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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.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has even more swearing than usual, so if you’re in a car with your kids, this is a standard warning about that.

[applause]

Craig Mazin: Hi. Hello.

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is the holiday live show of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are–

Audience: Interesting to screenwriters.

Craig: Every time they do it, they get more and more bored.

John: Yes.

Craig: Interesting to screen–

John: I know. It feels like an obligation. It feels like a chore, but it’s never a chore.

Craig: It’s a little bit like Christmas.

John: Aww. Do you enjoy Christmas? Do you enjoy the holidays?

Craig: I actually love Christmas.

John: I know you like cooking. You like baking.

Craig: I do, but also, I love Christmas because when I was a kid I wasn’t allowed to have Christmas, because Jew.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That was a real thing when I was growing up. Yes, sure. I wanted a Christmas tree and I just thought, “Oh, we can at least get a Christmas tree.” No.

John: No Christmas tree?

Craig: No, because that meant you were “giving in.”

John: See, last night, I was over at Aline’s house, Aline Brosh McKenna from — you know, our Joan Rivers — and she was having a Christmas tree decorating party. It was really, really fun, so I thought maybe you got to have that joy, but no?

Craig: Does it look like I’ve ever had any joy? That’s not what happens, but I do, I love Christmas time. I love Christmas stuff. I love Christmas music. I love the time of year. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m like a little elf.

John: Yes, and you’ve got some red socks on. One thing I always love about this show is this show is a benefit for Hollywood HEART. Let’s remember what Hollywood HEART is. They are a great charity that provides summer camping experiences for kids who otherwise would not be able to go to summer camp. We want to support them every year, so this is a benefit for them. Thank you everybody who bought a ticket tonight. Thank you for great charity. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Thank you, Hollywood HEART for having us.

Craig: It’s great to do this each year, and we give how much? Half of the money to them?

John: We give every single penny out of tonight goes to them, plus we are chipping in on top of that, so we’re matching dollar for dollar. Everything raised here is going to Hollywood HEART. Sorry. Sorry, Craig.

Craig: Okay. Fine.

John: All right. You’re going to have to sell another show or something to make up for what we’re giving up tonight.

Craig: Fine.

John: Let’s talk about tonight. Tonight we have three very special guests. Oh, here’s the thing. The people who are listening to this at home who are clicking through their podcast player, they know who’s on the show, but you in the audience, I don’t think you do. Do you?

Audience: No.

John: Oh, this is pretty exciting.

Craig: Or, they’re like, they just get up and walk out.

John: Like, oh, my God, they’re storming the doors. First off, we have Jac Schaefer, creator of WandaVision and Agatha All Along. She is here to walk us down that Witches’ road. We’ll ask her all sorts of questions about how she put that show together and also why it kind of made me want to become a lesbian. There’s something about that show that just pulled me over in that strange direction.

Craig: How’s it going?

John: It’s going pretty well.

Craig: Great.

John: Looking at Aubrey Plaza and I’m like, yeah, I see that.

Craig: Same. Then we’ll sit down with Brian Jordan Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig of English Teacher. That’s right. To talk about their hit series and how to work with your bestie without killing each other, which I think you and I have done a really good job of.

John: I think we’ve done a pretty good job. We can always get some more help. We can always get some more hints from the experts there. And not intentionally, Craig, but somehow we booked the creators of the gayest shows of the season.

Craig: I’m going to give them a run for their money, I’ve got to be honest with you.

John: All right. Season two, right?

Craig: Yes.

John: All right, and Craig, you have a special game that we’re going to play.

Craig: Yes, we’re going to do a special little Christmas song game in the middle of the show. I’m very excited about it. It’s got a little twist.

John: Craig put it all in the workflow, but he’s like, “Don’t look at it,” so I didn’t look at it. It’s a surprise to me as well.

Craig: You will be a contestant.

John: I’ll be a contestant.

Craig: There will be two exciting guest contestants.

John: Yes. Who just found out they’re going to be a guest contestant. We’re so excited for that. We’re also going to have a raffle, which is raising more money for this incredible charity of Hollywood HEART. Now, there’s three things you can win in this raffle. One of them is a guaranteed audience question.

Craig: Otherwise known as a GAQ.

John: Yes. If you put your name in for the– I hear Megana’s voice laughing. I’m so excited.

Craig: She’s the only one that really loves me.

John: If you put in a thing for raffle, you could get a chance to ask a question of us and this amazing panel. So it’s time to be thinking about what question would you want to ask?

Craig: Yes. you certainly don’t want to flop on the Christmas show.

John: No, you better ask a good fucking question.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes.

Craig: Whoa.

John: Yes, I just swore. That’s how serious I am about this.

Craig: Oh, my.

John: I know, the vapors. We should not waste any more time. Let’s bring out Jac Schaefer, is a writer, director, and a showrunner who created two very witchy series. Jac Schaefer.

[applause]

[Music: The Ballad of the Witches’ Road]

Jac Shaeffer: Oh, I got a little lost on my witches’ road to the stage.

John: Yes, you got to go follow the arrows.

Jac: There were arrows, it couldn’t have been easier.

John: So we played you out to the Witches’ Road song. I want to start with that question. How early in the creation of Agatha All Along, which is so spectacular, but how early did that you know that okay, we need a song, and the song is not going to be theme music, but it’s actually be a fundamental part of the narrative of the series.

Jac: We always knew there would be music because it was so central to WandaVision. I had sort of a checklist for when we decided to do the Agatha show. Here are the things we need. We need another bop, or bops, plural. We need hair, makeup, wardrobe. We need opportunities to see her conning. We needed a meta piece. We needed to examine some form of tropes. The music piece sort of dovetailed with a larger mantra that I had, which is I wanted the show to be a spell. That was my sort of guiding light. As we sort of worked it in the room, I think it was probably three weeks in that it became that the song is the spell. It started as like, it’s the thing that opens the road. It’s the spell that opens the road. Then as we worked it more, it became it’s actually– I’m spoiling everything if you haven’t watched it.

John: I was just going to say that.

Jac: Sorry. Have you seen the show?

John: If you have not seen WandaVision, leave right now and go home and watch it, then listen to the episode afterwards.

Jac: Yes. It became it’s actually the con. It’s Agatha’s con. It’s the spell she is placing on the characters around her, on witches globally and, this was my big aspiration, on the audience. That it’s, she’s pulling one over on the audience with this centuries-long con that is the song.

Craig: In listening to you talk about it, it just sort of reinforces this question I’m dying to ask you. Because in your show and the way your narrative is structured, there seemingly is infinite possibilities. You could do almost anything. I love that you put these interesting restrictions on yourself. I’m really interested when you said work it, right? You guys can go down so many different witches’ roads. How do which ones feel consistent with some sort of, I don’t want to say rules, but a consistency when the nature of supernatural narrative is that you can kind of do whatever you want.

Jac: It takes so much discipline. And it’s something that I learned on WandaVision. Because Wanda’s power is that she can make anything happen, and that’s too much and too big. So in order for it to hold together and be satisfying for the audience, we have to put restrictions on that kind of in every way. One of the early discoveries on WandaVision was we knew we were going to do Wanda and Vision and sitcoms. It was actually Kevin Feige who early on helped us realize that we needed to limit the sitcoms we were doing. Because there’s workplace sitcoms. We were looking at Cheers. We were looking at Seinfeld. We were looking at Golden Girls. We were looking at all kinds of stuff, but it didn’t have any rigor. There wasn’t any reason.

John: Rigor. Great word.

Jac: Because it was like, what is Wanda after? Wanda is after the perfect nuclear family. That actually then pushed to the side All in the Family. It even pushed Roseanne to the side, because any sort of like larger social commentary or reflection, any political element, we were only entertaining aspirational family sitcoms. That was a revelation to me, what that did for us, because it meant that the themes were so supported and her journey was so supported. Then we applied that same ethos and that same sort of restriction in Agatha All Along. It was all about Agatha’s journey and supporting these characters and truly what is a witch? That’s what we came back to every time.

Craig: Got it.

John: That question of what is a witch is what you went into this writer’s room with. As you assembled your team, one thing I really like about how you set up Agatha All Along, is that it is sort of a heist. You’re putting together a team in order to perform a heist, which is to sort of get down this witches’ road. You were assembling a team of writers for this writer’s room. How much did you know on that first day? What could you tell them about, this is what the show is going to be about, let’s work a way to get there.

Jac: Yes. I like to have a very robust document going in that says, here’s what we have, here’s what we’re missing, here is what I desperately want to achieve. With the Agatha document, at the top, it said, “The show is a spell.” Then it was sort of explaining conceptually what I meant by that. For me, it was like The NeverEnding Story, it was The Usual Suspects. It was these pieces where at the end, there is a twist that feels right, but you realize you have been duped, and it’s expansive.

With The NeverEnding Story, it’s like, the whole thing unfolds and you realize you’ve been a part of it the whole time. That’s a children’s movie, but it turned my head around. It was an ecstatic feeling. That was the aspiration, is how do we pull the audience into our coven? One of the ways you do that is you hire the Lopez’s to write an earworm. The song really did cast a spell, and that is a trick of a lot of really talented people. The document is also very brass tacks of like, here are the characters we’re looking at, here is who– Like the Marvel rules to things, it’s like here’s who’s on deck for us. Should we partake? Here’s who we have to stay away from.

I was desperate to have them do a Fleetwood Mac style performance. I didn’t know how it fit. I didn’t know what it was, but I was like, I have this bee in my bonnet and it’s never going to go away. That ended up leading to, has everyone seen the live performance of Fleetwood Mac in their reunions?

Craig: Silver Springs.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: The greatest moment of all time.

Jac: The greatest moment of all time.

Craig: When she screams her anger in his face. Stevie Nicks is singing this song and she’s just singing it right into Lindsay Buckingham’s face.

