Search Results for: subplots

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Well, my name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode of 602 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at pages written by our listeners and discuss what’s working and what could be working better. We’ll also answer listener questions on verisimilitude in dialog, POV, writing samples, and more. In our bonus segment for Premium members, what can we get away with never having to do or learn?

Craig: Podcasting.

John: Craig and I will discuss the perks of procrastination. An announcement, next week will be some sort of repeating episode, because Craig and I are both going to be off the grid for a little bit, but it’ll be okay. Everyone will be fine. We’ll find a great episode from the vaults to pull up and put into your ear.

Craig: We only have 600 of them.

John: Actually, even more when you consider bonus episodes and other things we’ve done along the way. There’s plenty of good content.

Craig: Guys, spin the big wheel of podcasts and see what you get.

John: Or maybe just listen to this episode extra slow. Give it to yourself in small doses, and then you’ll have more to savor. You do you is what I’m going to.

Craig: You do you.

John: We have a little bit of news. Craig, I texted you last week, because Weekend Read 2, our app for reading scripts on your phone, is now out. It’s in the app store. It’s been in beta for more than a year, but we finally put it out there. It has not only all the For Your Consideration scripts that we always have in there, but it has two old short stories of mine, it has your entire Chernobyl collection, it has all of the Scriptnotes transcripts for 600 episodes, thanks to Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Amazing.

John: It’s there.

Craig: I was looking at this. It’s pretty cool. What font do you guys naturally default to? I’m just curious.

John: The default font for the reader view is Avenir.

Craig: Avenir.

John: Avenir. It’s a good face.

Craig: Is that what you call these things? It’s a good face?

John: A typeface. You call them typefaces. It’s a good face.

Craig: That’s what the kids in the cool font community call it.

John: It really is. That’s my graphic designer background coming back through, because a font is a specific, deliberate. Medium bold would be the font, and the face is the whole family together.

Craig: Nice face, bro.

John: Nice face, bro.

Craig: Somebody walks by your desk. “Sweet serifs. Nice face.”

John: Sweet serifs. The Three Page Challenges that we’re looking at through today will be available in Weekend Read. The point of Weekend Read is that it is so hard to read a normal formatted script on your phone if you need to. You’re pinching into your zoom. It’s not a great experience. This makes it a good experience. It melts it down, and it re-formats it in a way that works really well.

Craig: John, what is the cost of Weekend Read 2?

John: Weekend Read 2 is free to use for all you people.

Craig: $0?

John: $0.

John: It’s a public source we put out there. If you want to have a larger library, if you want to do notes, if you want to have it read stuff aloud to you, then you can subscribe to it. It’s two bucks a month, I want to say.

Craig: What? That’s a pretty good deal.

John: It’s a pretty good deal. That pays for our coding. It also pays for Drew and Halley, our intern, who are formatting stuff and finding stuff to put in there every Friday so we can keep new stuff in that library.

Craig: Nice. We gotta keep Lamberson eating. We can’t let Lamberson starve. Halley, you know I’m going to call you Lamberson, right? Because again, I just want to say, Halley, what a great last name.

Halley Lamberson: Thank you, Craig. I now have people calling me amenably.

Craig: Nice.

John: Aw, the anagram.

Craig: Nice.

John: One thing we added this last round, which is a suggestion from Dana Fox, our mutual friend, is the typeface Open Dyslexic. Craig, have you looked at Open Dyslexic as a typeface?

Craig: You mean is a face?

John: As a typeface. Have you looked at that face?

Craig: I’m confused. It’s face, right?

John: It’s face.

Craig: Wait, it’s called what now?

John: Open Dyslexic. Are you in Weekend Read right now? Are you looking at it right now?

Craig: I’m looking online at Open Dyslexic. Oh, look at that. I can see. Whoa.

John: Some people find it easier to read this.

Craig: Interesting.

John: It has very unusual weights. It’s a little bottom-heavy in a way. Some people find it much easier to read. Our friend Dana finds it much, much easier to read. We put that in there for her.

Craig: This is really interesting. I’m fascinated by the science behind this. I suppose it makes it much easier to understand what the bottom and the top of any particular symbol is. The lower L’s have little uppercase squidgetties coming off them, so they don’t just look like mine.

John: Little feet going the opposite direction.

Craig: It’s also a groovy font. It feels like, hey, man, I’m a little high.

John: You’re just a little bit high. I think the idea behind it is it makes your brain less likely to flip a letter, which is some forms of dyslexia. What I’ve heard about dyslexia more recently, and this is me opining on things I’ve read in one article, is that a lot of it tends to be a brain auditory processing thing much more than a visual thing, but whatever helps a person read and feel more confident and comfortable reading is a good thing.

Craig: Whatever impediment there is between you and what you want, if someone’s helping you get there with technology, then hooray. It’s funny. I never thought about this sort of thing, because I don’t have dyslexia. Nobody in my family or immediate family has dyslexia. It wasn’t anything we had to concentrate on. Once you get there, you go, “Oh yeah, that makes sense, actually.” There has to be at least some difference in fonts. Sorry, faces.

John: Obviously, there’s basic fundamental readability. There’s reasons why you don’t use tiny type sizes. There’s reasons why you want contrast between the letters in the background. There’s a reason why we made Courier Prime the typeface, because it just was a better typeface to read. I guess Open Dyslexic is an attempt to be very aggressive about making sure the letter forms are so distinct that they don’t get flipped in people’s heads. I like people who are trying to solve problems out there in the world.

Craig: Love it.

John: Love it. Love it. Let’s solve some problems out there in the world by tackling some listener questions.

Craig: Segue man.

John: Because we often put these at the end of the episode, and then we run out of time and energy. We’re going to foreground them today. Drew Marquardt, can you help us out with a listener question?

Drew Marquardt: I sure can. Eric writes, “I’m writing a screenplay where the protagonist is an aerospace engineer. I myself am just a humble, lower middle class guy with very little college education. I want my characters to sound real, so I’m asking my older cousin about these topics, since he did go to college and graduated in this field. I sat down with him and recorded us talking about a bunch of subjects and explored the mind of the main character. He gave me these awesome pieces of dialog that the main character could say. I also text him from time to time as I build the script and ask him, ‘Hey, check out this scene. I wanted to talk about blah blah blah. Does this sound?’ He replies in full detail how the character should be saying things. Is this cheating or allowed? Could I use his language verbatim to build this character in this world? Does he get a writing credit, or what type of credit would be given for this, or is it just using a resource like reading a book and pulling out language from it, which I’m also doing?”

John: Eric, I’m sorry. You need to just stop what you’re doing and never, ever try to be a screenwriter again. You’ve broken incredibly important rules about never using any person’s expertise in your script.

Craig: Throw your laptop out, Eric. Throw it out.

John: It’s tainted. Everything’s tainted.

