tie which is spectacular because his child is dying.

Again, I don’t quite get that. But he says, “Dr. North, Hughes,” his daughter is dying. And then he doesn’t say anything? Or do anything ever again. Which is crazy, to me.

So, overwhelmers have to really be respected. However, where we end is really beautiful I think. Because it’s hard to make a kid die and make me go, ooh, because they died. And I went, ooh, because I saw this and I liked that Mabel was there. I think there’s a point of view problem here because the point of view doesn’t really feel like it’s Mabel’s point of view. It feels like it’s more Anna’s point of view. But this dawn comes in and we have our first clear view of the child. And she has golden curls, dimple chin, cherubic. Her name is Sunbeam. She’s dead, or is she? Ooh.

So, anyway, I loved where it ended up. I think there’s really good visuals involved. I think you have an overwhelmer problem that you have to deal with and I think you’ve got to dial down the sort of written period of it all and just get more into humans, because we actually only care about the human part, not so much the stilted stuff.

**John:** I agree with especially the emphasis on the images, because the images are what really worked for me. So as I went through the script I found myself scratching out lines that I felt we didn’t need. And in those omissions I thought we actually could make some progress. So, like you I cut “right now she’s wondering what it’s like to have no more air in her lungs.” I cut out the door chimes. I cut out Dr. North’s dialogue in a lot of places. Basically just getting to the next thing, because in these moments of crisis people don’t stop to say those lines. They just actually rush through to the next thing.

There’s even moments for when you’re taking out blocks of dialogue very naturally you got to the next thing and people just said the thing that has to happen. A bigger thing that we haven’t discussed really is that this is all from Mabel’s point of view but I don’t know anything about Mabel in the course of this. And I feel like at the end of three pages if she is our character I want to know something specific about her. Why we’re entering this story from her point of view.

And so giving us some image or some connection between her parents, between apparently that’s her sister, what it is that she’s here rather than just being a camera through which we’re watching all this. And so by the end of three pages I wanted to have a little bit better sense of why we’re experiencing this through Mabel.

Luckily because we’re doing this with Heidi here she can come on and answer these questions because generally we couldn’t do this. Heidi, step out on stage here and talk to us about what you’ve written here.

**Heidi Lewis:** Hi.

**John:** Heidi, hi.

**Craig:** Hey. Hey.

**Heidi:** Thank you so much.

**Craig:** All right. No problem. You took a couple of shots there. You took a couple of shots, so hopefully you’re not feeling too rattled.

**Dana:** By the way, that’s like all of trying to do this job. [laughs]

**Craig:** It’s literally all we experience all day.

**Dana:** It’s 100% that all day long. No matter whether it works out or not, you’re just like, oh, everyone is saying horrible shit to me all the time.

**Heidi:** You’re generous. I mean, this is generosity because your knowledge is so helpful. So, what I love about this story is that this is a true story. It’s a little – do you want me to go into the background?

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, just tell us what it is.

**John:** Please, please.

**Heidi:** So, I was at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England a few years ago and I saw this massive golden figurehead. And it was the image of a child. It was just haunting. It was so beautiful. And I went over and looked at the little plaque and all it said was this belonged to the ship the Sunbeam. The first family to sail around the world in 1856 went on this ship and I went down this whole rabbit hole studying all of the journals that they wrote. And Anna Brassey, the mom, was this like – she was this strong explorer naturalist adventurer.

And then her daughter dies. And so they decided to build this ship and sail around the world. And the thing that interested me about it was that grief is just something that’s universal, first of all, and that this family went to such great lengths to escape their grief. And they actually brought the daughter with them who died in the form of this figurehead in the name of the ship.

And so it is a ghost story.

**Craig:** Ah, good.

**Heidi:** Yeah, so it’s a ghost story where, I don’t know, I was just kind of looking at how all of us in a family might approach grief. Maybe the mother is distracted and Mabel, the surviving daughter, just when she needs her mom the most has her mom completely just separate from her. So that’s what the story is. It’s a ghost adventure story, true story. And a female story, because it’s the mom and the daughter. So, yeah.

**Dana:** Can I jump in and you can take any of this for what it’s worth. But I love what you’re saying there and I think that you have the potential for a really, really cool story. Maybe think about, sometimes what I do with my stuff is like I write the kind of linear version of it and I look at it and I go there’s something not quite working here. This is the sort of like this is what happened version of it. And I realize like, oh, there’s this thing that in my mind is backstory and it has to become story. So I end up moving around pieces.