Jac: Into his face.

Craig: Because it’s about him. I’ll follow you down and I’ll haunt you.

Jac: I will haunt you.

Craig: I will haunt you.

Jac: The sound of my voice will haunt you–

Craig: Forever. He’s like-

[laughter]

and she’s like, no, no, I’m going to say it again.

Jac: She’s like, “I am currently casting a hex on your face-

Craig: It’s incredible, you’ve got to google it.

Jac: -with my talent, with my anger.” I made the room watch it. I talked to the Lopezes about it. I was like, “This is what we’re doing because I believe I saw a witch.” Every time I watch that clip, I’m like, “That’s a fucking witch.”

Craig: She was known as the white witch. That’s what I think they called her, the white witch. Is that right?

Jac: She’s what– she is still on the planet. She’s somewhere.

John: Oh, no, she’s still here.

Jac: Praise Stevie, don’t come at me. That was in the document, was like a thing that I’m like, this is a dream. If we can integrate this in a way that makes sense, let’s do that. We didn’t know the Witches’ road, that was a missing piece. That’s something I call the container, like I need a container and–

Craig: Go into that a little more like as a practical tip.

Jac: I’m relatively new to television, I’m more of a feature person. What I find like enchanting about TV and also terrifying is that it can go in a million directions. How do you organize your episodes? What makes sense to me, and I also love non-linear storytelling, but like, what do you hang on to? The container for me is the thing that holds it all together. In WandaVision, the container is the hex. She created this hex. We made all the rules to the hex. We made sort of like all the sort of limitations of it and how it works and how she sort of has to understand it.

We had a vocabulary for what the different things were. We called them weirdnesses when something odd would happen. On the page, when we were in sitcom mode, the page would look normal. Then when we were stepping out, it would be italicized and have some bold in it. It needed to be organized in that way. That was my first time working with what I call the container.

Then for Agatha, I knew her character inside and out. I knew this was a story of a liar and that the point A to point B was, she’s a liar, we get to see her truth. I knew we were doing her and Billy and what that journey was and what it meant, but I didn’t know where were they going to be. How do we justify–

Craig: What are we supposed to write?

Jac: Yes. What’s the world and how do we make it big enough for the show, but contained enough where it doesn’t fly off into outer space? The road became that thing.

John: Now, one of the challenges you’re facing as you’re coming up on Agatha, which is after WandaVision, we sort of have an expectation of what Agatha All Along is going to be like.

Jac: Yes.

John: You know that each episode has to do certain things, but that the audience is going to have a discussion and an expectation of like, oh, this is this thing, this is this thing. How much, as you were putting together episodes, were you trying to anticipate this is what the internet is going to think is happening next and here’s how we honor that, stay ahead of that, use that to our advantage.

Jac: I don’t really think about it like the internet. I think about it– I’m constantly thinking about an audience’s experience, because what I want more than anything is I want that gasp. That like the moment where your brain starts to anticipate, “Oh my God, is that what’s happening?” That it is and you were right. Oh my God, and that thrill of that. Then, I also want everyone to laugh and it’s great when people cry and it’s great when people sing, but like that sort of thrill that makes you lean forward. What I wanted with this one, like it was so exciting when we hatched– Megan McDonnell is here, and she was one of the writers on episode four in WandaVision. Episode four where we stepped out of the sitcom.

One of the things that I loved about– I’m talking a lot about WandaVision because they’re–

Craig: You worked on it, that’s fine.

Jac: I did. I sort of diagnosed for myself that a sitcom lulls you, that you get into this place of comfort. I can count on one hand the times when a sitcom deviated and how distressing that was and how it made me– Like in Growing Pains when Carol Seaver’s boyfriend died, played by Matthew Perry. I was like, I’m going to throw up. This is not supposed to happen in this world. The idea that we could lull the audience three episodes of like, we’re moving through time and we’re going to episode style each time. Right? This feels good. This feels good.

Craig: Get people in a rut, get them leaning.

Jac: Yes. Then episode four would be like, just kidding. We’re back in the MCU with a different character. We’re like back in time. I wanted to do that again, but I was like, well, we can’t do it in episode four, so we did it in episode six. I tried to bundle it with the mystery of this team. This time when we get our step out bottle episode and we’re backfilling, we’re getting so much more information that the audience has been craving. It’s sort of– If that answers your question.

John: Absolutely. You’re really thinking about how do you make episode by episode so rewarding for the audience that they’re desperate to see the next episode. You and Craig both have the luxury or not like the way TV should be made, which is that week by week, there’s that weekly anticipation of the next episode. Now somebody can stream it all at once, but if they’re watching it in the real time, they’re part of a cultural moment, like trying to figure out what’s happening next.

Jac: Right. I love the theories. They make me really sick and keep me up at night, but like that audience engagement, it’s incredible.

Craig: Do you ever have that moment where you’re looking through some stuff and it’s–

Jac: It’s a better idea than I had?

Craig: No.

Jac: It happens a lot.

Craig: That’s actually never happened to me.

[laughter]

But people are trying to figure out like, this is what’s going to happen, this is what’s going to happen. The more sure they are, the wronger they are. Then one sort of random person says literally everything correct.

Jac: Tiny little voice.

Craig: They don’t even get told no, they’re just ignored.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: Yes, I’m like, you, a screenwriter.

Jac: I know. I wish I could think of an example of when that happened-

Craig: I want to rescue them, you know.

Jac: -a couple of time. I know. I want to be like, oh, I see you.

Craig: Yes, you got it.

Jac: You’re so smart.

Craig: There was like a guy that was like, here’s how I think every episode is going to start and finish in season one of The Last of Us. Nailed it. Nailed it. I was like, gah.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: Everyone’s like, shut up.

Jac: There’s this incredible TikToker and it’s terrible that I don’t know her name. If anyone knows who I’m talking about, please shout her name, she’s really great. She did a hilarious video. I can swear and say–

John: Yes, we understand.

Craig: You fucking can.

Jac: Great.

Craig: It’s fucking Christmas.

Jac: She did this hilarious fucking thing, where she was talking about like– She was like, “What kind of like cunty theater kid queen made The Witches’ Road? Like, ooh, the trial is we got to down a bottle of Merlot. We’ve got to like all like perform like Fleetwood Mac. We got to get together and be a band.” She was like, “Who’s the queen doing this?” And then it’s Billy Maximoff.

Craig: Yes.

Jac: Yes. I sent it to the room and I was like, “This is too delicious. I hope she feels rad when she realizes that she was right all along.”

Craig: That’s gorgeous.

John: Let’s talk about your room. Let’s talk about the room and who you assembled and why you pick the writers you pick. Obviously, you had that first session where they’re getting this document and your goals and plans for it. How do you like to run a room? What does a room look like to you?

Jac: I love assembling a room. I love running a room. I had no idea that this was– I wanted to direct and it turns out I wanted to be a showrunner. The working with a team of brains who are also awesome, fun, smart, funny, great people. It’s just the best. It’s so great. Don’t tell my children. I’m like the greatest joy of my life is working in a writers room. When I was doing WandaVision, I was terrified and I got some really good advice. One of them was my friend, Chris Addison, told me that it’s not my job to have the best idea in the room. It’s my job to be the keeper of the vision. I was like, I can totally do that.

I look for idea machines. I look for people who just think crazy thoughts, but I have of slots. On Agatha, first of all, there were some POVs that I needed to service that I could not do myself. That was crucial. I had chairs for those perspectives. That was going to be vital. Then there were people that I knew from WandaVision who were really suited to this spinoff show that was quite different from WandaVision. It had a different sensibility. It was about sort of bringing the people that I already knew who had the right dimensions to them.

When I look at a room, the first thing is that the people need to be kind and respectful. That’s always where I start, because I personally can’t work if there’s tension or disrespect or anything unpleasant like that, and it also has to be fun. When I read scripts, what I look for like specs and stuff is I look for audacious ideas. I don’t care if people can stick the landing. I don’t care if the end comes apart as long as you gave a shot. It’s really the like, what is the weirdest thing that someone tried really hard to have it hold water on the page?

Craig: Bravery.

Jac: Yes. I hired Giovanna Sarquis on Agatha because she had a character in her spec who was a mother and I believed the mother. Giovanna is a younger woman. She doesn’t have children. I was like, how did she write this middle-aged mom in a way that felt raw? It’s about that. It’s like once I have– Like I hired Jason Rostovsky and he is like a goth horror guy. I was like, I’ve nailed that piece. Then when I’m looking at the other chairs, like that’s covered, so what do I need over here? It’s a toolbox. It’s so fun.

John: Awesome.

Craig: Do we have time for one more question?

John: One more question.

Craig: One real fast one. Just talk a little bit about the challenges of protagonizing someone, because Agatha wasn’t the protagonist and now she’s sort of. Well clearly.

Jac: She’s a protagonist of her own story. That’s for sure.

John: Anti-hero.

Craig: How do you protagonize a character in such a way that doesn’t negate what came before, because side characters are fun and villains are fun and they’re not accountable the way that protagonists are?

Jac: First of all, thank you for not asking how do you make a character like Agatha likable?

Craig: Fuck that. It’s the worst note in history.

Jac: It’s the worst.

Craig: We’ve talked about that before.

Jac: Of course, as a writer you would never say that. Protagonize someone. It wasn’t hard because Kathryn had brought so much to the role of Agatha, so much more than was on the page for WandaVision. We were like, okay, she’s Mrs. Roper and she’s Rhoda and she’s all these other things. Kathryn can do that in her sleep. Then we wanted her to be this like scenery chewing centuries old witch. We’re like, Kathryn can do that as well. Kathryn brought all this texture about what she really wanted, what Agatha wanted. To protagonize, to use your awesome word, this character into her own show, it was following those threads.

Craig: It was already like raring to get out and do it.