Craig: Set your clothes on fire and leave town. I think you probably have figured out that we’re totally fine with this. It’s actually just a sign that you’re doing your job well, to check with people. No, what they’re doing isn’t writing. No, they shouldn’t be getting a writing credit. It is perfectly reasonable to say to them that you will do your best to advocate for a consulting credit of some sort, like aerospace consultant. You can’t guarantee those sorts of things, because ultimately, somebody’s going to be producing this, and it’ll be up to them. This is totally fine. I do this all the time, call people up like, “Does this sound right?”

John: “Does this sound right?” I think you’re concerned specifically about like, oh my god, I’m using the actual words that he said. In this case, it’s your brother, first off. He’s giving you consent. He knows why you’re asking him these questions. You’re showing him scenes. He’s giving you feedback. He wants you to be able to write the best thing, both because he’s your brother, but he also would love to see aerospace engineering portrayed properly on screen. You’re doing [inaudible 00:08:30] for all these reasons.

Weirdly, it’s only the last sentence of your question that I want to flag here, “Is it just using a resource, like reading a book and pulling out language from that book?” Be more careful about pulling out language from a book there, sir. In reading that book, you might figure out what terms people are using and how people talk about stuff, but just make sure you’re not plagiarizing. Make sure you’re not literally taking the sentences out of that book. Yes, do research. Research is not cheating. It’s never cheating.

Craig: No, it’s essential. When you say language, if you mean nomenclature, terminology, all fine, you want to do that stuff for sure. Yeah, you’ve got a great resource there. It’s your cousin. It’s his cousin. It’s not his brother.

John: It’s one more step removed.

Craig: One more step removed.

John: Less blood in there.

Craig: I feel like people that do jobs that are constantly misrepresented on screen are going to be thrilled if they can see a movie where they’re like, “Oh my god, it’s clear that these people talked to an aerospace engineer.” Have you ever heard, John, the little bit of Ben Affleck’s commentary, the DVD commentary for the movie Armageddon?

John: Yeah, I think you’ve talked about it on the show. It was an amazing thing.

Craig: It’s so wonderful. I’ve talked about it before. Part of what he’s talking about is just this huge gap between what the movie is imagining or presenting and what the reality is, which I’m sure, yes, if a bunch of guys and ladies at NASA were watching, that they would probably just laugh their asses off. You’re avoiding that, which I think is a fantastic thing to do. Eric, I feel like you knew we were going to say, “Eric, you’re okay.”

John: That’s fine too. Sometimes you just want some validation, like, “I’m right here.” Eric, you’re good.

Craig: Eric, you are right.

John: Craig, I have a question for you. Are you close with any of your cousins?

Craig: No, but there’s a reason. There are a couple of reasons. I only have two first cousins. I had three. One of them passed away. My dad was 13 years younger than his sister. My mother is an only child. My dad was a mistake. Therefore, I am the son of a mistake.

John: You’re generationally much farther away from those cousins.

Craig: That’s the point. They were so much older than I was when I was a little kid. There’s Bilya. He doesn’t go by Billy, but we always knew him as cousin Billy. Cousin Billy and cousin Laurie. They were lovely. It’s just that they were just much older. Then also there’s a lot of… My sister and I never quite understood what was going on. In the older generations of my family, there are all sorts of, I don’t know, grievances, things like-

John: [Crosstalk 00:11:13].

Craig: This was in a situation where we saw each other all the time at family reunions. It was pretty rare. I was always excited to see them, because I looked up to them, because they were so much older and exciting. No, I’m not. How about you?

John: I’m not. I’m the youngest of all that branch of cousins. We lived in Colorado. Everyone else was further back east. Growing up, my cousins Tim and Cindy were close enough to my brother’s and my age that we would hang out some. I do have some good, fond memories of that. They all moved to different places. I was never around them. They all got much, much, much more Christian over the years, and so it became harder and harder. We still keep in touch. When my mom died, they were at the Zoom memorial service, and lovely cards and all that, but no, not close.

I always envied people who had cousins in town, because that felt like such a special thing. It’s not so close as a sibling, but a friend plus a blood connection felt like a really cool thing to have.

Craig: I do have that with my cousin Megan Amram.

John: Absolutely, but you didn’t even know she existed until well into the Scriptnotes era.

Craig: I certainly didn’t know she was my cousin until we 23 and Me’ed each other. She’s my cousin. I mean, third, possibly fourth, but yeah, she counts. That’s the cousin I have, Megan Amram.

John: That’s the cousin you want. The cousin of choice.

Craig: Yes, cousin of fact and choice.

John: Love them both. Let’s try a new question. Drew Goddard. Drew Goddard? You’re not Drew Goddard.

Drew: I’m not Drew Goddard.

John: Let’s try a new question. Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Is Drew Goddard here? Is he listening?

John: He’s very tall. We would notice him if he were on the Zoom, because he’s very, very tall.

Craig: Very tall.

Drew: Ricky in Venice Beach writes, “My entire movie is told from the hero’s perspective, and there is never a scene that she’s not in. She also has three family members who have powerful character arcs that I want to resolve by the end of the story.”

John: Are they cousins is my question.

Craig: And how powerful.

Drew: “The problem I’m running into is how to resolve these subplots in the third act when the lead character has traveled far away and is no longer geographically close to them. I would love to cut back to the other characters to see how they changed over the course of the story. Unfortunately, I’ve never cut away from the lead character’s perspective the entire movie. I feel like cutting back to these characters makes sense emotionally and thematically, but it just feels off to me. What advice or thoughts do you have about breaking from your main character’s perspective in order to complete a separate character arc?”

Craig: Ricky, something is wrong. Something is fundamentally wrong, because you are saying that there are three family members who have powerful character arcs. I’m not sure how powerful they can be if they’re never alone and they never are separate from the main character. Do those character arcs connect specifically to your main character? Is there a way for everybody to get together for a little family reunion at the end?

It sounds like you’ve got a problem of, “I want to do this and I want to do that,” and the two things are opposite. It’s what Lindsay Doran refers to as a closeup with feet. You’re trying to do a closeup with feet, and I think you’re going to have to pick one way or the other. That means probably going backwards in your script and looking for where things may have gone slightly awry.

John: In a previous episode, we talked about group dynamics and how important it is for the group as a whole to evolve and for the individual relationships within that group to evolve. It’s possible that I can imagine scenarios where these characters really work together a lot more, and so therefore we did establish arcs that those characters could go through. Just because of the circumstances of Ricky’s story, they’re not going to be around to complete those arcs.

Craig’s solution, basically to go back and really look at do I need these things to happen, that way is entirely possible, or the other solution of just like, we need to get everyone back together at the end to learn and see what has happened and what has changed, because I don’t think you’re going to be satisfied with the first-time cutaway at the end of the story to break POV. I’m sure our listeners can find 10 examples in great movies that do that, but it’s certainly not recommended practice.

