Search Results for: stressing structure

The original post for this episode can be found here.

Craig Mazin: The reason I don’t like this producer is because they’re doing this thing that makes me insane, which is to elevate their personal issue to an industry-wide rule that does not exist. It is an appeal to authority they do not have, or rather, it’s an assumption of authority they do not have, and they are inviting people to just throw a wadded-up poster of Home Alone in their face. I shall do so virtually.

John August: 30 minutes earlier. Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 735 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

What you just experienced was a flash-forward, or what we call in this podcast, a Stuart Special. They are surprisingly common in spec scripts, to a degree, they can feel cliché. Today on the show, we’ll look at what makes an effective flash-forward, when to consider them, and when to run away.

We’ll also be answering a bunch of listener questions, including some from our random advice mailbag, and in our bonus segment for premium members, how to go to Hollywood parties. Craig, if there’s one thing you and I know about, it’s how to go to parties.

Craig: I can’t wait to learn.

John: Absolutely. There are some minimums. We’re going to teach you the minimum.

Craig: We’ve been to enough.

John: We’ve been to enough.

Craig: We can fill people in who have not been to Hollywood parties on what they’re really like.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: If you ever do find yourself in one, how to behave?

John: 100%. Absolutely. One of the last Hollywood parties I think I went to was premiere for second season of The Last of Us, and I did the things I think you should do at a Hollywood party. We’ll talk through those.

Craig: Great.

John: Some follow-up. Last week and the week before, we invited our listeners to participate in a ScriptNotes survey. We asked them to click a link, go through a form, and answer some questions about ScriptNotes. 333 people, Craig, answered that survey. That’s a good number.

Craig: That’s a great number.

John: About half of them were premium members. Half of them were- our regular listeners.

Craig: I’d like to say about half of them enjoyed the podcast.

John: More than half enjoyed the podcast. What would be terrible if you put the survey like, “We hate this show. Please stop doing it.”

Craig: We’re running about a 55% right now.

John: Yes, that’s what it is. Just above the minimum-

Craig: Just above.

John: We’re higher than Congress.

Craig: Yes, we’re higher than Congress.

John: That’s our goal on this podcast.

Craig: We got all those people, and what did we learn?

John: Some top-line numbers to tell you. 82% of our listeners listen to almost every episode.

Craig: Wow.

John: That’s great. Half of them have been listening for five years or longer. 40% of listeners found out about ScriptNotes through word of mouth.

Craig: That makes sense.

John: That does make sense.

Craig: We don’t really advertise.

John: We don’t advertise. The other ways people find out about it would be like Google, or it was recommended through the algorithms on Spotify, or they saw us at Austin Film Festival, that thing. Word of mouth is probably the way. I guess tell all your friends you listen to ScriptNotes. That’s probably the only way that people are going to start listening.

Craig: You at home are our Salesforce.

John: 100%.

Craig: We do offer some commission.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: 100% of 0%.

John: Yes, exactly. How old do you think our listeners are, Craig? What percentage of our listeners are college-aged? They’re between 18, 22, 23.

Craig: I would say a curiously large number. I’m going to go with 12%.

John: 3%.

Craig: Wow, okay.

John: Small?

Craig: See, I thought 12 was curiously large, so I’m not surprised that it’s not.

John: Again, this is people who filled out the survey, so there could be some of that.

Craig: A little bit of self-selection.

John: What percentage are between 35 and 54?

Craig: That’s going to be the meat there. I’m going to go with 60.

John: 65, yes, that’s 100%.

Craig: We’re an adult podcast.

John: We’re an adult podcast.

Craig: We’re a mature podcast.

John: Absolutely. What percentage of our listeners who filled out the survey have an undergraduate degree or higher? For international listeners, that’s college.

Craig: Sure. We’ll have to deduct 3% from the kids who haven’t graduated yet. I’m going to say 78%.

John: 98%.

Craig: 98?

John: 90.

Craig: Oh, 90.

John: Nine zero.

Craig: That’s rather educated.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m not surprised.

John: If we were to have advertising, which we will never have advertising, that would be a very attractive market for them. What percentage of our listeners live in the Los Angeles area?

Craig: I’m going to go with 22%.

John: 25%.

Craig: Oh.

John: Yes, see? Craig knows this stuff. What percentage work in the entertainment industry? As writers or as anywhere else in the entertainment industry?

Craig: 34%.

John: 50%.

Craig: Oh, that’s more than I thought.

John: Yes, that’s good.

Craig: Okay, that’s quite good.

John: 67% of premium subscribers gave the premium service a 10.

Craig: Oh, that’s great.

John: 90% gave it an eight or higher, which feels great. People just seem really happy in that.

Craig: I like the people who just keep paying for it, but they’re like, it’s a three.

John: It’s a three.

Craig: It’s so mid, here’s another five bucks.

John: Absolutely. I’ll never stop subscribing. We asked about some other things that I’d be interested in. Of the recurring segments, people liked most of them. There wasn’t a-

Craig: A big favorite or a-

John: Some people don’t listen to the Three-Page Challenges. “Mike, my husband, never listens to Three-Page Challenges,” which is great.

Craig: Sure. I don’t think Melissa does either.

John: No, which is fine.

Craig: Then again, Melissa mostly listens to the podcast to fall asleep. I think I’ve said this before. It’s not an insult, because I’m not around. She likes hearing my voice. Your voice apparently does not put her to sleep. My voice gives her some comfort.

John: You are her sleepcast.

Craig: I don’t think she ever makes it to the end. Then again, she rarely makes it to the end of any media before falling asleep.

John: One finding that was interesting in terms of a new thing we could try to do more of is, we could describe it as a screenplay book club, which is basically where we just talk through a screenplay. It’s a deep dive, but if we could tell people in advance that we were doing it, that we’re all reading the same script and going through it.

Craig: That’s a great idea. I think we should do that.

John: I think we should do that too.

Craig: That would be fun.

John: What we need to figure out is are we doing something that’s already been produced or an unproduced screenplay. What is the best way to do this?

Craig: I find that people tend to like things they’re familiar with. It’s a little bit abstract, I think. Probably fewer people will be interested in reading a script of an unproduced thing. What we could do is pick a script for something that’s been made that isn’t necessarily the one people talk about.

John: 100%. That makes a lot of sense. I was also thinking if there is some screenwriter who’s really good, and just for whatever reason, this thing was never made.

Craig: Well, there is that.

John: They’re willing to share it with us.

Craig: Scott Frank wants to give us that great unmade screenplay. I’d be happy.

John: Some other suggestions from the open answer sections. Someone said they would love John and Craig to get into writing phone call scenes because I always struggle with how to best represent this type of scene on the page. We should do that.

Craig: Great topic.

John: An entire episode devoted to what we could learn from the work of Stephen Sondheim, Tony Kushner, Jeremy O. Harris.

Craig: Oh my gosh.

John: Yes. We haven’t done a lot on playwriting overall, and it does feel like-

Craig: Sondheim alone deserves a 750-episode podcast, and I’m sure there are some out there, but what a wizard. What a wizard.

John: I would need to do some reading, and I need to get up to speed with his workflow and the fullness of the work because I know a lot of the musicals, but I don’t know the process behind them.

Craig: Very rigorous. Not surprisingly because if you look at the lyrics, they are so crafted. I do remember reading one interesting thing about a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. The show initially, when it was running, it began with this song about war. It anchored the audience in a position where they were like, this isn’t a funny show because it wasn’t a funny song. Everything that happened after that was a comedy, no one laughed at. Sondheim, in a panic, wrote Comedy Tonight. What became the opener, and nothing else changed, and everybody laughed at everything. It was just anchoring people.

John: As we get into our discussion of flash-forwards, that is actually one of the main things is whatever you introduce the audience to first, it’s anchoring them. It’s setting a frame for what everything’s happening around there. A flash-forward could do that or could mislead the audience in terms of what they’re expecting. Other last things, people suggest your episode on how to write a movie is a thing people can keep coming back to. I’ve always promised I will do my own version of that. At some point, when you’re gone, I will try to do a version of that because we have similar aims but different techniques.

Craig: Different methods. I have promised people how to write a television episode. One day, I’m going to have to do that one.

John: Maybe when you’re done writing television episodes. If it will ever happen.

Craig: My God.

John: It will end. Within a year, you’ll be done writing new episodes of this series for a while.

Craig: Yes, it will end, but until it ends, “Oh, man.” It’s a lot of words.

John: It’s a lot of words.

Craig: When I look back, and I put all the episodes together, it makes large volumes like big thick books on your bookshelf of pages. Oh, man. John, can you imagine if you did that with everything you wrote? Oh, it looked like the World Book. Hey, kids, remember the World Book?

John: No reference at all.

Craig: None.

John: Our listeners are 35 to 54, so they’ll know what the World Book encyclopedia was.

Craig: The 48 to 54’s will remember the World Book.

John: That 3% who are in college right now, they have no idea what we’re talking about.

Craig: The F is a World Book. That is not fire. Cringe.

John: Cringe.

Craig: Cringe.

John: Let’s talk about flash-forwards, or as we call them on this podcast, the Stuart Special. Craig, can you remind us who Stuart Friedel is, what his role was on the podcast, and how the Stuart Special became its thing?

Craig: Stuart, I believe, is the first producer of Scriptnotes. One of Stuart’s jobs, of course, as producer, is to select Three-Page Challenges. We came to note, I think probably because it was just very au courant among people writing screenplays, that so many of them began with a flash-forward where there would be some half a page or page, and then a title would say three weeks earlier, or one month earlier, or one year earlier. We came to call that a Stuart Special because we just figured, “Oh, Stuart loves these,” which he probably doesn’t.

John: No.

Craig: No, he’s indifferent.

John: The volume of what’s coming through, these are- the ones he’s picking, and he’s not the only person who encounters them. We have a listener question from Anonymous.

Drew: “I read for The Black List website, and as with your Three-Page Challenges, I get a lot of Stuart Specials. In my opinion, the flash-forwards generally aren’t interesting enough to get the audience excited about what’s to come, or they give away too much and take some of the suspense out of the story. What makes a strong flash-forward? I’m very interested to hear your thoughts.”

Craig: Let’s say you had a story where the hero, in the end, kills himself. You probably wouldn’t want to start anything like that.

John: Well, except they did.

Craig: Except they did, and I Stuart Specialed the hell out of it.

John: Go opens with a Stuart Special.

Craig: There you go. Here’s the deal with Stuart Specials. Like everything else, if it’s interesting, it works. If it has purpose, and if it needs to be a Stuart Special, if it really does add something, then it’s of value. If it’s just, I don’t know how to begin this thing, so I’m just going to do a record scratch, and then someone’s going to say, “You’re probably wondering how I got here,” then it doesn’t work because you don’t need to do it.

For me, at least, in Chornobyl, I did not want people to eventually get to the end and go, “I wonder what happens– Oh, no, he kills himself.” I’m just like, “Let’s just get that out of the way. Let’s ask ourselves, why did this guy end up doing that?” I think the way ones that work, work.

John: We’ve talked about opening scenes many times on the show, most notably in episode 493. What we were stressing is that an opening scene needs to ask a provocative question and set a promise and an expectation for what the story is about to see. I talked about with Comedy Tonight, it is setting a frame for what the experience is going to be like. You’re starting that contract with the audience in terms of, give me your attention, and I will make it worth your while, and that’s what you’re supposed to be doing.

What’s interesting about a Stuart Special is that you are essentially borrowing drama from later in the story for whatever reason. It may be because the actual chronological beginning is too quiet or too ordinary, or it doesn’t feel like where the movie’s going. That can be legitimate, but you have to really think. You are borrowing, so you’re creating a debt, and you have to make sure that you’re paying off that debt in a way that is meaningful and rewarding for the audience. Otherwise, it’s just going to feel like a cheat.

Craig: Correct. You do need to be able to tell a story moving forward that allows people to arrive at that moment again and go, “Oh, actually, now that I know what I know, I feel differently about this. I’ve learned why this was important.”
The most powerful Stuart Special I have ever witnessed is Gandhi. Gandhi begins with Gandhi being assassinated. As a kid, I was so shocked and traumatized from the jump.

Immediately, I was in a place where I felt unsafe in the best possible way, which is to say in a movie theater where you are safe, but understanding that whatever this man did, it earned him death by gunfire. What was it? In a beautiful way, you begin to forget if the story does it well, so that when you arrive there, again, you go, “Oh, no. Oh, that’s right. Oh, no. Oh, no, he’s going to die.” That’s when the Stuart Special is working well.

John: That moment where you have returned to that place that you set up in the Stuart Special, if it’s just like, “Oh, now we’re here,” that’s not so rewarding. If you’ve recontextualized that moment based on what we experienced before, now we know the characters, we know the situation, and it’s actually surprising that we got to this moment, those tend to be the ones where it really was structurally a great choice to open with that flash-forward and get us there.

We talk about the framing, Comedy Tonight, this is actually comedy, you’re supposed to be laughing. Often, a movie will get big, but if we don’t know that it’s going to be able to get big later on, those first five, 10 minutes might feel so small that it doesn’t work. I would just always urge the writer to think about, does it need to be so small to start? There may be a way to actually start with the size and scale of what the thing is going to get to in those opening moments.

Craig: Or it may be that the moment that you’re thinking of as a Stuart Special would play better if it just unfolded. Here’s an example. I love John Wick. I love that movie. It starts with a Stuart Special. I got to be honest, I’m not sure it’s necessary.

I remember seeing that Stuart Special and thinking, “Okay, well. Sure, fine.” It didn’t actually make that moment better later, and given what happens early on in the story, I don’t think I needed it. That’s really the test for me, is would this be better to just happen once or is it better if it happens twice.

John: Let’s also talk about anticipation. Because one of the things that a Stuart Special does is it creates an anticipation in the audience that we’re going to get to this moment. That can be great. It can create a sense of dread because the audience is ahead of the characters because we know that this thing is going to happen. We know the gun is going to get shot, and they don’t know they’re going to get shot.

It can also make the reader impatient because it becomes that, “When are we getting to the fireworks factory? We know that’s going to happen at some point. Come on, let’s get there now.” It can make us pay less attention to the scenes leading up to it.

Craig: Which is a good challenge for yourself as a writer, don’t let that happen. Titanic sinks. James Cameron did not let us sit there going, “Oh my God, this boat sinks. Can we just get to the sinking part?” No, he brilliantly distracted us with a lovely romance. I think that’s the challenge, right?

That’s why Stuart Specials are seductive as a writer. You’re basically saying, “I’m a magician, Penn & Teller, do this. We’re going to show you how we do this trick. Got it? Now watch us do this trick.” It’s still awesome because there’s so much sleight of hand and ingenuity that goes into it. That’s the fun challenge of a Stuart Special.

John: The last thing I’ll say about a Stuart Special is you think like, “Oh, we’re setting up the size and scale and scope of the movie,” but sometimes you’re actually just delaying the start of the movie. We’re delaying getting to know who our hero is, what their situation is because it’s all this extra [unintelligible 00:16:20] before you get there. There was a movie I watched a bit of on a plane, this was last time, with talented actors who I loved, but the opening sequence was just meant to set up the size and scale. It’s like, “I don’t care about any of these people.”

Craig: Who are these people? Why is this happening?

John: It’s not the movie I signed up for, so why are we watching this thing?

Craig: Yes. I think sometimes what happens is people make a movie, they test it, which is a horrible process. The guy who does the focus group after inevitably says, “Let’s talk about pacing. Overall, did you think the movie dragged a little bit, was pretty well paced, or moved too quickly?” No one ever says move too quickly, ever, even though many movies do. Almost always, about half the people say it was about right, and half the people say it dragged in spots because every movie will drag in a different spot for everybody. Inevitably, they will say, “It took a while for it to get going.” Correct, that’s how stories work.

Watch Star Wars, a half an hour of robots walking around in the desert. That’s how it starts, a half an hour of that and it’s slow. What do producers do? They panic, and they go, “We got to get them right away, right off the top of the bat. Take this thing, put it in the beginning, and then go three weeks earlier, and now it starts better.” No, not always. No. Sometimes, just let people, I don’t know, get there. They’ll get there.

John: They’ll get there.

Craig: They’ll get there.

John: Takeaway here, Stuart specials are not categorically bad, but if you’re going to use one, it has to really have a purpose. It has to be a purpose, not just because the start of your movie is boring. It has to be there’s a reason why you’re starting with this moment to set up the size and scale and frame of your story that is meaningful. If you’re just doing it for those things, ask yourself, could you do it with the actual present-tense start of your story? That should be your first instinct because you’re always borrowing something from later in the story, and there’s a cost to that. Sometimes the cost is 100% worth it, but so often it’s not.

Craig: It should definitely not be an excuse for you to not try to think of an awesome opening scene that would be present tense.

John: 100%. All right, let’s answer some listener questions, which is most of what we’re doing today. Do you want to start with this one about time jumps?

Craig: Yes, it feels relevant.

Drew: Michael writes, I’m writing a feature set in the late 70s that intercuts between present day 1977 and about seven months earlier. For the first roughly 40 pages, the script moves back and forth in five to 10-minute chunks, often in the same locations with the same characters. These play like different timelines more than flashbacks. My concern is clarity for the reader, especially someone skimming. The two timelines have very different tones. The present’s darker, more grounded. The earlier timeline is warmer, slightly heightened, almost nostalgic. The story really depends on tracking those shifts. What’s the cleanest, most professional way to signal these time jumps on the page?

John: That’s a common thing we run into.

Craig: That’s an extreme situation, though, because there’s so many shifts back and forth, and it’s not large jumps in time. If you go from the 1970s to the 2000s, it’ll just feel different from the way people are talking and probably what they’re doing. Seven months in time is not a lot. If it’s something really subtle like that, the choices, as far as I can tell, are– The most mundane thing is just, in your scene header, you just say what year it is. You can constantly remind people which part. I guess you’d have to go with the month if you’re just doing a seven-month shift.

John: Yes. My instinct would be, because I’ve had to do this in a couple of things, is for the things that are set further back, you put past there and don’t put present. Because the present is our present, that’d be confusing.

Craig: The present is assumed.

John: If you just put the years, I worry that you would actually– There’s two timelines, just mark one of them differently.

Craig: Seven months earlier is a weird thing to write. It’s a weird thing to write 40 times. The other big swing you could do is to just let people know right off the top of the bat, this is what’s going to happen in this script. When we’re in this timeline, it looks like a regular script. When we’re in this timeline, the font is like this.

John: Greta Gerwig does this in Little Women, and all of the past, I think, is in red.

Craig: Yes, exactly. If you can visually set it apart, then you never have to mention anything because they’ll know.

John: Because when you actually make your movie, you’re going to do things to visually distinguish those two timelines. It’s a problem of the script on the page.

Craig: This is the thing where people are, “But the rules.” I guess Greta Gerwig didn’t hear about the rules.

John: No.

Craig: You know what? There’s an interesting thing people ask, what is a common trait among successful screenwriters and as far as I could tell, the only common trait is none of us give a damn about the stupid rules. Literally none of us.

John: Related to that with Greta Gerwig, I would say that she, and this is true to every good screenwriter I know, is she actually does care about the read and she’s trying to make sure that she’s fully communicating what the movie feels like on the page.

Craig: That’s her job. That’s her job. Don’t direct on the page. Yes, do it and make sure people are feeling what you want them to feel. What you said is what she cares about is the read, not the rules.

John: Correct. Now, let’s intersperse this with some random advice. Where do you want to start with it?

Drew: Let’s start with Anais. She writes, “My oldest is going to kindergarten in the fall.”

Craig: Oh, congrats.

Drew: “Any advice for the elementary school years?”

John: By kindergarten, your kid has probably already gotten all the daycare sicknesses. Basically, they pick up all the things, which is just fine.

Craig: No one gets chickenpox anymore because of the vaccine.

John: Which is great. Listen, kindergarten is largely about learning to sit in a circle and just learning how to be around other kids and just do the things. They’ll be very basic. They’ll learn to read. They’ll learn to count and stuff. They’ll mostly just learn how to be a student and how to follow some rules and follow some structure. That should really be all your goal there.

Craig: The elementary years are the best years. This is the good news, Anais. Your child is, I assume, five or six. It’s typical kindergarten age. By the time they’re done with elementary school, they’ll be 10. Yes, some kids, especially girls around 10, will start tilting over into a different phase of life. At least five, six, seven, eight, nine, those are the best years because they’re children. They are not wrapped up in anything adolescent. They are fun and ridiculous, and they still love birthday parties. They love birthday parties. My advice to you, Anais, is, oh my God, enjoy this because, yes, man, then it gets a little crazy.

John: One luxury you have when they’re this age is that they probably get along pretty well with a lot of kids. See if you can figure out which parents you can actually stand being around because you’re going to play dates, and birthday parties, and stuff like that, where you’re going to just be around other kids’ parents a lot. If you can find friends, other parents you can stand to be around, and your kids get along, you’re happier. You’re better.

Craig: You know what? That brings to mind one last bit of advice I have for Anais. I have two kids. One is on the spectrum, one is not. Now, the thing about kids who are neurodivergent is, socially– As we know, a lot of neurodivergent people struggle socially, but children will generally struggle less socially in the elementary school years because everyone is struggling socially because they’re also young. What happens is somewhere around 11, 12, 13, what do we call the non-neurodivergent people?

John: Neurotypical.

Craig: Neurotypical kids will start to peel off and accelerate socially, and the neurodivergent kids just stay where they are, and then the gap grows, and then trouble starts. One bit of advice I have for you, Anais, is if you feel maybe your kid is neurodivergent and is struggling a little bit socially, but you’re tempted to go, “Oh, but they have friends,” keep an eye on it. Take it seriously because it’s never too early to learn skills, and it can become a significant issue for them and create a lot of stress for them and you once they hit those horrible middle school years.

John: Yes, middle school is universally bad for everybody.

Craig: Nightmare.

John: If you’re coming in there-

Craig: Absolute nightmare.

John: -with extra challenges, it’s horrible. All right, let’s go back to normal questions. Charlie in Sheffield.

Drew: “I’m very hyped for The Sheep Detectives.”

John: Congratulations on your movie, The Sheep Detectives.

Craig: Yay. In theaters.

Drew: “I noticed Craig is credited with both screenplay and screen story. What’s a screen story? Why say both? Presented like this, aren’t you just saying the same thing twice?”

Craig: It’s embarrassing. No, we’re not saying the same thing twice, but I wish we could just fold it into one thing. Here’s the brief summary. When you adapt something from source material, in this case, there is a book, Three Bags Full, written by a fantastic German author pseudonymically named Leonie Swan. I don’t even know her real name, but she’s a lovely person.

When you adapt things from source material, you get screenplay by, but if you adapt it in such a way that you create a story that is significantly different from the source material, then only through an arbitration, the Writers Guild may award the screenwriter also screen story by. The reason that’s important for us as writers is it confers separated rights, which we’ve gone through in a prior episode. If you get screenplay by and story by in an original film, they just fold it together and make it written by. Why they refuse? I’ve tried. They refuse to fold screenplay and screen story by into written by because they’re like, “Well, because written by is just for originals.” You end up with this very silly arrangement of multiple credits. I don’t like it. I apologize.

John: That’s reality. It’s one of those things which with great effort and probably a member vote, you could change. To change those credit things is elaborate and complicated. It’s a question of where do you spend your energy.

Craig: You basically have to go to the membership to get a vote, and then you have to go to the AMPTP and have them agree to make that change, also because it’s dictated by the MBA.

John: I will tell you that the AMPTP wants to say no to anything, even if it’s 100% free. It will cost them nothing.