I think maybe this isn’t the right way to start your story. I think maybe if you started the story on the ship with the family and you’re with these people and they’re out there and you’re like what the fuck are they doing out there. That’s crazy. And you see the thing on the figurehead, the masthead. And then you basically use the daughter’s death as a mystery that you’re solving to kind of explain why the behavior of them present day is what it is. That could be an interesting way of thinking about it. And, again, you can throw all this away if you don’t like it. But that’s something that’s sort of appealing to me because I know somebody whose child did die and it gave me a window into that profound deep grief of like a mother over their child. And like Craig said, it’s all encompassing. It smashes everything in the room. Like there’s no version of people being like, “We’re talking about stuff.”

But what I found so fascinating about it was as she started to go through it like it was a mystery – it was like a mystery she had to solve. Because her brain could not process it and get over it until she understood every single piece that led up to it. How it happened. Why it happened. Who was there? When the thing? How they got the thing?

So, maybe it’s an interesting way of looking at it as more of like the death is more of a mystery because right now we’re experiencing and we don’t care about the characters yet, so we of course care about a child dying because everybody does. You intuitively sort of know that. But it just might be a slightly more interesting way into it so that if I meet them and I know them and then you bring me back to this and I get to see for example Mabel in happier times. Like I’d go even further back, you know. And Mabel in happier times being a completely different person than the Mabel I’m watching in present day. Then I sort of care about both time periods in a way that could be kind of interesting.

I don’t know. John and Craig, is that terrible advice or is that–?

**John:** I think it’s actually really good advice. Because what you’re doing is you’re trying to find a way to make sure that the franchise of the show, which is really sort of what we’re emotionally invested in, is set up very early on. We’re sort of establishing what kind of show it is that we’re watching which is not going to be a haunted house. It’s not going to be a Victorian house show. It’s going to be a cool ship show. And the mystery of like we won’t know at the start of the show that she’s actually died. And that could be really compelling.

And if this were kind of the last scene of the first episode that would be really cool. Like we didn’t know that this girl who we’ve been following over the course of the story is actually already dead. That’s kind of neat.

**Dana:** Yeah, then I’d be like, ooh, I’m hooked, I’ve got to watch the second episode.

**Craig:** Yeah. These are great ideas. I think that Heidi what Dana and John are suggesting is a kind of advice that helps you take a little bit of the I’ve seen it before kind of feeling off of this. Because while grief is a profound emotion and human condition that we do empathize with and feel and need to discuss and understand through art, when you serve it up straight ahead it’s just – it feels a little kind of like, oh, right. She’s going to have to go through the stages of grief.

And then they will be over. So I guess I’ll be watching that thing. Do you know what I mean?

**Heidi:** Yeah.

**Craig:** and how you begin things really does frame how this can evolve. I mean, you’ve probably seen the Nicole Kidman film The Others?

**Heidi:** Yes. Definitely.

**Craig:** So that’s a fascinating exploration of grief and it does so in a way that does not say, right, first a kid dies, then [unintelligible] dies, then you get sad, then you – do you know what I mean? So you don’t have to do any of the things that Dana and John are suggesting. And, in fact, you could even start in the house if you wanted. But what you do need to do is say how can I surprise people who are going to think, oh, OK, so this is going to be a this – how do I surprise them? How do I keep them off-balance so that when the emotion comes it comes in an unexpected way, in an unexpected direction because that’s what grabs us.

The audience, see, people are protective of their hearts. They will try and protect their heart from you. As somebody who is trying to break it, so you have to surprise them.

**Heidi:** Yeah. I love that. I think it’s great advice. It gives me a lot to think about. I love it.

**Craig:** Awesome. Well thank you.

**John:** Heidi, thank you so much for sending these pages in and for joining us.

**Craig:** Thank you, Heidi.

**Heidi:** Thank you.

**John:** All right. Next let’s look at Find Him by Dylan Guerra. This is episode one, Atlas Didn’t Shrug He Actually Had a Pretty Strong Opinion.

We start in a rundown apartment building in Harlem in the middle of a thunderstorm. Dylan, our main character narrator, desperately bangs on a door. Dylan calls for David, begging him to open up. They open up the door. Then through voiceover Dylan steps back and lets us know that the scene didn’t actually happen this way at all. Instead Dylan takes us to his apartment where he sits in his underwear and types David a series of increasingly passive-aggressive texts. Dylan takes us back and forth between the scene in the hallway and to his bedroom.

Until we arrive at a happy medium with Dylan wearing clothes and texting David from his bed. Dylan admits to the audience that he struggles with being clear. Dylan realizes that he hasn’t yet given us enough context on the scene so he shows us David’s dating profile and describes David through the description on the profile. Dylan steps through the scene and addresses the audience directly telling us that this is the story of David, a guy he met and sort of dated who then went missing and this is Dylan’s search for him.

Let me start off with this because I really dug a lot of what I read in Dylan’s script for Find Him. This script as we look at it has the most formatting issues. It feels like the least screenplay ready of all of these. I liked the control over the writing that Dylan really showed and his ability to inhabit the space and really have a clear point of view and tone that came through from the very start.