Jac: Also, in film school, the like want versus need, I always had a hard time with that. But Agatha, it’s like so clear. She wants power, she needs community. End of story. That’s really what led to the thrust of the show or the kickoff, is like the most hated witch has to form a coven. You have the longest runway.

Craig: Great. Love that. Love that. All right. Interesting.

John: I think it’s time for your game, Craig. Talk us through what we want to do here.

Craig: Oh boy, here we go. Okay.

John: First off, we need to bring up two very special guests.

Craig: Yes, we got to get some guests going.

John: Holidays are a time for family. Let’s bring back some Scriptnotes family here. Two former producers of the Script Notes podcast, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. Can you guys come up?

Craig: Megan and Megana.

[applause]

Craig: Megana, is it true that you just flew back from India literally just to be in this game?

Megana Rao: I was in India.

Craig: Did you literally just got on a plane to be here.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: Thank you.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: For my game?

Megana: Yes.

Craig: Clearly not the case.

Megana: I am hours off of a plane. I also want to put that out there.

Craig: Excellent.

John: Absolutely. All right. Do you guys enjoy– These are Christmas songs we’re doing?

Craig: Yes.

John: Do you guys enjoy Christmas songs?

Craig: Oh, apparently not.

John: Megan MacDonnell, did you grow up with Christmas songs?

Megan MacDonnell: I love a Christmas song.

Jac: Megan MacDonnell is Christmas.

Craig: She’s Christmas.

Jac: Let’s be clear.

Craig: She’s Christmas.

Megana: Do we get to be on the same team?

John: You’re all on one team?

Craig: You can be on the team too.

John: All right.

Craig: Here, let’s switch seats.

Megana: Okay. Fantastic.

Craig: As you guys know, every now and again, John and I like to do a three-page challenge. Today, we’re going to be doing a little Christmas song game. Of course, because we’re writers, I like to concentrate on lyrics. We’re going to be doing a Christmas song three word challenge. Here’s how it goes. I have picked the strangest three words I could find in a Christmas song. They’re in a row, they’re not random. For instance if they were Deck the Halls, it might be “boughs of holly,” and then you go, oh it’s Deck the Halls. That’s it.

I’m just going to give you three words, you have to tell me the Christmas song. If you know it out there, don’t shout it out, just raise you hand.

Megana: Do we shout it out, or we have–?

Craig: You can confer, you can shout. You guys can shout. You guys can do anything you want. You can shout. You can confer. Let’s start with this one: Every mother’s child. Here we go.

Megan: Every mother’s child. Oh, that’s wrong.

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: This is awesome.

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: Does anyone out there know?

Megan: I’ll be home for Christmas? No that’s–

Craig: No.

Megan: No, I’m not saying. That wasn’t an official guess. That wasn’t an official guess.

Craig: Oh.

Megan: What about–

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: Someone’s ready to go in the front row it looks like.

Megana: Silent Night? Sorry, that was my answer.

Craig: No, this show is only like– It’s not five days long.

Megan: So we’re not qualified.

Jac: I can almost hear it.

Audience: The Christmas Song?

Craig: Yes. The Christmas song, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. Every mother’s child is going to spy to see if reindeer really know how to fly.

John: All right.

Megana: Oh, wow.

Craig: All right. See. It’s hard.

John: It’s hard.

Megan: Stop with this game.

Craig: Ready? How about this one, you ding-dongs. I love this one, because this one really speaks to me. How you’ll hate.

John: How you’ll hate.

Craig: How you’ll hate.

Jac: Can we do Christmas movies?

Craig: No.

Jac: I don’t know, Wheelhouse.

Craig: I love saying no like Hannibal Lecter. No.

Megan: How you’ll hate to come in from the snow or something like that?

Craig: Yes, you’re very close. How you’ll hate going out in the storm–

John: Baby it’s cold outside.

Craig: Well, that’s part– No, it’s not. It’s, but if you really hold me tight, all the way home, you’ll be warm.

Audience: Let it Snow.

Craig: Yes. Are you from Australia? Oh, great. I thought I heard let it snorr.

John: Let is snow, all right.

Craig: It is. It was let it snow.

A platinum mine.

Megan: Santa Baby?

Craig: Yes. Santa Baby.

John: That’s a dime.

Craig: Yes.

Megana: You’re so good at this.

Megan: No I’m not, that’s my first win.

Craig: Okay, we’re cooking now. All right, this one is weird. I don’t know why this is in a Christmas song at all. This one speaks to you Jaq: Scary ghost stories.

Megan: [humming] Long ago.

John: Scary ghost stories.

Megana: Is that it?

Megan: Tales of the glories of Christmas. What is the song?

Craig: Yes. [humming]

John: It’s not my favorite things, it’s–

Craig: [humming]

Megan: It’s the most wonderful time–

Craig: Yes, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.

John: It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Craig: This turned into name that tune, but with so many notes.

The kids bunch.

John: The kids bunch?

Craig: The kids bunch.

John: The kids bunch uo, I assume. Is it a verb?

Megana: The kids would like to bunch up.

John: The kids bunch.

Craig: I like the analysis. Anyone?

Audience: Silver Bells.

Craig: Yes, it’s Silver bells.

Megan: Nice.

Craig: See the kids bunch. This is Santa’s big scene. I told the three words. This one you’ll get: The tree tops glisten.

John: [humming]

Craig: Oh, my God.

Megana: When the tree tops glisten.

Craig: You just said she was the– Yes.

John: Tree tops glisten.

Craig: Keep going. And children listen. To hear sleigh bells in the snow.

John: I’m dreaming of a White Christmas.

Craig: Yes, you are. White Christmas.

Jac: Apparently this is not how my brain works.

Craig: If you don’t get this one, I’m going to lose my mind.

Megana: Me neither.

Craig: Do you recall?

John: Frosty the snowman.

Jac: Rudolph the red nosed reindeer. I got it. I got one.

Craig: Yes. All right: Some pumpkin pie. It’s hard.

Megana: You got it. You got it.

Megan: I’m this close. It’s close. Nope.

Craig: Nope.

Megan: Is it rocking around…?

Craig: Yes it is. Rocking around the Christmas tree.

John: All right.

Craig: All right. Two more: You didn’t hear.

Jac: I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.

Craig: Oh, God. We’re going to turn to the audience?

Megan: What’s the lyric?

Craig: You didn’t hear.

John: You didn’t hear.

Craig: I case you didn’t hear.

Megan: Oh, by golly [crosstalk]

Craig: Yes, of a Holly Jolly Christmas.

Jac: These are all the same song. Right?

Craig: They are not. Last one. Then I’m going to ask a trivia question that connects them all. I know: a circus clown.

Megan: Yes, then we’ll pretend that he’s Parson Brown, it’s Frosted Snowman.

Craig: No. No. No.

Megan: Yes it is.

Craig: No, it’s not Parson brown…

Megan: We’ll pretend that he’s a circus clown.

Craig: Yes.

Megan: It’s not called Frosty the Snowman?

Craig: We’ll have lots of fun with Mister Snowman. Until the other kids come and knock him down. Does that sound like Frosty the Snowman to you? No.

John: Winter Wonderland.

Craig: Yes, you’re walking in a Winter Wonderland.

Megan: Wow, you’re so right. It wasn’t Snowman. Snowman is the clown.

Megana: So certain.

Megan: I was so certain.

Craig: No. All of these are linked by one commonality that isn’t that they’re about Christmas. I’m going to read the names again, see if you can tell. If you know in the audience raise your hand. You’re ready? Maybe they already know. The Christmas song, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. Let It Snow, Santa Baby, It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Silver Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, Holly Jolly Christmas, Walking in a Winter Wonderland.

John: They were all written for movies.

Craig: No.

John: All right.

Craig: That was a great guess. I’ll give you a hint. The answer begins with they were all written.

John: Same composer.

Craig: No.

Megana: Same year.

Craig: No. We have a guess.

Audience: They were all written by Jews.

Craig: Yes.

[applause]

They were all written by Jews. You’re welcome. Great job. Great job.

John: Well done.

Craig: Front row crushing it out here.

Jac: I feel like you deserve a prize.

Craig: Thanks for playing.

Megana: Because that was really good. You guys did great.

John: We did, yes.

Megan: Yes, yes.

John: Phenomenal.

Craig: You did great.

Megana: All contributed equally.

Craig: Yes.

John: Megana, Megan, Jac. Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, guys. Thank you.

[applause]

I love how scared you were. They were all written by Jews. Because if you’re wrong, that’s, what?

John: What?

Craig: Jeez.

John: Oh, my God.

Craig: What the fuck, man. Who are we letting in?

John: I will say as a non-Jewish person, saying the word Jew just by itself is always still a little terrifying to me.

Craig: I’ll give you a pass.

John: All right. Let’s move on with our show. Our next guests have been working together as writers, directors, and actors for almost a decade, making dozens of shorts, web series, three feature films for YouTube. Now they are in one of my favorite shows of the whole year, English Teacher. Please welcome its creator, Brian Jordan Alvarez, and its co-writer and co-star, Stephanie Koenig.

[music]

Stephanie: Thanks for bringing the chairs and couches from my living room.

Brian: Thanks for bringing the chairs and couches in general. We didn’t want to have to bring these ourselves.

John: We try to keep our guests comfortable if possible. Could you hear backstage? Could you identify any of the lyrics in that song?

Stephanie: Yes.

Craig: All right.

Stephanie: What song? Wait, no. The Christmas songs?

Craig: The Christmas songs. Did you do it?

Brian: She was guessing them backstage. Yes.

Stephanie: I understand a couple.

John: You should have said you got them all. Yes. You had an opportunity.

Stephanie: No, I think I really only got one.

Craig: Oh.

Stephanie: I was singing it, and then I had to sing the whole thing to get to the refrain.

