The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. A standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.
[music]
John: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Umm. My name is Craig Mazin.
John: You’re listening to episode 695 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Often on this program, we offer advice to young filmmakers and screenwriters on the next steps they should take in their career. Today on the show, we’re going to turn our attention instead to a young development executive or aspiring development executive and offer her our guidance. How do you become an exec, an agent, a manager, a producer?
We’ll talk about the first steps and next steps she should consider. I also want to talk about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations and how they interact to form story with a specific example of the police procedural. To help us do this, we welcome back Scott Frank, a legendary screenwriter and director whose credits include Out of Sight, Minority Report, Queen’s Gambit, and the new Department Q on Netflix. Welcome back, Scott Frank.
Scott Frank: Thank you for having me. I’m mildly happy to be here.
Craig: Well, that makes one of you.
Scott: Yes, thank you.
Craig: And so it begins.
[laughter]
John: You actually had an agenda coming in here, too, because you said you wanted to talk about how we’re educating writers. Give us a little sense of what you want to dive into.
Scott: I just noticed because I mentor quite a few writers, and I’ve been doing, as you’ve been doing, the Sundance Lab for now, I think, 30 years or something.
John: I’m only 25 years. You got me there.
Scott: Okay, good. The thing I’m noticing a lot at the labs, in particular, we get a lot of people post film school, and it’s amazing what’s not being taught. It’s amazing the kind of approach to writing that I see increasingly. The discussion about writing has become, I think, co-opted by what I would consider craft issues and good student issues and not really voice issues and intention issues and things like that. One of the great things about the lab is we always start with the conversation about intention. We arrive at craft later. I feel like there’s a lot of discussion about reverse engineering screenplays. I’ll get more into that as we talk later, but that’s become my pet issue.
Craig: This is great. I can take the week off and not talk about all those things [laughs] because I have a feeling you and I agree about quite a bit of it. If there’s anything we can do to help, I don’t know if there is, but if there’s anything we can do to help, because I do think that people, at least some of the film schools listen to this, including the professors, that maybe we can offer some guidance that might be a practical value.
John: I love it.
Scott: As an AFI dropout, and I do think AFI is probably the best of the bunch actually because it’s more of a workshop, but these film schools are so– I feel like in order to justify the cost, they create these curriculums full of classes that are writing the thriller, outlining, writing a half hour. It’s all nonsense to me. It’s really about being able to make mistakes. It’s about getting comfortable with the mess. It’s wrong until it’s right. There is no way to game writing. There is no way to get ahead of it. It’s just being comfortable with that feeling of it’s not working, it’s not working, oh, it’s working.
You can talk about outlining. You can talk about a three-act structure. You can talk about setups, payoffs, conflict, all the things people like to talk about, but it’s really irrelevant without the real conversation, which is one about intention to begin with, and then mindfulness in terms of spinning yarn, which is really what we do, and then we apply the craft later. If you start with the craft, it feels built.
I see it happening all the time where people are talking about these things that are very craft-oriented. A lot of the things that people have arrived at, whether it’s screenwriting books or podcasts, a lot of it is looking back and analyzing something, which is very different.
Craig: It sure is.
Scott: You can look at a script and say, “Oh, look at that,” but when you’re writing it, I feel like it’s trial and error, and you have to be comfortable with getting it wrong over and over and over and over again. That’s where the best stuff happens, through those happy accidents.
John: I think we can hopefully get into a bit of the syllabus of the Scott Frank film school that does not exist as we dive into it.
In our bonus segment for premium members, I would also like to talk about education in general and how we educate our kids, because the three of us had kids who went through public schools, private schools, alternative schools. Now that we’re on the other side of that, I want to talk about the lessons we’ve learned and things we would do differently where we’re just starting over now in 2025 with kids.
First, we’ve got some follow-up. Drew, we had some follow-up about movies they don’t make anymore.
Drew Marquardt: Phillip wrote in. We had talked about the decline of sex in movies. Phillip wrote, “I recently read the story from 2021 about how the action superhero genre has people with perfect bodies and no interest in sex.”
John: It has the best headline, I think, for this saying, “Everybody is beautiful and no one is horny,” which feels very true about our superhero movies. It’s a story by RS Benedict writing for Blood Knife. We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. I think it’s just really true, like we have a bunch of sexless gods in our superhero movies.
Craig: Yes, I guess that’s true. The superhero movies are probably a subset of the larger PG-13-ification of the world. Even the rated R-ification of the world, they’re happy with violence, they’re happy with horror. We’ve talked about this before, but it does feel like there is a generation that’s like, “If I want sex on screen, I’ll watch any of the 14 trillion porn videos available to me. Why would I want that in this? This isn’t for that. Porn is for sex.”
They maybe have a point because sex on film has always been weird to me. The dramatized sex on film, I struggle. I’ve written two sex scenes in my life, and you can feel the camera wanting to drift towards the fireplace. [chuckles] It’s brutal. What do you do? Basically, the movie says you can be sexy up until a point, and then it’s fireplace time so you really can’t, whereas we can blow someone’s head off, and that’s interesting.
John: Scott and I have both written some sex scenes that I actually shot, and I think were good. The three-way sex scene in Go, it’s sexy and then there’s a fire burst out, so there’s a point to it. I think one of the real challenges of sex scenes is like, well, if it’s just the sex scene because of the sex scene, then it’s frustrating. If there’s character moments that’s happening, if it’s Jennifer Lopez and George Clooney in the trunk of a car and there’s a character happening there, that’s a different kind of sex scene. That’s something you don’t get in porn.
Scott: Yes, and I also think there are two things that drive me crazy vis-à-vis sex on film. One is when people are deliberately avoiding the physicality. They’re in bed having sex, and she’s wearing her bra or t-shirt or fur coat, and it’s so clearly perfunctory exercise, and now we’re having a sex scene, but we’re not really going to have a sex scene.
Then the gratuitous on the other side where it’s just as perfunctory where you cut to this other thing that feels like rote, now they’re in bed and there’s nothing learned, nothing gained, there’s nothing awkward or uncomfortable or interesting about it, there’s no conversation during it. You’re not exploring character, you’re just exploring naked people, and that’s a problem. There are movies where sex is done really well, I think.
John: Yes, I thought Anora did sex incredibly well. Obviously, it was crucial to the story, but it was interesting, it was fun. It was never gratuitous. The plot was happening as the sex scenes were happening.
Craig: We’re not going to be seeing that– we’re talking about big movies, right?
John: Yes, we’re talking about big movies.
Craig: Big movies used to have sex and then they don’t.
Scott: Yes.
John: I think I may have mentioned this last week, I watched Altered States for the first time, and like Altered States, there’s sex scenes in it, there’s nudity, there’s all this stuff. That’s not the point of it, but it’s because the characters would have been doing that stuff, and so we’re doing it.
Craig: Well, also in the ‘70s and ‘80s, people thought it was fun. They liked it. They thought it was exciting, and it was a draw.
John: It was a draw.
Scott: Take Body Heat, it’s part of the plot. It’s how she manipulates him through sex. There’s a scene where she literally leads him by the dick, and you’re going, “That is the point of why this is happening.” He’s showing you how she has completely got this guy under her physical spell.
Craig: It does feel like the audience, when people say, “Well, everyone is beautiful and no one is horny,” this is a guy named, or a woman named, RS Benedict. I don’t know if it’s a man or a woman, but this writer, RS Benedict, I’m guessing, is complaining. I do feel like when you talk to people who are younger than we are, which is 98% of the world’s population, they’re like, “I don’t know if I want to see this cringy shit on film.”
It isn’t what it was for us, and I think in part because, putting aside the artistic value that a good sex scene has, it could be as good or bad as a fist fight. It could have as much character or not character as a fist fight. When we were watching movies as 20-somethings, it was harder to see sex on film. It was harder to see nudity on film. It was special, and now it is not. It’s just not.
Scott: Yes.
John: I saw F1, and there is a sex moment in it, basically, but it just skips over. They start to, and then you come back to it at the end. Movies of a different time would have actually shown that thing, and it would have been a bigger deal, and the movie just skips right over. It was the right choice for that movie, but it is a little bit frustrating that we don’t have those moments anymore.
Craig: I got to be honest, I’m not frustrated. I’m okay. I’m with the kids. It’s tough. I do feel a little squirmy.
John: This whole conversation stemmed out of a discussion last week about genres of movies that Gen X (sic.) has just not seen at all because they haven’t made them. Sex thrillers was one of them, but spoof movies was another. There’s a whole big list of them. My point was that if people never have any exposure to a certain kind of movie, they won’t even know what to do with it. They won’t have a vocabulary for it. They might not know that they’d love it if they’ve never seen one of them.
What I propose for our listeners is write in with your suggestions for what are the genres that people should see at least one movie in that genre of? You can offer examples from that, but I’m really more curious about what are the genres that people should see at least one of? I’ve seen very few Japanese horror movies, and I feel like that’s a whole genre that I should see at least one of those. I’d love that list of what are the 15 or 20 things that everyone should at least give one of those movies a shot, because there could be something there that you probably love, you just don’t know about it yet.
Scott: Well, it’s tricky because I’m not even sure you need to break it down by genre. There are movies that you should just see that are either part of the canon, or they speak to you in some– I’ll recommend a movie specific to somebody I know in terms of their point of view, and so on. You want to talk about Japanese horror, I say, “Okay, go watch the Audition,” whatever it is.
John: Exactly, but I don’t even know what that is, and so I think I need to be told like, “Oh, Japanese horror is a thing,” because I might not even know that. Then like, “Okay, what are the examples within that to consider?”