Craig: If you offered them pizza, they would say, ” Pay us for it.”

John: Absolutely.

Craig: What, we’re buying it for you. No, their immediate answer is no. They love saying no. Everything you ask puts everything else you ask in jeopardy. Of course, if the Writers Guild had a– Many years ago, there was a mid-contract mechanism, called the Contract Adjustment Committee, which was somewhat controversial. The idea is that as little, tiny things would come up inside of the term, you could then go back and, without an official reopening of the contract, adjust some things. Now that our contract term is four years, there is perhaps some wisdom in considering the value of something like that. This is the thing you would do in that.

John: Totally.

Craig: It’s not a big money issue- it’s just a little friction point.

John: Absolutely. A related question that I think we may have answered on the podcast before, but sometimes a writer’s name will appear multiple times in the credit block because they did some writing by themselves. They also wrote with a partner, or they wrote with multiple partners on things. You see one person’s name mentioned three times in a credit block. It is weird and uncomfortable. You could imagine some scenario down the road where the mathematical credits should be a certain way, and the actual credit you see on screen could be slightly different than that.

Craig: It actually does work like that in those cases if the writers agree. If you have written by A and then end the writing team of A and B, if writer A agrees, and they should, but sometimes they don’t, it’ll just say written by A and B, but A will get more residuals because of that. That is possible, but in this case, not possible.

John: It wasn’t, yes. Weirdly, yes.

Craig: It looks like I just threw a tantrum and asked for my name to be on there twice, no. Anyway, I hope they enjoy the movie.

John: Let’s answer a listener question from Colton.

Drew: What is something that is undervalued yet offers the greatest return when it comes to health or quality of life?

Craig: Oh my gosh.

John: I will say relationships. Obviously, having a life partner is incredibly valued, but I think people know that. I would say other relationships. Relationships outside of your marriage are really important. That you have a group of people that you can-

Craig: Friends.

John: Friends, yes. Our weekly D&D game, super important. My other friends who I see independently of Mike, super important.

Craig: Yes, especially as men grow older. There’s just so much research to show that women maintain lots of friendships as they get older and men don’t, and then they just get sad and die. The answer, I would probably say there is sleep by any means necessary. People struggle with sleep, and you can get by on less than you should get. The more you get, the better off it seems you are, unless you’re depressed. If you are feeling fairly mentally healthy, getting sleep, and if you have trouble sleeping, I’m a pro-sleep aid person as well. Whatever it takes, I don’t care. Sleep. I know they’ll say, “It’s not as good of a sleep.” It’s better than not sleeping. I just think people struggle, and sleep is huge.

John: Money spent on a good mattress, a dark, quiet room, try a white noise machine. Do the things-

Craig: Yes, blackout curtains. Although we’re all trying to be energy conscious, one thing we do know is it’s hard to sleep in a hot room.

John: Air conditioning is good.

Craig: Yes.

John: Victoria has an audio question.

Victoria: I wanted to ask a question about the problematic way that unfilmable is used. I don’t think it’s a very helpful note because I almost never see it applied to visual logic issues. It’s usually something that’s directed at– The camera can’t see it, so it’s not real. I also see it frequently criticizing a screenwriter’s use of internal character narrative. I really like to use that, and I like reading it. Not a ton of it.

One of my favorite examples of this is in the first Chornobyl script, where Bryukhanov is said to envision a very likely fate for himself. An inquiry, an arrest, a trial, a bullet. I love that because I feel it. I feel it from the script. That said, I do think there is a valid note that applies to the invisible information being laid out for the reader that the viewer has no way of getting. I guess my question is, when do you decide to add detail to a character’s internal world, and when is the information on the script readable but not legible to the viewer? Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you. That’s a good question. I’m certainly a criminal when it comes to this. I do this all the time. Victoria, to me, the big difference in what I would call a annoying and useless unfilmable and a helpful, useful unfilmable is when it informs the actor so that they can perform something because then it is filmable. Their inner thoughts, their inner feelings, and emotions come out.

Most of the time, I think good direction is not about how to say the words. It’s about how to feel or what you might want to feel here, and it comes through. It is filmable. That line, for instance, Con O’Neill made that clear in his performance. It was filmable. What I don’t particularly find useful are these omniscient, novelish narrations where a character is introduced and then the writer says, there are so-and-so who thinks they’re this and thinks that, but really they’re this or really they’re that. Well, that actually is not filmable because you’re not their writer. If it’s something the character is feeling in the moment, or thinking in the moment, then yes.

John: I would add to that, if the audience is going to experience that visually in watching the movie, then it’s not unfilmable. Sometimes you’re really portraying, if you’re talking about what this small village feels like and you’re giving description to it that may not directly match what this is, but it can be a metaphor that just helps us understand what this is going to feel like when we actually see it, and it gives information to the director-

Craig: Absolutely.

John: 100% valid.

Craig: Absolutely. It’s the [unintelligible 00:33:28] doesn’t know it is the classic, right? That’s the most cliché, horrible, unfilmable there is. So-and-so arrives, “hot but doesn’t know it.” How the hell do I know that she doesn’t know it? How is that possible that I can show that she doesn’t know she’s hot? I’m not sure. Anyone has actually ever not known they were hot anyway? Maybe some people do, but there’s only one way for me to find out. That’s for her to be shocked when somebody thinks she’s hot. Otherwise, it’s useless. It’s useless. Things like that, we avoid as best as we can, but anything that would help the actor, the production designer, the director, the costume designer, the composer making the score, anything that helps them is filmable.

John: Absolutely. I will also say there’s things you might include in an outline or a treatment that don’t make it through to the screenplay because those documents, they’re preliminary, and you can swing bigger in some of those ways because it’s not-

Craig: They’re meta.

John: They’re meta, yes. They’re talking about the scene rather than being the scene itself.

Craig: Exactly. Yes, they’re meta. Whereas the screenplay is the drama, and you can say whatever you want in an outline. You can interrupt yourself and say, “Okay, imagine this is like from Breaking Bad except blah, blah.” You can do whatever you want in an outline.

John: That would be dumb in a screenplay. It’s referencing another movie in your screenplay-

[crosstalk]

John: Yes. Final bit of random advice from Nick.

Drew: “What advice would you give to your older self?”

Craig: Didn’t we just do this?

John: We did our younger selves.

Craig: Oh, this is older self.

John: Older self, yes. I don’t know. I guess I would have to do it based on my observation of older people and things that frustrated me about them, or things I’ve seen that worked really well for them. Let’s go on the positive.

Craig: Okay.

John: Dick Zanuck, who produced Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Big Fish, and many of Tim Burton’s movies, and was just an absolute mensch, I would say, don’t retire just because it’s what’s expected to happen to you. He genuinely loved working and producing movies for Tim Burton. It gave him so much joy, and so he didn’t stop just because he was old. He was loving doing it, and so why stop? He also called his sons every day, no matter where he was, and I love that for him.

Craig: Oh, how old am I?

John: You can decide.

Craig: Well, I’m going to project forward to quite old. My advice is, don’t bother doing a whole bunch of stuff to try and live longer. You’re not going to. Just keep rolling. Just keep rolling, you’re good. You’re good. No one lives forever. No one lives forever. What are you going to do? You’re going to start going to the gym every day? No, you’re not. At 80, you’re going to decide that’s when I’m going to start?

John: People don’t fundamentally change. I think that’s an important thing to remember. When I see people say, “Oh, well, maybe I’ll change.” No, they won’t change. They never will change.

Craig: No, old dog. No new tricks required. I would advise myself to eagerly go to any lifetime achievement ceremony that might come my way- because that’s actually the good sign that you’re done. That’s when you know they don’t want you anymore. They start giving you the thank you for your service awards.

John: Let’s go to another audio question. This one’s from Robert.

Drew: This one’s also follow-up from our conversation about avoidance in episode 731.

Robert: Hi. I just listened to your episode on protagonists’ motivation being driven by their desire to avoid things. I was just wondering if you have any tips for how to differentiate between a character driven by avoidance and a character that appears to have very little agency. I’ve received notes on a story that I am currently in the middle of and about half the people respond to the character positively and can totally understand why he’s doing what he’s doing, while about the other 50% of people seem to very much think that the character doesn’t have any agency, that they’re very much just reacting to everything around them and therefore is not very likable. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated. Thank you so much.

John: Let’s recap what we were talking about before with avoidance. The thesis of that episode, 731, was that we tend to think about characters going off on a quest and wanting to do and achieve things, but often they’re just trying to avoid uncomfortable situations. In agency, we’re talking about a character’s ability to take action that moves them in a direction they want to move in, so they proactively go after a thing.

They’re related concepts, but they’re not quite the same. A prisoner has very little agency over certain aspects of their life. A person trapped in a bad domestic situation might have little agency over certain things. Yet, as an audience, we get frustrated by watching that person because we feel trapped there with them.

Craig: Yes. This is a bit different than the question of wanting something or avoiding something. This comes down to– Robert is describing what we would often call a passive character, which is a very easy character for people giving notes to pick on, and here’s why. Passive characters don’t seem to demand our attention because what we’re looking for in stories are those special moments in someone’s life where something important happens.

There are some art movies where you just sit there and watch someone stroll around through some random week of their life. I don’t like those. I like movies where stuff happens. When you have a character who doesn’t have agency, at a minimum, you have to give them a desire, a hope, some need. Even if you were to say, “Here’s a story about a prisoner, they’re never getting out, ever, and there’s no way to get out.”

Then the question is, how do they survive here? Can they find love? Can they find some spiritual peace? Can they figure out how to handle their own guilt or remorse? Can they seek amends? What is it that they want to do? They need something or are they just trying to stay alive, which would be avoiding death? Either way, what you really can’t do is just get pushed around and react without any goal.

John: Yes. I want to stick up for and defend two different groups. The groups who might say, well, there’s a whole range of cinema that is valid, which has passive heroes, passive protagonists. They’re just sure seeing their daily life. That’s absolutely valid. That’s not what we focus on on this podcast, which is movies where things happen, movies where people go on a one-time journey that is transformational, which can absolutely happen in a prison movie.

You’re right in saying that there has to be a point of view, a perspective that the movie has on this character and why we should be caring about this character and why we’d be so interested and invested. I want to defend the people giving these notes, saying, “I didn’t connect or didn’t relate because this character just wasn’t doing anything. It wasn’t moving the ball forward. That was my set of expectations.”

Craig: That’s what I want.

John: Yes. As we said from the start, from Comedy Tonight, you’re setting a frame on why we’re supposed to be paying attention to this character and his situation, what the journey is going to be. Maybe that’s really the issue is you’re not properly establishing what it is we should be looking for in this movie with this character balling things forward.

Craig: Great. Great points. There is a genre that I would call person trapped in lunacy. Kafka writes these stories beautifully. Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil is insane and bananas. Jonathan Price is a cog in a massive machine who slowly starts to realize that he’s a cog in a massive machine. Then, of course, it changes him.

There’s also the after-hours/something wild type of story where an average Joe ends up in a series of wild circumstances that they weren’t expecting. They are pushed around, except inevitably they’re also in desperate need of this, and they fall in love. The point of the story is you need to live.

These are essential, I think, to traditional storytelling. Certainly, if you hand somebody a script that doesn’t have that, give them fair warning. This is not one of those scripts. If you don’t like stories where nothing happens, this one isn’t for you.

Drew: It’s fair. A question from Mare. I’ve been working on an original screenplay that features a nine-year-old girl. I’ve had a few professionals in the field read it and provide really helpful notes. One producer director argued that, in no uncertain terms, that unless I were to direct a film about a child protagonist, a film featuring a child would never be made and could never be sold. He suggested that if it was something I needed to write, that I should write this as a book instead of a screenplay. I’d appreciate your insight on this opinion. I can’t shake the story. Most of the stories I’m drawn to feature younger people coming of age.

Craig: John, what do you think about this producer and his interesting insight into Hollywood?

John: This producer can say, like, “I wouldn’t make this movie.”

Craig: Totally. Not a problem.

John: That’s true, and that’s valid. Is there somebody who would make this movie? Yes.

Craig: They’ve made movies about children, starring children, since time immemorial. Shirley Temple, for God’s sake. Not to mention Little Man Tate and Sixth Sense and the movie where Macaulay Culkin died from a bee sting. Spoiler alert. There’s been so many movies.

John: Home Alone.

Craig: Home Alone. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There’s so many movies starring, I don’t know, are they specifically nine? I don’t know. Yes. How old was Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone?

Drew: Probably nine or 10.

Craig: Let’s Google that. I’m tempted to say about this producer, what an idiot. I’m going to. What an idiot.

Drew: Macaulay Culkin was nine years old.

Craig: He was nine years old in Home Alone, one of maybe the most successful family film of all time. The reason I don’t like this producer is because they’re doing this thing that makes me insane, which is to elevate their personal issue to an industry-wide rule that does not exist. It is an appeal to authority they do not have, or rather, it’s an assumption of authority they do not have. They are inviting people to just throw a wadded-up poster of Home Alone in their face. I shall do so virtually. Ha.

John: Is it valid to say it’s harder to make a movie with a nine-year-old protagonist? Sure, but it’s hard to make any movie. Come on.

Craig: They’re all hard.

John: Every movie’s hard. The thing, Mare, you should take away from this is try to get your movie made. Also, hopefully, this script is great, and that this is a sample for you to do other stuff too. You should not avoid writing the thing you want to write because it has a child protagonist. Stand by Me.

Craig: Stand by Me, for God’s sake. I’m going to actually get angry about this. Mare, broad advice for you now for your life. Anyone who says you can never do blankety blank in Hollywood, especially when it’s something that you know you can, don’t argue. Just walk away.

John: They’re not the person for you.

Craig: Cut them out of your life. I don’t know who that producer is, but if they are successful, it’s a mistake. It’s literally a cosmic error.

John: There’s producers who would say, “Oh, you can’t make a no-budget horror film,” because it’s not a thing they don’t want to make.

Craig: Exactly. You could say, I’m not going to make it. You could definitely say it’s really hard making a movie with a nine-year-old kid as the star because the restrictions on shooting with children are very specific and very onerous.

John: Also, well-intentioned and good because–

Craig: Oh, necessary. Yes. We don’t want child labor laws to be violated. It’s tough. We have kids on our show all the time, usually in smaller parts. We just know, here’s the deal. The time they take to ride there, then the time that they’re in the makeup chair, the time it takes to take the makeup off, that plus lunch, plus their teaching time, plus their mandated rests, and they can’t work more than eight hours total anyway, including all that stuff, you end up maybe four hours shooting with them, maybe?

John: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory had five kids. How challenging.

Craig: It ends up costing way more money to make the same amount of movie with a kid than it would with an adult, like you said, for good reason. Still, people do it all the time because it works all the time. I’m not saying it doesn’t fail all the time, but when I say all the time, I mean lots of the time throughout history.

John: Let’s do another audio question. This one from Sydney.

Sydney: Hey, John and Craig. My name’s Sydney. My question is craft-related. I find that in my scripts, I often describe a lot of movement in the action lines, like a character walks this way or crosses the room. I’m actually noticing I end a lot of scenes with a character leaving a room or walking away from another character if they’ve just had a confrontation. I just feel like I do that very often, especially with the ending the scenes that way. Then I don’t know how to end them.

Is it better to just end on the dialogue line or is that cutting it off too early? Sometimes it feels like that’s almost getting out too early, but maybe that’s just because I’m used to ending it with someone walking away. I’ve been looking at other scripts for movies or pilots I’ve seen just to compare what’s on the screen versus what they wrote in that scene. I did just want your guys’ input to see what you thought.

John: It’s because she’s noticing a pattern, and it’s bugging her a bit that she’s doing it. It’s valid. Listen, characters walking away in a scene, it’s a choice, but if you’re doing it in every scene, something weird.

Craig: It’s a rough choice, specifically for ending a scene. If somebody walks away with purpose, if it is shocking that they walk away, if they walk away and slam a door behind them, if they walk away and disappear into a fog, sure. If they finish an argument and then turn and walk away, you’re just watching that. Then the question is, okay, let’s imagine us in the movie theater, where are we going to put our camera? At that point, you need to really end the scene on how the person who is being left feels. That’s more important than just somebody walking away because you’re not just going to watch people walking. It’s shoe leather there at the end of a scene.

John: I would ask, Sydney, if we’re following the person who’s walking away, a good choice can often be they have the confrontation, cut, and then we find them walking away, and then we can focus on them. The reaction they don’t want to show to the other person, and what that is, that’s a chance for us to get into that space. Just look at what you’re doing there. In terms of the movement within a scene, Craig and I are both huge fans of screen geography. Let people move around, let us see where things are going.

You might worry like, oh, you’re going to box people in on the blocking, you’ll figure it out. It gives a sense of what the flow is in the space and what things are like because if it feels like two characters are just standing, talking to each other in a scene, it’s not good.

Craig: No. If you don’t know how physically it’s possible for these things to happen, you end up with directors on the day just coming up with stuff which they seem to love and which I don’t.

John: Lots of bits.

Craig: I think it’s important for the screenwriter to give everybody something real to hang onto. Then, when you get there, if it’s not quite working, you adjust. I do that to my own writing all the time when I’m directing, but at least have a basis that is set in reality. Moving people around, where are they standing, Lindsay Doran’s most important question. You say two people are standing in a bar. Where in the bar? Against the bar? By a wall? Why are they standing by a wall? Why aren’t they sitting? How did one get there so quickly from all the way across the room?

These questions are worth asking. When you end a scene, one thing that you mentioned is, okay, you can cut to the next thing. Sydney, don’t think about the ending of your scene as the ending of a scene. Think about the ending of the scene as one side of a cut. The other side of the cut tells us something about how you ended, and how you ended is going to tell us something about what you see next. If you start thinking that way, for instance, if you have somebody walking away and the next shot is somebody else walking toward us, or somebody else walking away, that’s a different person, or there’s some sort of contrast, that could be interesting.

Think about the relationship between what we call the A side of the cut and the B side of the cut.

John: If you had two walking scenes back-to-back, it could work, but it’s also going to feel weird.

Craig: It’s going to start getting a little silly, isn’t it?

John: Yes, it is. You got to think about that. What’s also good that you recognize here, Sydney, is movies are not plays. You don’t have to enter and exit characters all the time. The film does that for you, which is great.

Craig: Last bit of advice for you, I love a door.

John: Love a door.

Craig: Love a door. I am obsessed with doors. I write doors all the time. I know there are things that I do that, have you seen that Aaron Sorkin supercut where he just reuses dialogue all the time? It’s all really good. I don’t do that, I don’t think, but just giving away one of my crutches. People will have a conversation with somebody, then turn, walk away, get to a door, stop, turn back, say one last thing, and then go, and the door closes, and that’s an end of a scene. A door closing, scene’s over. I like that. It’s better than just walking.

John: We’re going to have Elaine come on the podcast shortly to talk about The Devil Wears Prada. I think I noticed in her movie, which I may not have time to bring up in our conversation, is glass doors. There’s a lot of times where people are walking– You’re able to see somebody through a glass door, but not open the door, or the decision to open a door or not open the door, and so that movement becomes really important in what they can see and what they can’t see. I love it.

Craig: Doors.

John: Doors.

Craig: Doors.

John: Helpful. Doors and windows.

Craig: Big fan of doors.

John: Let’s answer a question from Andrew.

Drew: I searched your transcripts and looked in the script notes book, but I haven’t found an instance of you two tackling best practices for cutting down your screenplay. You mentioned how vast Scott Frank’s early drafts are.

Craig: [laughs] Poor Scott.

Drew: It’s well-known to me. That’s reality.

Craig: Yes, it is. It’s quite well-documented.

Drew: My question is, how does he trim those back? Everything in my script seems so important and special. I’ve condensed many scenes, and I’ve arrived late, and I’ve left early. All right.

John: This is a great question. I think we should save it for his own marquee topic. I know you’ve written on the blog about cutting. To give you a taste of what’s to come, it’s like you can make the small changes, but ultimately, if you really need to cut a lot, you need to make big changes. You need to cut scenes and sequences rather than trying to just take all the fat out of existing scenes.

Craig: It’s definitely a topic worth its own episode, because I think if you have a lot to cut, it is either an indication of the nature of your process or a problem with the story itself and the way it was conceived in the first place, if you have a lot to cut. For some people, it is part of their process, and they are aware as they’re writing that, okay, I’m not sure if this is going to make it in or not, but I need it now. Sounds like, in this case, I like all of this. Well, okay. Then I suspect there’s actually an unseen problem here that we will dig into and diagnose at a later time.

John: At a later time. Let’s try one cool thing. My one cool thing is a blog post by somebody named Malmsbury.

Craig: Malmsbury?

John: Malmsbury. M-A-L-M-S-B-U-R-Y.

Craig: Love it.

John: What they’re doing is they’re looking back at a cookbook, Microwave Cooking for One, which is a book from the mid-1980s.

Craig: My heart just sank.

John: It garnered momentary attention on the internet as being the world’s saddest cookbook.

Craig: Honestly, most microwave cooking is for one, but that is such a profoundly sad title.

John: Well, you would think so. It’s written by Marie T. Smith, and she wrote this book, Microwave Cooking for One. What I like about this blog post is it’s going back and just resuscitating and reframing, basically, how to think about this cookbook because the author goes through and actually makes a bunch of the recipes. It’s like, this woman, Marie T. Smith, was an absolute genius. In terms of, if you take the mandate of, okay, what is the best way to cook everything on earth in a microwave oven? She just figures it out and basically, like, do this for seven seconds and this, this. She has all these techniques for browning and crisping things in a microwave.

It is basically a pay-on to the power of technology and the wonders of a microwave oven.

Craig: I get that it would be incredibly useful. It’s just the title.

John: Oh, it is.

Craig: Why did it need to be for one? You know what I mean? If she’s so good at stuff, why limit it to just– You could just say, if you’re going solo, do this. If you’re cooking for two to four, do this. I mean, for one? Oh.

John: The blog post does go into the whole, the one of it all, because also, like cooking for two, it’s more than twice as long to do it because it’s not like heating an oven or a fry pan, where you can sort of do, it’s just as quick to do it for two as for one. It actually is different. We don’t reward domestic home life optimization and stuff to where we should.

We don’t acknowledge like, oh, there’s actually, it’s like a scientific rigor applied to things you don’t normally apply it to.

Craig: Some great early life hacks.

John: Yeah, completely. It’s a person, if she had lived at the YouTube era, we would celebrate her as like, look at this woman who’s figured out how to do all this stuff.

Craig: You can’t shake the image of somebody softly crying while the little thing inside the microwave rotates and just waiting. It’s still always three minutes left. It is eternally three minutes to go.

John: Craig, I don’t know if you’ve witnessed this phenomenon where you have work crews on a site, like they’re doing stuff at your house. Sometimes they will bring a microwave oven to plug it in so that they’ll have a microwave oven on their truck, and that’ll heat up all their food, which I just find terrific and remarkable. I just love it.

Craig: Oh, a little microwave is powerful. I mean, look, we’re old enough to remember what life was like before them.

John: Absolutely. I remember our first microwave.

Craig: Yes. The first time you microwave something, you lost your mind.

John: Incredible.

Craig: I feel the same way about the air fryer. The air fryer is just incredible.

John: Yes, we don’t have an air fryer.

Craig: It is spectacular.

John: Yes, everyone knows that.

Craig: Basically, it’s like a microwave, not technologically, but practically, it’s like a microwave that takes maybe twice as long as a microwave would, but tastes 10 times better.