So, we had Phoebe Waller-Bridge on the show last week and so she is a character who is turning to the character and addressing us directly. That’s a thing that Dylan is doing. Mostly it’s working really, really well.

On the bottom of page one when we switch to more of what really happened there’s a lot of texting. We’ve talked about texting on the show before and it can be a tricky thing to show. This is just a big block of text which is not going to really work. I think you’re going to want to break it up into some different ways so that we can really sense like this is what we’re actually seeing on screen. This is the flow of how we’re getting to this stuff.

As we’re going back and forth between the various incarnations of this it felt – I can picture it. I can imagine what this is going to feel like as we’re seeing these shifting realities of sort of what actually happened here. If I could change a few things, I might sort of move the tenses a little bit. Right now on page three it says, “And David is important because he went missing.” Well, we’ll talk to Dylan about this, but David is missing. I feel like when you say “went missing” it felt like well this was a thing that all happened in the past.

I want a sense that this is a thing that is still ongoing as we’re setting up the story. If it’s at all possible I would love for David to have a different name because Dylan and David gets so confusing to have two D-words. So if we could rename that character. But I would say I’m very curious to see what happens next at the end of three pages.

Craig or Dana, what did you take out of these pages?

**Craig:** I enjoyed them as well. These are all about Dylan and about his tone. So either you’re going to enjoy the Dylan ride, or you’re not. By the way, I agree with you on the David thing. We do need to change one of their names. And since Dylan has written this I’m going to say Dylan keep your name and change David’s name.

It’s exciting to read things like this when you think, OK, I’m never going to quite know where I stand with my unreliable narrator. They’re going to keep pulling the rug out from under me. For a bit. And then it’s going to become an issue.

So talking to the audience and side comments and contradicting yourself, all of that I think is interesting and fine. I’m a little nervous about what happens on page three. When you actually now start talking about the techniques of the film that you’re in, or the show that you’re in. “That was cool right? The screen blacked out and I then I stepped into it. You thought you were staring at an image and then the image went out and I stepped into the darkness.”

So that is clever, but it’s annoying. It’s annoying because it’s unfair. You’re kind of cheating. In a sense that like I like it – I don’t mind being fooled as an audience member, I just mind being fooled and then having you say, “Ha, I fooled. Did you notice that I fooled you? Wasn’t that interesting how I fooled you?” That can get a little annoying because you are going to start to disconnect a little bit. So that’s always the danger of the fourth wall.

We talked about it on our last live show with Phoebe and with Ryan. That’s the area where you’ve got to be careful. One of the things that Phoebe did so brilliantly was use her moments to the camera – sometimes they were just a quick glance without a single word. But they never said, OK, actually what you just saw, wasn’t that an interesting camera angle? Because then I start to get a little too deconstructed.

It’s OK to do – I’m not saying you can’t do it. Just be aware that a little bit of that in particular goes a massively long way.

And I’m kind of fascinated to see, OK, will I want to keep watching Dylan? Especially if Dylan is narrating his own story. It’s hard for me to say, but I definitely enjoyed the shit out of him for three pages. So, I mean, I’m on board. Given that you can do anything, the only other challenge is you’re going to have to keep that up. Right? You can’t do all these fun tricks in three minutes and then just get bored with them and just start doing your regular linear story. So lots of challenges here.

But, I mean, it was funny. And he was so specific. And I think it might be, so that helps. The voice was consistent. So well done.

**John:** Dana, what did you think?

**Dana:** I really liked it a lot. I had a lot of little check marks, which that just means I’m happy, on a little different lines. And there wasn’t a thunderstorm. And I don’t remember what I was wearing. And he changes outfits and the thing. I was down with it.

I’m always intrigued by things where people are missing, because I think it drives you. It feels like it has a cool, forward momentum to it.

My thing is very much your same thing that you guys were talking about which is kind of like I definitely want to know more. I wanted to be a little more sure of what the tone was of this, in the sense of like are you going for streaming or are you going for broadcast? Because right now I kind of can’t tell and I think it’s important that you make it very clear in the first three pages who you’re for at this particular time.

**Craig:** Isn’t everybody going for streaming? Does anybody go network at this point?

**John:** There’s no such thing as network anymore.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. Like, unless you’re a procedural. I just don’t think so.

**Dana:** On the TV, where they watch the TV? I don’t know how the people do it on the TV.

**Craig:** The TV.

**John:** Derek Haas has all the remaining broadcast shows and everything else is streaming.

**Craig:** Everything else is streaming. Exactly.

**Dana:** But I guess to that end, if this is definitely streaming, which you know I think it’s super fun and you should lean a little bit more into that in the sense that like, you know, Phoebe, you guys were talking about her. I can’t even believe we’re just using her first name like that, like all cas [casual] like. She made a pretty R-rated version of the direct-to-camera address stuff and the stuff that she’s saying is pretty hardcore. Like there’s a lot of sexual stuff in it. And it was super funny because it sort of leaned into tone a little bit more.