Craig: It’s hard because every Christmas song does have three weird fucking words in there, all just for no reason. Yes, and I went right for them.

Brian: Wait, what was the common thread between all of them?

Craig: They were all written by Jews.

Stephanie: Wow.

Craig: No, you didn’t believe me.

Brian: I don’t know whether– I don’t know how to react to this.

John: See, I didn’t either Brian.

Craig: Are you angry?

Brian: No, I just don’t want to have the– I don’t know if you’re kidding.

Craig: I’m not kidding.

Brian: Okay, you’re not kidding. Great.

Craig: I swear to God, I’m not kidding.

Brian: That’s very amazing.

Craig: They were all written by Jews.

Stephanie: Wow, that’s great.

Craig: Apparently John gets nervous when I say Jew.

John: No. When you say Jew, it’s great.

Craig: Oh.

John: It’s when I say it that I feel so bad.

Craig: Well, because you yell it.

[laughter]

Craig: Let’s talk about English Teacher for a moment.

John: Brian and Stephanie, so in this award season, we’re seeing a lot of co-stars who will come on and do interviews for things. They’re just the best of friends when they’re on camera and the cameras are rolling, and you’re always like, do they actually like each other whatsoever? Now, the two of you are genuinely friends in real life. Is that true? You guys have known each other for a minute.

Brian: A long time. 11 years going on 12, I think.

Stephanie: It’s 11 years now. That’s crazy. We hang out all the time.

Brian: We hang out all the time.

Craig: That’s not convincing. We hang out all the time. We’re best friends.

John: Because we hang out some, too-

Craig: We do.

John: -but we also work together, then we have to do stuff together. How do you guys manage a relationship of being friends, but also co-workers who are doing stuff together? Are there tensions? What are things you guys have learned over the years making so many things together about keeping your friendship, but also a professional relationship?

Brian: I don’t think it’s been very hard. We focus on, making sure the friendship is primary. I think that’s the only– If ever we need a reminder, it’s just like, well, the friendship is more important.

Stephanie: Correct.

Brian: The work is– It’s like a privilege.

Stephanie: It’s all the same. It feels all the same.

Brian: It’s all the same thing, yes.

Stephanie: Because when we first met, we met at a student short film.

Brian: Student film.

Stephanie: Student film, we were like the adults in a UC Santa Barbara.

Brian: Yes, we were like the sort of lame hired actors in a student film.

Stephanie: Yes, we really had not much happening.

Brian: We didn’t have anything going on.

Craig: It sounds great.

Brian: Her commercial agent was in the process of dropping her.

Stephanie: Just dropped me, yes.

Craig: Oh, God.

Stephanie: I think she had just sent the email out.

Brian: I don’t think I had representation at all.

Stephanie: I remember the first day on set, we were making jokes about getting dropped. What was the joke? It was something like–

Brian: You were doing the–

Stephanie: Listen, we think you’re great. If at any point you get funnier or you know, if you’re getting prettier, reach back out.

Brian: You were pretending that you were your agent talking to you and I was being you. You were saying, “We’re dropping you because we just have so many people who are better and better looking.”

Stephanie: Yes. You had said the only way we’re going to actually– Because you meet friends when you’re an adult. It’s like you have to really try.

Brian: You have to find an excuse to keep getting together.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. He was like, we should make something to keep hanging out.

Brian: Then we worked on a short that then we didn’t end up finishing.

Stephanie: Never went anywhere. We didn’t make–

Brian: Then we started making sketches. The first night I met her, I was like, so this is the funniest person in the known universe.

Stephanie: That’s what I thought about you.

Brian: Thank you.

John: Aaaw.

Brian: We’ve gotten less funny over time and we’re still supporting each other as–

Craig: On the slow–

Stephanie: I’m now the funniest person in Sherman Oaks.

Craig: Still, that’s legit.

Stephanie: It’s big. It’s big.

John: A thing we talk about on the podcast a lot is, we’ll have listeners write in saying, oh, what should I do? I need to break in. We tell people, make stuff. You guys just made stuff. You’ve made so many things.

Brian: I know.

John: If you look through, your YouTube, you guys have been working–

Craig: You made a song about sitting.

Brian: I know. I did. I’m doing it right now. Crushing it.

Stephanie: Oh, my God.

Craig: Crushing it.

Brian: This thing of telling people, just go out and make your own thing. I keep wondering if there’s ever going to be some new answer to how to break– Because that’s been the real answer for the last 15 years. I think we got lucky because– Maybe we weren’t even at the very beginning of this, but there was a time when you had to spend $100,000 to get a movie made yourself in 1990 or whatever. Then there was the time when you were like, people have these cameras that they thought were good digital cameras. I think they were Panasonics, because it’s big. They’d be like, oh, yes, we’re shooting an indie on this thing. I’d be like, that looks like shit. It looked like a handy cam, I was like, that’s not– I don’t know.

We ended up coming to, into being able to make stuff at a time when– Even very specifically camera-wise, we were shooting our sketches on the Blackmagic Pocket that had a really cinematic look. I had an eye for this stuff, but, the tech was just– It was also when YouTube was just a few years old. You could post something that really looked a bit like a movie on your YouTube channel and then that’s global for anybody who wants to watch it. I guess whenever you come up, you’re finding how to make it work. We would have done that in any era, I think. I think we were lucky in some ways.

Stephanie: What was great was your YouTube channel was sort of like a network of your stuff. I would put– Because I didn’t have a–

Brian: Yes, later when it started gaining steam.

Stephanie: Yes, later. It was just nice to go, okay, well, I’m going to make something for us and put it on your channel, and I know that there’s going to be an audience there.

Brian: Because you made this amazing movie, Spy Movie, that was us as spies, and it was a full feature and then we put it on the YouTube channel and people loved it.

John: That’s great. Talk to us about, the transition between you’re making stuff for yourself versus making stuff for other people, because you both as actors, went off and did other things. You managed to steal so many scenes on Will & Grace in ways that were just absolutely criminal.

Brian: I still have them in my house.

John: Yes, that’s great, you took the scenes with you.

Brian: I’m very grateful to Max Mutchnick and [crosstalk]

John: Stephanie, you were doing other stuff too, but was it hard to think about, okay, we also need to do some stuff together. How do you? As you’re going off and doing your own things and having your own successes, you still want to do stuff together. Is that hard to find those balance?

Brian: It’s so organic.

Stephanie: Yes. It’s just coming out of, how much fun it is to make stuff. Spy Movie was just like, oh, wouldn’t that be so funny if we were two dumb spies? Dumb.

Craig: In terms of that sense of this feels natural, I’m curious, when it comes to your show, were you guys just feeling like, hey, we’re adults now, and who are these children, and what are they about? Because what I find so fascinating about the show is that normally high school shows are about the kids, and this one is not. This is fascinating to me.

Brian: Right. We needed to be the leads. We needed the lead roles, yes.

Craig: That’s actually a great fucking answer. Ask a fancy question, you’re like, idiot, we need to be leads.

Brian: No, this show, maybe it’s more organic. I unfortunately don’t put a ton of analytical thought into most of the things I’m making before I make them. Then as they grow, they end up becoming smarter and deeper, maybe. Really, I was like, this felt like an environment that would make sense. It was also just, Paul Sims, who’s a genius and is TV royalty and has made so many amazing things. He essentially cold called me through my agent because he had seen my stuff online. He was like, “We need to make a TV show together. I did Atlanta with Donald Glover. I’m doing What We Do in the Shadows.” He’s done a million things, he’s amazing.

It was also a little bit fortunately in a moment, or I don’t know if it was fortunate, but it was in a moment when I had given up on making things in the system. I was really focused on acting. I was saying, look, I just came off Will & Grace. I’m doing this movie, Megan, coming up. At that time I had booked the role of Megan, then they changed the part to– I’m just kidding.

Megan, you guys know Megan?

Craig: That would have been better.

Brian: Paul was like, “We need to make a show.” I was like, “Oh, I don’t think I can. I’ve tried before. I don’t know how to get through that TV system.” He was like, “I’m going to show you. You’re coming out of retirement. We’re making a television show.” It was like this moment when someone comes down from heaven and is like, I believe in you. Then it’s literally like, oh my God, I got to go write something. Then I just was like, I don’t know, I’m like a teacher at a high school, and Stephanie’s there and we’re at lunch– Really, it was like that.

Craig: What did he show you in terms of– Well, okay, so you had some experiences as a writer, you mean, trying to work the system.

Brian: We’d had a few developments deals.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. It was like a lot of shows that we were both in. We were like trying to make a show specifically where we were always including each other.

Brian: Yes, able to do our thing.

Craig: Yes, you were getting frustrated as you went through.

Brian: I mean, they just didn’t end up getting made. It wasn’t any more frustrating than anything.

John: Talk to us about it. What did Paul Sims bring into the process that was new to you, that was different to you, that got it passing?

Brian: Every part of it was completely foreign to me. I was just like used to doing everything by myself and just with my friends. Any time there was any somebody being like, we think you should do this instead. I was like, this feels insane. Then like, Paul’s like, it’s okay, you’re going to survive, basically. It’s like, why don’t you just try doing it and maybe it’ll work. Then I would be like, all right. Then the show gets better. Then eventually you’re like, this show is way better than anything I could have made by myself. What the hell happened here?

I got lucky because it’s like, it’s not just anybody who’s giving you, it’s like Paul Sims, it’s like really intelligent people.

Stephanie: Jonathan Krisel.