John: In many ways, I was reading different blog posts about technologies and what’s the earliest the technology could have been invented. The air fryer, it’s just a hairdryer mounted differently.

Craig: It’s just a massive convection air dryer thing that works so well.

John: We could have had them 30 years ago. It’s a while that it was invented.

Craig: There it is. My sister introduced me to the air fryer many years ago. We played D&D, and we had pizza. We often do. I always over-order pizza because I’m a Jew, and if you run out of food, you go to hell. We don’t even have hell, but they make hell for you. I end up freezing all these slices of pizza, and putting pizza in a microwave is sad. Putting pizza straight from the freezer, a slab, like a piece of slate, put it in an air fryer, eight minutes later, brand new pizza, like it just got made. It’s spectacular.

John: Lacking an air fryer, what we do is heat up the oven with a pan in there so the pan gets hot, and then you put it on there, 400 degrees, a few minutes, delicious. Air fryer.

Craig: Air fryer, that’s great.

John: Craig, what’s your one cool thing?

Craig: As is often the case, I have a game. Now, as everyone knows, I’m rather obsessed with Baldur’s Gate 3. Because I love what Larian, the company that made Baldur’s Gate 3, did, I went back, and I played Divinity 2 and then Divinity 1, which were the prior games. Of course, I will play the upcoming Divinity, but I’m out of Larian games to play. Of course, I go on my Steam Deck like, “Let’s say you love Larian games. What’s like it?” The answer is, here’s something like it. It is. This is not at Larian level.

I appreciate what this company is doing. They’re very small, actually. It’s a company called Tactical Adventures. Do they have the polish of a Larian game? No. I think the entire company’s 35 people, or something, where Larian, I believe, employs hundreds of people. They made a game called Solasta II. They made Solasta I: Crown of the Magister. Then they made Solasta II. It is in early access right now, which is how Larian does their games, too. They don’t give you the entire game upfront. They give you a chunk of it. Then they’re using it to get feedback, debug, advanced features.

It works like Baldur’s Gate very much, what I really enjoy about it is that it is not just based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset and encyclopedia the way that Baldur’s Gate was. It is firmly, very strictly attached to 5th Edition rules. The way we play, that super crunchy way, that’s how this works. I actually find it on that level fun. I wish them great success. I believe in little companies trying things. Not everything has to be Baldur’s Gate 3.

John: Totally. You’re playing on Steam Deck. Is it just a Steam game?

Craig: I’m playing on Steam Deck. It is available for platform. I guess it’s available on PC as well. I guess everything that’s on Steam is theoretically PC-ish.

John: I’ve not been using my Steam Deck at all recently, so maybe I’ll break that and try it.

Craig: I’m obsessed. I’m obsessed with the Steam Deck. I know I could sit down and play, and I will. Look, once Grand Theft Auto 6 hits, I’m not going to be on my damn Steam Deck. I’m going to be playing on the biggest screen I have on my PlayStation, going crazy.

John: Have you hooked up your PlayStation to your big screen downstairs?

Craig: No. My home used to be owned by Kevin Williamson. Kevin had set up a Sony PlayStation down there to go on the big home theater screen, but it was an older PlayStation. When I moved in, I was like, “Ahh.” It’s such a big screen. It’s overwhelming.

John: Yes, that was my worry.

Craig: Rather than feel like I’m being punished by the game I’m playing is so big, even the sound down there is great, it’s a little bit better on just a good old-fashioned, big-ass, wall-mounted. I play upstairs in a little gaming nook. It’s my gaming nook.

John: Everyone needs a gaming nook. That’s the advice we needed to–

Craig: Everyone needs a gaming nook. Doesn’t matter how big or small.

John: Whatever your game is.

Craig: Doesn’t matter.

John: Could be a puzzle nook. Could be whatever you want to do.

Craig: Whatever. You got to have one.

John: Got to have a nook. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. If you want to include an audio version of your question, go for it. 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.

The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. I just saw you put through an email that we’re on another college’s curriculum. I think it was at University of Missouri, Kansas City, I think.

Craig: University of Missouri, Kansas City. Yes. Those students have to buy the book.

John: Those students have to buy the book. That’s how we do it. One by one. Apparently, the first time they’ve ever signed a book, and the book is ours.

Craig: Well, that’s great. Thank you, university.

John: You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with 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.

Craig: 80% of you really enjoy it.

John: Yes, which is fantastic.

Craig: Thank you for continuing to enjoy it.

John: I think it was more like 90%.

Craig: 90% of you enjoy it.

John: That’s a very high number. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those backup episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Hollywood parties.

Craig: Woo-hoo.

John: Craig, it’s always a Hollywood party with you.

Craig: Aw. Thank you.

John: Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Drew.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. The question was how to go to Hollywood parties.

Craig: Got to go to Hollywood parties.

John: I’m taking this as not to how to get invited to Hollywood parties because–

Craig: No. We can’t help you with that.

John: We can’t help you with that. We can talk about, okay, you’ve been invited to a Hollywood party. It could be a premiere party. It could be a for-your-consideration party. It could be some producers throwing a party at their house. It could be a friend of ours doing a New Year’s Eve party. You’re going to a Hollywood party. What to do? Let’s start with when do you arrive?

Craig: If it’s a premiere, you have to get there to see the movie.

John: Except the thing to point out is they always start late. You can get there and be waiting for an hour in the theater.

Craig: They will tell you that you have to be at the theater by 7:30 PM under penalty of death. Around 7:50, the biggest star arrives, starts walking the carpet, and doing interviews. I’ve been to some that have really gone late, but typically speaking, it’s actually not too bad. A typical premiere will start about 30 minutes after. Then there’s always a speech or two. They will close the doors on you, though. Better to be on time for those things, and what I like to do is, you get to a premiere, and the theater lobby will be choked with people all yip, yip, yip, yip to each other. Oh my God, me, me, me, me. Even at premieres for things I’ve done, I don’t know almost anyone there.

I’m like, “Who are all these people?” I just go into the theater, and I sit down. It’s nice and quiet in there for a while everyone’s, me, me, me, me in the lobby. If you like chit-chat and being smashed up against people, sure, the lobby.

John: The party would be after the screening, generally. Ideally, it’s at the same venue or an easy walk. I always hate it when there’s a premiere someplace and you have to drive to a second thing.

Craig: It’s pretty rare, but yes, typically, it’s a little walk. If it’s a bigger premiere, it’s almost always a little walk because you have to get to some larger venue, but they’re pretty good about keeping it close by. The party will start technically immediately after the end of the movie. It will take possibly an hour or two before it really gets going. I don’t know what happens in that hour or two. Where did everyone go? Did they just go somewhere else and then go to the party? I’m always befuddled.

John: I’m thinking of two different parties, party for the first Iron Man and the party for the second season of The Last of Us, which were the premiere was at the Chinese and the party afterwards was at the Roosevelt Hotel, which is great because it’s an easy walk to get over there. A gladiator, too. It’s also the same situation. Yes, it’s weird. You get there, and it’s empty. It’s like, why did it take–

Craig: Did I make a mistake?

John: Then it does fill up.

Craig: It fills up. What happens in part is when the movie ends, if you are involved in the production, as you’re walking out, 4,000 people stop you to tell you how wonderful you are. Some of them you actually want to talk to, and you haven’t seen for a while, and you’re so happy that they’re there. You don’t know. Some of them you’re supposed to know, and you don’t know, but you get stuck. Everybody gets bottlenecked and stuck. Of course, you also naturally want to talk to the people that you’ve made the show with.

If you’re a guest at one of these things, just be aware you’re going to have to weave your way around this thick chunk of people. If you feel like congratulating someone, congratulate someone that isn’t currently being congratulated or is being under-congratulated. The actors don’t need more. Go find the writer. Then make your way to the party and enjoy the fact that there’s not a big line for food, and you could probably get a drink pretty quickly.

John: Let’s say we’re now at the party. I want to stress that you may have some agenda. Just think about what your agenda is. At a party, generally, I want to congratulate the person who I want to congratulate. I wanted to stay at your party until I could see you and say, congratulations, Craig.

Craig: Exactly. Bye. [laughs]

John: Same to Favreau on the first Iron Man and through the second. Once I’ve done that, I can leave.

Craig: You can leave.

John: I can leave.

Craig: You can leave. It’s up to you.

John: Absolutely. I can stay. I can go. Even if it’s not a “congratulate the person” party, it’s worth thinking about who am I expecting to see there, because that way I can think, oh, I’ll look out for that person and be able to have those conversations. For example, I was at the Interstellar premiere, and I didn’t know Christopher Nolan at that point, but I did know Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan. Oh, they’re going to be there. I could look for Lisa. We actually just had a great time chatting there, which is great. It started our friendship really more there. That’s the good thing about one of these parties. It’s an excuse to hang out with people you actually wanted to hang out with.

Craig: Now, if you are somebody who is going to your first premiere and you’re not expecting to know many people at all, it’s perfectly fine to go there. Don’t go alone because that’ll get awkward. Go there with somebody you can talk to, and inevitably, you will bump into somebody who will say something, and you might meet somebody, and it’s just like any other party. Feel free to compliment people who are involved in the movie. If it’s a famous person or it’s the director or whatever, somebody you want to get a selfie with, it’s cool. It’s fine. What you don’t want to do is just talk their ear off.

They don’t want to talk to you. They don’t know you. They would much rather talk to people they know. It’s as simple as that. In the case of actors, other famous people love talking to famous people.

John: A good conversation starter is, “Did you work on this?” If you don’t know, “Did you work on this?” Great. What was your problem? I really like that part of it. Or if they didn’t work on it, it’s like, oh, then why are you here? What did you like? All that stuff. What’s fun for you?

Craig: What brought you here?

John: What brought you here? Always a safe bet.

Craig: How did you end up at this fun party? Then someone explains their connection. You explain yours. It just works like any other party. You described a different kind of party, though, which is what I would consider the Hollywood party, which isn’t an organized event by a studio. This is more like a producer, a director, an actor is having some big party at their big house. You know somebody who brings you. You’re going to your first–

John: Good plus one.

Craig: Yes. This is like a real party. Now what do you do?

John: Walking back through examples of when I’ve done that situation, it’s more just like a normal party, which you’re basically just figuring out what is the point of entry for a conversation to have with somebody around me who looks interesting, who I want to talk with. That’s just a basic skill that’s not always easy to do.

Craig: Certainly, you should have the awareness that unless you do know a lot of people there or you are, in your own way, a fascinating human being, nobody wants to talk to you. You have to earn people’s interest. Be cool and don’t push yourself on people. Certainly, allow people to mingle. Don’t monopolize anyone’s time. Just be nice about it. That’s all.

Here’s another bit of advice. Those parties always start much later than you say, so show up later. Here’s something that happened to me at a party. I want to give people, this is my, you’re allowed to leave. It was the Golden Globes or something like that, I think. There was this big party that CAA was throwing at the Chateau Marmont.

They have one of those big rooms that they open up. My agent was like, “You got to come.” I’m like, “Okay, I will.”

John: I feel a dread. Those upper rooms, the Chateau Marmont, lovely view, but come on.

Craig: It started well. I got in the elevator, and Tobey Maguire was there. I thought, “Oh, this is cool. I’m in an elevator with Tobey Maguire. He’s Spider-Man. This is awesome.” We get out of the elevator, and we walk over to the room, and the door opens. It was a joke. You know the Star Trek episode Trouble with Tribbles?

John: Yes.

Craig: Is that what they were called?

John: Yes, Tribbles, yes.

Craig: Yes, where they just fill every space. The door opened, and it was just humans. You couldn’t even go anywhere. It was the most packed nonsense I’ve ever seen.

John: Sundance parties can be that way, too.

Craig: Here’s what happened. I said, “Okay,” to myself, and this is like, it’s full of famous people. It’s full of executives, full of people I know. I’m just going to go in there, see my agent, show him that I came, and leave. I slowly make my way. It took me 15 minutes to get through this throng just to the outside area where I could breathe a little, hoping that he would be there.

I did see him, but he wasn’t there. He was on the other side of the room. I went, “No, I’m done.” I spent another 10 minutes walking out. I spent 20 minutes at the party, walking in and walking out. You are allowed to leave. I did not want to be there.

John: You know what? You sent a text like, “Hey, I couldn’t make it over to you.”

Craig: Oh, I told him. I was just like, “Bro, you know me. You know this, I will not do this.” If you are at a party in Hollywood that is jam-packed with people, go. My feeling is like nothing good can happen here. There’s going to be an earthquake or a fire. That’s how my mind works.

John: You’ve had experience with Hollywood parties, too. What are we missing?

Drew: A little bit. My question was, I’m in this weird pocket where someone will be like, “Oh, I have to introduce you to this person who’s the director or someone, and then they don’t want to talk to me.” You have this weird introduction where you’re like, “Oh, hi, and there’s supposed to be this excitement,” and it very quickly fizzles. When do I leave? Because I understand what’s happening. I also, there’s another person here who’s introduced me, and I feel like I need to keep the ball in the air.

Craig: In those situations, my advice would be when you get introduced to that person, tell them why you’re so happy to meet them. Say something about them and what they’ve done that you think is great, and shake their hand and say, “It was great meeting you.” Rather than, okay, you’re probably wondering who I am and what I’m about, because as you know, they’re not. Everybody likes being complimented.

Drew: I keep trying to make a human connection, and I’m like, “Actually, I don’t think this is the time for that.”

John: The person that’s trying to introduce the two of you, are they trying to get rid of you? Are they trying to slough you off, or did they come over to you and say, “Oh, Drew, I want you to meet this person?” They’re trying to be–

Drew: In my situation, it’s usually a friend is the director’s assistant or something like that. It’s like, “I would love for you to meet this person who I’ve been telling you about.” It’ll be people who listen to the show, and they’re like, “I know my boss listens to the show. They’ll be super excited.”

Craig: What are you going to do with that? It’s okay for you to say, “That’s cool. I’m good.” Because you can say, “Hey, I’ve had a lot of these,” and unfortunately, what happens is they’re like, “Oh, cool.” Then it’s just dead silence. I don’t want to do that.

Drew: Well, but I think early career, there’s that scarcity mindset where you’re like-

Craig: I should meet everybody.

Drew: -“I should meet everyone.” You never know, and make those connections. You want to follow through on that, but you don’t.

Craig: You know, really, it’s not a connection.

Drew: Oh, no, not at all.

Craig: If your friend, and I’m annoyed at your friend, but if your friend really wants you to meet somebody to get to know them because they think, oh, you two would really hit it off, well, why don’t they just have a fucking dinner party or something with eight people? That’s how you meet people.

Drew: That’s much better.

Craig: Not at some throngy event where 90% of the people who are there are there out of some weird social compulsion to be able to say they were there. That’s the thing about these parties that I find so dreadful, is that they’re not actually– Most people who are at these parties are not there to celebrate anything, nor are they there to commune with anyone. They are just there to be there so that they could say they were there. Nothing makes me less interested. I don’t go to a lot of parties, as you can imagine. It’s not my thing.

John: Yes, and we don’t throw a lot of bigger parties here. We’ll have friends over for game nights and stuff like that. We had a party for our house turning 100 years old.

Craig: That was nice.

John: It had a purpose, and we had fun activities. We had a scavenger hunt. Things people can do.

Craig: Melissa and I went on a scavenger hunt. We didn’t need to worry about getting stuck in a corner with somebody. That’s fine. It was like an open house-ish sort of style thing. I keep saying to myself, “Oh, I should have a party at my house.” Then I’m like, “Why? Just why?”

John: Friends of mine moved up in the ranks and basically bought a house where they need to start throwing the party. It’s their agents who need to start throwing parties at their house.

Craig: Oh, no.

John: It’s like, I would not want–

Craig: What does that mean?

John: There’s an expectation they’ve got to entertain and do these things.

Craig: Apparently, my house was quite the party house when Kevin Williamson ran the show over there. It’s a good house for a party. Maybe one day. Since I’m a guy who’s constantly trying to leave a party, our friend Derek throws a great party. I actually enjoy those because it’s sort of an annual event.

John: Absolutely. I will know 30% of the people there, which is great.

Craig: You run into the sort of people that you don’t even spend much time with, but you’ll see them at that party.

John: Let’s talk through people who are like, “Oh, I know I’ve met this person. I don’t know where.” It’s so tough. We’ll do that. It’s so good to see you. Obviously, if you have a Mike at your side, say like, “Oh, hey, I’m Mike. I’m John’s husband.” That’s helpful. I just feel like we need to give a lot of grace for like, I cannot summon who you are.

Craig: Everyone should say their name to everyone. I’m still dealing with the paranoia that when people who haven’t seen me in a while see me, they don’t know who I am, just because I shaved my beard off. I’ll say my name to you if you look like maybe you’re not sure. There is no crime in forgetting someone’s name, or forgetting their face, or forgetting that you’ve met them before. It is not a crime. Anyone who holds you accountable for that is jerk as far as I’m concerned. A jerk. It’s cool. You’re not that important. Nobody is.

John: We were talking about Kevin Williamson a lot on this episode. Kevin Williamson, when I met him 30 years ago, whatever, four times in a row, he was like, “Oh, it’s nice to meet you.” I got a little annoyed at a certain point, but then I realized like, “Oh, I know who Kevin Williamson is because he’s like an Entertainment Weekly famous person, and I’m not. He has no reinforcement of who I am, whereas I knew who he was before I met him.”

Craig: Or maybe he just forgets names and faces. Sometimes you will meet somebody, and they remind you of maybe four different people you might know. Now it’s like, I don’t know which one this is. That’s okay.

John: We’ll talk about this when it lands on the show, but one of the things that I really appreciate about our movie is that obviously from Andy’s perspective, Miranda was a huge influence on our life, and Miranda has no idea who Andy was. It’s so classic and relevant and true.

Craig: It is something that happens. As you get older, if you are in our business, if you have succeeded and hung on and achieved things, people will know who you are. You don’t always know who they are. Sometimes you should know who they are. I realize sometimes I’ll remember somebody that worked for me in some capacity, and I can’t remember their name. I think, is it dementia? No. There’s too many people.

John: There’s too many people.

Craig: There’s too many people. There’s long-term memory. There’s short-term memory, but there’s also mid-term memory. Mid-term memory is where I put the names of everybody on a crew. Five years from now, and if I’m working on something else, I won’t remember that because a new crew came to take the mid-term memory.

John: So often I find myself searching email like, I know this person exists. Who is this person? It’s not memory. It’s a lot of this.

Craig: You get the text from somebody, and you’re like, okay, it’s just a number. They’re like, “Hey, man, da, da, da,” and you have to scroll back and look for context clues. You’re like, “Oh, that’s who this is.”

Drew: On the iPhone, there’s that little company thing, and I use that like crazy just to do context.

John: Oh, nice. All right. Good hints from you.

Craig: Well, I probably have chased people away from some Hollywood parties. They can be very glamorous. It’s cool to see famous people. I like it. It’s fun.

John: Yes. We didn’t talk about clothes at all, which is good because–

Craig: Oh, clothes.

John: Clothes, whatever. Wear clothes. Here’s the one–

Craig: Wear clothes.

John: The one tip I can give you is that if it’s an annual thing, Google photos from the last year. If it’s a thing that’s being photographed for places–

Craig: So you get the sense of–

John: It’s like where the vibe, what the vibe is.

Drew: That said, I went to a premiere a couple of weeks ago that was for a fighting movie, and everyone there was in all black. Every dude, all black. Black sweatshirt, black baseball cap, that kind of thing. It just felt like that was the dress code that we were all doing. It felt like the default. I had a blue and white shirt.

Craig: And a pink hat.

Drew: I didn’t get the memo. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing. I don’t know.

Craig: It’s not. One of the great rules of life, no one’s thinking about you. You think everyone’s thinking about you. No one’s thinking about you. They’re only thinking about themselves.

Drew: Yes, it’s true. Thanks, guys.

Craig: Thank you. Party.

Links:

• The script for episode one of Chernobyl
• Scriptnotes episode 493: Opening Scenes
• Greta Gerwig’s Little Women screenplay
• The Sheep Detectives
• Scriptnotes episode 731: Avoidance and Other Anti-Quests
• Sorkinisms – A Supercut by Kevin T. Porter
• My journey to the microwave alternate timeline by Malmesbury
• Solasta 2
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Follow Scriptnotes on Instagram and TikTok
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 719 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, when is good enough, not enough? We’ll discuss how you decide whether a particular occasion calls for your very best work or whether you’re wasting your time. We’ll also answer listener questions on packaging, bleeping, and when you know you’ve got it, or you don’t. In our bonus segment for premium members, every year, I come into a new long list of things to do. We’ll talk through what I did last year and why, and my list for this new year.

Craig: So organized.

John: So organized. I try to be.

Craig: Yes. No, that’s you. I don’t remember the last time I made a New Year’s resolution.

John: We’ve talked about it. I used to have not resolutions but areas of interest. Archery would be my area of interest. I would do archery for a bit. I would do Austrian white wines. The thing we do now is, Mike and I make a list of 25 or 26 things that together we’re going to do over the course of the year. We do those because we’re efficient people who knock things off lists.

Craig: It’s terrifying.

John: I strongly recommend it for people. In the bonus segment, I want to talk through what those are because the key is achievable, doable things. Not like, “Do this thing more.” It’s like, “Do this thing twice.”

Craig: Right. Something that you feel like you can actually manage.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s good. Modest expectations.

John: We’ll also talk through a– I did a year-end wrap-up of the stuff I did, including the fact that I played, I think, 42 sessions of D&D.

Craig: Not enough.

John: Not enough.

Craig: No.

John: Never enough.

Craig: No.

John: No. Let’s get you some follow-up. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Tyler writes, “I believe the origin of bumping this is from older web forums, where threads that have most recently been replied to will appear on the front page, and threads without a reply will fall down and eventually be relegated to page two.”

John: I think Tyler is exactly right. That’s where it comes from.

Craig: I think that sounds right.

John: Yes. Basically, because only the top 10 posts are listed. You go into a thread, you bump it, and then it shows up as a new thing.

Craig: Yes. Once you reply to it, it gets bumped up.

John: Yes.

Craig: That makes sense.

John: Thanks, Tyler.

Craig: Good job.

John: Nick wrote about back issues.

Drew: Yes. We were talking about Craig’s back issues in episode 716. Nick says, “I’m curious if your recent back problem listener is okay on their feet for more than 15 minutes and could possibly use a standing desk. Has Craig experimented with a standing desk at all?”

John: I don’t think I’ve ever seen you with a standing desk.

Craig: I tried.

John: You tried?

Craig: Yes. It made it worse.

John: Oh, I’m sorry.

Craig: Well, because my problem is standing.

John: Oh.

Craig: I recently received a little bit of treatment, feeling better. The thing about back issues is that it’s one of those things where everybody has advice.

John: Oh, for sure.

Craig: Everybody. Everybody’s back is different. Everybody’s problem is different. It’s just part of growing up. You know what part of growing up is? Part of growing up is getting back problems, giving back problem advice, realizing it doesn’t matter or work, and continuing to have back problems. You have to get to the other side of the advice stage. That’s when you know you’re really getting old.

John: Yes. I use a standing desk. I like it. I try to move between sitting and standing over the course of the day. I will do unimportant stuff like emails and all that kind of stuff. I’ll just do all that standing up, which is just great. Then what’s nice is psychologically, then if I’m lowering the table and sitting down to actually do real writing work, it feels like a change of state.

Craig: [crosstalk] Like you’re locking in. My version of that is to walk. Walking makes my back feel better always. I’ll take a long walk. Walking is also good because that’s where I could figure out what it is that I exactly want to write. There’s something about the movement that is– My thing is shower, walk, something that gets me out of my brain and therefore into my brain, if that makes sense. Standing is uncomfortable.