This felt like kind of in between like a thing I would expect to see on NBC and a thing I would expect to see on streaming. So I would kind of go a little bit more heavily into that direction if streaming is what you’re thinking of.

You know, the line on page one where it says, “Is Dylan the real Dylan? The Dylan who wrote this script?” That kind of stuff I usually absolutely hate, like with every fiber of my being. And the reason I usually hate it, and I didn’t actually hate it here, so yay, but what it did make me think is number one do you want to star in this, which is going to be in my head the whole time. Does this guy want to star in this? What are we talking about? Who is this guy?

So I don’t know that you want to do that. It gave me pause in sort of not a good way. I might take that line out. I don’t know. Those kinds of like cocky lines that we sometimes want to write in these lines of description, your script better be an A++ or else I’m annoyed that I’ve seen it in the script. So, when I get stuff from writers that has like a cheeky like, “Yeah, because we’re going to get a season three for sure,” I’m like [groans] take it out. It just really bugs me.

Again, because it makes me go like this better be A+ in order for that cheeky tone to pay off. So I’d be a little careful with that. And then I also have a thing on page two, “Why I was banging on this door, which again I didn’t do. Let me explain.” I have a weird rule which is like don’t say anything the audience might actually be thinking. So if a character of yours is saying something like, “Ugh, I’m getting really bored by talking to you right now.” No. Don’t say that. Because the audience might be like, yeah, I’m getting really bored watching you talk to him right now.

So if you’re saying that you have a problem. This was one of those moments where I was like that started to get into what Craig is talking about in terms of like don’t remind me so much that I’m watching a thing that is made by people because I’m trying to get into the thing that is made by people that you’re doing really well. So, let me get into it. Stop reminding me that there are people making it.

Yeah. But I really liked it. And I’m pushing hard on it because I really liked it and because I think you’re close. And I’d love to hear from you where the rest of it goes and if this kind of conceit is going on like Craig said for the whole thing. And how you’re going to do your storytelling in terms of how we’re going to understand the mystery of where this guy went. But I was in. I liked it a lot. I thought it was great.

**John:** Dylan, come up on stage and let’s answer these questions.

**Dana:** Dylan! Dylan!

**John:** Dylan.

**Dylan Guerra:** Hi.

**Dana:** Woohoo. Hi.

**John:** Hi Dylan.

**Dana:** Yay Dylan.

**Dylan:** Thank you.

**Dana:** Great Job.

**John:** So I’m going to disagree with Craig here a bit in terms of some of the tone and the talking to the audience. What I enjoyed about this is that I thought you were kind of deconstructing in some ways the actual talking to the audience of it all. It reminded me a little bit of the pilot for Mr. Robot which sets up this weird relationship between the central character and the audience. And so it’s like your character that seems very eager to please, but also a little cocky. And that combination is actually fascinating.

So, tell us about the origin of this. Because from what I was quickly able to Google it sounded like this was a play before this was something you were writing here. Tell us about this.

**Dylan:** So Find Him, it’s all a true story, which also a big I have with the show in general is to sort of also deconstruct what it means for something to be a true story. Is the reality we construct for ourselves more real than the reality that we actually experienced? And that’s sort of the ongoing theme and sort of why the camera interruptions happened.

So it started because it was a true story. And then I turned it into a one-person show and I’ve been doing it periodically at Ars Nova and some other theaters in New York City. And then I wanted to continue to sort of push the boundary of the narrative that the story was able to tell. And so I crafted it into a pilot. And so the deconstructing aspect or the hyper-awareness is sort of like the thing that will maintain throughout the show.

**John:** Now, the pilot that we’re reading, the first three pages we’re reading of this, is it a 30-minute pilot? A 60-minute?

**Dylan:** It’s a 30-minute.

**John:** So in some ways this reminded me of Search Party—

**Dana:** So great.

**John:** Which was a show I love which is about a bunch of 20-somethings who are ostensibly looking for this missing girl but really it’s just an excuse to have anything interesting happening in their lives. And it does feel like there’s an aspect of that to this story, too. Which is that you’re trying to figure out what this whole story means to yourself as you’re trying to do this investigation.

**Dylan:** Yeah. Totally. And I think throughout the pilot what starts to happen is you sort of – the end of the pilot episode you find out that I don’t actually have as much control of the situation as I thought I did. So the screen blacking out, like what begins to happen towards the end is scenes start to be shown that I don’t intend to show.