Brian: Krisel, John Landgraf. These are the best of the best. They’re changing your show very gently. They’re still preserving the whole DNA, golden fiber at the center of your show. This is what people say to me when they see it now, having known my work for years, they go, “Oh my God, your voice survived. Your voice actually got on TV.” That is to their credit, because they know how to make it better and better, but to not break that spirit at the center of it. What I’m saying is like, some places would have made my show worse, but this show I look at it and I go, this is infinitely better than what I started with. It’s John Landgraf, Kate Lambert, Jonathan Frank, Paul Sims, Jonathan Krisel, even our line producer, Kate Dean, Dave King. There’s just high level help of people that have made 20 shows and they just know what’s good.

Especially Paul, I was with him the other day. I was just realizing, I was like, this guy can see story. I once heard of a DP who could just see light in a different way. He can just see what light is doing and Paul can just see story through everything.

Stephanie: Yes. This is like a separate thing, but to see Brian, because I had, worked with him so much on our little sets where we’re putting iPhones in our bras and strapping these bandages around our belly to record sound.

Brian: Yes, for lavalier mics, we would use iPhones with these bandages.

Stephanie: To save on not hiring any sound guy because we didn’t have any money.

Brian: Save the money we didn’t have.

Stephanie: Just like rigging the lights and bringing all the gear and setting up the camera, all that stuff. It was so cool to watch a hundred people do all of that especially on the stuff that Brian was directing, because he’s also showrunning as well. It wasn’t weird. It wasn’t like a different– It felt exactly the same, but he wasn’t having to carry anything.

Brian: Right. That was the thing about making stuff ourselves for so long. It’s hauling the equipment gear.

Craig: It’s the worst thing, and the food is a little better.

Stephanie: The food is great, yes. You don’t have to remember what and be like, I got to go feed them. I got to go feed everybody.

John: We talked about your voice surviving through the process. One of the things about the Evan character, which is so wonderful, is that we see him taking a stand and then realizing that his stand is sort of indefensible or he doesn’t actually– He wants to be the person who fully believes what he’s doing.

Brian: Are you just talking about a specific episode or in general?

John: The gun episode is one of the examples. Also, when a kid comes in and says– Comes out to you, it’s like, what should I do? It’s like, fuck you, yes, talk to someone your age, this is not my experience.

Craig: Go be gay out there. Everybody else is gay. Yes, it’s pretty awesome.

Brian: Thanks. I love that scene.

John: Talk to us about like, those moments and figuring them out on the page, figuring them out on the pitch to the page to how they go through, because it’s your voice. You have to say like, well, no, this will work in my voice. Talk to us about that.

Brian: We have a great writer’s room. It’s a really specific group, and it came together very slowly. I even remember saying to Paul, there are these two guys that write on Shadows and I keep seeing their tweets and it’s Zach Dunn and Jake Bender. Paul was like, “Oh, that’s funny. They were asking about if they would maybe be able to come write on English Teacher with you.” It just came together really organically over time. Essentially we have a great writer’s room and we build these stories that I love and that have this real funny bone. Then beyond that, with the execution, and this comes to Krisel, Jonathan Kreisel too, the execution is where it gets all that flavor, but it’s in the writing too.

I talk a lot about texture, what’s special, one thing that we’re good at is this texture of the show, the way people talk over each other and the way people are reacting to each other. I just think it’s all of that. It’s like we’re writing the best stories we can, but then when we’re on set, we’re trying to figure out right then how to make it funnier. We do it a lot of different ways. We trust our editors, Antonia de Barros and Mike Giambra. They love us sending as many options as we can.

So I’ll do a take where I’m going huge and I’ll do a take where I barely move my face and I’ll do a take that’s like somewhere in the middle. Then we’ll do a take that’s almost– I’ll tell them, okay, now say anything you want, do one that’s like– Doesn’t have to be all improv, but just anything you want to say, like we’ve got the camera on you, so just go for it. Then some that are perfectly descript.

Stephanie: To talk about that scene where the kid is asking for his advice on being gay and he thinks he wants to come out and stuff. I think he’s really good at this, which I’ve noticed in like our sketches.

Brian: Spelling everything correctly.

Stephanie: He knows how to use the apostrophes. There’s a lot of apostrophes in that monologue.

Brian: Unnecessary.

Stephanie: No, it’s like the surprising turns, the left turns that he takes really well in comedies and what makes us laugh so hard.

Brian: Yes, because that’s what we were doing in our sketches too, was sort of being like, you expect this joke and then boom, it does this other thing.

Stephanie: Yes, so I think that’s what the show does so well, is you’re like, you’re getting led into something and then it like takes a left turn.

Craig: I think to do that as well as you guys do, you do need to be in touch with the world around you in a very real way, because that can go on, right? The same concept could be incredibly not funny and sort of upsetting, and then in that case–

Brian: You know what I think the secret sauce is to that? To this exact thing you’re talking about?

Craig: Yes.

Brian: I think it’s the acting.

Craig: Oh.

John: Oh, yes.

Brian: Maybe I shouldn’t say that.

Craig: But you’re saying you’re a good actor.

Brian: Me and everybody else on the show. No, I mean, playing things hyper real.

Craig: Grounded.

Brian: It’s amazing writing, and then you have to have really good, not just good acting, like Oscar winning acting, just acting that knows how to make that joke ripe. I say this because I’m not talking about my own performance. I’m saying like, we really care about the acting on our show.

Craig: It’s serious business.

Brian: We talk about it and we direct it and we need the performances to be a certain way to sell that joke. That moment specifically, when the kid says, “I’m gay,” and then the camera spins around, “I’m like, what? Just go talk to somebody in the hall about this. I can’t help you with this.” Yes, it’s an acting thing and the kid performing it really real. There’s this character in this field trip episode, Sharon, like we call her like stone-faced mom, right?

John: Yes, incredible.

Stephanie: Yes, she was stone faced mom.

Brian: She’s obsessed with these games that these kids are playing. Her acting is so brilliant. We saw all these different tapes for it and everybody was being funny and playing the joke. Then we got her tape and she was playing it like it was like an Oscar movie. We’re like, this was the most serious thing that’s ever happened. She’s like, have you heard about these games that these kids are playing?

Stephanie: We were all like obsessed, obsessively watching the tape.

Brian: it’s only the final piece on an amazing joke, but it’s another critical piece and I think it’s something. Jonathan Krisel also really cares about acting. If you watch Baskets, the acting in that is just hyper natural.

John: Very much so.

Brian: What’s the name of the person who played the mom in the–

Craig: Oh, Louie Anderson.

Brian: Yes. It’s so natural and that’s what we’re going for. Even telling the editors–

Stephanie: It’s the editing, yes.

Brian: -leave the little things where people say things wrong-

Stephanie: The mistakes, yes.

Brian: -or stumble on their words and make people talk over each other.

Stephanie: Like in reality, yes.

Craig: Yes. It’s a testament to you guys how technically good you are. I know that you’re saying you sort of almost stumbled into this situation and somebody plucks you out from the things you do. You have to be very, very smart to come– It needs the smartest people. The attention to detail and how serious you have to be about being funny, it’s incredible and it really shows.

Stephanie: It is also just in the writer’s room. We are like dying laughing.

Brian: Dying laughing, yes.

Stephanie: It’s probably most writer’s rooms for comedies, it’s like the joke that keeps making us laugh will stick in the episode. We’re like, “God, that still makes us laugh so hard.”

John: Talk us through the process of getting a half-hour script out of this. In that writer’s room, you’re coming up with the outline, you’re coming up with the beat, so this is what’s basically going to happen, these are the scenes. One person goes off and writes and brings back a script and then you’re workshopping it or what happens?

Brian: Oh, we’re in the nitty-gritty.

John: Oh, yeah, this is the podcast where we talk about the nitty-gritty.

Stephanie: Scriptnotes.

Brian: Okay. Yes, do we tell you? Do we tell you our process? We’re beating out the story as a group and then generally we’re sending somebody off to outline, and the outline is an outline, but it’s relatively detailed and then somebody goes off to script.

John: Is the outline funny or is the outline just-?

Stephanie: Yes.

Brian: Ideally, yes. Like Stephanie’s outline was fucking funny. [crosstalk]

Stephanie: I thought my outline was so funny.

Brian: Yes. I would say the outline is not as funny as the final script.

John: I would hope. Yes.

Brian: The outline’s not full of dialogue and the dialogue is a large part of also what’s funny, so.

Stephanie: Very true.

Brian: Yes, each part being as funny as possible is certainly ideal.

Stephanie: What I loved so much was it felt so– I felt going off and writing Powderpuff, I was like so taken care of by the story because we had really broken it. We do that with each episode. We would like really all together like break the funniest thing in the scene.

Brian: Yes, I often think going off to script is one of the least labor intensive parts because the outline is so– then you’re just dancing on the outline, but yeah.

Stephanie: It’s like it feels all easy. Isn’t that?

John: Making a TV show is easy is what I’m taking from this. Yes, so easy. Everyone can do it. Why aren’t we all doing it?

Brian: Why aren’t you guys doing it?

John: [crosstalk] We? Come on.

Brian: We have all the best writers.

Stephanie: Actually, only easy because it’s like the funniest people in there.

Brian: Yes. Dave King, Zach Dunn, Jake Bender, Emmy Blotnick. Shanna. You guys know Jeremy and Rajat?

Audience Member: Yes.

Stephanie: So funny.

John: Some people do.

Brian: You got [unintelligible 00:52:50] heading the house.

Craig: These guys know literally everything, by the way.

John: They do. They answer the questions.

Craig: These guys know everything about everything. Geniuses.

John: They should be hosting a podcast.

Brian: Geniuses.

John: Congratulations on your show.

Brian: Thank you.

John: We cannot wait to see what you guys do next.

Brian: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Stephanie: Thank you for having us.

Craig: My pleasure. Thank you.

John: All right. This is the time of the podcast where we do one cool things. Things we want to recommend to our listeners at home, to our audience here tonight. Jac, start us off because you warned that you might have two one cool things.