Scott: The question is, do you need to watch it? Do you need to watch it by genre? I feel like, again, going back to this, it’s storytelling stuff, and the way different cultures tell stories and the way– It’s not just Japanese horror, there are Japanese police years, there’s all kinds of different things. Just watching Japanese cinema, getting exposed to that in general, you can go on a huge deep dive, where one part of it is horror, same with French cinema, you can go down the deep dive. There are great psychological thrillers, erotic thrillers, and then there’s great comedy in France too and all kinds of things. Whatever country you want, pick one, we could do this forever.
I feel like when I watch these movies, I’m watching them to see how they’re telling the story more than anything. You’re always on the make for filmmaking things as well, but it’s like, “Wow, this is a different sort of story,” particularly European films because American films are now conceptual and everything sort of services, the concept. You can predict what the story of F1 would be or something and occasionally in a big movie, we get surprised. I feel like a lot of these films, they’re great to watch for storytelling, period, the end.
John: In part because you just don’t know what’s going to happen.
Scott: Exactly.
John: You don’t have a set of expectations, you come into it with a thing. I guess my counterargument would be that if you had a sense of what those genres were, then you could understand what they’re doing that’s different from that. You might understand like, “Oh, this is how this fits into this framework.”
Scott: Of course, yes, I think that’s true too. As a corollary to that, tone is something no one talks about in terms of writing because tone is super hard, both for writing and directing for that matter. Tone and transitions are the two most neglected thing you have in conversations about storytelling, I think.
John: That’s pretty good. Craig, you’re silent, but it’s because you agree.
Craig: What can I say? I’ve been talking about transitions. I feel like I’ve said the word transitions too many times, [laughs] so this is great. We’ll get to our complaining section, when Scott and I have a complain off. It is the part that hurts me the most. I think I try and be very positive about the things that we talk about on the show. When we do our three-page challenges, we’ll zero in on this.
When I watch movies or television shows, the first thing that hurts is fumble transitions, lack of transitions, clunky transitions because it’s not just a matter of a director failing to go, “Oh, big to small, far to close,” whatever it is, it’s just a lack of attention to the fact that one scene is following another. It contrasts to another. It exists in relationship to what came before it, and it is preparing you for what comes after it. The lack of transitions is an indication that I’m not in safe hands, and this happens all the time. Yes, when we get to our complaining section, we’ll get in– We’ve done entire episodes about transitions.
Scott: Also, it should be in the script. It should be in the storytelling [crosstalk]
John: Of course, 100%.
Scott: It should be you read a novel. There are great transitions in novels.
Craig: Scott, no one’s teaching novel writers to not direct on the page. Let’s save this for when we get into our film school thing, because that is, I think, the number one crime of writing education [laughs] for the screen is this terror of the DGA coming to whisk you away in the middle of the night for writing “close on.”
Scott: Well, it’s all in how you do it, too.
Craig: Everything is, everything is.
John: Well, this is actually a very good transition into our short marquee topic, which is advice to this young film student who’s an actual real person. We’ll call her Lisa for this discussion. She came into the office. She was a classmate of my daughters in high school. She’s now halfway through undergrad film school, a good film school. She’s a really smart young woman. She had questions about the next thing she should be doing. She’d gone to film school with the intention of becoming maybe a cinematographer.
She really wanted to get in the production side of things. She realized, after two years of film school, that was probably not what she actually enjoyed. She did not like the physical production of it all. We didn’t dig into this, but I think she also might not really like film students because there are some really annoying film bros who are doing that stuff. What she actually really loved was storytelling development. She really loved the making of big movies aspect of this. As we were sitting there across from her, I was like, “Oh, I think you are exactly right, that you are a prototypical, wonderful, young development executive.”
You see her, it’s like, “Oh, I can completely envision you in that office, in the meeting, having a discussion about a script.” We talked to her about taste, about knowing what you want, what you don’t want, being able to go into an interview or a meeting and describe the kinds of movies that you love, being able to talk about– I don’t know, she says, “I like big mainstream movies.”
I kept pushing her, I’m like, “Be able to tell us why. Be able to talk about the recent films that you loved and why you love them. Be able to talk about, specifically from your perspective as a 20-year-old, what are the kinds of stories that you’re not seeing about your generation being told? What are the things that they should look to you as being a good voice on? Because those are the kinds of things that make you so valuable in those rooms.”
Scott and Craig, you’ve both been in a lot of meetings with a lot of young development executives. What are some other things that impress you when you meet one of them and say, “Oh, this kid is going places.”?
Craig: Typically, for me, it’s nothing specific that they say. It’s not the fact that they know a particular movie or that they have a single great note. It’s that I can sense that there is raw processing power. They’re smart. They have a point of view. They know how to have a conversation. They aren’t there trying to know everything, nor are they there to be a student at your feet or anyone else’s feet.
When you meet somebody with processing power, it’s exciting. Not that there aren’t a lot of people at these companies that aren’t smart. There are, but at that tier, when you’re talking about these junior executives, you’re going to meet a lot where you just think, “Probably in 15 years I’m not going to see you around.” When you meet one where you’re like, “Ooh, look at the big brain on Brad,” then, yes, it’s exciting.
Scott: I think that’s true. Let’s assume they’re all smart. I’ve met very few really dumb, especially younger executives in particular.
Craig: [chuckles] All the old ones.
Scott: Yes, but they’re not. They’re smart. The problem is the conversation that you’re having. Most often, you’re having the wrong conversation. Again, I’m going to use this word over and over, and it’s going to be annoying, but intention is never discussed. They confuse agenda with intention.
John: Pull those apart for us, tell us.
Scott: A lot of times, they’ll have an agenda in both directions. It’ll be stuff they want to do and stuff they are afraid to do or don’t want to do, and so the whole conversation that you’re having about the story is filtered through that. Whether they’re overtly saying it or trying to push it and goose it into a certain direction, you feel that way. Instead of saying to– again, this goes back to Sundance, instead of saying to the filmmaker or the storyteller, let’s call them the storyteller, what is it you’re trying to do?
What is it you want to do? In the case of Lisa, your example, the best conversations are not just why she likes the movie in particular, but also what it is about the story, and I love how they did this in the story. It’s rarely done that way. It’s comparing movies with other– you read pitches, and it’s a lot like Succession meets The Last of Us. They’re comparing all these things, it’s going to be awesome.
There’s a lot of that. Instead of starting with, “Okay, what is it you want to tell? Why do you want to tell it?” Then having a conversation in that direction, making it downhill, not challenging it so much as– The problem, I think, is because people are smart, they feel every idea becomes instantly transparent. They feel the need to see through it right away instead of, “Let’s jam for a minute and see what this is.” A bunch of musicians get together, they’re just going to play and see what happens and see what they can create together.
Even if you’re going in to pitch, even if you’re going in for a meeting, you want to find a way to engage people in a conversation that isn’t just me, “I’m here for an interview. I’m going to tell you about my CV and my background and all the things. This is what I like. I like the flavor strawberry, I like the color green and I like to be warm, not cold.” That’s okay, but when you can get people communicating through storytelling, it’s always, always a stronger, better conversation.
Then everybody’s inside it in the same way so that when you’re actually making it, shooting it, we’ve had this conversation with the actors, with everybody and going, “Well, did you change your mind because that’s really what we said we wanted to do, and we still want to do that, or we don’t in some cases.” For me, the conversation to begin with is always wrong. It’s framed most of the time wrong. When you turn in a draft, they’re talking about length. “You know what? Fuck you. It’s too long.” They’re always too long. Every episode will be too long.
Every draft will be too long until we cut it. Right now, just let me tell the fucking story, and we’ll get the story right, and then we’ll figure out how to tell it more efficiently. You’re telling me that it’s 140 pages is too long. What the fuck do I need you to tell me that for? That’s the kinds of things they’re doing. They’re drawing from these mechanical ideas a lot of the time, that’s only one example.
Craig: I do try and keep in mind that that’s what– I’m only seeing the little bit of the iceberg above the water, and below it, they are in meetings being told, “Don’t come in here with a script that’s blah, blah, blah. Also, here’s what I want and here’s what matters. By the way, this guy’s going to come in and talk about intention for an hour. I need you to get him to make this like that movie [chuckles] instead of that movie.”
I try and keep in mind they also have a whole other life and a boss, and it’s not me because I’m like you, I want to always try and get to, “Okay, here’s what I’m going for. What are you going for?” Part of it also is me, almost quietly like a person that walks by someone that might be in trouble, and I’m like, “Just blink twice if you’re in trouble, and we can just quietly talk.” I’ll cover you. I’m never going to call your boss and go, “Well, they didn’t care about the link.” I’ll cover you on that. Let’s just have a quiet conversation away from your boss.
Scott: I’m going to push back hard because I think if you–
Craig: Do you agree?
Scott: Yes.
Craig: I didn’t state what I said fervently enough.
Scott: [laughs] I really think the problem with that is if you’re trying to be tricky from the beginning and have an understanding and so on, I feel like eventually you’re postponing the inevitable. You’re going to run into those people you’re talking about. I’m well aware that they’re being told, “We’re not going to make anything, period. We’re not going to do anything that’s about this or about that and so on and so forth.”
At the same time, everybody is looking for something golden. They’re looking for something different. They were looking for something that feels, sounds, smells different than everything else. You could be telling a story that might fit with what they’re looking for, but how you have that conversation, make it not feel like you could– We’ve all been in these pitches where you sit there, and it just feels like fucking homework.