Craig: No, I wouldn’t. I’m a little nervous. These character arcs, I just want to know, how are they relevant to my main character? Are they relevant? Do they inform the main character’s experience? Generally speaking, if you have a, like you say, “My entire movie is told from the hero’s perspective,” that means it’s about her. Therefore, all the choices that you make as a storyteller, that put her in the middle of the wheel, and then there are spokes of the wheel, like her family members, all those spokes have to feed back to the hero. They are there for a dramatic purpose that must connect back to the hero.

I have no interest in whether or not Aunt Sally’s marriage falls apart if the story is about Grandpa Joe, and Aunt Sally’s marriage has nothing to do with Grandpa Joe. We just need to connect it. We need to. At that point, that should guide you. If they don’t connect…

John: Let’s imagine a story in which the hero has inspired one of the characters to give up drinking or make a fundamental life change. I can see that being a powerful arc. They went through a whole thing, but they’re not there for the end.

Keep in mind, Ricky, that what’s meaningful to the audience isn’t that that character’s changed. It’s that your hero got to see the results of that character changing. It’s when you’re seeing it from your hero’s eyes, oh, this change happened, and that your hero was proud of this character and feels a connection to this change that has happened. That’s the reward. Cutting away to it without the hero knowing it isn’t going to be satisfying to the audience.

Craig: It’s interesting. I don’t think we’ve ever really talked about this. Storytelling that is built around a character, and that’s the majority of what we do, a central character, is essentially a narcissistic exercise, where that character’s feelings, that character’s experiences, that character’s problems, and that character’s resolutions and actions are what matters to us. We are essentially complicit in their narcissism. Other things happen elsewhere. They don’t matter as much. They just don’t. We don’t mind that. It’s just not a problem.

That’s why it’s so funny in whichever of the Austin Powers it was when the henchman dies and then they go to his family, because it underscores what a bizarre act of narcissism storytelling is.

I think what you’re struggling with is you’re trying to be not narcissistic about it, but here in the audience, all you’ve done is mainline narcissism heroin into my veins. I just care about the hero, because I identify with the hero. The story is for me to feel and appreciate. I want to know who I’m with. I don’t want to ever leave that person. If I do, it’s only because I want to see how it feeds back into the person I care about.

John: Perhaps it was a hundred episodes ago we talked about main character energy and how in real life it can be a dangerous pathological thing. In movies, main character energy, you know what? That’s what you’re here for is the main character energy. That could be, Ricky, what you’re feeling there is that. Don’t run away from it. Drew, what do you got for us?

Drew: Danny writes, “An independent producer and friend came to me with a sitcom idea. I thought it was great, so we developed the characters and plot together. I’m the sole writer of the script, with written by-credit, but he is a co-creator. He supports me submitting it as a writing sample for fellowships, but I list him as a collaborator if I’m submitting that script for incubators. We also have a pitch deck in case we have any opportunities to take it out.

“When I start querying managers after the strike, would it be okay for me to send this pilot as a second sample in addition to my other original pilot? The script definitely shows my voice and writing skills. The concept is not entirely mine, but we’re not a writing team. If I do send the script, should I mention my co-creator? Should I say a producer approached me to write on spec, or should I just focus on writing and polishing another completely original script before querying representation?”

John: Craig, I think where we’re getting confused here with Danny is that a producer approached to say, “Hey, would you write this thing kind of with me, kind of for me, on spec?” This producer person wants to produce this thing, but Danny is the writer. Danny owns everything. Danny can absolutely use this as a sample. There isn’t a problem here. That person is not a co-writer, doesn’t need to have their name anywhere on it, unless the agreement they have is that this person is only producing it, and every script has to say producer attached or something.

Craig: I think this is a problem that isn’t a problem, because what Danny is describing is a producer. A producer says, “Hey, I’ve got an idea for something,” which in and of itself is not, as we know, property. The producer looks for a writer. The writer says, “Oh, I like that. I’ll write it.” What do writers do with producers? Of course, they bounce ideas back and forth. They talk about stuff. Then the writer goes and writes. The producer is attached to produce. That’s it. When it says, “I’m the sole,” quote unquote, “writer of the script with written-by credit, but he is a co-creator,” no, he’s not.

John: Nope.

Craig: No, he’s not. First of all, just so you know, created by is a credit that the Writers Guild assigns as a function of separated writes. It has to do with who wrote the underlying story, and that is writing. What this person is is a producer. That’s great. There’s a whole world of non-writing producers. Danny, when you start talking to managers, you could send them pilot. Why wouldn’t you? You wrote it?

John: You did. It’s your writing. It shows what you can do. Let’s say you sign with these managers, and the managers want to take this thing out. Then it’s maybe a conversation like, “Okay, this producer is attached. Okay, what does it mean? What is the producer actually expecting? Has the producer done other things? Are you going to try to get some more senior experienced producer on board with this? Is the producer going to take it out on their own?” All that stuff has to be figured out. For you, Danny, getting representation, that’s not a barrier in your way.

Craig: Just mention it if you’re talking to a … If a manager’s interested, then you can say, “Oh by the way, just so you know, there is a producer attached to this one.” This one, no, free and clear. It’s not like you can only have one producer. Take a look at the credits for things. Jeez, Louise.

John: Good lord.

Craig: You can have a thousand producers. If a manager’s like, “I wanted to be the producer,” good, you can be the producer. Hey, how about this? Everyone gets to be a producer. Who cares? I’m the writer, and then there are 4 million people that have… That’s why the Producers Guild exists, to basically say, okay, of the thousand of you that have the producing credit, we’ve figured out that you’re a producer and you’re a producer. The rest of you stay in your seats.

John: For folks who are not familiar with the Producers Guild, you’ll see credits at the end of the movie or at the start of the movie that say “produced by,” and you don’t know who those people are. If it says PGA after it, PGA, just those letters, that means the Producers Guild has gone through, looked at who the people are who worked on this, and said these are the people who really produced-produced the movie. It’s a limited subset of the bigger, longer list you see there.

Craig: John, are you in the Producers Guild?

John: I am not in the Producers Guild. Are you in the Producers Guild?

Craig: I am in the Producers Guild.

John: Nice.

Craig: They gave me an award, and I had to join. Here’s the thing. It does make sense to figure out… One of the things that Producers Guild did that was quite wise was… Because they’re not a union. They’re not a labor union, even though they’re called guild. The Writers Guild and the Directors Guild just happen to use the word guild, as do the Screen Actors, but we’re all unions. They’re not.

What they did that was smart was they made themselves essential by I guess contracting with the major awards, to say, “Okay, if you’re giving out best television show or best movie, the people that collect those are producers. Who should get up there? We’ll figure it out. We’re the Producers Guild.”

At the end of each season of television that I do, at some point I get a thing from the Producers Guild, not because I’m a member, everybody gets it, that says, “What’s your title? What’d you do? Check off the boxes if you did these. Don’t check off if you didn’t do these. Then we’ll make our choice.”