**Dana:** I really like that.

**Dylan:** Thank you. I do hear and it is always a concern is that I don’t want it to come across – it is written for me be the main person in because it’s a true story and I’m trying deconstruct true narratives. And so the most heightened that I feel like I can get that is if I was playing myself. And I do come from a wholly theatrical background. So I feel like I’m still trying to figure out the formatting in the way – it’s my nightmare for someone to read this and to be like, “Oh, this guy sucks.”

**Craig:** No, no, nobody would – it’s really good. I’m actually glad to know that it came from a stage background. It’s starting to explain a lot. But all the more reason then – I’m even more concerned in a little bit of a way because there is an experience that you can have as an artist on stage with an audience that is very different from being on a television screen. Because when you are there performing it you are there. It is happening. So the moments where you’re like, “Oh did you see that, the lights just went off, or did you see this, you thought it was this but it’s this,” they’re with you in it. They’re experiencing it with you.

When we watch television we understand somebody sat down, thought of it, contrived it, shot it, did five takes, edited it, and put it on there. It’s sort of the difference between watching a magician do magic in front of you and watching one of those things like a magic special where it’s so rigged. It’s harder when it’s rigged.

So, that’s number one to just think about. And number two, I love the idea that you’re going to start to lose control over this thing that you think you’re in control over. It’s very Pirandello. I love this. All the more reason to be sparing about how much you do in the beginning because if you don’t establish a certain kind of rules in the beginning, like OK, I can tell, OK, I liked about this, I lied about this. But the more you break down in the beginning the less shocking it will be when we find out later that you’re not completely in control of it. It’s like you showed too many tricks early.

So, I think Six Characters in Search of an Author do not understand they’re in a play in the beginning of the play. They come to understand they’re in a play. So, it’s different obviously here. But just think about that dial because that’s such a fascinating concept. And I want you to blow people’s minds with it as opposed to them going, oh, geez, another trick. Do you know what I mean? That’s the difference, right? So that’s the thing to keep in mind as you go because the medium – it’s different. It’s different. And I like the fact that you’re transporting it, but as you transport it you are going to have to do some things.

**Dana:** One of the things that’s great about you when I get to like see your face and talk to you is this – I can tell you that you can bring a sense of intimacy to this. And so I would also hope that there would be a moment where you are actually real in the pilot. So that all of the sort of the sort of artifice means something to me. Like that’s one of the things that I think I loved so much about Fleabag is it’s like taking on this ride and it’s funny and fun and cool and cocky, and then all of a sudden you’re like I have the feelings. I hurt – my heart and also my stomach. Oh god. And I’m sobbing.

And then I’m so onboard for any of the other stuff because I know that this character is actually feeling real feelings and is capable of feeling pain or being hurt. To me, you know, all comedy comes from pain, personally just to me that’s how it’s always been. So I always want to know that there’s some pain underlying the comedy or the breeziness or the fun or the crazy, because then I’m like 100% onboard for the other stuff.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Dylan, thank you so much for sending these pages in.

**Craig:** Good job.

**Dylan:** Thank you so much.

**John:** You’re going to see what happens next. Cool. All right, our last script is by a familiar name. James Llonch has written many of the outros for Scriptnotes, but we’ve never actually met him. And so he sent through these pages and they were a delight. So let me give you a quick synopsis of Nights Never Over. We met Lett, a European woman in her late 20s, as she leafs through her sketch book on a flight to New York. While everyone else on the flight watches breaking news about an event in Times Square, Lett reviews a mug shot of a nun and an old map of New York City. The map is overlaid with symbols and sigils.

A Frenchman unsuccessfully tries to flirt with her. Then as the New York skyline comes into view outside the flight we see a nine-foot-tall shadow demon sitting a few rows behind Lett. As we watch Lett walk through customs and get a taxi we hear snippets from talking heads on the news. They debate Article Eight. Through conversations on the news we learn that the country has been divided into domains and murder rituals are acceptable. The shadow demon follows Lett until she gets into her taxi. And that’s where we’re at at the bottom of three pages.

Craig, do you want to start us off?

**Craig:** Sure. Well, I’m a sucker for this genre. One of the world’s great fans of Constantine. I love the movie Constantine. I assume that this is Constantine-ish in that it appears that–

**John:** Is it Constantinople?

**Craig:** It’s Constantinoples in that the demon world seems to meshing with our world. I’m not quite sure who knows it and who doesn’t know it. This was my big confusion because – so she is clearly looking at something and she has some sort of magical access to something. The mug shot that she’s looking at with the skull and gate seal seems very arcane and occult-ish.