I say very little in a pitch. When I pitch something, I’m just telling the story. I’m just saying, “This is why I wanted to tell this story. This is what I love about it.” I give the once upon a time of it. Then I let them ask questions because I don’t want to sit there and have them say, “Well, when you say you’re talking about them living in Encino, does it have to be Encino? Did you mean the valley? Were you talking about California?” Because shooting in California–“ whatever it is that triggers them, and it’s everything that triggers them, so I try to find a different level to have these conversations on.
That’s really what I’m referring to because you’re right, Craig, they are being beat up from above. Also, the good executives, the ones that are going to have a career, go, “Listen, I know you’re not looking for this thing, but here’s a story about 1921, whatever, that’s really fucking good. Someone’s going to make it. Maybe you don’t want to make it, but I’m going to show you this person and this idea. If you don’t want to make this, we should at least work with this person. We should at least buy them if you’re not willing to buy this project.”
John: Before we can get Lisa in the media across from Scott Frank, where he– tell me what you think, or realistically, probably not Scott Frank, but Drew. Before we get her into those meetings where she gets to have those meetings with writers, she needs to get that first job. She needs to get that first spot, and she has two more years of film school and has decisions to make after that. My advice to Lisa was, she’s already in film school. She should probably not do grad school right away. She’s learned as much as she’s going to learn in this system for right now.
Her next priority needs to be meeting a bunch of writers. She’s in a place where she can meet a bunch of– some could be good, some are going to be terrible writers at her school. This is an opportunity for her to read those scripts and figure out how to form relationships, and also just actually help writers get to their best next draft, and that’s a process too. She has to learn how to do that. She’s going to get some shitty notes for a while and have some successes and failures, but better that she’s doing that with writers who are also learning than to try to give a note to me or Craig or to Scott and have it just tank.
Craig: If you give a note, and it tanks, it tanks, but there’s ways to– Look, obviously if somebody that I’ve known for 30 years and who should know better gives me a really stupid note, I’m going to be like, “Come on.” If it’s someone who’s starting out, and they give me a clunky note, I’m going to be kind to them because I don’t want the lesson to be writers are dicks.
I want the lesson to be, “Someone took care of me and explained to me why that isn’t helpful, but here’s something that is helpful because it doesn’t cost anything to do.” One thing that I’m keying on that you said that is absolutely true is when you begin this job as an executive and a development executive, you are mostly going to be assigned to people that are beginning as writers.
You will get a chance to grow up. Neither side of you knows what you’re doing. No one knows what they’re doing. Everybody is tripping over their own shoelaces, so laugh about it, trip over each other’s shoelaces. Nobody should feel superior to anyone else. What ends up happening is ideally both of you, the new writer and the new executive, know what you’re talking about and have value and insight. If one of you does, that one will continue on. [laughs] If neither of you do, God help us all, it’s just going to be sad. I don’t care. Nobody comes out of the shoot just hitting three pointers. That’s not a thing. You don’t know what you’re doing. How could you?
Scott: Well, you just don’t know what you’re doing for the rest of your career. Every new project, you start not knowing what you’re doing again. I’m not being glib. It’s true. Once you get into it, it’s all a new organic organism. You’ve just cut open a different body that’s got different things going on. It’s all new. I completely agree with a lot of that and all of that, really. I think that it doesn’t mean that you have to be like everybody else. If you’re like everybody else– There are two kinds of writers I found now, very distinct.
There are people who are bodies in a room who are contributing and working that way and throwing out ideas and writing drafts and doing things like that, and there are creators. Who do you want to be?
John: As a person who wants to be working in future development, who wants to make movies, those are creators. You have to be excited to be in a relationship with people who are struggling to deliver a two-hour movie that makes sense, that is so hard to do, and that the writer will trust you and push back against you, but also understand where you’re going, and that just takes practice. It takes taste also. I feel like Lisa needs to read her classmates’ work and give notes on her classmates’ work and be really excited about that, but at the same time, she needs to read really good scripts. She needs to read the screenplays for her favorite movies to understand what that actually looks like on a page.
She probably needs to read everything that makes the blacklist each year so she has an understanding of where is the market right now? Where is the taste right now and how does she react to it? What are the things that she really loves? Who are the writers that she needs to be trying to follow and trying to understand? Because when she goes in for a meeting at whatever production company, Hello Sunshine or whatever it is, to be able to talk about these are the writers who are really exciting and why.
It could be some names that are on that list, but names that are not on the list because she’s read them because they’re classmates, that’s going to be helpful and impressive in getting her that chance to be in that room with other real writers.
Scott: You’re talking about someone who wants to be an executive, not a writer, though.
John: To be clear, this is a young woman who definitely wants to– she’s not a writer. She wants to be a development executive or a producer or an agent, or a manager. She’s going to probably go through one of the agency training programs, which I think is another good way to see a bunch of stuff and understand how the business works. No, she definitely does not see herself as a writer, the person who’s writing the script.
Craig: That’s okay.
Scott: Yes, which is great.
Craig: Somebody’s got to do it.
Scott: Craig will love this, but I just now fully understood that she didn’t want to be a writer.
Craig: Let’s go, let’s get grandpa’s pudding and– [laughs]
Scott: Give me my Jell-O and my blanket, and I’ll be fine.
Craig: At least he’ll give him pudding, but it’s too much for him.
Scott: I was off on this whole other thing, but I understand. When she’s coming in the room and talking about– it’s a whole other kind of thing, and it’s something which I probably don’t know how to help her with it. I don’t know how people [crosstalk]
John: Yes, but that’s the thing you really do because you know what it’s like to be on the other side, and you have a– I think writers have a certain amount of experience. We should have the ability to empathize and put ourselves in the places of those people who are giving us those notes, and I’ve been one kind of, and I’ve been around so many of those people. You get a sense of what their– you say what their agenda is, what their intention is. Your distinction there is really important because an agenda is like you came into this room with a list of things you had to accomplish, versus your intention is a more deeply seated, like this, “I’m trying to make these kinds of movies. I’m trying to tell these kinds of stories.”
Craig: Well, the thing that probably would help when you talk about– taste is a tough one because who knows, and it is a weird business, where 1 out of 100 people might think a script is good, and then it turns out that’s what the audience wants. It’s difficult, but I would say if you’re going to go down that path of being a studio executive, before you get that job, before you ever set foot in one of those buildings, know what you want to make.
Aside from what you think people would want you to make, aside from what you think they’re going to promote you for, or pay you more for, anything, just know, okay, here’s something pure. More than writers, we have something pure all the time. We have some story that we’re clinging to, and then we defend it to various levels of success, but they only get this one thing. This is their one life preserver, and then they are in the ocean for the rest of their careers. They better have a life preserver. It better be that touchstone that they can come back to; otherwise, they’re doomed.
Scott: What word would you use to describe knowing what you want to do?
Craig: Intention sounds pretty good, although I think I would, in this case, it’s really more–
Scott: Come on, can’t you give it to me? [laughs]
Craig: No, because this one actually is an aspiration, so this is aspirational. I feel like, okay, you’re a 19 or 20-year-old. You want to be in the movie business as an executive. Why? Because what I would love more than anything is to be there to help someone like a new Tarantino come along and make Pulp Fiction when everyone else is saying no. That’s the thing I want, that’s my aspiration. That’s what I’m praying and hoping for. Just know you’re not going to get anywhere near that for five years, but at least you have that there, so when it happens, [laughs] you’ll recognize it.
John: I’m recognizing an echo here because I do want to talk about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. I think, Scott, your split between agenda and intention is that. In intention, it feels like an inner thing that’s pushing you towards a thing, like this is a thing that’s driving you. Intrinsic motivation is the thing that is taking a character and making them go on that quest and make them feel like this is a thing I have to do, and I have to achieve, versus extrinsic motivation, which is they are being called upon, forced to do a thing in order to meet the plot requirements of the story. That agenda feels like an extrinsic motivation, like it’s being forced upon the character rather than something that’s coming from inside.
I actually want to circle this back to your show, Department Q, because one of the things that really struck me about the pilot that I really loved, and we’re not going to spoil some stuff that happens in the show. As we meet the Carl Mørck character who is at the center of this, extrinsic motivation is pushing him through a lot of it. He’s basically forced into taking over this cold case department that doesn’t really want to do.
It doesn’t match his intrinsic motivation, which is to solve the mystery of who shot him and get some closure on that and move forward, and he’s not being allowed to. What’s so interesting, in a feature, that tension would be tougher to manage, but in a series, that’s actually a nice engine to help tell stories. Was that a thing that was always present as you came upon this book and started on this project?
Scott: Wow.
John: Do you even identify that as being an engine of your story?
Scott: What I was thinking as you were speaking, and it’s what I’ve always thought is, “Man, John is really smart.”
[laughter]
Scott: All I think about is, and this also goes back to what Craig was just talking about, it’s I don’t think about any of that ahead of time, or even during. I am just trying to make people talk to one another. If I can’t make them talk to one another, it means I don’t know them. If I really know them, the plot is going to come from that. At some point, I may look back at it and analyze it this way or that way, say it’s too long, or we’re away from this too much, or we’ve lost this character, whatever it is.
There are certain craft things that I apply much later. For the beginning, I just want to get lost and confused and play in the sandbox and see what happens. I don’t think that way. Things like that may occur to me as I’m writing during the process, not before. I don’t even know what a theme is before. I only know, unless I’m adapting something specific, I might have a theme that I can extract from the book to help me adapt it, but with these books, there was some great ideas, but beyond that–
John: What is the central idea of the book? Because I don’t know what the original source material at all, and how similar is it to how the show sets itself up?