John: It’s a thankless task maybe to decide that, but I understand. The producers themselves decided they wanted to do this, because they were tired of having the value of a producer credit devalued by all the people who get those credits for reasons that are not really producing.

Craig: Exactly. They don’t make you join, by the way. You can. It’s nice. It helps them do the work that they do. They do this for everything, because if you want to go up there and get your award, you have to prove that you should.

John: Drew, let’s try another question.

Drew: Gary writes, “In Episode 598, Vince Gilligan discussed today’s over-reliance on IP as the basis for new shows or features. That seems to put even more impediments before fledgling or at least uncredited writers, given the difficulty of being able to option such a property. I have recent experience with this issue. I wanted to develop a script based on a 1956 YA novel, but the literary agency connected to the author’s estate wouldn’t give me, an uncredited writer, an option. What are possible strategies for such writers, or is it hopeless to get an option without somehow acquiring a production company’s backing?”

John: Gary, I feel for you. I think it is going to be hard for you as an uncredited writer to get that, unless you had some special connection with the author or with the material, you were somehow able to break through the, “It doesn’t really make a lot of sense for us,” options to backlog.

I would say hold on to this notion of adapting this book and focus on some other things. At some point you will be signed by a rep, you will be going on the water bottle tour of Los Angeles. That might be an opportunity to say, when they ask, “What else do you want to do?” it’s like, “Oh, I’ve always really wanted to do this book.” Pick which producer you might want to say that to. If it’s really a good fit, then that producer could track down those rights and may get that book for you to adapt. That’s a way that I’ve seen it happen in real life before. Craig, other instincts from on your side?

Craig: I think that’s basically everything I would say, except maybe if this is a fairly obscure novel, you might want to just wing it. Just do it, because they don’t want to give you an option, because they don’t know you, and they also don’t know if the script will be any good. Who knows? They give you an option, and then, oh god, next week, I don’t know, David Koepp comes calling, and they’re like, “Oh, no, we gave it to Gary.” That’s probably not going to happen, is it?

One of the things that Vince was saying is, okay, there’s an over-reliance on IP, and the implication of that is that if something hasn’t been snapped up in terms of rights, then maybe it’s just not really on anyone’s radar at all, or maybe people tried and gave up. It sounds like you’re talking about a screenplay as opposed to a series. Even if it were a series, it would just be a pilot script.

Your job is, you want to write a script based on this novel, maybe write it. Honestly, what you’re really gambling is… Okay, I don’t know how long it’s going to take you to write it. Let’s say it takes you five months. You’re gambling that in the next five months, no one is going to come out with a script for that novel, which I’m going to guess no one has come out with in the last five years. Might be worth it. Then show them the script. Then they might be like, “Oh.”

John: “Oh, this is actually not too bad.”

Craig: “This ain’t too bad.”

John: Is it a long shot? Yeah, it’s a long shot, but it’s not the worst idea, because what you’re going to come out of this with hopefully is at least a good script, a good script people can read and say, “You know what? Gary, he’s a good writer.”

I remember way back when I was in film school, I read a Alien versus Predator script. I have no idea who wrote that. It was just a spec that someone wrote an Alien versus Predator thing. I was like, “That’s a really clever mashup of these two things.” It never got made. Different fork of that whole idea came to be at a certain point. It was a cool idea. I’m sure that person got signed and got some meetings that got stuff started. That could be you, Gary.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: I would also say Craig may be right. If it really is inspiring you to do that more than some other original idea of your own, consider it.

Craig: When you say, “I want to develop a script,” I would love, Gary, if you said, “I want to write a script.” Development is what we do when other people are like, “I don’t know.” A lot of development really starts with a script, whether it’s something you’re rewriting or it’s something you’ve written already.

Maybe write it. Like John says, worst comes to worst, you have a cool sample. Can people make that sample without the rights? No. Do they have other stuff that they would want to do anyway? Yes. Was it likely that they were going to be, “Oh my gosh, there’s a 58-year-old novel that we could do.” Probably not. I wouldn’t worry about it. Go for it.

John: Gary, are you infringing on their copyright to write that script? Yeah.

Craig: No.

John: Are they going to come out to you?

Craig: No, they’re not. You’re not.

John: Here’s the question. You are not doing anything that diminishes the commercial value of the original thing.

Craig: You’re not exploiting it. Look. Here’s the deal. You can sit in your house, and you can write fan fiction about Star Trek or whatever. You can write anything you want. When you sell it or when you distribute it, that’s different. To write a screenplay and not receive money for it and not have it turn into a movie and not put it online and have it distributed around, no, there’s not exploitation.

John: Here’s the infringing part I would say. It’s that if Gary wrote the script, and then he wanted to submit it to the Office of Copyright for copyright protection, no.

Craig: No, you can’t do that.

John: You’ve created a piece of work that you cannot copyright.

Craig: That’s right. That’s right.

John: That’s a risk you take.

Craig: Exactly. It’s a risk you take. Actually, even that is not quite true, because if you write something, somebody else can come along and say, “Oh, Gary wrote this.” For instance, if let’s say the novelist were still alive, which they probably aren’t, the novelist picks up Gary’s script, and they’re like, “Whoa, this is a great script, but Gary can’t copyright this. I think I’ll just rip the cover page off, stick my name on it.” That would be infringing Gary’s… Gary does have protection, but he can’t exploit anything.

John: It’s interesting. That is a fascinating thing.

Craig: He only has protection insofar as this work represents what I did, but it is not exploitable, because I don’t have permission from the original rights-holder.

John: What we’re describing is essentially a chain of titles. Gary doesn’t own the underlying piece of material. No one else owns Gary’s script. In order to make a feature out of this project, you need both underlying material and Gary’s script.

Craig: Yes, I believe that is correct. That said-

John: Not lawyers.

Craig: … if an attorney wants to write in and explain why I am absolutely wrong, I am welcoming of it.

John: We’d love it.

Craig: It is a learning opportunity.

John: Let’s go on to our Three Page Challenge, because we have three entries into this. I want to make sure we spend some good quality time looking through them. If you are new to the podcast and have not listened to an episode where we do a Three Page Challenge, here’s what this is.

Every once in a while we ask our listeners, hey, would you like to send in the first three pages of your script, it could be a feature, it could be a TV series, for us to talk about on the air? Everything we’re going to be talking about is completely voluntary. These people volunteered for this treatment. We are not picking stuff off the internet and poking holes in it. People asked for this feedback.

Those folks went to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, filled out a little form. They said it’s okay for us to talk about it, they’re not going to sue us. They attached a pdf, and it went into a magical inbox that Drew and our summer intern, Halley Lamberson, read through all of those entries. Halley, this was your first time doing this. Can you talk to us about this process? How many scripts did you and Drew look at this past week?

Halley: I think together we looked at a couple hundred. The process was very fun, reading through the submissions over a couple days and talking to Drew about the ones we thought were standout. It made me think about my own writing to read the entries.