Jac: Oh, I’ve been sweating this for the 24 hours that I knew we had to do this. I already feel like I’m failing. The thing I am recommending to everybody is the English Teacher. In lieu of that, because everybody here’s a fan, I really loved My Old Ass. I don’t know if anyone has seen that. I think that movie is spectacular. I think it’s a Thanksgiving movie. I think it’s about gratitude. I saw it over Thanksgiving. I did a lot of crying. Aubrey is fantastic in it. Then just to be weird, I’m also going to do a song that is an obsession of mine from Billy Joel’s lesser worshipped era, Downeaster ‘Alexa’. Does anybody know that song?

Craig: Of course. Of course.

Jac: It is a song that really inspires me to write because I feel it’s very atmospheric and it’s very rousing and it conjures a place and a person and it’s very salty. Yes, it’s an inspiring piece of pop music.

Craig: It is Billy Joel’s finest nautical theme song.

Jac: That is correct.

Craig: No question. No question.

Jac: A little weird fact for y’all.

Craig: Excellent. Fantastic.

John: Hey, Brian, do you have one cool thing to share with us?

Brian: I started watching the Netflix reality show about people over 50 dating each other called Later Daters.

John: That’s a very good title.

Brian: It was excellent. I recommend it. There’s one woman in it who’s a total star.

John: Excellent. Nice.

Stephanie: You love reality TV so much.

Craig: I don’t like that we’re in a category that’s called later.

[laughter]

Craig: That’s fucked up.

John: We’re married. We’re good.

Craig: I might be over 55– We’re married, but if we did date, it would be like we should make a reality show out of you.
[laughter]

Brian: That’s freaky.

John: Stephanie, what do you have to recommend?

Stephanie: Wait, can I do two too?

John: Of course, you can do two.

Stephanie: Okay. One’s a quick one. It’s like get yourself a sun lamp. It’s one of those lamps that kind of that same warm lighting that was glazed over you guys.

Brian: You mean like a full spectrum?

Stephanie: It’s a yellow– that. You can have that in your room. At night, you’re like, “Oh God.” It just takes you to a good place. Then real quick, I would say I suggest escape rooms for dating.

Brian: Yes.

John: Sure.

Stephanie: Just a couple– Take one other person that you’re dating to an escape room.

Brian: Especially if you’re over 50.

[laughter]

Craig: We got to book. Hell yes.

John: Stephanie, that is such a good idea. Tell us more because it feels like it reveals something about a person that we’d like–

Craig: Because we love escape rooms.

Stephanie: Do you?

John: We love it. We do escape rooms all the time.

Craig: Obsessed.

John: We’re going some escape rooms things after this.

Stephanie: Okay. Really?

John: Oh, yes. [crosstalk]

Stephanie: The reason I got the idea is because me and my husband will do that. It’s like, “Do you want to go out to dinner?” “No. We’re going to go to an escape room.”

Craig: How many have you guys done, you think?

Brian: 25?

Craig: Oh my God. 25?

Stephanie: 60.

Craig: 60?

John: I’m sure.

Craig: I don’t even think they have that many.

Brian: We’re in triple digits for sure.

Jac: Do you do it with strangers? That sounds weird.

Stephanie: No.

Craig: In the early days, you did.

Stephanie: If they’re open.

Craig: That was like an issue. In the early days, they were like, “We’ve got shove 12 people in.” No one does that anymore.
Stephanie: No.

Jac: You can do it just you and a date?

Stephanie: Yes. With a friend or someone you love or somebody you might love. It does tell a lot about a person.

Craig: Are they dumb, for instance?

Stephanie: That. That. If you’re a really competitive person, it’s like you may want another competitive person who’s like, “This is serious. I don’t want any hints,” and that’ll be for you. You could really suss somebody out if they’re really upset about you not getting something right. If there was a fight in the escape room, it’s like you’re done.

Craig: Wouldn’t the worst person be somebody that is just like, “Why does this even matter?”

Stephanie: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: Date over. Over.

Stephanie: Yes. I’d be like, “Get out. Let me finish it.”

Craig: Yes. Exactly. Go home. I need to escape.

Stephanie: I need to do Welcome To Jumanji alone.

John: That’s a good one.

Stephanie: That’s one of them.

Craig: That’s a good one. Amazing.

John: Craig, what you got?

Craig: My one cool thing, Thin Mint Bites. Have you had these?

John: No. Tell us.

Craig: Oh my God. Thin Mints.

John: Yes, it’s delicious.

Craig: Girl Scouts in combination with Satan. I always thought that the thing about Thin Mints that are so good is the crunchy bit, but there’s just not enough crunchy bit. Then these bastards came up with a way to turn it into this little tiny ball. It’s all crunch with just a little bit of the chocolate on the outside. You feel like, “Oh, I’m just eating one little bit.” Then it’s like bla, bla, bla. They’ve perfected something that I thought was perfect. Christmas time, guys. Thin Mint Bites.

John: Treat yourself.

Craig: Thin Mint Bites. Fantastic.

John: Excellent. My recommendation, one cool thing that’s also very good for Christmas time, it is a show, it’s like number two on Netflix. I’m not the first person to discover the show. It is A Man on the Inside. It is a show by Mike Schur, who’s been on the podcast. He did Parks and Rec, he did The Good Place. You’ll see our own Megan Amram on the show, in a small part.

The star is Ted Danson. He is a retired professor who’s being sent undercover into a retirement home. It is really light and it’s just delightful. Then because it’s so light, it’s like a sitcom, it’s able to hit some surprisingly serious themes of mortality and just losing your sense of autonomy. Really well done. I say Christmas time because it’s actually a show you can put on with your extended family who don’t like each other and you can all watch the same thing and no one will object to it. It’s nice to have TV that is just a common experience for everyone. A Man on the Inside on Netflix.

Craig: Amazing.

Stephanie: Great rec.

John: All right. It is time for our thank yous. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew Marquardt, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, Drew.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also wrote our music tonight. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at JohnAugust.com. That’s also where you find all the transcripts going back 12 years. We’ll have lots of links to things that we talked about tonight, including your shorts and all the other stuff that you guys have done. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They make great Christmas presents. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments. Thank you to all our premium members. Do we have any premium members in the house tonight?

Craig: Oh, amazing.

John: Oh, my God. Look at that, so good.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Premium members also get first notice about live events like we’re doing tonight. Thank you to Brian Jordan Alvarez, to Stephanie Koenig, to Jac Schaeffer.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Do you want to do stuff?

Craig: Sure. Thank you to Kasey Anderson and everyone at Hollywood HEART. Remember, you can learn more about their programs at HollywoodHEART.org. Also thank you to Dax Jordan and everyone in the booth. Thank you to Missy Steele, Mary Sadler, and everyone at Dynasty Typewriter. Thank you to all of you. It is so much fun to get to do this live. Thank you guys for showing up and making us feel welcome.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Appreciate it.

John: Have a great night.

Craig: Have a great night.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, it is time for our audience questions. If we can bring up the house lights a little bit, and if we can bring our producer, Drew Marquardt here.

Craig: Yay, Drew.

John: Sometimes, Craig, in the past, you’ve run into situations where people seem confused about the idea of a question, and you try to give them instructions, and yet still it doesn’t quite work.

Craig: It’s amazing. Every time there’s one.

John: I thought this time we might do some modeling of behavior. Drew, this is an actual question that came in to ask at JohnAugust.com, a legit question, but maybe you could be an audience member asking a question.

Drew Marquardt: Hi, guys. Big fan.

Craig: Get to the question.

Drew: A writer friend of mine recently asked me what I’ll be getting my reps for Christmas, and my answer was I didn’t know that was a thing. Is that a thing? If so, what should I get them?

Craig: That was in the form of a question. It was concise. Loved it.

John: Loved it. Let’s talk about getting your reps, your managers, your publicists, the folks who work for you on your behalf, getting them holiday presents. What do we think? Suggestions?

Craig: Their publicists are here, so they got to lie about that.

John: All right. Let’s think about other folks.

Craig: Like the agents.

John: The agents. Agents or agents assistants.

Craig: Agents assistants, yes.

John: All right. Talk to us about this, because back in the day, I used to know my agents assistants because I would talk to them on the phone all the time, and we don’t talk on the phone that much. I’m just emailing people now.

Craig: Right. Also, back in the day, we were probably sort of their age and we were all sweating it out. Now, it is a nice thing if you can remember and so just make the list of– and it’s a good old fashioned Amazon gift card or an Apple gift card or something like that, so that you don’t have to like use brain power and, “Oh, I wonder what John would like,” whatever. It’s a nice thing to do. The agents deserve nothing. Nothing. They get 10%. That’s enough. It’s enough.

John: Craig’s gift to a manager is not firing them.

Craig: What manager?

John: What manager? Jac, do you have any guidance? What do you think about gifts for your reps?

Jac: This is tricky. It’s making me real nervous. What I do think, like for up and coming writers, I would say you do not need to get anything of monetary value for your representation. I think that holiday gifting in the industry is something that happens when you cross that invisible line into some form of success. I started noticing I was getting gifts from people I wouldn’t have expected to get gifts from after WandaVision.

I am sort of just getting my gifting together because I feel like a puppy that’s learning from like the bigger dogs. I would say, early in your career, absolutely not. Later, you’re sort of indicated. I think the types of gifts that the people who are making money in the industry, it’s like I do think always, always acknowledging a person is the thing. Calling someone by name, wishing them well, sending them an email, giving some lip service to what they have done for you is you can never go wrong with that.

Craig: Great answer.

Brian: I keep it simple. I get each member of my team a brand new car.

John: Okay. Good. Do you let them pick the color?

Brian: No, I pick the color.

John: Drew, thank you for that question. That was a great question.

Craig: Thank you, Drew.

[applause]

John: All right. Now, if you are an audience member who would like to ask a question of us, of our panel up here, this is the time you can line up. Now, John, remember you can ask the first question if you choose to ask the question, but there’s no pressure.