Scott: Very different because the show is about going from, again, looking back at it, isolation to the family you choose, which is everything I write. I always end up doing that, and how your identity comes from the people you surround yourself with, and so on, and your mental health is really defined by the quality of the relationships you have, and so on and so forth.
I just always come back to that for whatever reason. It’s not intentional, and it’s just something– When I’m writing, I’m just trying to think about once upon a time, what? I can’t do that until I know, once upon a time, who? For me, especially writing a lot of thrillers over the years and even some mysteries and things, I feel like the whodunit is nowhere near as interesting as the whydunit.
The audience is going to constantly be guessing the whodunit, and in Department Q, I give it to you right away. I pretty much tee it up, but you have no idea why. Even when you think you do know why, it’s different. For me, Chinatown is that way. Yes, you know Noah Cross is a fucking shit heel, but when you get to “she’s my sister, she’s my daughter,” you’re like, “Whoa, wait, what?” [laughs] That’s the why of it all.
I think that I appreciate everything that you’re saying in terms of identifying the two threads, and one could be an A story, and one could be a B story, is what I was thinking as you were saying, “Oh, that’s how that happened.” It was by accident. It was just by my messy process.
Craig: Well, I don’t know if it’s by accident. I’m going to say it’s not that you sit there and– okay, we’ll borrow the term intentional again. You don’t intentionally say, “Hey, I want to write about people who their inner want is this way and the world is sending them that way.” I think that there is something in your fingerprint where this does also come up quite a bit, and it’s part of the music of how your brain works. I think it’s important to say that there are things that we can– and this ties into the educational thing, that we can notice post facto that we do not notice, nor do we need to notice pre.
We just follow what feels right. It’s like Princess and the Pea. This feels good. “Oh, oh, there’s a pea down there. Something’s wrong.” How do we know that something’s wrong? Our brain is just telling us something’s wrong. We can’t get there through analysis. It is interesting that, as you said, like okay, so you’re identifying certain things that pop up, but even by your own admission, it’s not like you’re sitting down going, “And now a found family.”
[laughter]
Craig: It’s just in the DNA, and it’s also in the music of– and I will say it’s also in the audience for what you do because I consider myself a fan of your work, not because you’re a good person. You’re horrible-
Scott: Thank you.
Craig: -but the stuff is so good. It’s always struck me that way from the very first thing I saw that you did, which was Out of Sight. That means there’s something in my rhythm, too, because there are people that probably don’t like the things you do, that’s fine. Our brain’s like, “There’s a harmony going on,” and I love that. We can put a pin in this and bring it back when we talk about education, because I’m not sure there is a way to teach that at all.
Scott: No, there’s a way only to teach the process, which goes back to your development executive thing, which is it’s not really even about what made– Lindsay Doran taught both of us, I think, really, but she certainly taught me how to write. I thought I knew how to write when I was 24 and gotten my BA in film studies at UCSB. I was an AFI dropout. I know what I’m doing. I got an office on the Paramount lot, and I’m a writer. No, Lindsay taught me how to write because what she brought to bear was a process of thinking, a way of thinking, a way of thinking.
Everything about it, for me at least, just for me, I don’t preach this or think it should be this way for everybody else, it’s a way of thinking. If you’re writing a horror film, you’re mindful of certain things. If you’re writing this kind of movie, you’re mindful of certain things, but tone is a way of thinking. You can call it point of view, but I feel like for me, it’s more accurate if my brain gets into this kind of mode.
All you can do is figure out what is the primordial ooze to create that you can set up for yourself, and it’s different for everybody. Everybody has their own way of doing it. For me, I remember seeing, I guess it was Dustin Lance Black, maybe, who’s a great writer. He’s a terrific writer and done amazing things, but there was a YouTube video where he’s talking about his process, where he’s got three-by-five cards, he’s got six different colored highlighters. John, maybe you’ve seen it, I don’t know.
John: Yes, I think I did a similar one for the Academy. I would say mine was a little bit faked in portion, wasn’t quite true, so I’m curious what it shows of him doing his stuff.
Scott: Well, he was doing this whole thing that was very mechanical and for him, it works. For me, it just makes me feel like I’m a good student. I don’t feel like I’m being a writer, I’m being a good student. Outlining for me just makes me feel like I’m a good student because the truth is, I’ll outline two or three scenes at a time, but I don’t know what’s going to happen because, again, once I get them talking to one another, I want them to do things because of who they are, not because the script says so, and my big pet peeve.
How do you create a process? It’s why I think fiction workshops are more successful than film school because you’re just doing it over and over. You’re just doing it over and over, and you’re reading it out loud or people are reading it, and then they’re telling you what they like, what they don’t like. Then there’s a teacher who’s also telling you some things, and maybe you’re reading a lot of things at the same time, but you’re just doing it over and over. You’re not writing the thriller, writing a half hour, outlining, writing a treatment. It’s useless.
John: Let’s go into the syllabus because I really do want to– let’s imagine that Scott Frank course in screenwriting or filmmaking, if you want to call it that, but how do you start? What is the first class? What are the things that you’re diving into in the first class? You say intention, and intention is what is it that is making you want to tell that story? What is it? What is the spark? What is the genesis? You’re not talking about what the process is going to be at all. What do you want these students in the class to be doing? What is the discussion about?
Scott: Well, first of all, the first thing would be how to mix a cocktail and there would be an open bar and just that so that we can have our fallback, and just because we should be drinking while we’re talking about story.
Intention for me would not be something I would teach. It would be the style of conversation. It would be like, again, what happens at Sundance. We’re not saying we’re going to talk about– We don’t do that. It’s just the conversation is, so what are you trying to do?
John: Is it one-on-one or is it a salon? What do you think is the right way to–?
Scott: I think it’s both. I think you do have to write for people, and you do want to hear what people have to say. I also feel like, listen, our business, whether you like it or not or even agree, I really believe this, our business is one of apprenticeship and mentorship. The best writers come out of that. I’m not a writers’ room person. I didn’t come from writers’ room, so I don’t have any experience with that, so I can’t comment up or down on that. I know I am the beneficiary of mentorship and apprenticeship, where people gave me the time to– were telling me deliberately to slow down, as opposed to you get your first assignment, it says 10 weeks or 12 weeks in the contract.
For 40 years, I’ve been saying, I’ve never written anything in 10 or 12 weeks. I don’t even know that I can get a title page or my opening scene done in 10 or 12 weeks. If I do, I’m forced at gunpoint to write in 10 or 12 weeks. It’s going to be bad because the process for me is everything. I would say in the class, I would just start small. I would make everything bite-size. I wouldn’t say at the end of 10 weeks, you’re going to have a script, which is film school. “You need to have your project, and if you’re getting your master’s or whatever it is,” it would be just writing, talking about writing.
Let me tell you one thing about craft. I gave this speech at the Writers Guild, and so I’m just going to– I use this example, and Craig, I don’t know if you know, in Pasadena, they’re in LA, and they’re in Texas. I use the example of Mission Renaissance, which is, they’re usually in mini-malls. They teach you how to draw. The Larry Gluck method, his name is actually Larry Gluck, promises that he can teach anyone how to draw.
He’s pretty effective, it really does. If you want to learn how to draw, you’re going to learn how to draw by doing the Larry Gluck method. My kids went when they were very young, and I remember how he did it, how they did it. What you do is, you take an object or an image you’re going to copy, whatever it is, and you turn it upside down. You’re not looking at the image, you’re looking at what makes the image. Then you do that, you draw that, you copy that.
John: You figure out the light and the dark, and what the edges are.
Scott: Exactly, and then when you turn it right side up, it looks like the thing you were copying, but it is a cold, dead, fucking version of it. It is not the thing. There’s no life to it. That is how most conversations about screenwriting go, less fiction, but most conversations about screenwriting are, “Let’s look at it upside down and see what’s going on and what’s happening and the shape of it and the this.” If you don’t have that thing, that voice, that point of view, you don’t have that way of thinking, when you turn it over, it’s going to look like a script. It’s going to be the right number of pages, and things will happen when they’re supposed to, but it’s going to be a fucking cold, dead thing.
Craig: Well, this gets to the fundamental problem with writing education as a concept because I think you’re 100% right that professional screenwriting tends to be a pursuit where mentorship and apprenticeship occurs and is most effective. You were my mentor. I don’t know if I was your apprentice as much as your whipping boy.
Scott: Bitch.
Craig: [chuckles] I prefer whipping boy.
Scott: Yes, all right.
Craig: That’s what I was, and it worked. Then I was Lindsay’s student, just as you were.
Scott: Yes.
Craig: We all have people like that. Lindsay’s not a writer, so she’s a producer. We’ve had people that we’ve worked with who are directors, who are brand studios, and they recognized something and took us under their wing. Education, formalized education, and we’ll dig in a little further in our bonus segment, requires institutions to hire a lot of teachers. They need to bring in students, that is their commodity, meaning anyone can do it, is what they have to tell you, and they need to set up curricula.
That means standards with exams and targets. Before you begin, you’re fucked because that’s not how it works at all. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve spoken to people who are in the middle of very expensive writing programs. I didn’t even drop out of one. I just didn’t ever go. They are explaining to me what is going on in there, and I just want to light the place on fire. It’s not like it’s a large, organized RICO case scam. It’s not. Everyone’s trying. It’s just maybe this is not instructable like this.
John: I want to be a little more optimistic that there’s some better way, at least to get started, because I want Scott Frank’s Academy to succeed.
[laughter]
John: I’m wondering, a thing I would love to see, which I just don’t see it very much of, because when I’ve gone to visit film classes, what I’m often doing is I’m visiting on the day where they’re laying out the three by five cards and pitching me their story. There’s always too many cards for the first act, and it all falls apart, but at least I have some vision of what their story is. What I haven’t seen is they’re just writing scenes. Scott, I think I really appreciate about what you’re pitching is that don’t write a whole movie. Today, let’s write–
Craig: Scene work.