There’s a lot of people in our production office that the standing desk is now considered a chair. It’s too easy. Now there are people with the treadmill desk. There are people with the bouncy ball, keep yourself balanced desk. I just want to slap everyone.

John: I think the bouncy ball thing largely went away. You don’t see that as much. Are you still seeing it in your offices?

Craig: As I walk down the hall towards the elevators, there’s one room that has a full Pilates reformer in it.

John: Incredible.

Craig: Yes. Now that may be some sort of punishment.

John: Yes. It does look like a rack. [crosstalk]

Craig: I don’t meet out punishment on my production, but I know that somebody surely does. That may be where the bad people go.

John: Aline Brosh McKenna famously had a walking desk for a while. She had the treadmill on her desk. I think that got incorporated into Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I think literally, they may have taken her standing desk and just moved it over to one of the chairs there.

Craig: It is both admirable and frightening. There is something too efficient.

John: There is. We have a treadmill in the gym. I will set it at a low speed and just do very unimportant, email-y work on my iPad. We have a little keyboard that’s sitting up there. I will do some stuff like that, but I don’t have it on my main desk.

Big follow-up here, so this would be more of a topic. On episode 716, we had Mike Makowsky on. One of the things he talked about was how much he wanted text blocks and screenplays to be exactly even on the left-hand and right margins.

Craig: Yes, which is startling because that’s a neurosis even I don’t have.

John: Several readers wrote in to say that they felt seen. I think we have a little more of a conversation about things we said in that episode.

Drew: Jordan in Australia writes, “I just wanted to say to Mike that he’s not alone. I have an almost overwhelming compulsion to make the lines look neat on the page. Like Mike, though, I don’t consider it a problem because it makes me focus on the exact function of each word and line rather than accepting something as good or close enough that I can leave it. If push comes to shove and I think the result is worse or that something really just can’t be changed, I’ll put up with widows and orphans. Otherwise, I like that this compulsion helps with focus and attention, especially given my ADHD.”

Craig: It strikes me that when it comes to mental behaviors, people feel a need to justify all of it as if it mattered. It’s like saying, “I have red hair.” Let me give you the reasons why I think it’s actually okay. You don’t need to because it’s there. It’s not changing. That’s what you are. You’re a redhead. This is how your brain works. Don’t even bother justifying it. Let’s say it’s not helpful. Let’s say it’s actually harmful. So what? That’s how your brain works. We’re not perfect.

John: Yes. The last word of this response was ADHD. I want to talk about the medicalization of behavior, which I think is an aspect of what we’re going to be talking about here today, too.

Craig: Yes.

John: Go for it. Chris in Germany.

Drew: “I was blown away by the part where Mike had to explain his writing OCD. I have the exact same experience when I write. To me, these even blocks of text provide some sense of comfort through stability and order. It’s more important to me that the single lines in a block are the same relative to each other. Blocks on a page can differ. I would rather incorporate an intentional mistake than have the consecutive lines at different lengths. This sometimes blocks me, and it surely always slows me down. Best practice is not to look at the screen while writing. I really wanted to let Mike know that he’s not alone here.”

John: Again, I want to be supportive and say, what works for you works for you. Also, when you say, “I would rather incorporate an intentional mistake,” that’s making me wonder whether it is actually really working for him. That’s the balance I’m trying to find here.

Craig: I don’t know why I didn’t mention this to Mike, but I wonder if, for Mike, Joran, and Chris, just going into alignment and setting it to the justified thing, where it automatically makes it all the same length.

John: Yes. I wonder if that might be– It’s not typical screenwriting, but it also–

Craig: No, but neither is this.

John: Neither is this.

Craig: You wouldn’t have to think about it so much. It would just do it automatically. I’m sure that is a setting, justified.

John: Justified, yes.

Craig: Justified. It’s interesting because we get a lot of acronyms for these things. People, again, they want to assign a problem to this. It’s ADHD, it’s OCD. I’m not saying that Joran doesn’t have ADHD or that Chris maybe doesn’t have OCD, but that’s not relevant. It’s not necessary to pathologize it, nor is it necessary to celebrate it. It just is.

John: Yes. You can acknowledge it without pathologizing it.

Craig: If you get to a place where you think, “I wish I weren’t doing this,” now we’ve got a thing. Now think about how to stop. If you’re not in that place and if you don’t know how to do this otherwise, I think I’ve mentioned on this show before, if I lost my hands, I probably would have to quit writing because I think through typing.

John: You think with your fingers.

Craig: That’s how I write, through typing. I can understand this limitation that people feel.

John: I want to just acknowledge the synchronicity, the rhyming between justify and justify. These writers want to justify their margin, but they also want to justify their actions.

Craig: That’s a theme.

John: That’s a theme.

Craig: That’s a theme.

John: Let’s wrap up with Olivia here.

Drew: “I sincerely enjoyed Episode 716. However, I did want to flag something that kept coming up. Being OCD was said at several points during the podcast when referring to the look of a screenplay page. As a writer with OCD, I feel an obligation to speak on this. OCD is a deeply debilitating mental illness without treatment. For someone with OCD, the idea of needing a script page to look a certain way would feel like a life and death decision, not just an aesthetic choice or process preference.

Also, there is so little accurate OCD representation in the media that I feel it is incredibly important for writers listening to be aware of how something like I’m so OCD or you’re so OCD can come off. Not trying to censor anyone, but I think it’s a conversation worth having.”

John: I want to first acknowledge where Olivia is right, is that per the DSM, OCD can be a debilitating, pervasive life or death situation. It can feel like it is a life-or-death situation. That’s not quite what Mike was describing there in the experience. I don’t want to diminish or trivialize a person who has a diagnosis of OCD, and that was never our intention behind this.

Craig: No, but nor would any reasonable person think so. I say this as somebody who has a kid with actual diagnosed OCD, medicated, and so on and so forth. OCD is a pretty broad diagnosis. For a lot of people, it’s the O that is far more common than the C. We think of compulsive behavior as a hallmark of OCD, but obsessive thinking, cycling thoughts, is just as prominent, if not more so. There are people that have very severe cases and people who have very mild cases.

It is a useful term to describe behaviors that we feel we are not necessarily in control over, or thoughts that are pervasive and unwanted, or cycling. There is no value. I say this as somebody who is deeply invested in promoting both the destigmatization of mental health issues and support for mentally ill people. I say this as a parent who’s gone through this. This doesn’t help. This whole thing of, “You’re not allowed to call yourself or your problem this, you have to be as sick as I am to call yourself that,” does not help.

There are people who have mild schizophrenia. It doesn’t help to tell them you’re not, or to even say, “Stop saying schizophrenic when you really mean splt–.” It doesn’t help.

John: It’s a whole different podcast to go into when it comes to the DSM and things that are in there. Whenever you talk about there being a spectrum of something that always creates an issue where resources are being directed towards people who have very mild occurrences of a thing versus severe occurrences of a thing, that’s way beyond the scope of this podcast. We are a podcast about words and language. I want to talk about the words and the language here because, really, what I think we’re getting into is that there’s a DSM definition of OCD, but there’s been semantic drift.

The meaning has changed and broadened, which is a very natural thing that happens in language. The word nostalgia used to mean PTSD. It used to mean–

Craig: The pain, algia, is pain.

John: Yes. That changed over time. Nostalgia doesn’t mean that same thing anymore. It’s understandable why the term OCD, which had a stricter clinical definition, has broadened to mean picky, fastidious, that kind of thing. It’s in that same space as that original idea, but it’s not that same original idea.

Craig: Exactly. I don’t think it would be helpful for somebody with clinical depression to hear someone go, “Oh my God, I woke up today, the weather was so bad. I was so depressed when I saw the weather outside.” It would be unhelpful for them to scold that person and say, “You’re not depressed. This is what depression is.” We all know. We actually know. We know the difference. The thought, I guess, is that somehow your validity as somebody suffering is being diminished or stolen, like stolen valor. It is not.

Nobody is diminishing anything by this. That’s why, by the way, you see what I just did? I used the phrase clinical depression. We figured out a way in language to discriminate and get it back. Clinical OCD might be a nice way to describe what you have if you have diagnosed, serious obsessive compulsive disorder, per the DSM, per your psychiatrist, maybe you’re on meds, as opposed to somebody who’s like, “I just get very OCD when I see a pillow out of place on the bed.”

Olivia, I hope you don’t think I’m being too hard on you here. This is important because I actually want people to feel free to share their understanding of their mental health without feeling like they have to hit some target that someone else is setting. I don’t think you would want somebody with even more severe OCD than you telling you, “You’re not really OCD.” That’s the problem. Anyway, I’m going to suggest the use of the word clinical.

John: Clinical is very helpful here. As we’re having this conversation, I’m realizing that over the course of these 15 years of doing this podcast, there have been terms in which we’ve been such sticklers on trying to defend, like begs the question, where we feel like, “Okay, we’re losing the actual meaning of begs the question by–”

Craig: I will never, ever, ever quit.

John: I hear that there is something inconsistent in our approach to certain terms that we’re trying to do that.

Craig: That’s just fun.

John: That’s just fun.

Craig: That’s just fun. Did you see BJ Novak? I don’t know who it was that he corrected. Maybe it was Andy Cohen. He was on a New Year’s Eve broadcast or something, and I think it was Andy Cohen, said something about there are going to be less rats in New York and [crosstalk].

John: He said fewer rats.

Craig: It’s just gorgeous.

John: It’s gorgeous.

Craig: Way to go, BJ.

John: Another term which occurred to me was that narcissist used to have an actual definition.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: If we can’t say narcissist– you could say clinical narcissist. Someone who has a definition of narcissist, so helpful for distinguishing between just behavior we find [unintelligible 00:15:02].

Craig: Now that I’m thinking about it, we do this with every single mental illness diagnosis. We call people schizophrenic when they’re not, depressed when they’re not, anxious when they’re not. PTSD is now thrown around wildly, wildly. “I went to a restaurant. Oh my God, I saw PTSD from that waiter. He brought me the wrong thing.” It is analogizing. It’s instantly analogizing, because it’s talking about extreme forms of everyday mental processing. Yes, narcissistic, histrionic, dramatic. I’m now struggling to think of one that we don’t use.

Drew: Hysterical.

John: Hysterical.

Craig: Hysterical. You’re really not supposed to use that one. All of it. Every single word.

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes, too. There’s a sociologist, Nick Haslam, who coined concept creep, which is basically how you have a concept that just the edges of it bleed out into ways that– Trauma is one of the things he talks about there, which had a definition, which now we understand it’s broadened.

Craig: [laughs] Every time someone says trauma, I now think of the Jamie Lee Curtis supercut of her saying trauma. Have you seen this?

John: I know. It’s incredible.

Craig: It’s incredible.

John: It’s from Halloween? Where was it from?

Craig: It was from Halloween. When she was doing the press tour for Halloween, she was talking about how her character had to deal with–

John: Such a choice to tip to you and the trauma.

Craig: Yes. She went, “Trauma,” and then it’s just her saying the word trauma in 80 different– It was the Madame Morrible Wicked Witch of its time. Do you know what that is?

John: No, I don’t know Madame Morrible Wicked Witch.

Craig: Oh my God, you know what this is.

John: Oh, yes. I’m sorry. Just incredible. Love it so much. Let’s get to our marquee topic here. We can turn away from formatting on the page to the actual words themselves because so often on our show, we’re talking about getting things just right and making sure everything’s perfect. We do the three-page challenges where we’re really obsessing about the word choices, how we’re seeing the world through the words you’re choosing to put on the page.

Craig, last week, you were talking about there’s times where you will hold off delivering something because something’s just not right. You know it’s not right, and you don’t want it out there in the world when it’s not right until it meets your goals and expectation. I think the expectation there could be that in a perfect world, everything you write would be flawless. You would give them a flawless version of everything. That goes from the senior shooting this afternoon to that email to your landlord, but it’s not a perfect world. There’s not a limited time.

In many cases, it just doesn’t matter whether it’s the perfect version or not. I want to just try to find a rubric for figuring out when is it worth perfecting a thing, to finalize a thing, to polish a thing, and when is good enough, and making those choices.

Craig: I’m going to use a word now for mental health.

John: Which is?

Craig: Triggered.

John: Oh, sure. Yes.

Craig: Which I am not. Extending the use of that word, I have perfectionist issues.

John: I think you do.

Craig: I struggle with this all the time. I do know the difference between there’s something fundamentally wrong with this, and this is in a place where it’s on the putting green. It’s going to get into the hole, but I actually want people now to look at this, to gather opinions and thoughts, because it’s generally what it’s going to be. I do know the difference between that, but I will struggle writing emails, texts. I can’t leave the broken word in there. It’s a problem for me.

John: I hear you. I want to go to your process here because you talked about how Jack, who works with you, she’s your accountability buddy. Basically, you’re sending her pages. My expectation is, you have a relationship where you can send her things knowing it’s not quite perfect, because it’s part of the process is her looking at it to make a thing better.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Same with Drew for me. It’s like, I will send stuff to Drew so he can take a look.

Craig: I won’t read the editorial commentary, but a few typos. Page six, you write in here twice in one sentence. Page nine, bottom. “Aileen about putting the bandage.” That doesn’t make any sense. Aileen. Bottom. She with two Es. Bottom, “Tracking the sound as rises up the–” That’s horrible.

John: Yes. She’s a safe person for you to share it with.

Craig: I don’t proofread for typos. It’s actually not bad for– It was about 16 pages.

John: Sure.

Craig: Actually, a typo here and there does not flip me out. For scripts, it’s more about a quality thing.

John: Yes. Example from my own life. My daughter’s in college, and so she’ll sometimes send me a link to an essay she’s written for her class. I’ll read through it, and it’ll be good. It’s solid. She’s gotten to be a really good writer. It’s fascinating to watch how much better a writer she is year after year after year. It’s a huge improvement. I’ll notice that, “Okay, you missed this argument, or that point didn’t really land, or that conclusion’s not entirely supported.” She’s like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh.” and I was like, “But does it actually matter? Because one person is going to be reading this essay.”

Her instructor’s going to be reading this essay, and no one’s ever going to read the essay again. At some point, you have to make a decision. Is it worth the extra hour of time to improve this essay on a thing you don’t care about that no one will ever actually see again, or should she be doing her work on the other nine assignments she has? Those are choices a person makes in their real life, and a person who was so perfectionist and obsessed about making every last little thing as perfect as it could be would drop other balls because they’re spending too much time on one thing.

Craig: That’s the real problem. There’s a livable, supportable, quasi-perfectionism because there is no perfectible you, as Dennis Palumbo says, where you value doing your best. I would put it under that category. Yes, if I can take another 30 minutes, and I have 30 minutes to make this better, I should. That’s a good value to have. If you find yourself incapable of letting something go to the detriment of other things, well, then you really aren’t involved in modest perfectionism. You’re just doing poorly because a bunch of things aren’t going to get done or aren’t going to get done well.

What is very hard for me, I will tell you what makes me panic the most, and I have explained this many times to the people I work with, and it is particularly an issue when I’m directing. If I feel like I don’t have a sufficient amount of time to do my best work, I then start to feel like I’m dying because the gap between what I can do and what I’m allowed to do is too big, and I feel sick. If I have the time I need, and it’s not an unlimited amount of time, hit my satisfaction thing, and I can’t explain why that is. Probably has to do with some trauma [chuckles].

John: Yes, but you also have 30 years of experience of knowing yourself, knowing your habits, knowing how your work gets done. That’s reasonable. I get that, and I feel that too. There’s times where I’m not panicking because I know I can actually do this in the time, and if the time suddenly becomes too short, then I do start to worry.

Craig: It is also interesting how if you know going into something, before you even start contemplating what you want to do, that there’s only this much time. That’s great.

John: Weekly assignments. We’ve definitely done that, where it’s like, “I know I can’t fix everything. I can move this from this to that.”

Craig: Then it’s just, “Hey, let’s do– Everything’s getting better. We’re just making it better as we go,” and everyone will be shocked by how much you can get done anyway. I don’t panic over those situations, but this is a hard thing to figure out. I wonder whether it’s, “Okay, is good enough good enough,” or is it really about learning how to manage and prioritize the time you have to deliver the quality you can?

John: Yes, that’s fair. Let’s talk through some– I call it a rubric, but basically some decision points you’re going to have about whether you’re giving everything you have to this thing or you don’t need to be doing that. Audience, public versus private. We just went through this with Jack because it’s a private audience. You’re not embarrassed by typos in anything you’re sending to Jack because that’s the relationship you have. She’s meant to be looking at that.

Craig: Exactly.

John: If you’re sharing it with one close friend, you may be a little more concerned about those typos, but you’re not going to obsess about them. If something is public, it really does represent you out there in the world. We’ve often talked about how this is the manifestation of you out there in that space, and you want to make sure that it’s the best version of that. That’s why we encourage people to put their work out there so people can read it and do stuff. At a certain point, if you have older stuff of yours that isn’t really you now, pull it away.

Craig: Yes, if you can, and if you want to. We’ve talked about the illusion of intentionality before, the presumption that everything we see on screen is there because it’s exactly what we wanted to be there, when in fact, half the time, it’s what we got. That can haunt you because if you do put something out and you just didn’t have enough time and it wasn’t quite what you wanted, no one will know or give a damn. They will assume that’s exactly what you wanted, and you will be judged by it, and it will last until the end of written history. [laughs]

John: One of the actors, when he had a rivalry with Connor Storrie, there’s videos that came up. He became famous very quickly.

Craig: I saw this video.

John: He was a kid. It was this young little kid who’s like, “I’m an actor boy, da, da, da. I’m going to be famous and all that stuff.” What I appreciate about him is that he’s like, “Yes, I could have taken him down, but I’ve learned to love that kid.”

Craig: That’s the most healthy thing of all. By the way, that video was adorable. Of all the videos that you could make as a– he seemed like what? Maybe he was 14 or something.

John: Yes, or even younger, maybe.

Craig: Yes, 12. Of all the videos you could make of yourself at 12 or 13, that was the least objectionable, most wholesome, cute, and correct prediction of what you might be when you grow up. Oh my God, I’ll tell you, that hockey show, now my wife is obsessed with the hockey show.

John: Of course.

Craig: Jessica is obsessed with the hockey show.

John: My one cool thing that’s a spoiler, let’s just say there’s a woman who goes through and does– She’s a cinematographer who does breakdowns of it, and it’s phenomenal.

Craig: This hockey show is–

John: It’s great.

Craig: I’m putting it on my list.

John: We talked about audience, public versus private. Next, I would say–

Craig: I’m just thinking about them listening to this, going, “Hockey show?”

John: Hockey show.

Craig: “Hockey show, Craig? There’s a name for it. It’s a phenomenon.”

John: The hockey show.

Craig: “Dude, we didn’t call your show Mushroom Show.” Sorry. What’s it called again? He did Rivalry.

John: Yes, exactly. It’s a hard thing to say.

Craig: Rivalry is a tough word.

John: It’s a hard word.

Craig: Rivalry.

John: English doesn’t do that a lot.

Craig: L to R is tough.

John: We talked about audience, public versus private. Next, I would say, what stage is it? Is it a proof of concept versus a final? One of the things I admire so much about Mike Birbiglia, and this is true of a lot of stand-up comics, is they will just test and try material all the time. He’s going out, and he’s doing a stand-up, he’s trying new jokes, he’s seeing how they work, he’s recording the show, and he’s hearing, “What did I do? What was the reaction?” That is so important.

He’s not afraid to try a joke that’s not really formed, so he can figure it out. Even today, we have video cameras up here because we are testing a proof of concept to see how we’re going to do this show on video, if we ever decided to do it on video. No one’s ever going to see this. This is just a proof of concept.

Craig: Great.

John: I love that.

Craig: I didn’t put my face on this morning.

John: You didn’t have hair and makeup this morning.

Craig: My grandmother used to say that. “I have put my face on.”

John: There’s a product we’re launching next month or two.

Craig: Cosmetic?

John: Exactly, a cosmetic product. This is for you.

Craig: It’s a concealer.

John: It’s a software thing we’re launching. In trying to figure out how to do this, we were really clear about what is the scope of the minimum viable product. What is the simplest version of this that is useful, that we can see, that we can test, because we know that there’s things we’re not going to understand until we actually have a thing that we can try.

Craig: It interacts with the people on the other end of the relationship.

John: Third criteria here is context. What is the expectation of the person getting the message, or on the other side of this thing? I would stack this up from lowest expectation to highest expectation. A text message, your expectations of perfection in a text message are not as high.

Craig: They’re incredibly high.

John: For you, they are. For an email, incredibly high.

Craig: Incredibly high.

John: A tweet or a social blog post.

Craig: I don’t do those anymore.

John: A script, much higher.

Craig: The highest.

John: I would say for a book, even higher, higher, higher, because the number of times we had maybe six different proofreaders of the book and different editors going through it, we still missed the Star Trek deck versus bridge, but we got rid of so many typos. People who have the galley copies, even after we went through a bunch of those things, we still found typos in those.

Craig: Those will be worth more.

John: Absolutely, collector’s items.

Craig: Yes.

John: I think as you go up this chain, unless you’re Craig, the expectations of perfection increase.

Craig: Don’t be like me.

John: Don’t be like you.

Craig: Don’t be like me. I do think about this sometimes, how it is a waste of time, but also it makes me feel good.

John: Yes, I get that. After we get through the criteria, I want to go through the pros and cons of maybe you should obsess a little bit. I don’t know. Obsess is a loaded word, but maybe you should focus in on a little–

Craig: No. We can use these words. I’m giving us permission.

John: Focus in on these things. What we’re reading off of the Workflowy has a very low expectation of polish. There’s just typos all over it, which is fine.

Craig: It’s pretty darn good, though. I have to say the Workflowy generally is really good.

John: Some of those words missing. No one’s going to read it other than we’re going to look at it.

Craig: Right. I never look at this and think, “Oh, John doesn’t care. It’s sloppy. Drew doesn’t know how to spell.” It does exactly what it’s supposed to do. It’s an outline.

John: It’s an outline.

Craig: It’s fine. I think this is a perfectly good way of doing things.

John: You just said, “Is it worth it?” That, I would say, is the cost-benefit analysis. If you were to refine and optimize this thing, is the value you would get out of that time and effort really worth it for doing the work? The flip of that is you might satisfy this. You might compromise if the expected outcome is lower than what you would have put into it. It’s basically like you’re spending mental money to do a thing or time to do a thing, and is it really worth it to try it?

Craig: One of the interesting things about our brains is that we apply values to these things that are actually disconnected from reality.

John: Yes, we do.

Craig: I think, “Okay, I look at an email, it’s a mess, it must be correct to a point that I decide, ‘Ah, this is good.'” Somebody else out there would look at it and say, “Oh, no, there’s 12 more layers of good that need to occur. To that person, my value system is broken, and also, I just don’t care enough. When I got to the point where I thought it was correct, I believe that I indeed had exhausted everything. I’d done everything I could to make it great, and neither I, nor the person who wrote the shabby email, nor the person who wrote the hyper-perfect email are correct.

It is all disconnected from any metaphysical value. It is just perception. It’s just what makes our minds go click happy. There are people whose minds never go click happy when they correct a typo, ever. Most people commenting on YouTube videos don’t seem to care.

John: Absolutely. Mashing keyboard, yes.

Craig: Yes. What’s the famous one? How is Babby Made? Do you know that one?