The guy next to her can’t see what she sees. All he sees is sketches of flowers. So there’s some sort of glamoring or magic going on there. There is also a demon sitting ten rows behind them which no one seems to notice or care about. And I’m not sure if it’s notice or care about. I don’t know if she knows that he’s back there. I don’t know, but that’s fine.

There is a lot of talking head debate as we’re moving through an airport and I think the talking head debate is basically referring to – it seems like it’s referring to some sort of law that governed the meshing of the demon domain with ours. That’s my guess. Otherwise I don’t understand what it is. But on the other hand I still don’t know if anybody else notices this other demon moving around, so I’m confused. Can they or can they not see the demons? Are the demons here or are they not here? I am so onboard for a show where it’s District 9 but it’s demons instead of aliens. I’m so onboard with that.

I am so confused by who knows what based on the presentation here. And I am generally concerned about using the talking heads in the background format to deliver exposition. It just never feels good. And I’m not sure it’s super necessary anyway.

**John:** Yeah. As I went through page two and page three I found myself scratching out a lot of lines in the talking heads and you just didn’t need them. Giving us less gave us a better sense of what was going on. James has really good branded ads we’re seeing in the background for In-Mind Retreats, Inter-generational séances, 5th Domain luxury living. I sense that this world is heightened in a way that feels really great. I think the District 9 comparison is really apt here in terms of the demon world stuff.

I mostly picked this one because of the world building and sort of just like establishing the rules for a new world and a new universe. And I think it’s done really, really well in these first three pages. I’m very much intrigued.

One of the consequences though, there’s so much world-building happening here I really didn’t know anything about Lett, this main character we’re following, except that she’s in this cool, strange world. And so that is one of the real challenges of these kind of situations is that you’re doing so much work to establish what this universe is like that we’re not spending time understanding what is special about our central character that we’re meeting here. Because really all we’ve seen her do is look through a notebook, go through customs, and get in a taxi by the end of these three pages.

Dana, what was your instinct on what we just—

**Dana:** I agree with a lot of what you guys were saying. I mean, because I don’t read a lot of stuff like this. You guys probably read a lot more stuff like this. I was just overall kind of confused about the rules of the world as Craig was saying. Like if the demon can pass through people at the airport why is he going above customs and down, like just walk through customs because nobody could see you.

On the airplane when we see the demon, I loved that reveal. I was like, ooh, fun. And yet I didn’t cut to a stewardess walking by and then we see there’s nothing there, so that we know that nobody else can see. And then I think even if you reveal that there you definitely have to also reveal somewhere whether Lett can see that person, the demon or not.

I actually didn’t understand the magical thing Craig that you were talking about. I literally thought it was just that from his perspective the only thing he had a view of was drawings – that he saw something from his perspective that was different than what she was seeing. So I would just say, normally I’m not a fan of, as Craig calls it, like writing something you can’t shoot. But I think in these situations it’s helpful to kind of like ground me a little bit. You know, at some point when we land in the terminal I wouldn’t mind hearing it’s clear we’re in a dystopian…just say maybe one line about what it is that I’m in, this world that I’m in.

Even if it’s like a world that’s 20 degrees off from our own where we see demons and blah-blah-blah living in the blah-blah-blah. Like that would have helped me a little bit.

**John:** Dana, back to that moment. I misread the French guy looking at her notebook the same way, too. And what I really needed was just some underlining or some sort of bolding to sort of say like he sees something different than what we just saw. And that’s what – I just needed some clarity right there.

**Craig:** Unless I’m wrong. I mean, I could be wrong.

**Dana:** Or a description. And we’re going to get it.

**John:** Oh, I think you’re right.

**Dana:** I think you might be right.

**John:** We’ll ask him.

**Dana:** Or even just a description of what the actual visual effect is going to look like. Like what am I going to see when I’m watching it? That would have helped me.

I agreed with John and Craig. I’d cut out all of the righteous anger talking point talking head stuff. I basically took out all of it except for maybe the very last sentence about “make all the morality arguments you want, the founding fathers never intended murder rituals to be welcomed within our border” because that was like, oh, now I sort of understand what this world is that I’m in.

The thing about the demon going over the ceiling and looking down was – it was a very cool idea, but the way it was written was kind of confusing. I think you have to think about if you’re going to be shifting perspectives, if I’m in Lett and I’m a normal world customs agent, then you’re going to take me to the ceiling and I’m looking down from the POV of the demon, you have to make it a little more clear that I’m in demon POV. Because I had to read that a couple times to kind of go, oh, I’m up there looking down. OK, that’s cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a weird phrasing here. Shadow Black eyes Lett. So eyes is a really tough verb generally to throw in there like that as a transitive verb, because we look at it as a noun usually, especially with Shadow Black eyes. But Shadow Black watches Lett from above as its face skims across the terminal ceiling. If its face is skimming across the ceiling then–

**Dana:** And I’m looking at it, not—

**Craig:** Correct. Exactly. It’s looking up at the ceiling, not looking down. As it skims across – skims is also a strange verb there, too. It’s tricky. These things seem so tiny and dinky compared to the larger things, except that when people are confused, especially in something like this where a lot of it you know is going to be sort of novel and world-building you have to be so careful about how people are taking it in and how much they’re capable of taking in. The talking points, the problem with the talking points thing is that it’s a setup. It’s obviously a setup.