John: Scene work. Today, let’s write farewell scenes or let’s write [crosstalk]
Scott: Write a scene that’s four pages long called The Confrontation. Well, what’s it about, Scott? It’s about whatever the fuck you want it to be about, just write a scene called The Confrontation.
John: It doesn’t have to fit into a larger thing. It’s just about what this feels like.
Scott: Exactly.
Craig: Do you know the artistic educational system that gets this better is acting instruction.
Scott: Oh, yes, without a doubt.
Craig: Because acting classes, they say– Okay, I remember the very first assignment I ever got in my college acting class. Our teacher said, “Okay, one by one, each one of you is going to do this.” This is the very first day. “Go and sit in that chair on your own. We’ll all look at you. For one minute, act like you’re a person sitting in a chair.” Of course, everybody did something ridiculous. Then she did it, and she just sat there in a chair because that’s what you do in a chair, and we all went, “Oh.”
The point is, the building block was a moment of honesty. Honesty is the thing that we’re always looking for, and it’s what I appreciate about your work. When I watch the scenes, any scene, I don’t know if I’ve ever had a moment watching anything you’ve written where I thought, “No, somebody wouldn’t say that,” or, “I don’t believe it, or, “That’s just a false note,” no, never because honesty is so important to you. It’s so important. Well, no one’s teaching that. No one’s going, “Okay, everybody, forget the four pages. Write one half of a page and this is all that happens: Guy walks in, orders a sandwich, waitress comes back, says they’re out of it. He says, “What?” Go, you have a page, go. That’s all you need. Make it honest.”
Then, if you’ve made it honest, and it’s incredibly boring, what is she wearing? What is he wearing? Where are they? What kind of restaurant? What kind of sandwich? Do they know each other? What is he doing there today? What time is it? The million Lindsey Doran questions that suddenly bring forth life. Now, before it, it’s not an upside-down thing that’s dead. Instead, because I don’t know if there are a lot of teachers who can do that. I’m just saying it. I don’t think there are a lot of teachers who can do what we just did.
John: Here’s the question, I don’t know that you necessarily need a great teacher to do that. As long as you had an environment, you just had a curricula of the Scott Frank Academy where everyone was doing this, and we’re like, “This is the week where we are going to write scenes about this thing,” and everyone just does it, and they all share it. Then just the process of writing and sharing that scene, because the experience of writing 20 scenes will help you understand like, “Oh, this is how scenes work,” and reading other people’s shitty scenes makes you like, “Oh, that’s a shitty scene and it’s a shitty scene for these three reasons. Let me not do those thing,” is so helpful.
Going back to the Lisa example of the development executive, I worked for a year as a reader at TriStar. I read 100 mostly shitty scripts and I had to write coverage on them, which means I had to read the whole thing and write a synopsis of these things that often didn’t make sense, but it just so helped me develop my taste of like, “I don’t want to do these things. This will never work.” That’s an experience that I think people benefit from and writers benefit from, and you can’t start them with saying like, “Okay, now outline this movie you want to write.” You don’t know where to even begin.
Scott: You don’t, and I think that’s really smart what you were just saying, and I think both of you, and I think that you can’t, again, you just don’t know. Most scripts, you’re looking at scenes, and you’re going, “This scene could be in any movie.” These characters, every piece of real estate in a script, is precious. You only have a certain number of pages. If you have an elevator operator or a grocery clerk, you want them to be– they don’t have to steal everything, but where’s the specificity? Even in the scenes, in describing scenes, where’s the specificity?
Do you need to describe so much? Do you even need to stop, and there’s flow? It doesn’t flow because you’re stopping to just– you read down the page and you’re just stopping to describe someone’s fucking bedroom or whatever it is. It makes me nuts. I only need to know things when I need to know them. Don’t even get me started when you’re telling me how people are saying their dialogue, where you have the parentheticals where they’re sarcastically or reluctantly or whatever adverb they want to throw in there.
It’s like, “Isn’t the dialogue good enough that you should know? Don’t we know these people?” Again, what’s difficult about screenwriting, I think, more than anything, I think playwriting is even more difficult because in screenwriting, at least we have cut two get the fuck out of situations. In playwriting, I get them on and off. In screenwriting, the problem with it is we only have two senses, sight and sound. Anything else is cheating because the audience isn’t sitting there reading, “John, who was really traumatized as a kid, is walking into this feeling–“ They don’t get that.
How do you tell a story with just sight and sound? What’s an obstacle ultimately becomes something really interesting because you can find a tone in the script. Again, scripts should have a tone. You should read them; there should be a tone. It should be tense if it’s a thriller, it should be funny if it’s a– whatever it is, there should be a specific tone. You should have a voice, it’s not this mechanical, this happens and then this happens and then– and every scene could be, is just described in the most generic way. That’s hard. Again, one thing about the AFI is they were just making shit all the time.
John: At least when I was there.
Scott: They’re shooting–
John: The workshop aspect of it is really important.
Scott: Really good. In film school, you are making connections, and there’s plenty of things to recommend, depending on who you are. The most talented writers are both insecure and secure in what they want to do. They’re insecure in their ability because we all think we’re frauds, and we all think it’s over tomorrow, but at the same time, we know what the fuck we want to do. We know what we sound like, and that’s the thing. I know what I sound like. I know when I’m being me and when I’m trying to be somebody else, and I’m going to get killed because I’m not being true to the way I sound.
John: At the Academy, some of those first things you write will be imitations, because they have to be imitations.
Scott: Of course.
John: You’re learning what a thing is, and that’s okay.
Scott: Of course.
John: We’re writing scenes all the time, we’re reading scenes, we’re reading whole scripts and having conversations about what’s actually happening on a page, separately from watching the movie, because we need to do both.
Scott: Absolutely, and steal. I think it’s perfectly okay borrow someone’s voice to get your own sea legs. If there’s somebody you really love and you really liked– and I really recommend reading novels more than scripts to become a good writer, because then you’re going to get character. The thing we’re not talking about enough is everything comes from character. Characters are not attitudes or types or, worse, just movie stars. You plug in, it’s Tom Cruise, that’s who it is.
Craig: Because you know who loves hearing that, Tom Cruise. He’s like-
Scott: Yes, he does.
Craig: -“Oh, you named me. Okay, yes, I’ll be there.”
Scott: I’ll be there.
John: You just spoke his name.
Scott: I think that characters are everything. I think that no one is all good or all bad. Everybody lives in the gray area. We’re manipulating people in a way, but we’re not being sentimental. We’re being emotional. There’s a difference. Sentiment, bad. Emotion, good because sentimental, is sort of, I’m telling you to feel this way. Emotion is, you’re just really feeling that way, and you’re not sure why. We’ve all worked on movies and scripts that needed to be fixed at a certain point. Movies in particular, you get to the end, and they’re saying, “Our ending doesn’t work.”
People are not feeling what they’re supposed to feel at the end. You go, “Well, because you fucked up the beginning. Because you were in such a hurry, because you were so worried that it was slow or whatever it was, even though in your test screening, nobody moved, nobody got up, nobody did anything, but it was–“ If you ask people, “Was there any slow part of the movie?” They all said, “The beginning.” “Was there any slow part of the fucking book you just read?” “If I had to pick the slowest part, I’d say the beginning,” and then the editor goes, “Okay, you need to cut 20 pages out of it,” fuck me.
I think that with movies, you don’t understand the character, so when you get to the end, you want to feel it. You understand it all the time. I understand I’m supposed to feel this way, but I don’t really feel it. What the trick is, how do you make people actually feel it, that’s character. That’s pure and simple fucking really interesting character.
John: Wrapping this up, it feels like the Scott Frank Academy is-
Craig: Failure.
John: -utter failure.
Scott: Let’s call it School of Scott Frank, like Rembrandt. Let’s do it like Rembrandt.
Craig: School of Scott Frank. You’re just churning out hundreds of foul-mouthed, miserable, bent-over– [laughs]
John: Wasn’t Rembrandt’s school, though, literally, it was like people had to paint his stuff for him. That’s not probably what we’re talking about. Here’s what I’ll say is that–
Craig: I like that idea.
John: None of us grew up in the writer’s room, the TV model, but some of what we’re talking about does happen, though, where you just have to iterate a bunch of shit all the time.
Scott: Of course.
John: You’re always in conversation about the thing you’re trying to do. You’re trying to do one thing, which is not the breadth of what we’re going for here.
Craig: I think in those rooms, there are some amazing rooms where you learn from incredible people like Vince Gilligan.
John: Historically, yes.
Craig: Then there are a lot of rooms where you’re learning from not great people, and it’s really more, “Guys, we need to make the donuts, more donuts, please.”
Scott: There are legendary rooms that threw off amazing writers.
Craig: Absolutely.
Scott: Going back to the show of shows, but even Everybody Loves Raymond, all those guys ended up doing their own stuff, Breaking Bad, Sopranos, Mad Men, all of it, so there are really great– and then there’s a lot of times where I have showrunner friends who’ll say, “I have 11 people in the room and only one guy can write.”
John: This is a salon situation where we’re writing a bunch of scenes, we are discussing really good movies on the page, and then probably screening them so we can talk about what has changed between them.
Scott: Reading books. As the instructor, I’m encouraging people to read novels that sort of feel like what they want to do. They don’t have to read the great novels, they have to read the novels that speak to them and make their sun tingle.