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: How is Babby Made? Here’s how babbies are made. I try to just keep it in the realm of either I feel good, or I don’t feel good. I don’t really understand why my feel-good is set where it is. I assume it’s some combination of just innate mannerisms and trauma. I’d love that.

John: There are times where I realize I have spent half an hour on this email that a person will spend 10 seconds reading.

Craig: Oh, yes. I don’t care because that time feels good. It feels good. Yes, there’s just something about it, but that’s why we’re writers.

John: That’s why we’re writers.

Craig: Honestly.

John: We shouldn’t put everything down in the trivial email category. On this show, I think we’re constantly talking about how important it is actually to perfect and polish the scripts that you’re doing to deliver. That’s why we obsess of the three-page challenges. Yet there are still things, even in the course of a 120-page script, that are probably not worth obsessing over and perfecting to a degree that there may not be any benefit to that tertiary character who appears in one scene.

Is that exactly the right name for them? Is it a name that we’re not even going to actually hear a person say aloud? We could spend another hour figuring out the better name for it, but is it going to improve the final product?

Craig: Things like that come down to, “All right, this is the tiniest pebble in my shoe. Do I need to unlace my shoe, take my shoe off, get it back on?” No, unless I’m about to walk a long time, in which case it’s going to make me insane. Sometimes a name is like a pebble. Then I’m on page 30, and that person comes back, and I’m like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m typing this stupid name again. I can’t. This name is not right. That’s not who they are.”

We can only do what we can do because what we do, as writers, creative artists who are building stuff out of nothing but words, is a mental exercise that is deformed and then beautifully reformed. It’s a mess in there. It’s a mess. If the biggest problem we have is justifying the margins, dwelling a little bit too long, I guess what I’m saying is, if it’s bothering you that it’s not good enough, fix it. If it’s not, don’t. I think that’s really what it comes down to.

John: I’m going to put an asterisk there because if a trivial thing is bothering you so much that you’re not getting work done, that you’re actually not going to be able to be a screenwriter, then there’s something to change there.

Craig: Then you need therapy. It’s not going to happen because you go, “I shouldn’t be bothered by this.” Yes, you shouldn’t be.

John: John’s the wrong name for this character.

Craig: Yes, but you are. What are you going to do?

John: Last criteria, I would say, which is closely related to cost-benefit, but stakes. How much does it actually matter? If it’s the best version, the worst version, does it matter at all? What is the upside of success? What is the cost of failure? For a lot of things, it’s incredibly low, and yet some emails actually are very high stakes. You understand why you’re putting all your effort into it. A text to my brother, it’s just like the stakes aren’t that high.

Craig: The stakes are not that high. I think sometimes of Steve Jobs introducing the iPhone, which is worth rewatching. It’s one of the greatest pieces of video that exists, as far as I’m concerned, because it is a living document of a moment that changed the world. It’s a presentation. Basically, it’s just a big PowerPoint, is really what it is. It’s a fancy PowerPoint, and it’s spot on. When he needs something to pop up, it pops up. It has been timed out. He has planned it out. He has his stuff memorized.

It is thought through down to the tiniest bit, and it works great. Then, if you would, after you watch that, watch the video of Elon Musk introducing the Cybertruck in which he insists that the glass is shatterproof and bulletproof, and has a guy throw a heavy weight at it, and it absolutely shatters the glass.

John: That is incredible.

Craig: Did they not try that first? It is so sloppy. When the stakes are high, perfect it.

John: Let’s talk in that general sense of over-optimization or over-satisficing. Satisficing, I’m using this being like, “It’s good enough.”

Craig: What is satisficing?

John: Satisficing, you never ever heard that term?

Craig: No.

John: Satisficing is basically choosing the first acceptable alternative.

Craig: Oh, it’s a blend of satisfy and suffice.

John: Oh, you hadn’t heard of satisficing?

Craig: No.

John: I think satisficing is a really good word. You do it all the time without realizing it. It’s like, “Which chips do you want?” “The first one that works, do.” I’m often doing that on a menu at a restaurant.

Craig: You’re satisficing.

John: I’m like, “That’s good enough. I’m going to be happy with it.” I might be happier because I didn’t spend a bunch of time worrying about the choice.

Craig: Got it. Satisficing, I like that.

John: I think there’s a danger to satisficing when you shouldn’t. Let’s talk about over-optimization first. This thing’s all what I’m thinking, but you can add to it. We said you might miss opportunities because you’re so busy futzing with something. Basically, you’re not doing other work. You’re missing out on other chances.

Craig: If you are in a spot where, think of the time you have, think of the goals, think of the stakes, plan it, you know you need a certain amount of time to do this, and this is really important, don’t eat into that time.

John: No.

Craig: If you have extra time and you want to sit there and–

John: Love it.

Craig: Great, go for it, but you got to know your time.

John: You may simply never finish it. Time may just extend out forever. You can also burn out on a project because I feel like you have a certain amount of time in which your brain is willing to commit itself to a project, and if you’re just stuck in the middle of it for too long, you can just burn out.

Craig: It’s true. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this on the show. Alec Berg and I were talking once. He was cleaning out his place when they were moving, and he found this box of these old scripts that were printed out from when he had just started in the business, so 1991. It was like he didn’t remember any of it. He was reading another him.

John: That’s great.

Craig: He read it, and his thought was, “This is not anywhere near as good as I am now. There’s a freedom to it. It is unburdened by the curse of knowledge, self-expectation, perfectionism, the echoes of failure.” Until you get burned, you don’t know what burned is.

John: There’s a self-defense you can write into your things because you know all the things that are coming, so you’re anticipatory doing stuff.

Craig: Yes, and because you know what it feels like to write something that wasn’t good enough, so you can’t let yourself do that. If you go too far down that road, then you can paralyze.

John: I think one of the real issues with over-optimization is you can get locked in on a bad idea. You might have written a scene so beautiful and so perfect that you can’t touch it again when a note comes that you actually do have to address. You wrote this thing for a location that you no longer have. It can be so tough because you’ve spent so much time and energy on it. You’re so invested in this one version of it.

Craig: Yes. I get caught in loops sometimes. Recently, I got stuck in a loop on something and wrote and then realized, “Okay, this doesn’t belong here. I’m moving it to a different place,” for an episode, in fact. I was lost in that loop for a while. There is a slight panic that kicks in of, “Uh-oh.”

It’s like driving across country. You have plenty of time. Let’s say I’m going to give you a week to drive across the country. On any given day, you can either drive all day or you can not.

Along the way, you have to sometimes experience those days where you pull over, and you don’t drive much. Then you just know on some other days, “Here we go, wake up, don’t stop.” That’s part of the sweet misery of what we do.

John: This last point with over-optimization, I’d say it’s really perfectionism in general. You may be trying to control things that are out of your control. I definitely see that with screenwriters. They will make something so flawless and perfect because they actually want this movie that’s in their head to exist in the world. You have to recognize that that’s not within the scope of your power. You’re doing everything you can to communicate what this vision is you have for the movie, but you cannot will it into existence just through the words you’re typing and through all the refining you’re doing there.

Craig: It’s absolutely true. There’s two mes. There’s the me that writes the script, who is fastidious and a perfectionist. Then, when I’m directing, at some point, I’ll go, “Why don’t we do this?” and then the script supervisor will say, “Just in the script.” Then I’ll say, “Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Actually, that would be better because I’d already–” but the me there, it’s like I didn’t write it. It’s a disconnection.

John: Director Craig is constantly compromising. There’s always shots that are on your shot list you’re never going to get to.

Craig: That’s so true. It’s so true.

John: I would say give writer Craig a little of that grace.

Craig: No, writer Craig is better than director Craig because writer Craig thought it all through. Director Craig needs to pay more attention, just like all directors do, to the script. That’s really what happens is that I end up thinking to myself, I’m doing the thing that would make me angry that directors would do, where they would focus on everything in front of them and forget about the bigger picture or all the details on the page.

John: Except that director Craig is dealing with not just what writer Craig delivered, but also the realities of what’s in front of the camera and behind the camera.

Craig: That is all true. That is all true. You know what? Maybe Craig should just give himself a break.

John: I think that’s what we’re coming down to.

Craig: All right.[00:39:38]

John: Let’s talk about the dangers of oversatisfying, because, in the initial example, I was talking about how–

Craig: Oversatisfying.

John: Sometimes it’s like, “That’s good enough.” I was talking about how an essay you’re writing for a class that you don’t care about, that you’re never going to read again, maybe it’s actually not worth perfecting. If you were to do that too much, that’s just laziness, basically. You might lose your sense of taste. You’re not used to seeing your best writing, so you might not always be able to hit your best writing. You might forget what your best writing even looks like.

Craig: You may also find yourself getting passed by people that are not faster than you. It’s just that you’re not running as fast as you can, and this will become an uncomfortable feeling. When I say passed, I don’t necessarily mean, oh, they’re going to make more money or something, but they’re suddenly achieving things that you wanted to achieve that you’re not because there is value in pursuing the best you can do. You won’t get there. Pursuing it as a value is a positive thing. If you have the time to make the essay better, even if it doesn’t matter, take the time to make it better. It will make you better.

John: I think that was one of the good things about blogging when I was doing it more often, is that I was basically refining and perfecting those arguments, and it’s learning how to think and how to express those ideas. Writing is exercise, and you’re building mental muscle strength to do that. We’ve also talked about how you might say like, “Oh, it’s private,” or “No one’s ever going to read this,” but you don’t really know that. Things will be out there in the world, and it’s still going to be potentially seen by somebody. I think you’ve stressed this in terms of your collaborations is you are setting an example for everyone else you’re working with. If they see that you’re delivering 75%, why should they give you 100%?

Craig: Oh, boy, is that a thing. I talk to people on the crew about this because they are always working on something. I work on a show. They work on shows. Some of them do say there is a thing where you are on a show, and you can just tell that the people who made it sort of care, then it’s a 70% vibe that they’re like, “It’s a job. Got to do it. I’m supposed to do it. Nobody really cares about the show, but we’re working.” Then you don’t necessarily– why beat yourself up? Why lay it all out there? It’s part of the culture of anything is, “How serious are we taking this?”

John: Now, let’s wrap this up with a conversation about vomit drafts because neither you or I are vomit draft people, but many of our listeners and also friends or colleagues of ours really believe in just like you’ve got to get something on the page first, and then we’ll have whatever you do to get something out, and then you can edit and refine it. I want to talk through the pros and cons and arguments for that, and why people may want to consider it, but also what our concerns were that– the pro arguments for the vomit draft were you just get the thing out as quickly as you possibly can. You don’t censor yourself. You don’t edit yourself. By suspending that internal critic, you’re actually just able to explore, to find out about stuff.

Some people really cannot see the movie until they can have a thing on the page that they can see. They make discoveries along the way. You can’t edit what doesn’t exist. A natural part of the editing process, sometimes that’s writing the whole thing. Kevin Williamson famously vomited-drafted Scream and just wrote it all in a fugue state.

Craig: Awesome.

John: It’s awesome. It’s great. The con arguments I would say is that I watch these videos where, if you’ve seen bricklayer videos or when you’re building something up from the base, if that first foundation isn’t strong and you’re trying to build something up, it gets wonky and crazy, and so it’s going to collapse and fall over. It can compound the fundamental flaws of something is that if you start writing without a plan, without trying to make sure every scene actually really works, it could just go 19 different ways haywire.

Craig: It’s hard for me to criticize people who do this because they must do it for a reason. It’s not how my mind works. I can certainly see the pluses and minuses of the not vomit draft. We’ve talked about a lot of the minuses. It is meticulous. It takes longer. You can find yourself mentally strangulated as you go. You can feel trapped. Sometimes you don’t finish.

John: No.

Craig: On the plus side, though, there is an enormous amount of intention and thought and cohesion. The thing about the vomit draft that scares me is what I would imagine to be just a general lack of cohesion. I’m not sure how you can vomit page 70 in a way that is reflected and made somehow inevitable and yet surprising based on what happened on page 20. It feels like it would be very much and then, and then, and then, and then, and very dialoguey or very actiony. There are dangers there that I can imagine, but I’m only imagining them because I’ve never done it, and I don’t know how to do it, and I’m never going to do it.

John: I’ll say, over the course of the podcast, we’ve talked with alternative strategies that I think are trying to do some of the things that a vomit draft does. When I don’t want to write a scene, I will write a different scene in the movie, but I’ll write a really good version of that, of a different scene in the movie, because I know what the scenes are in the movie.

Craig: Sure.

John: Katie Silverman, she’ll do basically a vomit draft, but with things that are not in the movie, she’ll just have the characters start talking so she can fully understand the characters and what the world feels like. That’s great. Maybe a thing people want to try independent of a vomit draft-

Craig: It’s a good exercise.

John: -is basically just getting stuff, words down on paper. I would say the other thing I noticed about vomit drafts is it’s so easy to fall in love with that first draft. The emotional attachment to the thing you did, and you have a sunk cost fallacy, but also you can fall in love with the temp music. You’ve all run into this, which is just like it’s working and it’s feeling good, and so you don’t want to change anything up.

Craig: Yes. What you do is you attach the feeling of success that you had as you were barfing to the barf, but other people just see barf. They don’t see or experience your feeling of purging and relief. That is important. That’s one positive thing that comes out of the meticulous plan draft is you don’t have that. You don’t get overattached to things. Everything is interrogated, examined, questioned, acid-tested, and so on.

John: I guess my final advice here is with vomit drafts and the good enough, not good enough, is if you’re struggling to get started, if you’re struggling with blank page anxiety, getting words on the page is probably a good first step for you, whether that becomes a full vomit draft or just like the roughest sketches of a scene. Alina often describes it as like walking into the ocean and letting the water get up to your ankles. It’s like, oh, suddenly you’re swimming.

Maybe vomit draft if you are often abandoning projects before you complete them, because I think sometimes we talk about burnout and that perfectionism burnout, like you just– the joy of completing a thing may be useful for you, and so the vomit draft may be the way to get there.

Craig: It’s worth trying, right? If one method isn’t working, try it. What’s the worst that can happen? You stop. It doesn’t work. You don’t get past page 3. I don’t know, but try things.

John: If you’ve tried vomit drafts and you’re not happy with them, I think the reason may be because you’re done with– the vomit draft, you can feel like, “Well, I’m done. I want to go on to the next thing.” You may have green pasture envy where it’s like, “Oh, I want to do this other thing instead.” You never actually go back and edit and finish that thing. That may be a reason why you actually need to scene by scene really do the best version of each of these scenes and really perfect a thing because then you’ll actually have the experience of what it feels like to have a really good script that you’re proud of.

Craig: Maybe people need to try both.

John: Yes. I’m surprised we got you there, Craig.

Craig: Yes. Give yourself a chance to see if– the whole concept of vomit draft is vomit. You’re not being held. It is vomit. Everybody knows this isn’t what we’re shooting. If you are maybe somebody that tends toward that too much, try the other method. Try meticulous planning.

John: I want to acknowledge that this is exactly counter to the advice that Scott Frank gave. It’s like, “Don’t move until you see it.”

Craig: That’s for me.

John: That’s for you.

Craig: That’s how I think. Don’t move until you see it. I know that that’s what works for me. Scott, God bless him. Scott’s way is the way that everybody must do it. I love that about Scott, but I am more interested, I suppose, in results because I know that great writers write differently. I’m pretty sure that– I know Scott and I don’t write the same way because he writes these very, very long drafts that he expects will be cut down.

John: There’s really not vomit drafts, but they’re more expansive than the form will actually allow.

Craig: They are unfettered by the restraints of the medium-

John: Yes, they are.

Craig: -which is awesome because it means that everybody can go through and say, “Okay, story, characters. This moment, this moment, this moment. Now, this is too big. We asked you to build a 12-seat plane. This is an incredible jumbo jet. How can we get all the best parts of the jumbo jet into the 12-seater?” and then he does. Point being, we all have our ways there. Find your way there. If your way there currently is not working, try a different way there.

John: Let’s answer some of your questions. We have one here from Alan.

Drew: ”Back in 2019, there was a huge fight between the WGA and the talent agencies over packaging. After everyone fired their agents, the agencies eventually signed an agreement that went into effect in June of 2022. Now, two and a half years later, has there been any real on-the-ground change, or have agencies found ways to work around the agreement and still offer packages to studios?”

John: Craig, I’m curious what you think about what has happened in two and a half years.

Craig: I don’t think that the agencies have found significant ways to work around the agreement. Here’s what happened. It definitely accelerated the shrinking of the number of agencies available to us, so conglomeration occurred.

John: Do you think that would have been different without the agency deal?

Craig: Yes.

John: Do you think there would have been more small agencies or what would–

Craig: Oh, I think ICM would still be there because what happens, once you took away a big part of what their income was, they were now exposed and vulnerable. We lost some diversity of agencies. CAA and WME arguably got more powerful. It’s almost like we were in a fight over what a beach should look like, and then a tsunami came, so it’s hard to tell.

John: There’s no counterfactual. We can’t know what the world would have been like if the agency campaign hadn’t happened. If agencies could still package the way they were packaging before, which we see, for newer listeners, we don’t understand, packaging is when you put together a writer with their script and a director and maybe some stars and sell that to a TV production company, sometimes a movie studio, but really it’s a TV thing. Agencies would do that, and then they would take a fee, and rather than charging their clients commission, they would take a percentage of the budget on every episode of a thing.

Craig: Which meant that they were essentially incentivized by the companies, not their own clients, and that was part of the problem.

John: Packaging still happens, but now they only get the commissions on their clients rather than a fee.

Craig: What we were hoping would happen might have happened, but shortly after that, the streaming wars accelerated dramatically. The massive television bubble began to burst, and huge tectonic changes occurred in our industry to the extent that I don’t know what this did because, like I said, it’s been tsunamied over by–

John: It wasn’t the biggest change in the industry by far.

Craig: No.

John: Much bigger things affected stuff, and so we can’t know quite what’s there. Also, the agencies themselves, we talk about CIA and WME, they entered into a lot of different spaces, and they were already starting to move into different things, representing sports, music, and other things, but just stuff that seems to have nothing to do with us. I think one of our concerns going into the campaign was that they weren’t prioritizing the actual needs of their clients, and the way they make their money isn’t off of us. That’s the big agency that is still kind of true. The money they’re making in the entertainment industry is off of us.

Craig: Yes.

John: That’s good.

Craig: That’s why they fight over clients tooth and nail. They would certainly argue that we are valuable to them.

John: I would say that as we started in the industry, the fighting over clients was a much bigger part of the story and drama of Hollywood, and it really isn’t a big deal now.

Craig: Well, because people don’t go anywhere because there’s fewer places to go.

John: There are fewer big places to go. It’s true.

Craig: When we started, there were CAA, UTA, ICM, William Morris, and there was Endeavor, and there was Gersh, which still is in Paradigm, and– what’s the artists and whatever? Anyway, and now it’s like there’s WME, CIA, UTA, then there’s a tier below, and then there’s nothing, and you don’t get moved around a lot because you don’t move– Even the agents don’t move around a lot anymore.

John: The other thing which changed, which had started before this, but certainly accelerated during it, is writers and directors and actors who just have managers who don’t have agents at all anymore, or who are also British people who have their UK agent who’s really up-prepping them in the US as well. I’ve seen that change happen.

Craig: Yes, the management thing is a big one, and management is worse. We were fighting the agencies over packaging. That’s all managers do. That is literally what they do. They exist to be producers on projects, which you can’t be as an agent, to not charge their clients commission, instead get all their money from the production. I don’t understand why–

John: As you’ve talked about, coming out of this, I signed a manager for the first time, and what’s been helpful as a highway manager is to have a person who can talk to anybody, who can call anybody because there’s no vested interest in their own agency. They have relationships that are different, which has been really, really helpful.

Craig: Yes, it really just comes down to who do they work for in the end.

John: Then they’ve been working for me.

Craig: That’s good.

John: The other thing which did change in the agency campaign, which is worth acknowledging, is that agencies now have to send every writer’s contract through to the guild, and so the guild has so much more information about every writer’s deal. To know how many weeks was this writer employed in this room, how many one-step writers have deals, that’s actually been helpful, even though, theoretically, all writers were supposed to send in–

Craig: We were supposed to per– yes. My question is, what are we able to do with all that data, exactly, other than look at it?

John: We can make choices in the negotiating cycle about what we’re going to do for things. The other thing we’ve done is WJA enforcement, contract enforcement, which is something I don’t know you like. We now know this writer had a guaranteed step and was not paid for this step. What happened here? We can actually proactively investigate these things.

Craig: I’d love to ask their lawyer, first and foremost, “Hey, why didn’t you do your job?”

John: Exactly.

Craig: That’s kind of crazy.

John: Yes.

Craig: I guess the long answer, short, Alan, for me is hard to tell what impact this has had. I think there have been positives and negatives. I do know that quite a few people were upset because, once this ended, and you could go back to your agent, their agent said, “No, we’re good. We don’t want you back.” I think a lot of those people were not being well-served by that agent to begin with, at that point, then.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I think they were just hearing from their long-distance girlfriend that it was over and that it was better because now they needed to find a representative that actually cared about them.

John: I think the overall goal of aligning incentives on a purely logical level happened, but what impact did that have on individual writers’ careers? Harder to say.

Craig: You know what? It just occurred to me that, maybe, the real value that we got out of that was that, regardless of what the companies thought of what we did, it appeared that we were committed to doing stuff, and that there was a unity there, and there was some sense of aggression. Now, did that ultimately matter? No, because then they said, “Fine, go on strike anyway,” and then we did. Maybe it was just even for our own internal sake that we thought, oh, we could do a thing and not fall apart, [unintelligible 00:58:19]

John: Then after that, we did the strike, and we did not fall apart.

Craig: We did not fall apart, yes.

John: Let’s answer one more question on bleeping. Moose has a question about bleeping.

Drew: Moose writes, “I’m an audio professional. I noticed that in episodes where someone drops a naughty word, you have the disclaimer at the beginning, and I’m wondering why you just don’t bleep out the offending words.”

John: How the sausage is made here, Craig and I don’t swear on the show if we can help it. We won’t–

Craig: I did today once.

John: Sometimes, if it’s a very easy lift, Matthew just snips it out, and you never notice it was there. Especially when we have guests on, and they swear, it’s just hard to take that stuff out. We want it to be authentic to what the experience was to have it in person.

Craig: We’re adults.

John: We’re adults. We’re making this podcast for adults, but also, your kids can be in the car, and so we’re just mindful of that. That’s why we put the little warning on, if there’s going to be some bad words.

Craig: Just culturally, it is so much different now than it used to be. When we were kids, saying the F-word was like, “Oh my God.” You would get sent to the principal. No one seems to give an F anymore. It’s like we have friends with younger kids.

It’s like language is not– because of the internet, I think, it’s just become less taboo. Context. There are words that we used to throw around that you wouldn’t get sent to the principal for, that now you do get sent to the principal for.

Also, context, if you’re using words in a sexual manner or something like that. Bleeping sounds stupid, mostly, is the answer.

John: I always notice bleeping. It’s not actually a big tradition of bleeping in podcasts. It’s not really a thing.

Craig: No, because we’re not on the air at CBS.

John: No, no.

Craig: It just doesn’t make much sense.

John: No. I agree. Let’s do our one cool thing. My one cool thing I mentioned earlier on, it’s a cinematographer. Her name is Valentina Vee. She is an L.A. or New York-based cinematographer and director. The thing she’s been doing recently is going through a show, in this case, Heated Rivalry, and talking about the specific choices that the director and cinematographer are making as they’re composing scenes. Things from blocking to locations to camera placement. Going through this, this is the sense I had while I was watching the show, but it’s really clear.