John: I remember when I was a reader at TriStar, you learn a lot by reading other people’s writing. You definitely learn sometimes things you never want to do and stuff you see on the page, like, “Oh, let me make sure I never, ever do that.” The sampling that you guys picked, I liked, because they were both interesting ideas and had some issues that Craig and I could talk about.

Thank you very much for all your hard work. Folks, don’t send in those Three Page Challenges until we ask for them, because, man, they really do stack up quick. You guys are really good about sending stuff in.

Let’s maybe start with Skulduggery. This was from Matthew Davis. Actually, in our last live show, one of the raffle items we had was we guarantee front of the line for a Three Page Challenge when we do our next Three Page Challenge. That was Matt Davis. He sent that through.

If people want to read along with us, it’ll be attached to the show notes for this episode, so you can click through and find the pdf, or they’re in Weekend Read right now if you want to read them. If you’re just listening to this on your drive, Drew, could you give us a summary for Skulduggery by Matthew Davis?

Drew: Madame Louvier, a Haitian Voodoo queen with her face grease painted as a skull, moves through the forest of the Louisiana backwater, illuminated by lamplight. She approaches a small home where Jenny, 40s, gives her son $10 and sends him away on his bike.

Inside the house, Madame Louvier has Jenny drink a mysterious elixir and commands Jenny to exhale a blue vapor, a spirit which Madame Louvier inhales and communes with. Jenny’s vision warps. She sees Madame Louvier with a giant boa constrictor, cutting a strip of fabric from Jenny’s dress and fashioning it to a voodoo doll. Louvier’s dagger erupts in blue fames and turns every candle’s fire blue.

Louvier explains that their journey is entwined with Pirate Jean Laffite and threatens to kill Jenny unless she tells her the location of a map, which Jenny only has a faint memory of.

John: Craig Mazin, talk us through your impressions of Skulduggery and some of the things you noticed as you went into it.

Craig: There were some nice visuals to start with. I’m a little fussy about movement issues.

John: I have a lot of movement issues in this too.

Craig: There was a cool beginning. “Frogs and crickets cry out from the swamp. Lamplight illuminates a SKULL. The skull… MOVES.” Oh. Okay. “We realize the skull is a grease-painted face: She opens her eyes with an emotionless, blank stare: ONE EYE GLAZED-OVER – an injury long ago unaddressed.” Oh. Okay. “Draped in a blood-red cloak,” great, “the ghastly figures murmurs as she trudges along… ”

Wait a second. Now, was she trudging or was she just still? That’s a cheat. This is where we run into trouble all the time. This is where directors start to tear their hair out, because you can’t do both. You can’t start with this fixed skull, play the trick that it’s not really a skull, it’s actually a person, but also have them walking. If you are going to say they just started walking, then what were they doing before? Just standing, waiting for the movie to start? These things, they maybe don’t seem like that big of a deal. They’re actually a really big deal.

Let’s get into the meat of it all. There’s Jenny, who is in a backwater home. I don’t know what that is.

John: I don’t either.

Craig: What is a backwater home? Is it a cabin that’s on the bayou? Is it in the swamp?

John: I have no idea what the size or scale of this is. Also, when we’re getting inside, there’s a hallway, so it’s not just a cabin, but I don’t have a sense of this. There’s a porch. Is this a gothic Southern mansion, a Big Fish-y kind of thing? What is this?

Craig: Also, you can’t start a scene with somebody handing someone a $10 bill and saying, “No need to hurry back.” Was he also just standing, waiting? Some of the issue here is that the way these scenes start, it’s almost like people were waiting for somebody to go, “Action.”

There are so many ways to start a thing like this. We could be outside that house, and we could here, “Mom,” and, “Okay, come here,” whatever it is. There’s always ways to do it. It just seems like the actors are waiting, and then someone goes, “Okay, now do stuff,” and then they start doing things. We lose a little bit of the sense of the moment before, which is a really big deal for actors. It’s something that I think about all the time as a writer.

She sends her kid away. He, “Pedals his ramshackle bike away.” Pedals is capitalized for some reason. I don’t know why. He, “Pedals his ramshackle,” ramshackle is not a great word for a bike, “away. He pauses.” Do you mean he stops? He, “TAKES ONE LAST LOOK BACK AT HIS MOTHER… ” Then the scene ends. Does he just stay stopped? There’s movement issues. I’m struggling with the movement. How about you?

John: I’m having many of the same problems you’re describing here. I love that it’s evocative and atmospheric. That all feels great. I like the skull reveal, but I had the same problem with the movement. We didn’t need to “realize the skull is a grease-painted face,” just, “The skull is a grease-painted face.”

The, “She opens her eyes with an emotionless, blank stare,” you’re saying she, but you haven’t even introduced the character yet, which was a little bit of a bump for me. “MADAME LOUVIER — a Haitian-born Voodoo Queen,” I need some matches dashes there to get us out of that little clause.

Matt is using a lot of colons as a punctuation device. That could totally work if we were consistent, but he does a lot in the first page and then stops, so making some choices about how you’re going to get us down the page.

I read Madame Louvier as… She’s “Haitian-born Voodoo Queen,” so I’m reading her as being a dark-skinned character, but then it felt weird to me that I didn’t have any racial information about Jenny Duralde. I’m maybe pulling it in from her last name. I just got a little nervous suddenly that, oh, no, I’m going to be in a trope-y, voodoo-y kind of thing that is uncomfortable. I think just being a little bit more specific would be a great idea.

I had the same problem with JD, the son. Gives him a dollar bill. She says, “No need to hurry back,” but I don’t even know what that’s in context to. I was thinking if she calls JD, and JD is on his bike, he could be on his bike from the very start, and she says, “No need to hurry back,” or, “Get yourself a soda too.” Then I see, oh, she’s sending him away. Because he wasn’t on the bike to start with, I didn’t know what I was seeing for most of the scene.

Craig: There’s also a little bit of a missed opportunity to understand relationship, because she says, “No need to hurry back. I’ll be fine.” Her hand is shaking. He notices her hand is shaking. He knows she’s scared. Also, clearly, there has been some kind of conversation, because, “I’ll be fine,” even though they were just standing, and she suddenly handed him the money.

“Treat yourself to a soda, okay?” Then he goes, “Thanks, mom.” Now, “Thanks, mom,” is not great. You say, “Thanks, mom,” when it’s like, “Hey, kids, there’s Sunny D in the fridge.” “Thanks, mom.” “Thanks, mom” is really weirdly dull for what is happening here. I don’t quite know what this kid is thinking. Also, man, he gets on that bike fast.

John: That’s why I think you start the scene with him on the bike.

Craig: We continue with some movement issues. We start with fingernails diving into a burlap pouch. “They pluck out a VIAL OF ELIXIR.” She’s walking down a hallway. Man, she got there fast too. It feels to me, like, wouldn’t we want to hear the knock, knock, knock? I don’t know, seems like we missed some interesting opportunity.