Oh, so we happen to be watching this in the background? If you started the show with just these two guys talking, then I would go, OK, fine. The point is we’re watching a show and these two guys are talking and this is what they’re debating. But when you throw it all in the background while Lett is walking by and you’re like, oh, how convenient that in the background of this other scene there’s the world’s most expository discussion happening on TV. That’s the problem.

**Dana:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s welcome James on stage and we can talk about what he’s written and where it came from.

James Llonch: Hey everybody, hey.

**Craig:** Hello.

**Dana:** Hi.

**Craig:** How much of that is going to become an outro, by the way? [laughs]

**James:** Quite a bit. Quite a bit.

**John:** James, tell us about the origin of this story.

**James:** Well, I always wanted to place a high fantasy show in New York City. I mean, through the three pages, I mean, you can’t pick up on it through the three pages, but the domains are relegated strictly to Manhattan Island. So there’s 13 domains within Manhattan Island.

**John:** So like boroughs but like—?

**James:** Right. Much smaller. And various supernatural groups kind of have control of these domains and they act as sovereign entities within the state and the country.

**Craig:** Got it. So like reservations for demons, vampires, werewolves, whatever it may be?

**James:** Yes. And there’s a lot of crazy stuff going on in the domains.

**Craig:** Clearly. Clearly. Some questions that we had, I’m curious if you could clear up for us. Is Lett aware of the demon on the plane?

**James:** Yes. That’s actually a sort of coworker.

**Craig:** Oh.

**James:** An antagonistic coworker that she is not very fond of. That’s why she’s not sitting with it.

**Craig:** OK. Well there’s a huge opportunity there.

**Dana:** That’s a super fun idea. It’s not coming through, but I love it.

**Craig:** Right. So a demon is stalking a woman and then finally she turns to him and says, “I just spent three days with you in meetings. I’m going home now. Why don’t you go that way? I’m going that way. No, we’re not sharing a cab, how about that?” And then she goes away. And then I go, wow, I was not expecting that that was the relationship going on here.

So, because the way it’s set up he’s stalking her in such a manner that we think she cannot see him. Can everybody else see him?

**James:** No. Lett is a witch, so only witches can see him.

**Craig:** Got it. OK.

**James:** Everybody in the terminals, they can’t see him.

**John:** That clarifies then the French guy, he couldn’t see the stuff in the notebook because it was a charm. It was like a magic thing that happens, right?

**James:** Exactly. But I will say, Dana, I know – the paint is a little wet on this draft. I knew that I cheated at that reveal and that’s like on my list of things to change. But thank you for pointing that out again.

**Dana:** Oh, please, don’t worry. This is all just fun. So the thing I was going to say is what it feels like it wants to be in this first chunk, so the Air France flight, what I loved was starting off and having everybody be watching something on their TVs that seems sort of awful. So I would get rid of all the language and I would show what it is that you want people to see. Because this is a visual medium. So you have the opportunity for there.

And by the way there’s no sound because everyone just has their fucking TVs on. So that’s cool, too. That works for you. And that means you can have a map of Manhattan. You can see the districts. You can see how it’s illustrated and what’s going on.

**Craig:** That’s a great idea. That’s a great idea.

**Dana:** And watch some of the chaos and the madness. What I loved about this was I’ve been on planes where I’m like, you know, something bad is happening on earth and you’re on a plane and it’s a really fucking disconcerting feeling. That’s like a cool, fun energy. And so what I think you want to do is I think you want to start out in a few lines here. We meet Lett. She’s doing this thing. We think she’s just in like normal human world, on a plane, and then we’re like, oh, something is going on down on earth. That’s disconcerting. Everybody else seems to be stressed out about it except for her. That makes her different from everybody else and I’m going like, ooh, now I know why I’m watching this specific lady.

And then you kind of want to have a normal human moment, which is like more drink, more drink. I need more vodka, let’s go. And then vodka comes and then it’s like reveal demon and I’m like what am I watching? I love this show. And, you know, do the Craig thing where she turns to him and is like, “Bob, I’m not fucking talking to you anymore. We went through meetings. It’s like you’re always talking over me. You demon-splained me through that whole meeting.” Or whatever that thing is that’s within your tone. And then I’m like 100% onboard. And just make it very clear that this moment is magic. She is a witch and that what she’s writing and doing nobody else can see. And so the guy looks and we watch it change before our very eyes. It turns into a…

I think all of this can be really great.