John: As we get to the point where they’ve actually written a full script, then I think, Scott, I’m guessing, we get more towards the Sundance model where you have individual meetings with smart writers who are there not to tell you what to do, but to help evoke out of you, what is it that’s not working for you, and let me help you move it to the place you wanted it to be. An extra brain for them.
Scott: Then craft comes out of that conversation because how many times at Sundance would you read a script that’s a mess? The font is weird, the format is weird, but there’s something fucking undeniable about it. You just go, “This person is an artist, but it’s a mess and it’s hard to read and I’m having– but it’s amazing.”
John: Every Sundance last project is unique. It’s very careful curation. These are very smart people who are doing very smart things, and even if the craft is just nuts, there’s good stuff there. Then, ultimately, great movies come out of this. Great writers come out of this, and it’s just a better model than I think what we’ve seen.
Scott: Because we’re not leading with craft. Craft is the easiest part of it. You apply craft last. You’re mindful
Scott: full of it. There are things that are obvious that you just know from experience. The problem is we’re always talking about all of the books, everything. It’s a lot of craft conversation.
Craig: It’s what you can write a book about. This is it. You can write a book about it. You can teach it. You can break it down into a lesson, and you can mass produce it. People do. This is the problem with the Scott Frank Academy. It requires a lot of Scott Franks, and we don’t have a lot of them, and they don’t want to teach.
John: I don’t think it does. I think I think the idea can be done without a Scott Frank. I don’t think it actually needs a genius at the helm of it. I think it just needs an intentionality of like, “This is how we’re going to do this stuff. I think you need some Scott Franks when it comes time for that. The Sundance part of it, where you’re sitting across from a very smart writer.
Craig: Sundance, correct me if I’m wrong. You guys deal with what? Eight, nine writers?
John: 12, 15 writers at top.
Craig: 12, 15 writers a year. There is a world out there that is a multi-billion-dollar higher education industry. 15 students pays for nothing.
John: Yes, I know.
Craig: It’s not–
John: Yes, I don’t think there’s a viable business model behind this. That was never my intention.
Craig: If your intention was to ruin Scott Frank.
John: We’re on a money-losing podcast still.
Craig: It’s a joy. I thought we were breaking even.
John: We are breaking even now.
Scott: What I was going to say, too, is it’s like you guys had a really interesting conversation about setups and payoffs. Last week or the week before, I don’t remember when it was, I wanted to teach people about setups and payoffs. I go, “Okay, let’s watch a couple of clips from Kramer versus Kramer. Let’s watch the beginning when his wife has just left him, and then the kid wants French toast. He doesn’t know how to fucking make French toast. He’s mad. He’s breaking things, and the kid is going, “Mom doesn’t do it that way.” He’s getting the shells and the yolk, and the kid is watching all disillusioned, and finally, he burns himself. He says, “God damn her.”
Then later, when the wife shows up– the second scene later in the movie, when the wife, when Meryl Streep comes back because she wants to take the kid now, and now the two are in the kitchen quietly, not saying a word, working in sync, making French toast. Really, it tells you everything you need to know that they love each other, that they figured it out, and now this woman is going to fuck it up. Okay, they’re set up some payoffs. You want obstacles? Watch Butch Cassidy when they’re running away from the train, and they have the super posse chasing them. Who are those guys? There’s obstacles. It’s like a lesson in obstacles for 20 fucking minutes.
There are ways to do that and then move on. You don’t have to have a fucking three-hour conversation. It’s just like, “Here’s a tool you can use. Here’s something you can do.” Here it is, but you know what, use it, don’t use it, it’s not a requirement. Melvin and Howard has a 30-minute or 25-minute opening scene. Best screenplay, Oscar. It’s two guys in a truck. I think that it’s just those things; rules are for the uncreative. The end. That’s what they’re for.
Craig: There are no rules.
Scott: You have to be mindful of certain elements and things, but you have your own rules. When you’re filming–
Craig: You understand, no one out there believes you. I am telling you-
Scott: I know. They don’t.
Craig: -no matter how many times we say it and no matter how many writers we have on the podcast who do what so many people want to do, no matter how many times they say it, everyone out there go, “They can do it, but we can’t.” We were they.
Scott: We were they.
Craig: We were they.
Scott: Also, here’s the thing. You are competing with a lot of people. I remember Bill Goldman used to go to those– what was that thing down by the airport, that screenwriter expo where they were 1,000?
John: This is 25 years ago, but there genuinely was a thing at the airport, a huge expo.
Scott: I did a thing with him, and I can’t believe he did this. I did an interview with him, and there were 600 people in this huge room. Bill said, “Okay, maybe one of you is going to actually have a career.” They’re like, “What?” They thought he was kidding. [laughs] He goes, “No, I’m serious.” Probably none of you are going to have a career, but maybe one of you might have a career. The odds are that none of you will have a career.
Craig: I will say we say this a lot, and maybe we’re not William Goldman-esque in the crunchiness of it.
Scott: He’s very Crunchy.
Craig: We talk about the fact that there are fewer professional writers than NFL athletes.
Scott: Absolutely. Why then would you want to follow the same rules everyone else is following?
Craig: Maybe if we say it four million more times. It is so frustrating. It’s almost like the crabs in a barrel thing. Everyone is like, “Yes, but before you escape this barrel, let us pull you down and remind you that you can’t say we see in your action description.”
Scott: Oh, my God.
[laughter]
Craig: This is what happened. This is what’s going on out there.
Scott: I’m like, “Wait, what? You can’t say we see. I was saying we see for 40 years. Wait, what font am I supposed to use? Fuck.”
[laughter]
Craig: It’s the crabs in a barrel. We’ve tried so hard. We really have. We’ve tried so hard to preach a lack of orthodoxy, not a it’s just as orthodox to say, “I’m going to break all the rules.” That’s also stupid. It’s just figuring out who you are and pursuing the thing that makes you unique because I can’t do you. You can’t do them. Then are you good? Are you good?
Scott: That’s the thing. You can learn all the craft in the world. Yes, there are people who are amazing musicians, and there are people who appreciate music. They’re not the same thing. I’m not going to be the one to tell you which you are. The universe will tell you, will sort it out pretty quickly. It is the truth. If you’re leaning into craft and not into the creative side of things in terms of spinning yarn and character and how do people talk to one another and all of those things that are, by the way more fun than writing shit on three by five cards or a dry erase board or whatever it is, then there’s a reckoning that’s going to come.
Craig: One day, a real rain is going to come.
Scott: One day, a hard rain is going to fall.
John: Let us transition to our one cool things. I’ll lead us off. There’s a book I’m reading right now called Antimemetics. It’s by Nadia Asparouhova. Craig and Scott, you know what a meme is. You’re familiar with the idea of a meme. A meme is a unit of culture. It’s an idea that wants to spread. The same way that genes are selfish, they want to get out there in the world, they want to propagate. Antimemetics, or an anti-meme, is something that doesn’t want to spread or just doesn’t spread easily. This all comes out of the– there is no Antimemetics Division, which was a work of fiction, which is really cool, which is now coming out as a book.
This is a nonfiction book that she’s written that’s really digging into this concept of what does an anti-meme actually mean? What is an idea that doesn’t want to spread? Some examples would be things like the topics that everybody agrees upon, but nothing ever actually happens politically. Like extended parental leave or universal background checks on guns. Everyone agrees, like, oh, that’s a good idea, but the idea never takes hold and never gets anywhere. Topics that are taboo, like pornography, or topics that are boring, like insurance.
Craig: So boring.
John: Things that are so traumatic that you just don’t want to think about them, like global poverty. It’s a really good, smart book on this nascent concept. I’ll put a link in the show notes to where you can buy it. If you decide to buy it, the book cover is really cool, and the shape of it is really cool. I really hate the typesetting in it. If you decide to get the digital version of it, I think that’s also fine, and it’s a good way to read it. The book is Antimemetics by Nadia Asparouhova. It’s published by the Dark Forest Collective. The Dark Forest being that part of the internet where you hide so that no one can ever find you. That comes from the three-body problem.
Craig: Oh, I would love to go there.
John: Wouldn’t that be nice? Craig, when you’re peeking your head out of the Dark Forest, do you have one cool thing to share with us?
Craig: I don’t know. You may think this is not cool, but did you read the story about the people that discovered the horrible security with the McDonald’s AI hiring bot?
John: No, but it sounds-
Craig: It’s incredible.
John: -great. Is it funny or tragic or both?
Craig: It’s in this case, I think it’s funny, but it’s funny because of the one cool thing. My one cool thing is hackers. Now, no one likes the idea of them. No one. A lot of them are malicious. No one is going to ever call up a newspaper and say, “By the way, we want to admit our security sucks. We’re going to do better. Nothing happened, but it sucks. We just wanted to tell you that while you’ve been using this, it’s been incredibly insecure. Nothing happened, but now we’re going to fix it.” No one ever does that.
We unfortunately need hackers. There are the white hat guys that are trying to protect us all. There are the bad guys who are trying to steal stuff. In the end, because people, corporations are irresponsible/stupid/lazy/cheap, these things happen. McDonald’s decided, so many people apply to work at McDonald’s that they were like, “Why don’t we just offload this process to a company that uses AI and they use a chatbot? It’s probably so regimented, it sort of makes sense like, “We are going to ask these formatted questions and we’ll get these answers. We’ll sort through some things. You’re going to eliminate 94% of people because these seven things are immediate disqualifiers.”
John: It’s just documentation, et cetera.