They have no coverage. There’s basically not a shot that they shot that’s not in the show, and so often, they’re basically just staying on one side. The camera’s never coming around to the other side, which is because they had an incredibly limited budget, and they had to maximize the value that they got out of that. These are directing choices, lighting choices, but fundamentally, they’re also writing choices.

That’s why I really encourage people to watch these videos that she does because, again, you’re seeing that the scenes are written in a way that they can be shot from one side, that it’s really about one character’s perspective. Therefore, it’s not important that we see the other people who are talking off the screen because it’s really about this one character’s reaction to what is being said.

Craig: One of my favorite things to do. I try very hard to cover things. I like options. I love an option, but as I talk about with my editors all the time, just because we have it doesn’t mean we have to use it. We don’t have to use any of it. We can just use one shot if we want, if it feels great, and we just want to stay there. Staying with somebody is terrific. Editing too much just because you have it, it just turns into ping pong, tucking head theater, and there’s no pace to it.

The question is, who do I want to be with right now, in this moment? Who do I want to be with? Who do I want to be looking at? If you know that you have limited time and limited coverage, get one shot right, and then just nab something fast just to give yourself some little hinge bit.

John: My suspicion is they didn’t even have time for [unintelligible 01:02:08]. In some cases, they’ve really boxed themselves in where they had no choice other than the master that they had, and it works really well.

Craig: When we’re shooting things in tight situations, there’s a shot that she does here where she has the two of them. They’re sitting in profile, sort of a mini master kind of thing, so we can see both of them. They’re looking at each other, and they are sitting against a mirror, which creates depth that isn’t there. If you put them against the wall, it’s a dead shot, but that creates depth. The problem is the mirror will also see the camera. Well, that’s an easy one for us. As long as they are not moving in front of the camera, you can paint it out, especially if the background sort of drops away.

If you have money in post to get rid of these things, getting the camera– I will tell you that because we’re a handheld show, the amount of times we have had to paint out one little bit of camera as it bobbed in because we really liked this shot, it’s just that as they were moving, A camera saw B, and then B goes, “Oh, shit,” and gets out of the way, but that’s okay.

John: It’s fine.

Craig: That’s okay. We do split screens. We do paint outs. We do blow-ups. There’s a billion ways to handle it. It’s more important to get the work in than it is to– and this is actually good enough, “Okay, do we have an eraser to erase this thing later? Then don’t worry about this. Just get this,” right?

John: Because the priority is, are you getting the performance or getting the shot overall? You can fix the other stuff.

Craig: Performance, shot, feeling. If I love it, if I feel something, if it’s making me cry, I don’t care if I can see the reflection of a crew person over there, I’ll get rid of it. One way or the other, I’ll get rid of it. It is so worth it. That is what people connect to. Obviously, people are connecting to Heated Rivalry, AKA the hockey show, in a profound way, and that means they did a great job with the time and resources they had.

John: What I like about this, she was not the GP on this show. She’s just breaking down shots she’s seeing from it, so she’s able to scribble on the screen and show where a camera was and stuff that was happening. It’s such a good example of a thing you can do in video that we just can’t do as well in audio because you were just describing a thing, but in a video, to actually draw and show is just so much more helpful. I just like that people are out there using the medium in ways that we don’t know how to use yet.

Craig: Yes. I think people are interested in the silly tricks. I think there’s probably a good video that I should do. After this season, I think what I’ll do is take a little time with one of my editors, Tim Good, and we’re going to put together a video called All the Tricks We Use because the tricks that you can use in editing are incredible and so helpful, and very helpful to know when you’re shooting because there are times where I will watch a take and think, with trick number seven, I can get rid of the flaw in this take because the rest of it was great.

John: Exactly.

Craig: Knowing what you can do is a big part of it.

John: It’s not all just VFX. An example that she points out is that there’s moments in the show where they just go to silhouette and where you’re not seeing actors’ faces, but it’s not important for the scene because it’s a physical comedy, but you don’t actually need to see the faces for it to work. By going to silhouette, there’s no crowd. The amount of extras they have is incredibly limited. They’re making shots so you wouldn’t see those people out there.

Craig: Yes. When you look at sports movies, always look in the stands, look in boxing, who’s out there. Boxing, in particular, it’s a ring that’s overlit and then a crowd that is underlit in total shadow because there’s no one there.

John: If the audio is creating the crowd.

Craig: When you watch actual boxing, the entire place is lit up like a Kmart. No one knows what a Kmart is. Walmart. It’s lit up like a Walmart. In movies about football and baseball, you’ll get a couple of select shots where they’ve either licensed the footage or they’ve done some CG people. Then it’s just 18 people at a time and in close-up.

John: The mastermarks are still good.

Craig: Yes. Everything. It’s all the product of many meetings.

John: We love it. Craig, what’s your one cool thing?

Craig: My one cool thing this week is a game, as it often is. This is for– well, I played it on iOS on my iPad. I’m a big fan of the Rusty Lake games. One of the things about those games that I love is how freaking weird they are, sometimes deeply disturbing.

John: They’re specifically weird, yes.

Craig: Yes, they’re very strange, surreal. I came across a game– there are a lot of knockoffs. I thought for a moment, “Oh, I think maybe this is going to be a Rusty Lake knockoff. I’ll play a Rusty Lake knockoff. I don’t care.” It was not a knockoff. The game is called Birth! It is made by an independent game designer named Madison Karrh. That’s K-A-R-R-H, which already I love. That’s because the spelling is gorgeous. What she’s done is made a fairly satisfying puzzle game. The puzzles are sometimes too easy, sometimes they’re tricky, but they’re beautiful-looking and so deeply weird. The entire thing is so deeply weird. When you get to the end of it, it’s also so sweet and satisfying. It’s art. It’s art. It’s a lovely game and also fun.

I run into a lot of these things. I’m just going to whisper about this because I don’t want the people that make these games to hear it, John.

John: All right.

Craig: There are like 5,000 games that you can get for your iPad that are about grief. They’re not really games. They’re just somebody talking about– it’s just a very obvious metaphor for grief. They’re games, and they’re not fun.

John: Same way that there are joke aways. There are things that have the structure of a joke, but they’re not actually funny because they’re like– you know.

Craig: Yes, they’re really just trading on sadness or whatever. This is a game.

John: Good.

Craig: It’s fun to play. She did a great job. Excellent work, Madison Karrh. Birth! Well worth playing.

John: Very nice. That is our show for this week. The description is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: I don’t think so.

John: Our show this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram @scriptnotespodcast.

We have T-shirts, hoodies, and drinkwear. You’ll get those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers, especially the folks who’ve just signed up new for the holidays or new for 2026. Thank you. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on 26 for 26.

Craig, thanks for a perfect discussion of perfectionism and when good enough is good enough.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, in the outline here, I have a blog post I did called What I Did in 2025. I thought we might just review that first because I recognize that I’m not a person who remembers things. I don’t remember when things happened. Mike knows all that stuff. He can remember exactly what happened when and how things worked. I’ve been better at journaling this year, but I took a day and actually just went through what did I actually do in 2025? It was a lot.

This was the year I went to Egypt, Jordan, Dubai, and Mexico. We had the Big Fish 29-hour reading in New York City. We released Highland Pro. I got third place in Rachel Bloom’s Spelling Bee.

Craig: Pretty good.

John: It’s pretty good.

Craig: That’s a big deal.

John: We had two No Kings [unintelligible 01:10:43] tests, I did a half-marathon, went to Australia. I would say, overall, 2025 was a very shitty year for the world, but I had some good, fun things happen locally and personally, which was nice.

Craig: You say I never do this.

John: It’s the first time I’ve ever done this.

Craig: I just don’t look back. I mostly have feelings. I think about the feelings and moments and things, and there are these moments that stick out. I don’t really look back much. I’m all about right now and tomorrow.

John: I’m not generally a looking-back person, but I’m also a forward thinker. The second part of this conversation is, the last couple of years, Mike and I would do a 24 for 24, 25 for 25, 26 for 26, where we would basically share note and–

Craig: You know this is going to get tough. You see where this is going. This is going to be hard for you guys.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: The older you get, the more crap you have to do.

John: Yes. It’s a lot of stuff. This year, we had to find one extra thing, but it’s going to be a creep every year. It’s a fun thing. Basically, we have shared notes in Apple Notes. It’s like a checklist of things we mean to do over the course of the year.

Craig: I like that.

John: What’s different about this than a New Year’s resolution is they are specific things you want to do, and they’re not all laborious chores. We’ll go through some examples here. One of the things we need to do this year is sort and rationalize what we’re going to do with all our CDs and DVDs that we’ve not looked through in years. Do you still have all your DVDs and CDs?

Craig: No.

John: What did you do? You just got rid of them?

Craig: I have no idea where they are. It doesn’t matter. They’re gone. It’s gone. It’s over. They may exist somewhere, but I don’t know where.

John: Drew, do you have physical discs?

Drew: I have DVDs and Blu-rays. I have some CDs, but they’re just left over from when we bought CDs. I don’t even think I have the ability to listen to it, actually.

Craig: You can listen to it through your DVD player.

Drew: Probably.

Craig: I think so.

Drew: For a minute, my DVD player was broken, and I had a, “Do I just get rid of everything?”

Craig: I have a DVD player. I never use it.

John: For a while, we were playing Blu-rays through our old PlayStation, but then that gave up the ghost. Stewart gave our daughter some Blu-ray DVDs. She wanted to watch them. We didn’t have one, so we had to get a little cheap Blu-ray player, and then she didn’t remember to watch them.

Craig: Children.

John: Basically, we divided things into three categories; stuff around the home, stuff around L.A., and stuff that’s out of town [unintelligible 01:13:13] anywhere. We were revamping the room that we’re currently in, which is going to be our reserve recording studio. We already did the soundproofing. The wall behind you, Craig, looks crappy on camera because it’s just too blank and bare, so we’re going to introduce different stuff to that.

Craig: What are you going to do?

John: I’m not sure. We’re going to bring in somebody to help us figure that out.

Craig: You know I’m not going to be here, right?

John: No. When do you come back from–

Craig: Okay. My heart stopped for a second. I’m like, “Wait.”

John: While you’re gone, some of the time, there’ll be famous people who’ll come in. We’ll record some of that stuff.

Craig: Love famous people.

John: While you’re gone.

Craig: They’re famous for a reason, you know.

John: We’ll do three game nights. We love having people over for game nights.

Craig: Amazing.

John: You love game nights.

Craig: We love game nights.

John: We’ll do some pool parties. Around town, three restaurants in unfamiliar neighborhoods. Often, our food-related thing was three new cuisines, like ethnic cuisines, but we basically run out of ethnic cuisines. We got to Bangladeshi, and it’s like, “I think we’re good here.”

Craig: Near the end.

John: “We’re near the end.” Two escape rooms. I need to make it back to Catalina.

Craig: Sorry, you said two?

John: Two.

Craig: No, no, no, no, no.

John: Got to do more than two.

Craig: Got to do more than two.

John: We only did one escape room this entire year. We did the new one as– the downtown.

Craig: Here’s an extra one cool thing for you. Melissa and I did this with our friends Cle and Mia. There’s an escape room up in Santa Clarita.

John: I’ve heard. They have a–

Craig: It’s called Appleseed Avenue. Fantastic. Must do. Must.

John: Drew went with us to the one we did this last month. What was it called?

Drew: It was The Lost Cat?

John: It’s downtown. What I liked about it, the general concept is this old woman has lost her cat, and you find her cat.

Craig: Did it.

John: Did it. Good and solid.

Craig: It was cute.

John: Cute. Good time.

Craig: It was cute when the stuff fell down. That’s fun.

John: Love it. Then some out-of-town stuff. We’ll do another half-marathon. We’re going to visit one new country and then see some concerts and some shows. What I’m stressing here is that some stuff is work. We’re basically dealing with our CDs, DVDs, repainting the kitchen chairs, tuning the piano. Most of it is just like– inertia will just keep you on the couch and not doing a thing. Their challenge is for yourself to actually just get out and do your thing. It doesn’t feel like work. It scratches that check-off span of the list to actually like, “Okay, we’ve got to see a concert. What concert are we going to go see?”

Craig: I love doing nothing.

John: You love doing nothing.

Craig: Oh, my God.

John: You love playing a game. You love playing a little rest-your-leg game.

Craig: Doing puzzles, playing games. It’s just joy. That’s the thing. Follow your heart. I’ve never been a checklist person. I’ve never been somebody who’s like, “I should do blank.” If I hear the word should in front of something, I’m like, “Do I want to?”

John: You’ve got to recontextualize. “I want to do this thing. I want to remember that I want to do this thing.”

Craig: That’s the thing. Do I actually want to do this thing? I’ve really gotten it down to, I just do the things I want to do, and I don’t do the things I don’t want to do.

John: You prioritize D&D, which is nice.

Craig: Because I want to. That’s the beautiful part.

John: Looking at the blog post here, I misspoke in the main episode. We actually played 39 sessions of D&D because I did miss a few.

Craig: 39. Solid.

John: It’s a lot. Craig, you are going to be off shooting a new season of the show.

Craig: Yes.

John: What other, I don’t want to say goals, but what else do you envision for your 2026? What do you think would, at the end of 2026, just like, “Yes, that was a good year.”? What are some things that would have happened?

Craig: If I am alive at the end of 2026, I will feel great. This is going to be a difficult production because of the size of it and the things we have to do. It’s going to be tough, and the length of it. My goal is alive. I want to try and make sure that my blood sugar stays– my big task is keeping my blood sugar at a healthy number, which I’ve been able to do. I keep my eye on that, and I continue to reflect on some of my mental health pluses and minuses.

John: Sure.

Craig: I’m looking forward to working with the people that I have worked with before that I love, and some new people that I know I’m going to love that I’ve met, and I’m very excited about. Then there’s just the adventure aspect of it. It’s an adventure. That’s the thing. This list of doing stuff, I’m going to hike, stay up all night, see a forest fire, do this. There’s going to be 200 things that I’m going to do because of the show that’s like, “That’s my living.” When I say see a forest fire, we don’t actually have fire. I don’t know why I said that. We’re not lighting a forest on fire, don’t worry, but we are going to do some crazy stuff. That’s where all the living comes in.

That’s my big goal, and to keep playing D&D throughout it all because–

John: Absolutely. You’re starting a whole new campaign for it, so I’m excited.

Craig: Starting a whole new campaign. It keeps me sane. It’s my thing. It’s what I’m allowed to do for me. Everybody knows it. You got to carve out some stuff.

John: You’ve got to carve out some time.

Craig: You’ve got to carve out time.

John: Basically, be yourself. One of my nervous breakdown during my TV show is basically I existed only for the show, and I was stuck in this impossible place.

Craig: I exist almost entirely for the show, and then I carve out a little bit.

John: Nice. Craig, felicitations on this past year.

Craig: Likewise.

John: I hope it’s a great upcoming year.

Craig: I think it’s going to be a fine year for the two of us.

John: I hope so, too.

Craig: Drew, Happy New Year.

Drew: Happy New Year. I thought you were going to say, “Maybe not for you.”

Craig: What a horrible way to start 2026.

Drew: Good luck.

Craig: For Drew–

John: You’re fired.

Craig: Yes, you’re fired.

[laughter]

Drew: I knew it was coming. Thanks.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Links:

• Jamie Lee Curtis says “Trauma”
• Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology by Nick Haslam
• Young Connor Storrie on YouTube
• Steve Jobs introduces the iPhone
• Elon Musk announces the Cybertruck
• Valentina Vee on TikTok and Instagram
• Birth by Madison Karrh
• John’s What I Did in 2025
• Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Eric Pearson (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.

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.

Craig Mazin: Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin, and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, I will be solo hosting, but joined by the creator and showrunner of FX’s Say Nothing, Joshua Zetumer.

We’ll talk about that show, which is one of my favorites of 2024, if not my favorite of 2024, as well as answer some listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, and this is probably going to be a surprise to Joshua, he and I will put on our urban planner and civil engineer hats to answer what I think is a fairly easy question. How would we make Los Angeles function better? Joshua, welcome to the show.

Joshua Zetumer: Thank you for having me. I’ve listened to the show. I love the show. I’m a big fan of yours as well. So I’m really excited to be here.

Craig: Oh, go on.

Joshua: No. I can go on. I can go on.

Craig: Please don’t.

Joshua: No, I’ll just say one thing, which was Chernobyl was very much a model in my mind in how to do a limited series right and was a huge influence on Say Nothing. I’ll be excited to talk to you about that.

Craig: Well, we will get into that. Whatever influenced you, tip of the hat, because as I said, it was one of my favorite shows of 2024. I think it’s a fantastic show, and I really want to dig into, from the writing point of view, how you put it together and ask you some interesting questions about both the nature of your process and the show itself, the story.

Before we do that, some interesting little bits of biographic detail on you. First, your parents are both psychiatrists, so I think I’m really, really sorry, but I’m not sure. I think that’s better than therapists, probably.

Joshua: I feel like it’s worse than therapists. I feel like neo-Freudians at the dinner table is like maybe worse than like a touchy-feely LA therapist because they’ll really just put it all on themselves since that the Freudians blame the parents for everything.

Craig: Right. I’m sure they were blaming their parents at the same time. Poor grandma and grandpa.

Joshua: That’s right.

Craig: That’s right.

Joshua: It echoes down the line.

Craig: Oh, yes. More interesting than that to me, I guess when you were in high school, you were a jazz drummer.

Joshua: This is true. Yes. I was a drummer, and I was going to try to be a professional drummer for a long time. My childhood was very much like shrinks and punk in San Diego, which is where I’m from, and which is infinitely uncool to be from San Diego. I was like the indoor kid, having an existential crisis while everyone else was enjoying the beach.

Craig: Well, that’s what I would have done also, just so you know. Also, love playing the drums, probably not as good as you, and people that say jazz drummer are always very, very good, I feel like–

Joshua: Or just very pretentious, or just deeply lame. [chuckles]

Craig: Fair. Fair. You can play poorly and call it polyrhythm. I’ve seen this happen.

Joshua: What kind of stuff do you play, may I ask?

Craig: I was mostly just good old– still occasionally I’ll play, but just good old standard rock and roll stuff. Nothing– I actually never got into like the full punk, tu nda, tu nda, tu nda. Jazz drumming to me is– well, first of all, I just couldn’t do the traditional grip anyway, to start with. Then I was like I’m decent with rudiments, but not like jazz drummer good. I always felt like jazz drummers are like the wizards of drummers, and guys like me are just like the warlocks of drummers.

Joshua: [laughs] I definitely– it may be a stretch to call me a jazz drummer, I certainly studied a lot of jazz in college, and I felt like I tried to apply it to other styles. I think for me, those were always my heroes. The jazz guys were always my heroes, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams, because they were so unapproachable in their skill level, and it was something I really aspired to. Ultimately, I remember there was a really dark joke that I think someone told me when I was 20 years old, when I was really studying, which was like, maybe you’ve heard it, “What’s the difference between a jazz musician and a large pizza? A large pizza can feed a family of four.”

Craig: Oh, wow.

Joshua: That’s-

Craig: A fact. It’s a tough life. You picked, I think, a similarly tough path. “Oh, I think I’ll try and do the thing that’s even less likely to work out,” which is becoming a professional screenwriter, and yet you have. You, like me, mostly working, were working in features, you worked on Quantum of Solace, I’m jealous that you got to work on a James Bond movie because I’m a huge Bond nut, you did the RoboCop reboot, which I thought was terrific, and you also did Patriots Day in 2016, which is also an excellent film. Then you went, “I think I’m going to–“

Let’s talk about Say Nothing and some facts for our listeners. Say Nothing, the limited series, is based on the book, Say Nothing, A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe, who’s also a lovely man.

It is a nine-episode series that follows the story of two sisters, Dolours and Marion Price, who joined the IRA as young women in the early ‘70s, and through that story of idealism, liberation, oppression, terrorism, imprisonment, and murder, we get what I think, this is me editorializing, the best and most complete portrayal of the complicated reality of who the IRA was, and what they achieved, and what they failed to achieve. This miniseries was not your first attempt to write about the IRA, as I understand.

Joshua: No, that’s right. My first job writing in Hollywood was writing a script about the IRA, actually for Leonardo DiCaprio, when I was 26 years old, and that film never got made, but it got me steeped in the troubles long before taking on Say Nothing. The movie that I wrote for Leonardo DiCaprio was going to be– I didn’t want to call him Leo, just there, I had a moment of being like, “I can’t call him Leo,” but it was going to be produced by David Benioff, who created Game of Thrones, of course, and then Brad Simpson, who’s one of the producers on Say Nothing.

So when the book came out, Brad had a very early option on the book, and I think I was one of the first people he thought of because I was good friends with him and I’m one of his friends who happened to be a writer who knew the history of Northern Ireland pretty well. He slipped me the book and it just instantly became my favorite book. I thought it was just an extraordinary piece of writing, and also, I just thought, upon reading it, there’s just no way in hell it’s ever going to get made, just because Hollywood is so fear-based and the idea of doing an ambitious period show set in Northern Ireland, the odds of getting it greenlit seem like they were maybe 5%, no matter how good the book was.

The show was also like un-pitchable. It’s a very awkward pitch. If you pitch it, it’s about two Catholic sisters in Belfast who joined the IRA, and then you follow them on a 30-year journey from idealism to disillusionment. That pitch does not make studio executives see dollar signs. Now, when I look at it on the platform, it’s on Hulu, I can’t believe that it got made. It feels like I got away with robbing a bank, honestly. It’s on Disney Plus outside the US, and so I see this show about Irish paramilitaries like up there next to Buzz Lightyear, and I just cackle at the very idea that somebody was ballsy enough to make it. I spent five years doing the show that I actually got it done.

It is a testament to everybody involved that it got made. Not only my producers who are Brad Simpson and Nina Jacobson at Color Force, they’re super pugnacious. They really fight for the projects. Then also John Landgraf and Gina at FX. I don’t want to shill for FX, but truly like they believed in the book, they really believed in the scripts, and they believed in the cast, and that they were willing to make a show that was period, that had no stars, that was limited, that was doing everything that you’re really told not to do. I’m just really grateful that they said yes.

Craig: I know a little something about that process because I went through it with HBO, and you’re right, you have to find some people who are willing to do a thing that probably won’t work. By won’t work I mean gathering viewership and capturing people’s imaginations. Because when we tell these stories based on real-life events and we spread them out over the time they require, there is a worry, I think, in everyone’s mind that it’s going to turn into the thing that substitute teachers show when they come in because they need to do something for the social studies class. And our job, I think, is to try and convince people that, in fact, this story isn’t going to be homework, it’s going to be gripping.

I think what you achieved, we’ll go through how, but I want to ask a simple question. When you set yourself down to lay this thing out, how much were you thinking about the audience and how much were you thinking about how to keep people riveted? Because you kept me riveted through every episode, and because it’s over 30 years of time, you are telling stories about barely young adults. You’re telling stories about women who are, in their 50s and they’re the same people living completely different kinds of lives because of the way things stretch out.

All the events that occur, all the people– you had the same problem I had with Chernobyl. Everybody sounded the same and looked the same. It’s like a collection of white people with Russian names. You have a collection of white people with Irish names. How concerned were you about grasping the audience and holding them?