John: You’re missing a “transition to.” If there were a “transition to” at the bottom of JD going off on the bike, and then we were jumping forward in time, because we are jumping forward in time, because we’re going to come to her. She’s already in the chair, and there’s candles everywhere. A thing has happened. It’s okay to do that. We can compress some time, but give us the “transition to,” because we need some sense this is not a continuous thing.

Craig: Absolutely. Then we get into the meat, which is this supernatural thing. I don’t know what’s going on. I gotta be honest. I know eventually what is happening is Madame Louvier is abusing some sort of voodoo ritual to get Jenny to tell her where the Pirate Jean Laffite’s map is, which is fine, perfectly fine thing to do, I guess, if you’re an evil voodoo ritual person. Prior to that happening, I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what Jenny wants.

John: Exactly.

Craig: I don’t know why she’s participating in this.

John: Is she terrified of this woman coming, and that’s why she sent the son away? She seemed like a willing participant, at least at the start of this, because she’s already there, and all the candles are lit. It doesn’t seem like she’s a captive, quite, so she may have called for this woman to come, but she’s scared of this woman. I don’t have a clear read on what’s supposed to be happening here. Mystery is great, but I’m just confused.

Craig: Yes. For instance, if I understood that she said, “My son is sick,” in a more interesting way, “My son is sick. He’s going to die. Can you do some voodoo and make him live?” okay, I know what she wants, at least. I just don’t know what she wants. Voodoo, it’s Haitian. I understand that. One of the languages of Haiti is French. Where we do run into tropes, with anyone that speaks-

John: Oh, god.

Craig: … any language is them saying something in one language and then repeating it in English. Why would you do that? Just say it in one or the other. She’s constantly saying something in French and then repeating it in English, which is…

John: Tropey, tropey, tropey.

Craig: It’s really tropey.

John: I scratched out all the English repetitions. In every case, they can say something in French, and the context is clear based on everything else that’s around it. We get it.

Craig: Exactly. There’s good description of all this cool CGI stuff that’s going to happen, but I’m confused about what is happening with… The context is where I’m really tossed, because the scene begins with, Jenny has already encircled her chair by lit candles. She’s ready to go. This lady shows up and says, “Drink.” That’s it. She just hands her a thing, goes, “Drink.” Then Jenny’s like, “Yep, done.” Then Jenny says, “Thank you.” Okay.

Then all this other stuff happens, and I’m not sure why. A lot of cool visuals. It was exciting. I like the way that Madame Louvier was yelling at her. Cranking up the speed of the scene was really interesting, but we’re missing some key information.

John: Madame Louvier also says, “Drink,” before the vial is seen. There was just orders of how you’re telling the audience and the reader what’s going on. Showing the vial, and she says, “Drink,” great. If you say, “Drink,” and then you show the vial-

Craig: She did. Before that-

John: I guess before, she pulled out a vial of elixir, but we wouldn’t have necessarily seen that.

Craig: That was part of the… If she’s walking, then I don’t know how to show that, or at least in the closeup that’s indicated here. It was cool. She “drops her cloak, revealing a FIVE-FOOT BOA CONSTRICTOR draped around her neck,” although-

John: Love it.

Craig: … we’ll have to make sure that that cloak really does cover the neck well, because your costume designer’s going to be like, “Uh.” The snake-covering cloaks are actually hard to find. When she yells at Jenny to tell her about the map, Jenny says, “I saw it once…as a child.” What? Earlier, she goes, “Our journey entwined with Laffite,” and Jenny goes, “Laffite?” Huh? Huh? Then she’s like, “Laffite!” Then Jenny’s like, “Oh, that Laffite. Yes, yes, I did see that once as a child.”

Then there’s a series of shots, which are “fractured scenes flashing in her mind,” Jenny’s mind. Man, that’s a big shift to go from a scene beginning with Madame Louvier, close on her, and now we’re in Jenny’s mind. It’s hard to pull off that bit without being overloaded. I think there’s probably too much going on here, Matthew, just too much, too fast, too abruptly, and motion issues.

John: Agreed. Just going back to the title page here. Set up as a pilot episode, an Episode 1, that’s all great. I would take the MFA off Matthew’s name. You’re not going to see that. I would take that away.

Craig: Master of Fine Arts?

John: It is Master of Fine Arts. Drew and I both have our Masters of Fine Arts-

Craig: You know who doesn’t?

John: … from the Stark Program.

Craig: I don’t.

John: You don’t. Halley will by the end of next year. Also, “fifth draft,” no. Don’t tell us how many drafts this was. The date is perfectly adequate for this.

Craig: Yes. Also, the date here is June 6th, 2023. Now, because Matthew gets to jump to the top of the line, he gets to send in a thing and then right away we show it. Just do be aware, there is this little thing of you don’t want to send people a script that is from 12 years ago. You sometimes don’t want to send them a script from today or yesterday, because it seems like you were just like, “Hot off the presses. I haven’t thought about this. Here you go.” A couple months, that’s pretty good.

John: Thank you, Matthew, for sending this through. Thank you for buying those raffle tickets there. I’m glad you got your script in here. Drew, can you tell us the log line now? The idea is that we only see these two pages, then you tell us the secret about what the actual script is about.

Drew: “An orphaned Cajun boy and his summertime friends search for a legendary pirate treasure but must outwit a merciless Voodoo Queen merely to survive.”

Craig: I guess Jenny died.

John: I think Jenny dies [inaudible 00:46:36].

Craig: Jenny.

John: Jenny.

Craig: Jenny.

John: Great. I would not have predicted that it was going to be a child-focused thing. That could be great. It’s dark for what this is, but dark habits, that’s fine.

Craig: It’s true.

John: It looks like there’s a bonus here. He included the Skulduggery map, which Craig can download, because apparently there’s puzzles involved on the map.

Craig: I’m looking at it. We have two things. We have some sort of letter that’s written in a cipher, which I could absolutely run through a crypto quote analyzer. It’s my least favorite kind of puzzle solving. Then there is a map that contains various pentagrams and rectangles and also a couple of additional things using that symbol, glyph alphabet. I don’t feel strongly about it. The one thing that’s interesting is that the first line of the cipher includes a lot of Roman numerals, which makes me think-

John: A date?

Craig: … these ciphers are only letters and not numbers.

John: Great.

Craig: Who knows?

John: Who knows?

Craig: I have not dedicated the time to it.

John: You have not. We will include that along with the script, if people want to try to solve that.

Craig: Great.

John: Let us get to our next entry in the Three Page Challenge. This is Scrap by Tertius Kapp.

Craig: What a great name. Lamberson, someone’s coming for your crown.

John: Tertius is a pretty damn good one. Drew, could you give us a summary?