Craig: “You can’t be currently on parole.” I don’t even know if that’s true. This company, Paradox AI, was being looked at by these security researchers, Ian Carroll and Sam Curry, and they were doing it not for security purposes. They were just like, “We just want to know, what is this like applying to an AI chatbot?” Then they were like, “While we’re here–“
John: I’m not surprised you could break the chatbot.
Craig: “While we’re here, let’s just see if we can log in to the admin system of this entire thing.” What they tried was the username admin and the password 123456.
John: Hold on.
Craig: It worked, and just like that, they had access to 64 million records, including applicants’ names, email addresses, and phone numbers. Furthermore, [laughs] they discovered that even if you weren’t that enterprising, even if you didn’t think, “Let’s try admin 123456,” when you applied, in the URL, it would create your application, and it would give you a number. It’s like a big, long number. You’ve seen those in URLs, where it’s like some long, shit numbers. They were like, “What if we just subtract one from that number and reload the page?” Yes, that’s the person’s application before us, and so on, and so on, and so on.
The company’s like [onomatopoeia] We say the same thing, like, “Yes, it’s not so bad, but we’re going to fix it. We’re going to fix it.” My one cool thing are hackers. Please, hackers, use your powers for good. I’m begging you. Without them, no one would ever know, and companies would do stuff like this all the time, which is unconscionable.
John: I think what you’re asking is hackers, but probing their intention. If they’re going into these sites with the intention of uncovering things for the good of humanity, fantastic. It’s when they go in there to–
Craig: Here’s the deal. It’s the only thing that keeps these companies honest. It is the only thing that makes them go, “We have to harden the wall around the stuff we give them,” is the idea that there are people out there trying to steal it.
John: It’s the stories that come out about them that scare the genius out of stuff, which helps.
Craig: Hackers.
John: Hackers.
Craig: Hackers.
John: Scott Frank, do you have one cool thing to share with us?
Scott: I do. The New Yorker fiction issue has two great pieces in it, one about Elmore Leonard and one about Richard Price, two of the great dialogue writers of all time. Pursuant to what we’ve been talking about today in terms of character and in terms of efficiency and in terms of describing character and so on, and the way they work, I recommend both of the pieces in the magazine. The Elmore Leonard one, Anthony Lane wrote it. It’s really terrific. It’s full of great quotes. It’s going to lead you to also read Elmore Leonard’s 11 Rules of Writing, which is this little book which begins– it’s a great list of things, one of which is–
Craig: No rules.
Scott: No, one of which is never begin a book with weather.
John: Oh, yes, sure.
Scott: It’s a great read. It’s hilarious. You’re going, “Yes.” Never use adverbs. It’s like J.K. Rowling, you read the Harry Potter. He said sneeringly, he said [unintelligible 01:12:59] never do that. It’s full of stuff.
John: Opposition to only the L-Y adverbs or all adverbs?
Scott: I think mostly the L-Y adverbs, I would say, because he’s not ruling out all adverbs.
Craig: Sneeringly.
Scott: Specifically, he said just said. Everything should just be said. It’s also full of great things. The piece that Anthony Lane wrote is terrific because it’s full of great examples of how he thought and the way he thought about story. You read it, and you just go, “Okay, that’s specificity.” The same thing with Richard Price. He’s amazing. What he does is slightly different in that they’re both big research guys, but what Richard does is he immerses himself in a culture, usually cops or city people, city government, or things like that, or a restaurant in the case of, I think, Lush Life.
He gets into this place, and the language of it and the feel of it doesn’t feel like research. It feels like character. They’re both, for us, and what we were talking about tonight it’s about really good writing. They’re not telling stories that are breaking ground. You don’t have to do that. What you have to do is just do it really well and do it in a way that feels fresh. I think both of those pieces are great examples of those two guys that I just love. Those are my two one cool things.
John: I love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Don’t know him.
John: Outro this week is by Nico Mansey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube, just search for Scriptnotes. We have a brand new one up, which is me and Aline talking about farewells. That’s great. We talk about Big Fish, and Devil Wears Prada and Terminator 2, Casablanca, Past Lives, a really good video up there on YouTube for Scriptnotes.
We have t-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week, at least until Scott Frank’s Academy opens up, and then we’re out of business.
Scott: Good.
John: You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on education and alternative schools for everything that’s not film education. Scott Frank, thank you for this film education and everyone should watch Dept. Q on Netflix. Scott, thank you so much.
Scott: Thank you for having me. It was mostly fun. [laughs]
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, Scott, Craig, we have had children go all the way up through from kindergarten through college and various different schools. Craig, you and I both started in public schools, our kids were in public schools. Scott, what was your kids’ journey?
Scott: My kids, they were in private school until high school, and then they had three different tracks. They were in a very progressive school until through eighth grade. My daughter went to an all-girls school, private school in Pasadena called Westridge, uniforms, everything. She went from the super progressive school called Sequoia over there. Then my son went to LACHSA, the LA County High School for the Arts, as a jazz drummer. He went there. Then my youngest daughter went to Thatcher, which is a boarding school, and the first person in the family ever to go away for school.
John: I remember talking with you about that because we were at some Sundance thing, and you were like, “My daughter’s just suddenly at a boarding school.” It’s like, that’s not a California thing. No one does that.
Scott: It’s not remotely. She wanted to do her own thing and didn’t want to do what her siblings had done. It’s a great school. It was at the time, at least, I don’t know now, but I loved it. It was very progressive in its social thinking and more rigorous in its academics. It was a really great place for her. It’s in Ojai and it was beautiful. It wasn’t that far.
John: My daughter went through K through five at the local public school, which was great. The sixth grade year was the year that we were living in Paris. She went to an international school in Paris, which was a really good experience. International schools, by their nature, they turn over a third of their students every year. They’re just really good at onboarding kids and getting stuff going. The fact that she made friends from around the world was terrific. Then, coming back to Los Angeles, she went through a girls’ school for 7 through 12 and then went off to college. Craig, your kids both went through public school the whole way?
Craig: My older kid switched over to private about halfway through. Then my younger daughter went public all the way through. My older daughter has not gone to college. I don’t think has any plans to go to college. My younger daughter is currently in college, but I don’t know how long that’s going to last either.
John: She’s at Berkeley, and so she’s in a very special program.
Craig: She is, and she’s doing well. Berkeley is a vocational program, and she’s doing well enough where maybe she has a vocation, and so school becomes moot.
John: I want to talk about, we had the experience of sending kids through this, but now in 2025, if you’re a parent who’s looking at the future of education and what that is, I’m just recognizing that so much of how we set up our educational system, and Scott, you have more experience with alternatives to things, is that very classic– there’s a teacher in front of the room who’s mostly just there to keep the order and this is a set curriculum, but we’re not really assessing whether kids are getting any mastery over these things. We definitely know that kids need to understand fundamentals before they can move up to certain things, but we do also just progress them when they progress.
I was in a talented and gifted program growing up, which was useful, but I was never accelerated, and I was always bored through a lot of it. I was able to get out of high school a little bit early to do some college classes, but I came so late. We had the school of Scott Frank for future screenwriters, but for all kids, do we have a vision for what a better education would be if we could just magically do it?
Scott: Also, the other thing is we’re confronted by the double negative of right now, curriculums are smaller, everything is considered a waste now, which is a mistake. What they’re teaching, they’re not even teaching really well. What is the United States in terms of an education, number 39 or some fucking thing?
Craig: However they measure it.
Scott: Yes, however they measure it. In California, certainly pretty low in terms of the rest of the country, but I think they’re cutting the funding, they’re cutting the curriculum, and the other negative is that it was a system that was designed for people who work in factories. We’ve still got this antiquated education system, and so I think that it is the single biggest threat to our country. It was until recently, but I’ve always felt like an uneducated population is a disaster, and I think that we have an uneducated population.
Listen to how people in leadership speak. It’s amazing, the language is eroding, and this is me sounding like an old guy, but I do feel like no one knows civics. When I was shooting in Scotland, the cab driver would know who Chuck Schumer was, or the Electoral College, or the Fed, and all this stuff, and they were really well versed in sort of civics. Here, I doubt people can talk about how many people are in Congress versus how many people are in the Senate, or even tell you what the three branches of government are, and so I think education has become, I think, the weak spot for us.
John: I’ve been reading articles about alternative systems that are replacing how we’re doing, and I feel like they remind me honestly, I don’t know if your kids went through Montessori preschools, but that kind of thing where you have smaller activities where you’re just focused on– everyone’s doing their own thing, but then you are coming together for stuff. Some of the most extreme ones, basically all of the classic academic education, is individual. You’re going through the assignments on your computer, in a group room, but you’re going through all this stuff, and they do all of that just in the morning, like two hours in the morning.
The whole afternoon is group activities, putting on a play, sports, if it’s a sports school, or something like that, where it’s like the whole afternoon is for you to do all the group stuff together, because they don’t have to– instead of using teachers to do– the person in front of the room, everything is just like, you’re at your computer. It’s almost like the remote learning, but a very focused time where the person’s coaching you through that stuff, and then everything is grouped in the afternoon.
I don’t know if that’s the answer, but I just feel like how we’re doing it right now, I agree with Scott, it’s like a placeholder for 12 years, and you just don’t know that– certain kids will thrive in it, but a lot of them don’t, a lot of them learn to hate school.
Craig: Maybe this will sound weirdly optimistic relative to Scott, but on very quick psychoanalysis, more pessimistic. I don’t think it’s gotten worse; I think it’s always been horrible. I think education in the United States has always been a disaster. It’s just that we used to not insist that everybody go to college, and we used to have more vocational programs, which I think are incredibly important, and also we used to have people that knew how to do things, make things, fix things. We still need people to do these things, but what we keep telling everybody culturally is that’s not good enough, and that what you really need to do is go get yourself that college degree.