**Craig:** James, think of a trailer for this thing and think of the little tiny moments that have no words to them that tell you so much. So like you’re on a plane and all of these people are staring at their screens. They’re all watching the same thing. There’s no audio. But we can tell it’s a tragedy. Someone is even like getting teary. And then there’s one woman who just glances over and rolls her eyes and then just goes back to what she’s doing. Rolls her eyes.

If everybody was watching 9/11 on their screens and someone was like, ugh, idiots, you’d be like who are you and what is your deal and what do you know, and where are you from?

**James:** Right.

**Craig:** So little things that draw character out and put us – so that rather than facts coming through we get humanity/character coming through that helps juxtapose how things are.

The demon is stalking her because as it turns out he does not want to spend money on his own Uber. He wants to share the Uber. He always does. He’s cheap. She doesn’t want to have it. If you’re saving the reveal for later of what their relationship is, the problem is that you’ve cheated here because you’re getting fake suspense out of us. And then later saying, “Oh, that wasn’t really suspense.” You have to undermine it in the same movement or it’s cheating.

**James:** Right. OK, I mean, I reveal their relationship maybe ten pages later, 12 pages later.

**Craig:** Yeah. But it’s cheating here because he was stalking her and then it turns out he wasn’t stalking her. So you get the freebie of him stalking her. What will happen later is people are going to be like, well, why did you make me think that? That doesn’t even – why was he even doing that? You know what I mean?

**James:** I actually do the same exact thing again 12 pages later. But then I like reveal–

**Craig:** Stop cheating.

**Dana:** Well I think that’s one of the things that I think is good to say to yourself for all of the people that we’ve talked to today. One of the things I always try to say to myself is what would really happen. It doesn’t matter what you’re actually showing or what world you’re in, or even if you’re in demon world. Because if you’re in demon world what would really happen given your rules and your world? What would really actually happen?

And what would actually happen is that she would turn to him and say something to him at some point. Or she would see him or acknowledge him or whatever. And so you’ve got to do that, because that’s the world you’ve set up.

**James:** OK.

**Craig:** Awesome work, man. Thank you.

**John:** James, thank you so much for sending this in and thank you for all of the outros.

**Craig:** Yeah, seriously. And honestly I’ll watch this because – I’m serious – I love the genre.

**James:** Yeah, I have some crazy shit in this.

**Craig:** Good. I love crazy shit.

**John:** Thanks. This is normally the time on the show when we would do our One Cool Things but the show has been going on for about 19 years. And so I propose we cut One Cool Things, unless you had something you especially wanted to share?

**Craig:** No.

**Dana:** No, last time I did my breast pump. So, I really don’t feel like I can top that.

**Craig:** Oh, and that was mine for this time was breast pump.

**Dana:** OK, perfect.

**Craig:** We’re covered.

**John:** It’s crucial. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Special thanks this week to Nima Yousefi and Dustin Box and especially Quinn Emmitt for helping us out.

**Dana:** My baby.

**John:** Our outro this week is by James Llonch.

**Craig:** How about that?

**John:** If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Dana, you are @inthehenhouse.

**Dana:** Oh my god, you’re amazing. Yes. And please give to the support our crews fund.

**John:** Absolutely. So the support our crews fund, just search GoFundMe. It is It Takes Our Village. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’re find the three pages that our four wonderful people sent in. If you want to send in your own three pages you can do it. Go to johnaugust.com/threepage. It’s all spelled out.

You’ll find the transcripts up about four days after we get the episode up on the air.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes, bonus segments, and if you’re in this situation you had to be a Premium member to send in your three pages, so thank you to all 160 who sent in for that.

Craig, Dana, thank you so very much.

**Dana:** I love you guys so much.

**Craig:** Thanks guy. We love you, too.

**John:** And thank you to our entrants. Thank you so much. Bye.

**Dana:** Bye.

Links:

* [Home Before Dark](https://tv.apple.com/us/show/home-before-dark/umc.cmc.5yqy2wv4w7l0v4x5mn3le8l1y)
* [It Takes Our Village Campaign](https://www.gofundme.com/f/ittakesourvillage)
* [Hampton](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/AliImranZaidi.Hampton-Hampton.pdf) by Ali Imran Zaidi
* [Sunbeam](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Heidi-Lewis-THE-SUNBEAM.pdf) by Heidi Lewis
* [Nights Never Over](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/James-Llonch-Carry-On.pdf) by Jim Llonch
* [Find Him](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Dylan-Guerra-FIND-HIM.pdf) by Dylan Guerra
* Sign up for Scriptnotes Premium [here](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/).
* [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)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/447.mp3).