Drew: Sure. Two young men, Sam and Knowledge, sit inside a space shuttle wearing colorful space suits emblazoned with ZSA, Zimbabwean Space Agency. Over the radio, Sarah announces the countdown to take-off, but when a cow’s head rips into the shuttle, it becomes clear that the shuttle is homemade. Sam insists that they rebuild their homemade craft, because he is chasing a girl and wants to impress her with a video of the takeoff. Sarah tells Sam not to pretend he’s an astronaut for this girl, but Knowledge insists Sam needs to lie about his job, girls want an entrepreneur, not a scrap metal scavenger. Sam then expertly drives a trolley full of scrap down the local street and into the scrapyard.

John: I enjoyed quite a lot of this. I would say I was concerned and confused when I read that Sam and Knowledge are both in their late 20s. This felt much younger to me based on just the premise. I also want to make sure that I actually am reading this right, because I took this to mean that they were using their phone to create the video as if they were blasting off, that they were in no ways themselves to see that this was all happening, so that it wsa all to impress this girl who was coming in there. There was some sort of fun misdirection, but ultimately, I got frustrated that the dialog got very premise setup-y and didn’t surprise me with details that let me know this is what Sam is like, this is what Knowledge is like. It was just very much like, here’s a premise. Sam loves this girl that he hasn’t seen for a long time, and is trying to impress her. Craig, what were your takeaways?

Craig: I agree with you that the writing was a bit surface-y in that it was very expository. We were talking about the circumstances. We were announcing our intentions and our feelings without any subtleties, just, “This is what I think.” “This is what I think.” “That is what they think.”

I’m more concerned about the premise, because the idea is I haven’t seen a girl in 13 years. I’m going to go to a reunion. I assume it’s a high school reunion or something. When I go there, I’ll be able to show her this video to prove to her that I’m an astronaut, except Zimbabwe does not have a space agency. Zimbabwe has not sent astronauts into space. One would presume that if they are still indeed in Zimbabwe, that his schoolmate would know that Zimbabwe does not have a space program.

John: Basically, do they believe that this girl is so sheltered that she would have no way of actually ascertaining this to be true or not true? I agree with you there. That premise was concerning, especially that it’s meant to take place I believe in present time, because they have phones and stuff. If this were somehow the ’50s or something, I could see impressing a girl who somehow had no idea that such a thing was impossible or had not happened.

Craig: It’s at least in the ’80s, because it’s Zimbabwe and not Rhodesia. Here’s a few things, just simple things, Tertius, that are easy to address. First, we’ve got, “Inside the command pod of a space shuttle.” Now, you’re cheating, because we’re going to reveal it’s not a real space shuttle. In fact, it’s just something that they’ve built, cobbled together, plastic and aluminum wrapped around wooden staves. How do we not see that initially? You might want to talk about it being dark. Maybe there’s emergency lighting or something just to hide what’s going a little bit.

Knowledge is, for at least Americans, a gender-neutral name, so I wasn’t sure if Knowledge was male or female or otherwise. It would be helpful a little bit.

“A countdown in Shona language is heard over the radio.” Then it says, “Sarah (on comms).” Now, we don’t know Sarah. We haven’t met Sarah. That’s not a way to introduce somebody’s name. You can just say female voice.

John: Female voice.

Craig: They hold hands. They look into a phone’s camera with proud smiles. Now, do you mean I see the phone’s camera? Are they looking into the camera of the movie? If I see the phone’s camera, then I know it’s fake already, because astronauts don’t look into phone cameras while they’re launching. “We’re all stardust, brother. Let’s go home.” They’re not leaving the planet, but this is leaving planet stuff, counting down, “Commencing solid rocket… ” Do you know what I mean?

John: I took that as being they were shooting a video, and in that video they were saying to each other, “Stardust. We’re all brothers.” They would send that video through to the girl.

Craig: I understand, but he says, “Let’s go home.” Wait, where are you? Are you on Mars? Are you on the moon? Why is there a countdown because you’re going home?

John: Let’s go home to the stars. We’re going back to the cosmos from which we came.

Craig: That’s weird.

John: I think it’s kind of poetic. I get why [crosstalk 00:53:21].

Craig: It’s a little doomy. If you’re an astronaut and you’re like, “Let us return to the stars,” I’m like, “Oh, you guys aren’t coming back.” That’s a dark thing to say as you’re heading off into space, I think.

Also, Sarah, when she cuts off the countdown, she says, “Holy shit – what’s that? Stop! Stop! Abort launch! Sam!!” Now, obviously, Sarah is reacting to the cow that’s about to hit them. When she says, “Holy shit – what’s that?” it’s a cow. What happens is, even though going forward in time, because we don’t know it’s a cow, you can get away with the confusion. We will subconsciously do the math backwards. When we do it, even, Tertius, if we don’t, in our seats, go, “Wait a second,” something happens. There’s little cracks in the dam of believability that occurs subconsciously, that you want to avoid.

John: Think about what could Sarah be shouting at the cow to get the cow to run away, that we could misinterpret in the moment.

Craig: Yeah, as if she’s going, “Shanu … ina … nhatu … mbiri,” and then, “Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,” and then boom, cow head. That would be fine, because it wouldn’t be enough time for her to be like, “Ah!” Also, if a cow is charging your fake shuttle, why would you keep the premise up? “Stop! Abort launch!” It’s over. There’s a cow.

There’s all these little… You know what? This is a great example, Tertius, first of all, why writing comedy is incredibly hard, harder than drama. The need for constant logic and stress testing of every little thing that happens is so important, because if any of that stuff isn’t really, really solid, you lose credit for the jokes, because people feel like you’re just cheating your way to get to the line you wanted to instead of earning it and surprising them, like magicians. There’s multiple things to think about here. I’ll say this. I’ve never seen that scene before. I’ve never seen a cow bust its head through a space shuttle command thing.

John: I liked the reveal that they were in the field, there was a cow, all that stuff.

Craig: Good invention.

John: It was only when they’d gotten us to the point of, oh, now we’re going to talk about the premise of why we’re doing this thing that I got a little… My enthusiasm flagged. Craig, did it bump for you that the countdown was in Shona, and then everybody else was speaking English the whole time?

Craig: It sure did. It sure did, because again, it’s stressing the logic. Look, obviously, what Tertius is trying to figure out here is, I’ve got people who are Zimbabwean, and they either speak English and Shona or only Shona. We’re making a movie, and we want people that speak English to watch the movie and not worry about subtitles maybe, which is fine. There is a convention where people will speak accented English.

People in Africa do speak with a particular accent. There’s all sorts of accents across the continent. You can zero in on like, okay, specifically, what is the Zimbabwean accent for English, and then maybe just stay there, because if you start in Shona, I’m a little confused, yes, why the person over the radio is speaking in Shona. These two people are speaking to each other in English. It just didn’t make much sense.

John: Agreed. Let’s jump to the very end of this. We have the streets of Harare. “Sam is expertly riding a trolley laden with scrap metal down the street. He has a homemade handbrake to help him steer the heavy load and he whistles to communicate with traffic.” Sure, I get this. I like this.