Why? I don’t know. I do not know. There are plenty of things that college degrees are wonderful for, but need? If you want to be a doctor, or a lawyer, or an engineer, or if you want to, I don’t know, something that requires that level of education, sure. If you want to be an art historian, if you want to work as a molecular biologist, sure. If you aren’t one of those people, and almost no one is, we think everybody is, very few people are, I’m not sure there’s a point to that.
Our educational system, our K through 12 educational system, which used to just be geared to, let’s just give you enough stuff so that you can go into the workforce and not be a total dummy, now is about go pass these tests. Which have no bearing on anything except to help you with your standardized application, that now goes to 800 colleges all at the same time. I just read an article where the biggest problem on college campuses right now is not only are students using AI to write things, professors are also using AI to read things. Now you just have AI talking to itself while parents are plowing hundreds of thousands of dollars into this nonsense.
Go all the way back to K through 12 and start asking some difficult questions. There are a lot of things we just take for granted. For instance, everybody needs to take algebra. No, they don’t. Very few people need to take algebra. You should take algebra if you have an interest in algebra. Once you get past arithmetic, I honestly believe math should be something you opt in on. I don’t understand why we force kids who clearly have no aptitude or interest in mathematics to learn the quadratic equation. Why? Why are we doing that?
John: I hear you, Craig. I think there’s good enough evidence that most math education is just so terribly done that the reason why kids struggle to get into algebra is because all the fundamentals weren’t. They were getting advanced beyond.
Craig: What is it that most kids, and I’m going to include us here– look, I love math. I would have opted in. I love it. Why do you need that?
John: I do wonder whether some fundamental understanding of logic is actually very difficult to do without algebra.
Craig: Okay. Logic. Let’s talk about that, because that’s actually very important, because I think Scott put his finger on civics, which is critical thinking, is the topic that is the most important thing for kids to learn in school, and no one teaches it anywhere at all. It is not a curriculum topic anywhere. It is so vastly more important than trigonometry, I can’t even express. Our civilization will not be undone by only 5% of people understanding trigonometry, because only 5% of people understand it right now. It will be undone by people who do not understand how to think critically, because they’re not taught it.
John: Thinking critically is discussion, but it’s also writing, and that is an area which I do feel like the influx of AI is incredibly dangerous, because if you don’t have the process of actually having to compose your thoughts and think on the page and express yourself, you really aren’t thinking. You don’t have the ability to analyze an issue, analyze what your opinion is of something.
Scott: Also expressing yourself, also being able to write and express yourself in writing, and being able to do that, not relying on AI or anything, but being able to make an argument on paper, to being able to just speak the language.
John: I remember proving my daughter’s papers from 7th grade through 12th grade, probably earlier than that, but really 7th through 12th grade, and you just watch how frustratingly limited she was in seventh grade and how good she got by the end of 12th grade, like, “Oh, she really is genuinely thinking. She’s expressing herself with new, unique ways.” It’s just so much hard work, and it’s so necessary to do all that work, and there’s no shortcut.
Craig: Counterpoint.
John: Please.
Craig: That’s what we value.
John: It is what we value.
Craig: I do think there is a system where you take children and you say, “I’m going to arrange a bunch of things you can look at today. Pick one. What do you want?
John: That’s preschool Montessori.
Craig: Where do you go? Because there are incredibly wonderful and pivotally important people in our society who can’t write at all, they’re terrible at it, but they’re very good at–
John: Absolutely valid. 100% I agree with you.
Craig: For instance, tax attorneys, not great writers, but God bless them. They love that. My younger daughter and I both do something that neither one of us was actually rigorously instructed in as part of a curriculum K through 12. I did not take any creative writing classes because they didn’t exist in my school at all. I did take calculus. Now, that was a waste of my time, a full waste of my time. It is a requirement to be in a pre-med track, which I would argue is a waste of time for people that would make excellent doctors. We have a system that is built around a pedagogy that is stupid. It is ancient.
Our society is changing at light speed daily. Our educational system is firmly in 1930. If we’re lucky, it’s in 1950. If we’re lucky. The government system that funds it is stupid; it is underfunded. The teacher unions have too much power. They do. The structure of the way the unions and the funding collide together– you have administration funding, you have unions, and together they go swoop. In the middle are children who are not being served well. Then they all get funneled up into the worst system of them all, the college system, which is mostly there, as far as I can tell, on a broad basis to support NCAA sports. I’m not joking.
John: I will say, the three of us on this call with kids, we all had the resources to effectuate whatever was going to work best for our individual kids. All three of Scott’s kids were different. Your two daughters were different. My daughter was exactly the right kid to go through a selective girls’ school and thrive. We need fundamental changes to the system so that parents who don’t have the resources to do all those things, the time, the money, the whatever, can have a great outcome for their kids.
Craig: Absolutely.
Scott: I think that’s true.
Craig: Since we’re waving the magic wand, we should be spending far more money on education, but it’s a little bit like your antimemetic thing, nobody can really agree on it because there is no instrument through which to spend it right now that makes any sense at all. Everybody understands that the more money you pour in, the more it will be absorbed by two entities: administration and teachers. By the way, my parents were both public school teachers. I don’t want teachers to think I– I love teachers. They’re incredibly important. I’m not a big fan of the way some of the unions function, but that’s fine.
There’s a whole tenure thing in California that makes it very hard for good teachers to be hired, and it makes it very easy for bad teachers to never go away and to soak up a lot of funds. If we could figure out a delivery system, then it would be worthwhile to pour all that money in, and our country has money.
John: My mom was originally a Spanish teacher, but then, when she went back after I was old enough to be a latchkey kid, she became an ESL teacher. As an ESL instructor, she had two or three students at a time, where she had most of the day to get them up to speed on everything. Guess what? If you have an adult working with a motivated kid who’s engaged, you can Zoom through all that stuff. I just feel like with the job losses that are probably coming in a lot of different sectors, using those to educate our next generation makes a lot of sense.
Craig: If teachers, let’s say great teachers– we understood as a society, there was a system where a great teacher could thrive and get what they needed and be rewarded for it. We came and said, “We’re going to pay you guys like they pay Goldman Sachs first years.” What a glorious–
Scott: Pay them like they were even teamsters. The guy that drives the honey wagon on the set makes more money than a teacher.
Craig: A new teamster doesn’t, an old teamster does. That actually is sort of the teacher issue. Figuring out how to make it work so that teaching is a viable profession where people have protections and pensions just like we do, all of that is doable. The system, as it currently exists, is a negotiation between two enormous entities that are so far away from individual students or teachers, it’s insane.
Scott: Even well below that, what you were saying is really the problem too, which is really teachers and what they’re paid and how they’re valued is a huge issue, and-
Craig: Of course.
Scott: -awful.
Craig: Of course.
Scott: Again, one of those anti-memes that we’d say this forever, and nothing ever happens.
Craig: Nothing ever happens.
Scott: I do think that what are the fundamentals? Okay, yes, no one needs to know calculus unless you really want to learn calculus or physics or whatever. There are basic science things people should know.
Craig: Of course.
Scott: There are basic fundamental things people should know to be a functioning human in the United States. I also think that I don’t think people should learn to write like the way we write. I think it’s just the basics of how the language works. The end. Ideally, maybe speak another language, but dare I dream?
Craig: Dare you dream.
Scott: I do think that the civics and the fundamental things that in order to be a responsible, participating, voting citizen in this country, it’s all been pulled out. The attitude toward being educated. Now, if you’re educated, the cultural elite, and the intellectual elite– I want my doctor to be smarter than me. I want people-
John: At least about medicine. [laughs]
Scott: -to be smarter than me. This whole idea that people are smart or whatever, we’re in this place where it’s weird. Now education has become also the target. I agree with you about universities. I agree with you about not everybody should go. Not everybody needs to go.
Craig: No. Which would require employers to stop requiring college degrees for jobs that do not require college degrees.
Scott: That don’t need it.
Craig: That is ruinous.
Scott: Ruinous in many ways. Financially ruinous in terms of where you spend your time, where you could be either getting your life together or traveling for a bit, and then getting– whatever it is, because people are too young to know what they want when they go to college.
Craig: Being able to afford a house because you don’t have $400,000 of loans or whatever it is. It’s the system. Every year, I get angrier about it. Every year, I get more extreme about it. It’s not going to change. I know that.
Scott: No, we have the head of– what’s her name? The head of wrestling or–
John: Oh yes, Linda McMahon.
Scott: Linda McMahon is going to fix it. We’re going to–
Craig: She’s done a great job with the WWF. Bang up job over there.
Scott: Thank you. Yes.
John: By getting rid of her dad? Anyway. Thank you both for helping us solve the education crisis in America and probably worldwide. We’ll be looking forward to seeing it rolled out shortly.
Scott: School of Scott Frank, coming.
Craig: That’s the real problem.
Scott: To a mini-mall near you.
Links:
- Dept. Q on Netflix
- Scott Frank
- Scott’s last time on Scriptnotes, Episode 476: The Other Senses
- Everyone Is Beautiful And No One Is Horny by RS Benedict for Blood Knife
- Scriptnotes 639: Intrinsic Motivation
- Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading by Nadia Asparouhova
- Elmore Leonard’s Perfect Pitch by Anthony Lane for The New Yorker
- Richard Price’s Street Life by Kevin Lozano for The New Yorker
- McDonald’s AI Hiring Bot Exposed Millions of Applicants’ Data to Hackers Who Tried the Password ‘123456’ by Andy Greenberg for Wired
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
- Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
- Craig Mazin on Instagram
- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.