Audience Member: All right. Just for the younger, like the up and coming, just breaking in and are about to spend 8 to 10 years grinding and probably overthinking as you are, like you’re in it though, but you’re at the very beginning. What is the advice? The one thing that sort of, and it’s usually I feel like something simple you would tell yourself.
Craig: What is the advice that we would give our younger selves?

John: Yes.

Brian: Do less, more often.

Craig: Oh. I like that.

Brian: I got that from somebody else, but I’ve been doing that my whole life. Do less, more often.

Stephanie: Like a brick a day is going to build a house?

Brian: Yes. You can build a house by putting one brick down a day.

Stephanie: I would add to that and say, whatever energy you’re putting into something, like energy in will match out. It might not be what you’re expecting, but it always– it’s like if you’re putting it in every day, something will happen.

Brian: Right. There’s no wasted energy. You could spend four years working on a project that doesn’t work out, but that energy will be the thing that made your next project work.

Craig: I like that. What about you? Do you have anything?

Jac: I would say the feeling that you get when you’re like at a bar telling a friend a story and you’re loving telling them the story and they’re loving hearing it and they’re hanging on your every word, channel that into your work.

Craig: Yes. Nice. Ooh.

Brian: Nobody’s ever hung on my every word.

Craig: Lots of snapping. Love that. John, you got any?

John: I do. I will say that too often you’re looking for who is the person who is a few steps ahead of me who could help me out. That’s the mistake. Look for people who are at your level who are trying to do the things you’re trying to do. Make friends with them. Help on their short films. They’ll help on your short films. Rise together with a group.

Jac: So good.

Craig: I love that. I’ll leave you with this very simple one. Do the work. Work. So much calculating, so much guessing, so much thinking, planning, wondering, blah-blah-blah. Do the work. Just do the work. That’ll get you there.

John: John, thank you for your question.

Audience: Good copy.

[applause]

John: Nicely done. Hello. What is your name and what is your question?

Brandt: Hello, my name is Brandt. My question is mainly for Craig, so ‘70s and ‘80s, Airplane, Naked Gun, huge movies, spoof movies. Then ‘90s, early 2000s, Scary Movie and Austin Powers. Today, from 2010s to today, there’s really no spoof movies around. I’m just questioning why you think that is.

Craig: An opportunity first to say rest in peace to Jim Abrahams, who is one of the three members of Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker, and a wonderful man. I think the reason is actually a lot to do with what you were talking about earlier with the way timing and technology works. Back then, a movie would come out and people would talk about it amongst themselves. No one would be talking to each other across the country or the world. Then somebody would say, “Here’s a funny version of that.”

Everything is parodied instantly and publicly, second by second. A parody or spoof is ancient by the time next week rolls around. There’s just no way. When Jerry and Jim and David made Airplane, they were spoofing a movie called Zero Hour that no one had seen from the 1950s. No one lets you do that anymore. No one’s interested in that. It turned into this weird pop culture machine. They are remaking Naked Gun and Seth MacFarlane making it with Liam Neeson, which that’s fucking exciting.

Brandt: Definitely.

Craig: I don’t know if you’ve seen his thing on Ricky Gervais’ Show where he’s, “Let’s do some improvisational comedy.” It’s fucking incredible.

Jac: Even as the Lego cop. He’s so funny.

Craig: Yes, that Lego cop. He’s just like that when he was like the deadpan– that’s my hope, but it’s unfortunately technology.

John: Stephanie, you were about to say something?

Stephanie: I made a spoof and you should watch it if you’re craving.

Craig: Oh, okay.

John: What’s the spoof?

Stephanie: It’s called A Spy Movie. You can watch it on YouTube.

Brandt: Yes. I definitely will.

Craig: How about that?

Stephanie: It works.

Brian: It works. It’s amazing.

Stephanie: It’s because it’s not specifically-

Brian: It’s not topical.

Stephanie: Yes. It’s not parodying– like it’s not doing the exact copy of the scene and remaking it. It’s actually just going–

Brian: The genre?

Stephanie: Yes. Yes, so you have to be less specific about it.

Craig: I think that’s exactly right.

John: Great. Brant, thank you so much.

Brandt: Awesome. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

Stephanie: I’m like shameless plug.

John: Hello. What is your name? What is your question?

Ken: Hi. My name is Ken. It’s for everyone on the panel. When you have a story idea, whether it’s for like an original feature or an episode of something or even just a scene, when you have that first spark, what do you immediately do to get that sort of seed to sprout to become something other than a passing notion? Then, by the same token, when you get further on in that idea and you hit what Aline Brosh McKenna calls the Rocky Shoals and you slow down. What do you do to remember what really sparked you about it in the first place?

John: For me, my first instinct is I do just write it down just so I don’t completely lose it, so I have like a stack of next cards and just like write down the idea so I don’t lose it. There’s something that resonates with me that’ll keep me thinking back about it. If it’s an idea that I do forget about next week, it was never that good of an idea. It’s the ones that keep demanding brain time like, “Oh, that’s a really good idea. I have to remember what that is.” I see some nodding.

Jac: Yes, I agree with that. For me, this is very specific to me, so this isn’t necessarily advice. I find that if I have something I’m excited about, if I tell someone about it, the magic goes away. The longer I keep something secret, the more I nurture it because I am thirsting for the day that I share it. The more sacred– and I can tell when something is very sacred because I have the discipline not to be like, “I had this really cool idea,” Even to my husband, like I just protect it, protect it, protect it.

For me, that works. That’s sort of like hoarding, “It’s my secret treasure,” spurs me on. Then later, when it gets bad, there are people in my life who they’re light helps me. Megan McDonald is one of them, like truly. There are personalities that if I talk to them about the thing, they have a natural energy that reminds me what I love and I can continue.

Stephanie: I follow that. The magic, it going away, is so huge.

Jac: Leaves the building, it’s so sad.

Stephanie: My husband gets so mad at me when I tell somebody an idea that I’ve had. He’s like, “It’s gone, girl. It’s gone.” It’s like 80% of the time I’m like, “Yes, I don’t like that idea anymore.”

John: Great. Thank you very much for your question.

Craig: Thank you.

Christy: Hi, I’m Christy and I’m an actor who’s dabbling in screenwriting. I was wondering if you had any specific, especially because we have some actresses who are like obviously doing more than dabbling.

Brian: What is that can in your hand?

Christy: Oh, it’s wine.

Brian: Oh, nice. You were kind of holding it out.

Jac: I thought you were filming us or something.

Craig: I thought it was a phone.

Christy: It was like a cheers, like top of the morning.

Craig: Okay, cheers. Yes.

Brian: Yes. I’ve been drinking. Yes. I love it. Do you remember your question?

Craig: You’re saying you’re an actor and–?

Brian: Some advice on being an actor and then transitioning to writing.

Stephanie: Yes. Okay. I strongly suggest it’s similar to what John was saying is like finding people that are in a similar position as you that make you laugh or you trust their creativity and you make stuff with them. I don’t know. I just think it’s easier with community as an actor when you’re specifically writing something for you to be into. You usually want to make it. You want to show that it’s just– and it was so helpful to– I swear to God, I would not be up here if I wasn’t also writing stuff for myself. The auditions, the endless auditions that people are like, “Next, next, next. They are not interested,” which is insane.

Brian: Because she’s so fucking good.

Stephanie: It’s just crazy to me. Yes, there’s been so many rejections. Actually, it was so nice. It was so nice. I remember like being like I would come home after like an audition or like a casting director being like– Oh, whatever. I’m not going to say anything. The rejection actually like fueled the writing. It was like you can do something, you can actively do something about it when you are inspired to write.

Brian: I support this. My only question is do you want to make things? Are you more like, “I should do that because people say I’ve got to break in that way.” I don’t know that I have an answer either way. I do think there’s a lot of pressure when you are an actor to figure out how to make something. I was always making things and so were you. We were making movies as kids, like on our handy cam. It’s also like an old muscle.

I don’t know. I would say you can you can also just be an actor and stay on the grind and you will get a part that will get you another part that will get you another. I many times was pursuing that trajectory and had some success that way, and also had more success also making things, so I don’t know. Do you have a natural instinct to write something and film something, or it’s more you’re doing it because people are telling you that that’s the only way to break in?

Christy: I have made things. I feel the same as you where it’s like I did it, it was so hard and I got it made and it got some recognition and people said it was good. Then it’s like, “I guess I’ll make another one.”

Craig: Welcome to writing. Yes, it never ends. “I guess I got to go make another one.” Here we go. That’s what it is. That’s the gig. It never ends. That’s how you know you’re a writer. When you go look– When you hit the end, you’re so proud of yourself for whatever. Give yourself a week… Fade in. Here we go again.

Christy: God damn it.

Craig: I know. I know.

John: Thanks so much.

Brian: Good question.

John: Hello. Can you tell us your name?

Katie: Hi, I’m Katie. In a previous episode, you guys mentioned that it can be helpful to let your representatives pigeonhole you in a genre as a writer so that they know where to put you. You guys have a myriad of different genres that you’ve written for. I’m curious how you navigate transitioning out of that once you have solidified your foundation.

John: Great. That’s a great question. I think what we said on the podcast before is like sometimes it’s useful for people to know what box to put you in just so they have some sense of how to send you out into the world. Yet it can be really frustrating. For a while before Go, I was only getting sent family movies. Things about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. With Go, I was able to say like, “No, I can really write a lot of other things.” Jac, I’m curious for you, as a feature writer, were you pigeonholed originally? Was there a thing that like, “Oh, we’d think about Jac for this, but not for other things.”?

Jac: Yes. I made a feature called Timer. Referring to the previous question.

Brian: I made a one called Oppenheimer so, people watched that too.