Joshua: I love a show that doesn’t tell you too much. I love a show that does not spoon-feed. I think there’s a certain amount of table setting you have to do with Irish history that is mostly just jammed into the pilot that I just had to do. The show had to do two things to me. This is actually what made the adaptation such an extremely high degree of difficulty was I wanted a show that was like The Wire. I’m not going to compare it to The Wire because it’s not The Wire, nothing is The Wire. I want a show that was extremely authentic down to all the granular details. And I wanted to capture the spirit of Belfast, which is like very contradictory at times.

At the same time, I wanted to make Say Nothing for a global audience– needed to make it for a global audience who had never heard of the troubles, frankly. I think that was the tightrope of doing the show. When it came to exposition and telling the audience things, you have your narrators, which Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes are looking back on their youth and the world can be very forbidding at times. You need a guide if you’re unfamiliar with the troubles and that device, though a little shop worn, I think is very organic to the story and so it was very useful.

Then beyond that initial table setting, I really want the audience to play catch up. I love getting invested in a world. I love when I don’t know everything and I’m not spoon-fed. I think that was actually honestly a big creative, not argument, but discussion, because as a writer, I’m like really, really allergic to exposition. I love the paranoid thrillers of the early ‘70s where you just dropped into a situation with like Harry in the conversation and you’re just wondering who this guy is and what he does and you’re not spoon-fed any information.

Craig: It sounds like there was a little bit of give and take on that because I have the same thing on my end of things. There’s always a request for clarity, I guess, is that. You’ll say spoon-fed and the people on the other side of the argument will say clarity. For writers who are moving through the system maybe for the first time, that can be quite a shock. How do you navigate those conversations and get what you want?

Joshua: You underline things in the script.

[laughter]

Joshua: You just go back in your second draft and you underline multiple times.

Craig: That works?

Joshua: No, it does work. No, I have done that. I’ve definitely, not on Say Nothing, but on another project, I definitely did get some notes. I felt they had already been addressed, and so in the next draft, I went back and underlined and the executive probably got what I was doing and was like, “I’m going to leave him alone.”

I think there are the compromises you can make that will destroy your work and there are the compromises you can make that will actually be really useful. You have to know the difference, I think, because you can’t be a horrible dick the whole time. You can be really close to a horrible dick the whole time, but you can’t cross that line. You just have to know where that line is, I think.

There’s that book, Difficult Men, about all the showrunners. Running a show, you realize how they became so difficult because there’s such a degree of control that you have to maintain. Really, it’s just about how do you maintain the level of control to get what you want without turning into a monster. That’s–

Craig: Let’s dig into that because like you, I came from features where we don’t have the authority. In fact, we are often in this unenviable position of being the person who knows the most and yet has the least amount of decision-making to do because they put the director in charge. Now, over here in television, you are put in charge. This may have been your first major dose of authority, but not only just over the creative aspects of the show, but also other people working on the show. Did you have other writers on the show or were you a–

Joshua: I had a brilliant writer’s room, honestly.

Craig: Fantastic.

Joshua: If I have time, I would love to just tell you everyone who wrote on the show because–

Craig: Run through it and talk to me a little bit about how you went from a guy alone in his room writing stuff and being told by directors or producers, “Mia, mia, mia” to a guy who is in charge of a show and also now in charge of writers.

Joshua: I think you’re only as good as your writers, I think, especially in a show like this. I was an outsider telling this story, which meant that I’m an American telling a story whose characters have a life that is as far from my life as you could possibly imagine. That meant that I had to treat it with a fundamental respect. I think it meant an insane, like a crazy research process for me, which was years long. Honestly, I think I probably spent nine months just writing the pilot because of the language, frankly, and trying to teach myself to write in a Belfast accent without speaking in a Belfast accent myself, which was just a whole exhaustive process. This is not your question though.

I wanted to make sure when I had my first writer’s room that we had a ton of different perspectives. We had a multitude of different perspectives. The writers who also worked on the show with me, we had Joe Murtagh, who created Woman in the Wall and is a show runner in his own right. Joe is a writer who is of Irish descent, was raised in London, and writes amazing action and his dialogue is hysterically funny. We had Claire Barron, who is a formidable New York playwright who’s been nominated for a Pulitzer and had brilliant insight, particularly into the sisters.

Claire wrote Episode 6, which is the hunger strike episode, which is one of my just absolute favorites.

Craig: Yes, remarkable.

Joshua: When the cast read that episode, they were crying. It’s just a very powerful episode. Then we had Kirsten Sheridan, who’s the daughter of director Jim Sheridan, who’s–

Craig: Oh, wow.

Joshua: Yes. She’s been nominated for an Oscar for co-writing In America.

Craig: Sure. Sure.

Joshua: Her writing is super earthy and humane, and she’s also great with subtext. I was running it, and we had these four different writers, myself included, whose writing was all just wildly different, as different as could be. For whatever reason, the alchemy in the room was just great. It was the writer’s room that you dream of having, where there were no toxic personalities. Everybody was friends, and it just ended up being a wonderful experience. I don’t want to speak for the other writers because who knows what they secretly think.

Craig: Well, they probably will say that you were almost a complete dick, but not–

Joshua: I actually think they would say that. I actually think they would because I definitely–

Craig: “He’s almost a complete dick.”

Joshua: I work really hard, and I try to get the people around me to work really hard and do their best work. It also should be said, we also had Patrick as an executive producer, who was dropping in and out, talking about the history. We have this murderer’s row of talented people all trying to wrangle this massive book. The whole thing, by the way, took place over Zoom during the pandemic, during peak COVID.

Craig: Oh, boy.

Joshua: Me and Kirsten were in LA, Clare was in New York, and Joe was in Madrid. It was crazy. It wasn’t a unique writer’s room because a lot of people were doing that, but it was certainly the thing that got us through COVID, I think, for a couple of us.

Craig: That is a fairly impressive room. You’re gathering up all this great work from all these people. Of course, you’re generating your own work as you go. The thing that impressed me so much, one of the many things that impressed me so much about Say Nothing is the tone. Because the tone, there’s probably a million ways to go wrong and one way to go right. I think I’ve seen a lot of things go wrong with stories like this. The tone here was so gorgeously grounded. It felt so authentic. It wasn’t trying too hard. I also loved how the show found beauty in the plain, the mundane, the faces, wonderful faces. No one was too gorgeous.

Joshua: I think Anthony Boyle would totally take offense of that, but we’ll move on.

Craig: [laughs] He’s very handsome.

Joshua: He’s a handsome man.

Craig: He’s very handsome. You didn’t have a model suddenly in the middle of it. Everything felt deeply detailed and deeply real. How do you keep that tone consistent when you are pulling in so much work from other people whose minds work slightly– Everybody’s mind works differently.

Joshua: Yes. I love that you asked that question because the tone was the thing that I felt most protective of throughout the process. Really, throughout the shoot, into post specifically, I felt like my job was really to just protect the tone and to make sure that really delicate balance between comedy and tragedy was maintained. I think that that’s a facet of a lot of Irish storytelling, obviously, that you can laugh in the darkest of times, and that idea had to be shot through the whole thing.

Otherwise, it wasn’t going to work because the subject matter is so grim. You have prison, you have a hunger strike, you have orphaned children, you have people who have done terrible things in the name of their country, and then realized it was all for nothing. It’s literally could be as bleak as a show gets. The idea that it had to have humor and heart, that was always at the center of it. I think, to your point about intimacy, I think when you have a historical show, my least favorite thing in a historical show, the characters are talking about history with the knowledge that they’re living in history and you’re like making a show about punk and the characters are like, “This is what punk is” or whatever, when nobody was saying that.

So for me, I was just trying to create intimate scenes between people and then let the scope of the canvas deal with the historical details. It was really about just being very aware of what was happening historically, but then throwing everything out. Fortunately, the conceit of the show, at least for the first half, is that these are kids. These are kids who are suddenly given power over life and death, who are suddenly thrust into the center of history and have to figure out what to do, but they’re still making decisions with brains that are, you could argue, not even fully formed. You stop developing as a person when you’re 25, and these were kids who were 22 and even teenagers.

For me, it was trying to capture the experience of okay, what would it feel like to be 19 when the world around you has suddenly turned upside down and the civilization that you’re living in has suddenly adopted violence and what would it be like if you really wanted social change and thought violence was the only way to get it, but you were a teenager? That’s at the heart of the show.

Craig: That also poses an interesting challenge because, as I’ve said many times on the show, my least favorite note is the character isn’t likable enough because I think that’s a compliment.

Joshua: Yes, I agree.

Craig: However, people need to relate to characters. For instance, you have an incredible character, a British military man named Frank Kitson played by Rory Kinnear, who is in a number of ways, a villain. He certainly represents the oppression of the British Empire, yet he’s also fascinating and you admire him. He’s possibly autistic, it’s hard to get a read on him, but he’s so gorgeously smart that you find yourself leaning towards him. Similarly, at the heart of the story, the two main characters, Dolours and Marian, are doing terrible things. At some point, how do you manage those slippery slopes of both humanizing people regardless of what they did, without drifting into, say, apologia?

Joshua: Yes, I think in the case of Frank Kitson, I would quibble a tiny bit in that I don’t think I’m humanizing him. I don’t think he was– He’s somebody who, when you do the research, he’s virtually impossible to humanize. At the same time, he’s ruthlessly, brutally effective at sowing distrust amid the IRA. He’s really good at what he does despite being, undeniably, a dark, dark individual.

Craig: But brilliant.

Joshua: But brilliant, yes. I think there’s another element of it too, which is you can obviously do the tricks that screenwriters do, which is you make everyone around him dumb, which is an old screenwriting trick. I think you can either make it so they’re keystone cops or you can make them smart and him smarter, which is usually the better thing to do. In the case with this show, I wanted a slightly more comedic tone because I did not want the sort of newsreel version of Frank Kitson that I feel like we’ve seen before from stuff about the troubles. I wanted him to be funny.

On the page, Frank Kitson was very funny. I think it’s one of the reasons they greenlit the show was because the stuff with the British, it was really engaging. It did not feel like a dour political drama. I think they greenlit the show because of the tone, to be honest. Then Rory showed up on set and he was so fucking funny and so deft at understanding what the tone of the show was. Because that’s the thing you have to do. Your actors have to know about the dance you’re doing between comedy and tragedy as well. Otherwise, you’re dead. You get an actor who doesn’t understand the tone, especially in the part like that, and the show completely falls apart.

Everybody needs to know the show that they’re making, and Rory really understood the tone. There was one moment when he showed up– I’m embarrassed to say this, I probably shouldn’t say this. Maybe I’ll wake up tomorrow night and tell you to cut it.

Craig: Let’s find out.

Joshua: Yes, let’s find out. He shows up on set and first of all, he’s like already Frank Kitson when he gets there. We have one conversation in the makeup chair and then he’s in character and the Director Mike Lennox and I are both intimidated by him and going like, “Is he Kitson right now? We can’t tell, or is this just his vibe?” Then he does a scene– his first scene was when he is with the two lieutenants who are around him, and the guys playing the lieutenants are also incredibly funny. They’re doing it and they’re saying the lines are in the script, but it’s just so funny that I actually went to Mike Lennox, I tapped him on the shoulder and I was like, “Is it too funny?”

I just had a moment of going– because you’re making the show that is incredibly politically sensitive, and you’re finding out the tone while you’re shooting when your actor’s reading out the line.

You have the tone on the page, you don’t know what it’s going to look like. I’m like, “Should we get one that’s a little more serious, just to have it in our back pocket, in case this is too far?” Mike goes over, and Mike directed all of Derry Girls, so he knows his way around a comedy. He goes over to the actors, and talks to them for five minutes, and then comes back, sort of like hangdog, and he looks at me and he just goes like, “I don’t know how to make them any less funny.” He’s so good. I guess this is the tone.

Craig: It starts when he lands. He gets out of a helicopter and his lieutenants say, “How’s the trip over?” He looks at them with dead eyes and goes, “45 minutes,” which is awesome. Maybe it was 48, I don’t know.

Joshua: That was right.

Craig: He’ll do everything in an instant. I love how compact and efficient that was. Let’s talk a little bit about the big argument at the heart of this. You touched on it, but if you could, I have my answer. I know what I think this show is about, and I’m right, of course. I’ll give you a chance to see if you’re correct about your own show. This is, I think, of value to anybody that’s trying to write something that is a sprawling historical epic that covers many, many years. You and I have both done this. I think what we both know is the events themselves aren’t enough. There is some glue that makes a cohesive point, even if that point is debatable, and hopefully, it is. What was there for you in the very center of this?

Joshua: The challenge, of course, is that with something like this, there’s not one thing. There’s actually like three or four. I’m really curious which one is the right one according to–

Craig: I’ll tell you.

Joshua: Don’t worry, you’ll let me know.

Craig: I’ll tell you. Yes, I’ll let you know.

Joshua: No, I think for me, there’s so much there and I would actually make two thematic points about it. I think the big one is that it’s about both the romance of radical politics and also the cost of those politics, that you can have acts of violence that have a terrible cost to them for both the victims and for the perpetrators as well. That you can get swept up in something when you’re young and then have to live with those decisions for the rest of your life. This idea that there would be an emotional cost, not only for the individual but also for the entire society, I think that was something I was really interested in. That was point one. Then there’s another thing, I don’t know if that’s right. You tell me if that feels right.

Craig: You’re almost right. Let’s hear what number two is.

Joshua: I think number two was just about this idea of silence and this idea that the price of peace is silence. That if you are going to have a country go from violence to peace, I think for a lot of people in Northern Ireland, people who’ve committed acts of violence and had acts of violence done to them, that the cost of that is that you don’t talk about it, that you don’t talk about the past and you bury it. I think the reason that I wanted to do the show in the beginning– this is actually deeply embarrassing, but I was raised by therapists, as we said, and for me, it was like all emotions are on the table. I was in a house where you were expected to talk about your feelings. That can be good and it can also be bad.

The alternative is having all this trauma– we all have trauma. Having all this trauma and not talking about it. For me, it was about the idea of the destructive power of silence and what it can do to a person to have this thing inside you and not be able to get it out. This idea of unprocessed trauma, both for the victims and the perpetrators, I think that was something that was at the heart of it for me.

Craig: Those are pretty good answers. I’m going to combine them a little bit in my answer, which is the correct answer. I will say to people, if you have not yet seen Say Nothing, you will experience a series of shocking events and startling events that you can imagine having to hold inside as a secret would be very difficult. I assure you, as you’re going through that process, you still have yet to see the thing that is the most upsetting and the one that really feels like, how can you hold this inside? I’ll tell you for me, and I’m joking, I don’t really know, but as a viewer, what struck me about the show was that it articulated something that I think we all struggle with when we have hopes and desires to make the world a better place.

That is that it may be impossible to experience an ideological war and still remain idealistic when it’s over. That it might actually be impossible because the people who inspire everybody through ideas are necessarily throwing a lot of those people onto a fire, whether they are murdered or killed or injured themselves, or spiritually, they die because of things they do to other people. They become pawns in a larger movement that ultimately becomes political. I found that tragedy to be beautiful and moving. The story of people who cared so much because they were inspired to care so much and were possibly necessarily abandoned and betrayed, which, by the way, and I don’t know. Does that sound like something–

Joshua: No, I love it. I love it. I think you should just– You send me the recording and I can just play it back. I can transcribe it. I can start using it in interviews. I think it’s really good.

Craig: You just, you just Venmo me and you can have whatever you want. That leads us to, I guess my final question that revolves around the narrative of the show, and that is Gerry Fucking Adams. Gerry Adams– here’s what I knew, going into things. I was not a student of the IRA. What I knew was there was an ongoing battle between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants/the British government in Northern Ireland, which was possessed by the UK. That battle was between the IRA and the British primarily than the, I guess the Northern Irish police. It involved bombings and it also involved terrorism perpetrated by the IRA and oppressive acts perpetrated by the government.

I know Sunday Bloody Sunday, we all do because we love U2. I knew that Gerry Adams, was– this is what I thought, as an American I thought, “Oh, and then there’s this guy, Gerry Adams, who helped make peace. He’s good. He’s the head of Sinn Fein, which is the political party in Northern Ireland that is part of the British Parliament that figured out how to get to the Good Friday Accords,” I believe it’s called. Good Friday Agreement?

Joshua: Good Friday Agreement. Yes.

Craig: Good Friday Agreement, which essentially ended the troubles. Here’s what your show taught me. Gerry Fucking Adams, as they refer to him over and over, “Gerry Fucking Adams,” was the head of the IRA. He was in charge of the IRA. He was the person who was ordering the terroristic attacks. Perhaps more distressingly, or at least equally distressingly, he was also the person who was ordering the internal purges of people, Irish Catholics, who were believed to be touts, informants to the British, whether they were or not. The show, in fact, is framed around the story of a mother of seven children, or nine?

Joshua: 10, actually.

Craig: 10?

Joshua: I think in the apartment you only see, I believe, eight.

Craig: I was trying to count. There’s a lot of kids. A single mother of 10 children who was murdered by the IRA because she was suspected to be an informant. Yet, “Gerry Fucking Adams,” who, by becoming this political leader and essentially denying that he ever was part of the IRA, he becomes the interesting villain of the story. It’s his betrayal of everybody around him that’s so shocking. What you do, and this is fascinating to me, you are telling this story, and he’s still here. Gerry Adams is still alive. Gerry Adams was a member of the UK Parliament as leader of the Sinn Féin party for 35 years.

He only stepped down six years ago, in part because of some of the revelations about what happened back then. He still denies that he was even a member of the IRA, much less the leader. You found what I think is the most brilliant way to tell the story exactly the way you wanted without getting sued and it made it better. Talk to me about the amazing disclaimers that you ran at the end of every episode.

Joshua: The disclaimers are a way for us– really, this is not an answer that’s going to be satisfying for you. The disclaimers are actually a way to give Gerry his due in a way. I think it would have been morally wrong to not include them. I think on the one hand, we needed people to know that Gerry has always denied being a member of the IRA. I think when to do it and how to do it was obviously a conversation between me, the producers and the legal department. The answer that we came up with was we’re going to do it after every episode.

That kind of repetition, I think for people, creates its own feeling, which is purely unintentional on my part. I would give a disclaimer to the disclaimer and I would say that any feelings you may have about Gerry Adams are not the intention of the artist creating the show and are purely up to the viewer and their own emotional state.

Craig: Well this viewer over here, every time that disclaimer came up, I went, “Wow.” It’s an incredible story, so beautifully told, gorgeously cast. I looked up, I was like, “Who cast this? Oh, Nina Gold. Of course.”

Joshua: There you go.

Craig: Nina Gold who cast Chernobyl.

Joshua: I read an interview with her about the casting process on Chernobyl. That was one of the reasons why it had to be her.

Craig: You chose wisely.

Joshua: I would love to talk about Nina. Can I just go back and say one thing about Gerry Adams just before we move on, just beyond the disclaimer? I think one thing I would say, his role within the IRA, whether he’s running the IRA or not running the IRA, is fundamentally very murky. The IRA had an army council who– you see the old guard, in Episode 3, of other men who are the leadership. His relationship with them has always been very murky. Either way, the show depicts him as being very high up the chain of command in the IRA. I think there is something about–

Craig: The Big Guy.

Joshua: He’s called The Big Guy.

Craig: The Big Lad. The Big Lad.

Joshua: The Big Lad, yes. One of the things I just want people to take away was this fundamental contradiction about Gerry Adams, which is that on the one hand, he has a major hand in the peace process and on the other, his role in the IRA undoubtedly led to the deaths of many, many people. I think that fundamental discomfort that you should feel towards the character, I think that was something I was trying to achieve was that I wanted him, as a character, to make us uncomfortable. We shouldn’t know how we feel about him in the end of the show. I think that’s something that I really wanted, honestly, for all the characters, with the exception of the victims, of course, who are-

Craig: Blameless.

Joshua: -in many ways– No, and in many ways, the heroes of the story. Laura Donnelly playing Helen McConville, is unambiguously the hero of the story and one who is left at the end of the film. I was very adamant that the last shot would be her. She’s left holding the bag. Everybody else, you’re supposed to be kept off balance about them, where they have Dolours, of course, has her sensitivity, her humanity, and also her willingness to kill and die for her beliefs, all of which should throw you off. That was really the goal, I think, with everyone. Anyway, I just wanted to–

Craig: You got there. It was perfectly done in that by the time it concluded, I was uncomfortable with all of them. I wouldn’t know because I ask a simple question when I’m watching these things, “What would happen if I were to walk in a room and meet that person? If I were to meet them, if they were alive– Dolours is not, but if they were, how would that go and how would I feel?” The answer is I don’t know.

What’s so beautiful about your show is that it depicts this very complicated thing, which is violence in service of idea that is almost always depicted stupidly. You depict it with such intelligence and grace. Congratulations on the show. Would you be interested, because you’re so smart, in helping me answer some listener questions?

Joshua: Oh, God. I love the little bit of flattery that’s really supposed to make me say yes.

Craig: Oh, you are the child of psychiatrists.

Joshua: Oh, my God.

Craig: None of my tricks are working. How about this? I’m going to order you to answer some of the questions.

Joshua: I’m good. Unless you want to talk about Nina Gold, I’m good to answer the questions.

Craig: Oh, well, I think Nina would be blushing right now, and I can hear her saying, “Oh, God, no.”

Joshua: She’s a wizard.

Craig: She’s a wizard, and she’s a wonderful person who consistently casts things brilliantly. She casts Game of Thrones. She casts Chernobyl. She casts Say Nothing. She’s just an amazing person. A wonderful person. So well done again, Nina Gold. You’ve done it again.

Drew, would you be so kind as to give us a listener question that we could theoretically answer?

Drew Marquardt: Yes. This question comes from Riley. Riley writes, “I finally got an agent at one of the big three agencies to read one of my scripts, and just before the holidays, he told me we would talk after the holidays, which would be January 6th. I messaged him the morning of the 7th, and he replied that he was currently evacuating his home in the Palisades. On January 10th, I sent him a message saying, basically, I’m so sorry for what he’s going through. I hope he and his family are safe, and of course, no need to respond.
I didn’t mention the meeting or the script.

I haven’t heard from him since, which I totally understand. I honestly can’t imagine what all he’s having to deal with right now. First and foremost, I want to be respectful and compassionate about his situation. I also know the industry is taking an overall hit right now, and I imagine that alongside his personal issues, his current clients are probably reaching out to find out what’s going on with their careers and projects.

Do you think there’s even any time, energy, or bandwidth for him taking on a new writer right this time? And how long should I wait to follow up? I don’t want to reach out too soon and have him say, ‘Never mind. The timing isn’t right. Best of luck,’ but I also don’t want to fall through the cracks or jeopardize this potential opportunity. I also don’t feel comfortable sending the script elsewhere before talking to him first.”

Joshua: We’re going to have to workshop this one because there is not an easy answer for this one.

Craig: No. What do you think?

Joshua: Everything’s upside down right now. I think it’s been upside down for the last couple weeks. I do think that probably Riley is correct in that the agent is probably concerned about their current clients and not thinking immediately about signing new talent. I also know that it can make you incredibly itchy when you’ve turned something in and you’re waiting for a response. I don’t think that Riley should wait for the agent and I think they should try to use any leverage they have to make other inroads.

As far as the timing, the timing is the big question for me. You can wait for months to get an answer from a single person. It’s why Hollywood takes so long to do anything. So I think if they have other relationships, they should use them. Everything is still underwater here. I would at least give it another week for things to get back to relative normal would be my guess.

Craig: Yes, I think you’re right there. Riley, the issue is you aren’t a client there. My guess is this agent is probably not doing a great job of calling back his actual clients because his house may have burned down. If not, evacuation is a brutal thing to go through. I’m going to say I agree with Joshua. You don’t want to stand on ceremony here. He got the script. He has it. He didn’t write back. If you have three other agents that are excited to read this thing, yes, send it. You don’t belong to anybody just yet. I know I like to remind people that agents work for us. We don’t work for them.

I think probably you don’t need to text them again. You just wait now. Joshua says, if you have other opportunities, go for them. There is no hard rule here. He certainly would not be able to say later, “How could you do this to me?” He’s had the script.

Let’s go with Mauro, or perhaps Mauro, in Canada. Drew, what does Mauro wonder about?

Drew: What do you guys recommend to study or watch or practice in order to keep the audience’s emotions in mind when writing? What I mean is taking the reader and hopefully viewer on an emotional journey in an effective way on every page.

Craig: Questions like this always blow my mind.

Joshua: No, but actually, God.

Craig: If you have an answer, that would be great.

Joshua: No. I have sort of an answer, but it’s an annoying answer, which is read the basics, learn the basics, go read the screenplay to Rocky or whatever movie, older movie gets you excited. Find an artist you like and read all their work and then really try hard not to imitate them. I think the bigger thing for me is actually that writers need to go out and live and you have to have life experience truly in order to write something great so that you’re– which is like a corny thing to say, but I really believe it.

When you’re writing, we have a culture that recycles everything right now. A lot of it. For a long time, we’ve been in a backwards-facing culture where we want to make movies that are like the movies we grew up on because that’s the easier thing to do. It’s very easy to go out and say, “I want to make a movie like Fargo, so I’m going to go write a movie that is like Fargo.” Then what you have is a movie that’s like Fargo, but not as good as Fargo. I think the thing that I would really try to do, really recommend is using your personal relationships and saying, “What would it be like if I was writing about my mom?” but doing it on a bigger canvas?

What would it be if– I wrote television and wanted to write television because of The Sopranos. That was David Chase writing about his mom on a bigger canvas. Ultimately, he’s very open about his relationship with his mother being like the seed of The Sopranos. That I think is what artists should be doing. I think you should quietly observe your parents and your friends and just think about writing from the inside out, as they say, after learning the fundamentals. That would be really my recommendation.

Craig: That is probably a more useful answer than the one I’ll give, Mauro, which is to say, I don’t recommend that you study or watch or practice this at all, because if you’re studying it or practicing it, it’s not going to be right. What you’re really getting at, Mauro, is something that is innate to writing and it has to be developed over time. And I think is probably the function of experience. It is the fragmentation of your own brain so that not only are you yourself taking care of all the things that the script needs to be, but you’re also all the individual characters and you’re also the character that’s listening and not talking.

You are also the audience watching all of it. I return to my audience section of my mind all the time. As an audience member, I’m like, do I care? I’m like, how does that make me feel? Just as you need to quadruplicate yourself into four characters in a scene, you also need to be the audience. That is a developed skill. You have to start with some kind of innate understanding of humans and humanity. I completely agree with Joshua that part of this is just going out there and living, but a big part of it is writing stuff down, shooting it, even if you have to shoot it on your camera, watching people watch it, you’ll probably want to throw up and you’ll learn.

Oh, my God, I remember the very first time I sat in the theater and watched something that I had written on screen. It was like I was seeing it for the first time because I was fully the audience and my level of judgment and scrutiny skyrocketed because now I’m a customer. I don’t give a shit what’s happening in the kitchen. I don’t care if the fish delivery was late or the gas stove wasn’t working. I want an awesome plate of food. I don’t care about anything else.

That was a painful wake-up call. I would urge you more to go through as many painful wake-up calls as possible because it’ll speed the process along.

Joshua: That’s a really interesting answer. You asked this question to me earlier about the viewer and your relationship to the audience. I just agree with you so much that the experience of watching your own stuff, it’s just so important. The idea of going out and shooting something just like, yes, please, everyone should be doing that. Everybody should know, even if you don’t shoot it, even if you just give it to some friends to act, even if they’re terrible. Just doing that feels so important.

Then there’s this thing that happens for me where you ultimately stop paying attention to the audience when you write. You tell me if you disagree, but I feel like the artist or the writer or whatever has to be fundamentally very selfish. You have to just care about yourself and the kind of things that you would want to see. Otherwise, you’re fucked.

Craig: That’s you as the audience, right?

Joshua: Yes, it is.

Craig: That’s my point.

Joshua: It’s the same.

Craig: You’re saying, “I want to see this.”

Joshua: I’m saying don’t think about people who are different from you and what they might like-

Craig: Right, don’t do that.

Joshua: -because that’s when you’re dead, right?

Craig: That’s calculating and chasing and that’s horrible.

Joshua: I really think like I just have a feeling like Chris Nolan likes Chris Nolan movies and Michael Bay likes Michael Bay movies, and ultimately, these are biggest directors are trying to on some level make themselves happy.

Craig: That’s a great point. To amend, Mauro, when you are being the audience in your mind, you’re being you as an audience member. Not imagining a demographic or a room full of people. Just you, like what is this working on you? I’ll tell you, the first time you write something and then start tearing up as you’re writing it, that’s when you know that you’ve gotten there, unless you’re writing a comedy. That never happens.

I think we have time for one more question. Victor writes in with a question about citing sources, which is something that I think Joshua and I know a little bit about. Drew, what does Victor ask?

Drew: “I’m working on a historical drama screenplay based on real events and attempting to stay as accurate as possible. This includes taking notes and at times quoting directly from a few books that have accounts of events within the period, as well as biographies and published collections of letters from people involved to use their own words where possible. If this were to be produced, would I need to cite of these somehow, or only the book that is most directly concerned with the time frame and events that I’m writing about?”

Craig: Did you have to go through this rigorous process that I had to go through on Chernobyl?

Joshua: Oh, yes. There was a cite-your-source process with the legal department for virtually everything. You go first. What was it like for you on Chernobyl, which, by the way, I just have not gotten the chance to wax, poetic?

Craig: Oh, geez.

Joshua: No, I won’t. It’s just, it’s such an amazing piece of work. That like the balance between genre and drama, whatever you would call it, the balance of genre filmmaking and genre writing and non-genre writing was just like really at the heart of-

Craig: Thank you.

Joshua: -at the top of mind. You not only made this incredible piece of entertainment, but then also, it felt like it was capturing a fundamental truth that I think, and I think that’s what we’re all trying to search for. You state it so overtly at the cost of the lie right at the beginning. Then you’re like, “This is the thesis, and now I’m going to decimate you with how I illustrate that thesis.” I just thought, beautifully done.

Craig: Thank you. I’m very happy that decimation occurred. As I was going on the journey towards decimation, I had lots of books I was drawing from, some documentaries. I wish I had known ahead of time that I was going to have to go back and provide the sources specifically for all that stuff for HBO. They have a very rigorous guy who is going to stress test everything. It was really just an inefficient process on my end because I had to go back and go, “Okay, at least I have a pretty good memory. This was from this book, this was from this book.” I can hand all those books over, hand over all those sources, hand over the documentaries and say, “Okay, all of this worked out.” There were some interesting questions and challenges, but overall, I think maybe I had to slightly change one thing for legal purposes. I think it was somebody’s name. How did it go for you?

Joshua: Similarly, just extremely rigorous with the legal team. I think there was, you’re citing your sources for everything you want to do. They know that you’re not making a documentary, which is, I think, they know that a certain amount of artistic license has to be taken in any show, but beyond that, they’re pretty strict. All that stuff is very carefully vetted and it’s a challenging but worthwhile process to stress test the thing that you’re making. I would also say though, I would want to add one thing which is probably not the question and tell me if you experienced this, that the research can become a crutch at times.

Craig: Oh, of course, yes.

Joshua: You can have this desire, which probably you and I both had along with the listener, to make it absolutely as accurate as possible. Ultimately, I think in my case, and certainly Craig in your case as well, you can’t know what was said in every room. Because in the case of Say Nothing, it’s about the IRA, it’s a culture of secrecy.

Craig: You say nothing.

Joshua: Yes, exactly. Yours deals with state secrets and things like that. Ultimately, you have to do the research and do as much of it as you can. It’s like a musician practicing scales. You practice your scales, and you practice your scales, and you do your rudiments, or whatever, over and over. Then, at some point, you have to trust that you’ve built enough of a solid foundation that you can go and you can actually just play. Ultimately, do your homework. Do a ton of homework. Do more than you think you need.

Then, at some point, you got to let it go and go and write. Then if it’s lucky enough to be made, which is, of course, a very high bar, only then will you really have to deal with the scrutiny of a legal department. I think you should probably write the best story that you can first, and then hope it survives that process second.

Craig: Fantastic answer. I think we covered all those bases really well for our listeners. Congratulations to you and me for doing so great. Drew, I think we deserve a gold star. It’s time for our one cool thing. It can be anything at all, small or large. I’ll start with mine because it’s so wonderfully stupid today. My one cool thing is eating ice cream as an adult.

Joshua: I love it. I love this one cool thing, by the way, despite being lactose intolerant.

Craig: Same. Ice cream in my mind for so long has been associated with like sin, a weakness, bad health. It’s also like food for children. Every kid has probably gone a little crazy on ice cream, but a little bit of ice cream every now and then, I have to say as an adult, is a lovely thing. It’s just a reminder of something that is elegantly delicious that has been there our whole lives. It is the ultimate comfort food. My method is to put some ice cream in a tiny bowl. This way you won’t go crazy. Because as we get older, it’s a little harder.

Do not eat out of a carton. Folks, stop eating out of a carton. Only bad things will happen from that. Also, you have permission, I grant you permission, from one adult to another, to just eat regular ice cream if you want. You’re not obligated to chase the adult flavors. If you want, whatever, rosemary, chive and black pepper ice cream, that’s fine, do it. If you like vanilla, that’s awesome. One cool thing, if you’re an adult, give it a try, just a little bit of ice cream.

Joshua: I love that. My postscript ritual, whenever any draft goes in, is McDonald’s ice cream and bourbon, which is embarrassing to admit as an adult man-

Craig: Wow. Nice.

Joshua: -but it should be like cigarettes, and I don’t know, something more grown up, but it’s not.

Craig: That’s awesome. What is your one cool thing this week?

Joshua: Mine is less fun and whimsical. Mine is a book that you have maybe read, which is a book about the origins of punk rock called Please Kill Me. Are you familiar with this book?

Craig: I have not, no.

Joshua: Oh my God, it’s so good. It’s an oral history of the early days of punk in New York and then in London from the late ’60s to I think the ’80s. It’s an incredible oral history that really captures a scene and a particular moment in time and makes you envious to not be living in the center of culture, during the peak of culture. Even more than that, I think I’ve said this a few times, but there are moments in the book that you really can’t get out of your mind, that go beyond just rock and roll excess.

I think, I may be getting this wrong, but Iggy Pop is up there doing his very particular thing, birthing a new genre of music, inventing punk. In the process, people are pissed off, and they throw bottles, and he proceeds to roll around in the broken glass as a power move to be like the ultimate “fuck you” to the audience and shock and appall people and continue the show while he’s all cut up and things like that. I think the thing about it that is so incredible to me is that it was this time when art was really dangerous.

It was this time when you could go to a performance and anything could happen. I feel like that is the thing that we’re missing in the age of corporate consolidation. That we’re missing this element of danger and we’re missing this element of like– This is extremely lofty, so forgive me if this is like really pretentious, but I feel like on some level, the question that artists need to ask themselves is, what am I risking by saying the thing I’m going to say? In the case of Iggy, it’s like great bodily harm and death, right?

Craig: Right.

Joshua: I feel like that idea that the artist is supposed to be a risk taker, which is so hard right now with got-you culture and cancel culture and all these things, I feel like that is an important thing to remember that somehow there should be this element of danger. That book captures that spirit in incredibly vivid ways. That would be my–

Craig: All right. That’s Please Kill Me, which is what I say every morning when I wake up, just to myself. Just to myself, please kill me.

That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today so adroitly. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. I love drinkware, this is my new favorite word. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the e-mail you get each week as a premium subscriber and thank you to all of our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this every week. Finally, you can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you can get all of the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record now on how to make Los Angeles function better.

Joshua, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Joshua: Thank you so much for having me, I really enjoyed it.

[Bonus Segment]

Craig: Okay, Joshua, so this is magic wand time. We just went through this convulsion here in Los Angeles because of the fires and that prompted me to think about the ways our city, and I believe you live here in Los Angeles now.

Joshua: Yes.

Craig: The ways our city could be improved in a functioning way to help. We’re not going to address social problems like mental health right now or unhoused populations or crime. This is just like civil engineering stuff. Let’s start with this question: Should we, after the fires, start to think about leaving some of these places alone? Meaning, should we rebuild in areas where we know fires and mudslides are going to occur?

Joshua: This is a truly tragic question, right? Because as I go through Los Angeles, the dream of LA is that you can be in nature and also be steps away from the city, that nature is at your door. Now this idea that the neighborhoods that are the most ensconced in nature are the most vulnerable is truly tragic. I live in the foothills and I’m unsure if I have to move. I, of course, like everyone, have multiple people in my life who just lost everything. The idea of whether or not we should be rebuilding, it’s a really tricky one. I feel like, as the idealist in me says we shouldn’t give up on that dream.

I think the part of me that wants to be cheeky, if I’m allowed to be cheeky even in a moment like this, is that yes, we should rebuild and everybody should be legally obligated to get a pool. Every home should have a pool and it should include one of the machines that is a real thing that sucks the water out of your pool and uses it to spray down your house. I know a guy who had a pool, had this device installed, and saved his home because the water from the pool was sucked out and covered his house.

Craig: I think that’s–

Joshua: Not a real answer, but like–

Craig: No, but let’s put that under general zoning ideas. It does seem to me that in areas where we know the homes are going to be extremely vulnerable to fire, that we have to improve the infrastructure and we probably have to improve it through zoning. Some of it has already occurred. There are building codes that make homes far more, I wouldn’t say fireproof, but I would say fire resistant. The problem is that those codes were introduced, I think in 2012 or something or 2008, and nothing is grandfathered in because nobody’s going to rebuild their house to match the code.

So, so many of the homes that were built before then, and that’s the majority of homes in LA, are vulnerable. I think zoning laws perhaps coming up with, okay, if you’re in a vulnerable area, you need to install this kind of thing. That makes total sense to me. The other question I have, or it’s just an idea is, I think it’s important to look at some neighborhoods where we know there’s really only one way in.

There are certain areas where there’s one main road. If that main road is blocked off, you can’t get in there either with emergency equipment or evacuation is incredibly difficult.
Because, if you’re in Benedict Canyon, that’s Benedict Canyon. Should we be targeting some of those places and creating additional arteries for movement?

Joshua: When it comes to the canyons, in a perfect world, yes, of course, you would want more than one way out of Laurel Canyon, right? I suppose there are two, there’s this side of the hill and that side of the hill.

Craig: Mulholland and that’s it.

Joshua: But the actual cost of creating multiple exits feels, I’m sure, incredibly daunting to a city that’s already facing enormous unhoused populations, et cetera. I don’t know. You would want to hope that putting in a reservoir that strategically placed reservoirs might help, but the problem is we also have droughts. That’s another piece of the puzzle. I believe that there was a reservoir that they were supposed to be drawing from for the Palisades fire that was dry. Then I heard that they were taking the water from the Hollywood Reservoir to put out the Hollywood fire, which worked, right?

Craig: Right. I think, from what I’ve read, that the Palisades Reservoir probably would not have made enough of a difference, that that fire was just so brutal. Also, nobody could fly. That debate will be going on forever, probably, whether or not it would have mattered. Again, I’m using my magic wand here, but let’s talk a little bit about cost, because anything we do to improve this is always going to come with this enormous cost. That drives me over into traffic, which is another problem that we have in Los Angeles. I’m just trying to make it function better.

We’ve spent an enormous amount of money on creating public transportation, a metro line. Will we finish all of that in time for it to still matter? Are we heading towards a place where either working from home removes an enormous amount of traffic from the freeways, or automatic driving essentially eliminates traffic, because if every car on the road is automatic, self-driving, there is no traffic because there’s no rubbernecking, there’s no accidents.

Joshua: It’s Minority Report, basically.

Craig: It’s Minority Report, exactly. Do you think our future, that LA will function better with more mass transportation or more self-driving buses and cars?

Joshua: Cynically, I think that it will get so bad that half the people will leave and then we’ll be fine. [laughter] No, I think I–

Craig: That’s also a thing.

Joshua: I actually don’t think that self-driving cars will get there to the point where everybody has them in order to get to Minority Report. Everybody needs to have them, every single person. Because you picture Minority Report with the one old Chevy Nova in the middle of the beautifully flowing ribbon of traffic, just causing entanglements. I just feel like, no, maybe in 150 years, but by then, everything’s going to be on fire every other week unless we can fix our global problem of fixing the environment, which is the real issue, right?

I feel, no, just cynically, I don’t think we can look to self-driving cars to save us. Certainly, if the people who are trying to create self-driving cars are the same people who are trying to create them for the next 20 years, make of that what you will, I think we’ll be in trouble. Get over there. No, I think we’ve got to go work it out. I do think that mass exodus is on the table.

Craig: Mass exodus would certainly solve a lot of traffic problems. Here’s something that I think would make Los Angeles function better, at least be more enjoyable. Los Angeles is enormously spread out, we know this, it’s famously spread out, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have, in fact, I think it’s an argument that it makes it even easier to have a very large central park. We have Griffith Park, which is enormous, but it’s like in the hills and its mountains and valleys and hiking.

What we don’t have is that great park in the middle of a city that people can enjoy, that’s beautiful, that is an oasis. It would require, again, enormous amount of public domain and the knocking down of a lot of things, but it seems to me like we could use it.

Joshua: I love that idea. I was just in London for-

Craig: There you go.

Joshua: -a long period of time making the show, and they call the parks, the lungs of London. That was the thing that I liked most about the city. I’d never spent a lot of time there in the past. That was the thing that I think I enjoyed most. I think we could just wipe out everybody who lives in Hancock Park and then just put it all there. No, exactly–

Craig: Wow. That’s where I’m at. That’s literally where I am.

Joshua: That’s where you’re proposing?

Craig: Not in my backyard.

Joshua: No, but where would you put it though? Because I do agree, it’s much better. What we have drawing the people now are like the Rick Caruso mega malls, which are not the lungs of Los Angeles, right?

Craig: No, they are not.

Joshua: We have the Grove and the Americana and that is not doing it.

Craig: There is Pan Pacific Park, which I think could be expanded. The Motion Picture Academy, of which I am surprisingly a member, is certainly screaming right now at the thought that their beautiful new museum and headquarters would be knocked down for park. That seems like a nice place and I also think as you head further south, maybe south of the like the 10, there’s also some nice areas where, again, there’s a lot of commercial stuff which would have to be like, yes, there’s a cost. You have to eliminate things.

You wouldn’t want to eliminate residences, but if we could find some places that are– or downtown, some old train yards and whatever, I would love the idea. I used to live in La Cañada and we would go over to Huntington Park in Pasadena, which is beautiful and we could use one of those.

Joshua: I agree. I would also say that it dovetails into the first question, which is it does feel like the safe way to get nature in your city, right? It is not actually like living in the foothills. It’s going to Central Park. It’s going to Richmond Park or Hyde Park or whatever.

Craig: Hyde Park, exactly. One of the things that I think would make Los Angeles function better is the elimination of jurisdictional fragmentation. I think the rest of the country and the world was very surprised by something we’re all quite used to here, which is 12 different police departments plus the county, plus the state. We’ve got LAPD, but we also have the Pasadena Police Department. We also have Santa Monica Police. We also have West Hollywood Sheriff’s Officers as part of the county. We have California Highway Patrol.

Sometimes they don’t talk to each other. Sometimes you pull up and you’re like, “Oh yes, we’re LA Fire Department.” That’s LA County across the street. The county has to come there and put that fire out. We’re going to put this fire out on this. Everybody else is looking at us like, “Just to make the one thing.” If we could combine it all into one thing, I think that probably would be better. It would be enormous, but I think it would be better.

Joshua: I’m completely with you. I think you see the same thing in medicine, right? Where like, my family’s all doctors. My brother’s a hospitalist. None of the hospitals can communicate with each other because they all speak a different coded language to do their databases. Similarly with law enforcement, I know that lack of communication, certainly when there are crises, and if the Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire are any indication, there’s going to be a lot more of those. Responding very quickly is like, right at the heart of stopping some of those events.

I’m in complete agreement. I think, no doubt, they have their bureaucratic reasons, but certainly.

Craig: Oh, yes. Oh, they’re not going to change.

Joshua: I just know mostly the LAPD and the sheriffs, right? There are strange relationships where there will be corruption cases within one department and the other department remains untouched and all that.

Craig: My magic wand is going to try one more thing, and this is perhaps the most magical thinking of them all. The one thing that I think would make Los Angeles function vastly better would be a completely new airport. Air travel, which was once the domain of the wealthy, is now completely democratized. People from every socioeconomic stratus fly, and all of us in Los Angeles, unless we’re lucky enough to go somewhere super local and we can make it to Burbank, we’re all going to Los Angeles International Airport, LAX, which is ancient and stupid.

It is a stupidly designed airport where you have to roll around in a horrible oval loop, everybody’s smashed together. The terminals are subject to refurbishing at great expense, and by the time they’re done refurbishing it, it’s already old and stupid-looking. Security-wise, I think it’s a complete disaster. They’re building a monorail to help move people back and forth, which everybody hates and also probably won’t be done by the Olympics. LAX is just a nightmare. The problem, of course, with building an entire new airport is money, sure, and space.

Airports need an enormous amount of space. If you can build a brand new airport, where would you put it?

Joshua: Oh wow. Obviously, I agree with you. The LAX is the worst airport one could envision. If one were to design an airport built around all the things you don’t want to do, I think you would have LAX. Just to do one Devil’s Advocate, it’s not even a Devil’s Advocate, it’s just, have you ever seen a film called Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round?

Craig: No.

Joshua: There is a film where, I think it’s a heist movie, it’s an old heist movie, the third act of the film takes place at LAX. You get to see LAX in all of its period glory, with the cars that are the right cars, the cars that were intended to be driving there, with all of that beautiful mid-century detailing that it once had before it just became a shit show, and it’s actually really fucking cool in that movie. You realize that it was just built at a time when there was just so much less traffic, and now it’s just congested, it’s worse than the Trader Joe’s parking lot of your nightmares.

If I was going to build it some, can I still wipe out all the people in Hancock Park? Is that still a thing?

Craig: You could. I would take a wipeout here, although that’s really going to be a snarled traffic situation.

Joshua: It’ll be bad.

Craig: And really loud.

Joshua: All I can say is, if we’re waving the magic wand, the Burbank Airport is a delight, I absolutely love flying out of Burbank, it’s quaint. Perhaps if we could just amplify its size and make it our major airport, we would get a chance to redesign the parking, but that would be– if I have advice for anybody moving to LA, it is always fly out of Burbank if you can.

Craig: Yes, fly out of Burbank and take Fountain.

Joshua: That’s right.

Craig: I think we’ve done the best we can to come up with some things that will absolutely never happen to make Los Angeles function better. Almost certainly what will happen is we don’t change at all, and we go through some convulsions from time to time. It is the cost of living here in the city we love. Joshua Zetumer, thank you so much for spending your time with us today, such a fan of your work. Congratulations on Say Nothing, and hopefully we’ll get you back on the show one of these days.

Joshua: That would be great. Thank you for having me.

Links:

• Say Nothing
• Joshua Zetumer
• Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe
• Difficult Men by Brett Martin
• Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.