Jac: I wrote because I wanted to be a director. I’m not a good actor, so that really resonated with me, the like do you have the creator piece? Because I think that’s really what it is. I made it, this feature called Timer that’s about a device that counts down to the moment that you meet your soulmate. I was going for like an eternal sunshine, kind of a vibe. When people looked at it, all they saw was the rom-com. For a long time, I was the rom-com girl.

John: You’re also a woman. Could that be a part of it?

Jac: Yes.

John: Maybe.

Jac: It was a little bit of a part of it. It was really frustrating. Then I wrote– I was very angry. That’s another thing you said that I feel like when you write out of frustration, it can be really fantastic, like when you’re sick of something. I wrote the spec out of frustration and it was to sort of break out of the box. It got on the Black List. It’s called The Shower. It’s about a baby shower that gets interrupted by an apocalyptic alien invasion.

I was like I can do action. I had no idea how to do action, but I was like– so I sort of burst out of the box with a spec script. In fact, my agents didn’t get it. My manager, bless her, was like, “It’s time for you to leave,” so I left with like no career and a spec script that nobody got that was totally just all about vagina panic. It was me being like every horror movie is just a big, scary vagina and I need to address that in the script.

The script, then it got on the Black List, then I got representation. For my journey, I had to be like I’m going to write the thing. I didn’t feel like it was helpful at all to be in the rom-com box. I do think it is about what a kind of a creator you want to be. Do you want to be a writer for hire who can do any genre, any thing, like whatever? Then you need material that demonstrates that. If you want to have a singular voice, you got to write that singular voice. I think the real answer is what do you envision for yourself and write that.

John: We can stop there. That’s great.

Craig: Terrific.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

John: All right. Our last two questions of the night.

Thomas: Hi, I’m Thomas. This one’s aimed at Brian and Stephanie, but open to whoever.

Craig: I’ll take this.

Thomas: When you’re making your own stuff and you’re excited about it, how do you strike that balance of wanting to show your friends and your contacts and stuff, but also not wanting to seem annoying or needy?

Brian: Wanting to show your friends and your–?

Thomas: When you make something and you’re really excited about it and you want to send it to everyone, but you don’t want to annoy them.

Brian: Oh. That’s a great question.

Craig: Early on when you’re like, “Look, I made another short,” and everyone’s like, “We really don’t care.”

Brian: I have a gift where I’m not afraid to be annoying. My mom, when I was like five, she was like, “When you go to school, don’t care what people think of you.” Obviously, I care what people think of me. It’s also not just that I’m not afraid to be annoying. It’s that just being annoying– I had an older sister, so I just am kind of annoying. Then that’s like– it’s just not all the time, but it’s just a part of my personality where I’m like, even, I don’t know, it’s like part of something I’m comfortable within my relationships. I’m like, “Oh, I’m being a little annoying right now.” I can’t believe I’m saying this publicly. This is crazy.

Stephanie: It’s very endearing.

Craig: You brought your publicist. We will strike it from the record. “I’m annoying.”

Brian: Anyway, hopefully it’s endearing or something.

Stephanie: You’re saying don’t worry about it.

Brian: I’m just saying, yes, I would make something that I thought was funny. I would post it on YouTube, but I would also like send it around to people and be like, whatever. J. Crew is spamming me every day. I can spam my friends.

Craig: He’s got a point there.

Brian: You’re a business. You got to get your stuff out there. What I do say a bit more earnestly is, at first, if the stuff you’re making is good, which I’m sure it is. At first, maybe you’re sort of spamming people or you’re being annoying about sharing it. Eventually, people are sort of thanking you. “Oh my God. I love your stuff.” It’s almost like the same people that were ignoring it at first are like just complimenting it later. I don’t know. It’s like the– and the world will thank you for being willing to give it something that’s cool, that it didn’t have before. Then eventually you won’t be annoyingly spamming people on Facebook. You’ll be here talking about your TV show. That’s cool.

Craig: Yes. If it’s good, it’s not annoying.

Brian: Yes. Yes.

Stephanie: That’s great. That’s amazing.

Brian: It’s okay to be annoying, basically. I think.

Stephanie: Yes. What’s the point? You might–

Brian: Any business is annoying. It’s trying to–

Stephanie: Yes. No, but there’s also just no loss in spamming people your stuff that you made, and you made it. It’s like, “Watch it, damn it.”

Brian: Yes. Exactly.

Stephanie: Send it away.

Craig: I like this.

John: I will tell you that I feel your insecurity there because I’ll post one thing. I posted the one thing that’s all [unintelligible 01:20:16] and then I do it, but then I have friends who are 15 stories in a row for the next two weeks that are proposing another thing. It’s like, “I clicked through and it’s fine.” I’m not angry with them. I would say err on the side of showing too much because you don’t know who’s going to see it, and then when they’re going to see it. People are not going to get annoyed by you. They’re not going to unfollow you, it’s fine.

Craig: I wish that all our emails had the thing that the texts have that says, “Reply ‘stop’ to end,” so that I could respond to a friend with just the word stop.

Brian: But if you think about it, what you are trying to do is make something that the whole world sees. It’s like why would you be afraid of trying to get a bunch of people to see your thing. Isn’t that why you made it? Maybe it’s not why you made it, maybe it’s also you make it because it comes of you and is art and needs to exist, but it’s both, you want people to see it. Don’t be afraid of showing it to people.

Thomas: Thank you so much.

Brian: Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Our final question, and I don’t want to jinx you, but these have been the best questions we’ve had on a live show.

Craig: Oh, that is such a jinx. Oh my God. I would be drenched in sweat if I were you right now.

[laughter]

John: Let’s see if you can hold up to the standard here.

Ben: Oh, no.

John: Oh no. First off, what’s your name?

Ben: Hello, my name is Ben.

John: Hi, Ben.

Ben: I have a question about how writers’ rooms are scheduled and structured. I’m wondering-

Jac: I love this topic, so I’m already in on this question.

Ben: -Is it like a 9:00 to 5:00, a 10:00 to 6:00? Is it every Saturday and Sunday? I just have this irrational fear that if I get staffed, I’ll never see my wife again. I’m just curious how that works.

John: What a good question. Well done, Ben.

Jac: Such a good question. Such a good question.

Ben: Thank you.

John: What an audience. What an incredible audience.

[cheers]

Craig: I think we made it. I think we made it. This is a great audience.

John: Maybe the best audience we’ve ever had.

Craig: I think it might be.

John: It is a Christmas miracle. Jac Schaeffer, we’ve talked about writers rooms a lot.

Jac: We have. I love this question. I stumbled into TV with WandaVision because I was writing features at Marvel. When I got the job, I won the job, they were like, “How do you want to do this?” I was like, “How do I want to do this?” I asked all the smart people I knew who had TV experience and Micah Fitzerman-Blue said to me, “It is possible to have a civilized writers room that is 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, and that you get your work done. You have to be focused. You give them 15 minutes to shoot the shit in the morning. You are clear about what time your lunches are.” He broke it out for me.

My children were two and four. I was like, “This is going to blow up everything.” Also, I was doing TM at the time. I was like, “When does the TM happen?” Transcendental meditation, it’s 20 minutes, twice a day. I don’t do it anymore, which is maybe why WandaVision is probably the best thing I’ll ever make, because I was tapped into something. I’m a kind person and I’m a warm maternal person.

So I was warm, but I was real clear. I was like, “Go to the bathroom when you need to go to the bathroom.” Another thing I was told is let everyone know what the expectations are, and how they can reach you, when they can reach you, when you’re on the clock, when you’re not. I was told to give homework because I was like, “I don’t want to sit here,” like, “We’re not going to stare at each other until it gets funny or cool.” We end, everybody leaves.

I also had an hour-long commute. I was on the West side. We were at Marvel. It was, like, I’m still married and good job me. It’s because of what I did in this room. That’s not every showrunner, that’s not every show, but there are rooms out there that function in a way that support a life outside of the room and also support your creative mind outside the room.

Not everybody is fast in the room. Some of the greatest ideas on both my shows were born of homework, were born of people reflecting. Sometimes they would do it in pairs. They were allowed to stay as long as they wanted to stay. The childless people were there all the time. I promised them we wouldn’t have any overnight work sessions. We ended up doing that on WandaVision, and everyone loved it because it felt like we were kids in a candy store. This is the longest answer forever.

Brian: This is so good. Amazing. I’m learning.

Jac: I believe that we are currently in a moment where people can advocate for their personal lives and for their mental health, and I hope that we stay there. I think it’s about people in charge modelling that, and I think everyone has a right to that. You just have to do your job well. That’s the end of it.

Ben: That’s a big relief, thank you.

[applause]

Stephanie: Are there writers rooms Saturday, Sunday that you guys– Other than Saturday Night Live? That’s not even Saturday.

Jac: No.

Stephanie: I think Saturday and Sunday, you got-

Brian: I think the other thing is they vary wildly.

Jac: Production is totally different.

John: Production’s crazy.

Craig: You need to get a job on one of her shows. [crosstalk]

John: I was going to say.

Craig: You’ve got to get a job first.

Brian: We all want to work for Jac.

Craig: Step one, get a job.

Ben: It’s funny, you mentioned mental health. My wife is a therapist, which is why I’m asking this question for my own mental health. Thank you.

Craig: That’s great.

John: Great question.

Jac: Bless her.

Ben: Thank you.

Links:

• Hollywood HEART
• Jac Schaeffer
• Brian Jordan Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig
• Agatha All Along
• Fleetwood Mac – Silver Springs (Live)
• English Teacher
• A Spy Movie on YouTube
• Sitting
• My Old Ass
• The Downeaster “Alexa”
• The Later Daters on Netflix
• Sun lamps
• Thin Mint bites
• A Man on the Inside on Netflix
• 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 Matthew Chilelli (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.