What I didn’t know though is, I don’t have any visual for what the streets of Harare are like. I don’t know if this is super crowded streets. Should I be picturing Mumbai, or should I be thinking of empty, rural streets? I just don’t have a good visual for this, so I don’t know what I’m seeing around, which really affects what I’m picturing in my head with him steering this cart.

Craig: Look, Harare is certainly not on the scale of Mumbai, but if I were to say the streets of Mumbai, I would also not know what I was looking at, or I said the streets of New York or the streets of Los Angeles. We’ve got a lot of different kinds of streets. Basically, every town has main street, urban center, suburban, sticks, poor, rich-

John: Paint us a picture.

Craig: … commercial, residential. Give us a little bit more a sense of what neighborhood are we actually in. What do I want to know about… All these things will give me information.

Obviously, look, Sam is a blue-collar guy. Even the kids call him Scrapman. He collects scrap metal. This is not a wealthy person. Where’s he collecting it from? Is there a contrast between him and his vehicle and the neighborhood he’s in? Is he riding around in maybe the nicer part of Harare, and even kids are looking down on him, or is this kid really happy and cool? Does he like the kid? Is he glad that the kid… Is the kid like, “Hey Scrapman. Here, I’m helping you,” and he’s like, “Great. Thanks, kid.” I’m not quite sure what to think about that.

John: We were just out in a field with a cow, which felt rural, and now we’re in a city. I don’t have a good sense of what I specifically should be thinking about. This is a situation where I as the screenwriter might throw in a one eighth of a page establishing Harare and giving us a sense of what this looks like and feels like. That may not make it into the movie, that establishing shot, but it helps the reader anchor visually what kind of space I’m in. What is the air like? What does the light feel like? What is this space? Is it noisy? Is it crowded, or is it empty? Tell us in that establishing shot.

Craig: You can also tie it into the end of the space shuttle scene where they’re in the field. He says, “Behind them the shuttle finally falls down.” The camera rises up, and we see in the distance a city, cut to Harare, so I know that the city is far away, but not crazy far away, so I get that there was a journey, or something, because it’s going to be weird to go from cow field to city with no connective tissue.

John: Drew, can you talk us through the log line, the secret rest of the story for these three pages by Tertius Kapp?

Drew: “A janitor’s son discovers an unusual lawnmower part in his father’s store. When he tries to sell it online, offers go into the millions. He’s captured and recaptured by various intelligence agencies but must find his high school sweetheart to solve the riddle. He has unwittingly discovered an extraterrestrial artifact.”

John: That is a fantastic premise. I like it a lot.

Craig: I’m cool.

John: Great.

Craig: You got a good premise. Now execute. Logic. Logic, logic, logic.

John: Logic in comedy. Our final Three Page entry, Drew, can you talk us through Another Life by Sarah Hu?

Drew: A young Taiwanese couple stand in the departures at JFK, the husband, Daniel, says goodbye to his wife, Josie, and their baby, Ava, as Josie and Ava are boarding a plane to travel for a month. He ties a red bracelet on baby Ava, who is wrapped in a red blanket. Meanwhile, at another airport, Anne, a young Taiwanese mother, hurriedly sends her baby girl, Mei, off with a woman in her 60s named Fei, to be delivered to Anne’s parents in Taipei. Mei is wrapped in a blue blanket.

After their first flight, Josie and Ava are at the Narita Airport in Japan, when Josie suddenly collapses waiting outside the gate to Taipei. A gate agent rushes over to help. At the same time, and at the same gate, Fei approaches the gate desk and signals to the agent that she needs to use the bathroom and hands baby Mei over to the agent. The gate agent who had rushed to Josie’s side, now cradling Ava, joins the agent who is holding Mei.

John: Craig, talk us through your first impressions with Another Life.

Craig: It seems like we’re doing a baby switcheroo here. Really, you couldn’t get more of an emphasis on the fact that one baby’s wearing the blue and one baby’s wearing the red.

One is coming from JFK, and one is coming from Philadelphia, at I assume the same time, although it’s weird. It says, “Super: 1985. JFK Airport.” Then we do the scene. Then we go to, “Super: 1985. Philadelphia Airport.” 1985 is really long. I just want to know, is it the same day, same week, same month? Is it not? I think giving us a little more information there is fine. 1985, I think it’s going to be frustrating for people, because it’s so generic. I think genericism is a little bit of the issue here.

Look, let’s just first talk about the most obvious issue, which is that everybody has to figure out how to deal with people speaking not English in movies for English-speaking people. You’ve dealt with it. I’ve dealt with it. We’ve all dealt with it.

Sarah’s choice was to say, right off the bat, “All dialog in brackets indicates Mandarin language.” Fine, except literally all of it, except for a couple lines… Actually, one of the lines is in Japanese. There’s one line, and then the VO of the gate announcement is in Mandarin.

At that point I’m wondering if there’s maybe a better way, because what happens is all the dialog ends up in brackets. I got fatigue. I got punctuation fatigue when every single line was in brackets. Let’s put that aside, because that’s a technical thing.

There’s a slightly generic vibe here. The airport feels generic. The time feels generic. There’s nothing about this that says 1985 to me. I have no feeling for 1985. I don’t know what time of year. The conversation that Josie is having with Daniel, who I assume is her husband-

John: I assume so too.

Craig: … is generic. This is the back and forth. “Stop worrying. It’s only a month.”

John: “She’ll be a brand new baby by then.”

Craig: “You can really focus on work now. I’m sorry I’m just… tired.”

John: Then he hands a roll of film over and puts a red bracelet on the baby’s wrist. “Take a picture every day for me. So you remember how much you are loved, Ava.”

Craig: You’ve had a kid. I’ve had a kid. Nah.

John: That’s not a real moment.

Craig: Nah. It’s not a real moment. It doesn’t feel real. When parenting couples are dealing with stuff like this, you get to a moment of truth or honesty after all the other sweating and stuff. I’m not sure, what is Daniel worrying about exactly? She’s taking the baby. What’s the problem? I get that he’s like, “I’m going to miss my baby.”

Also, she’s like, “You can really focus on work now.” “Josie registers Daniel’s hurt expression. ‘I’m sorry I’m just… tired.'” Why isn’t Josie hurt that Daniel’s like, “You’re leaving for a month, and I don’t give a crap about you. I’m just bummed out that my baby’s going to be gone for a month.” Also, a month isn’t that long, and no, she’s not going to be a brand new baby. It didn’t feel true. It didn’t feel complicated. It didn’t feel sticky and tricky.

Then this is compounded by the fact that when we flip over to the Philadelphia side, we have another generic conversation. I’m not quite sure what was going on. Who’s Fei?

John: God bless Drew and Halley for maybe writing up that summary, because I think the summary actually makes more sense than what I was getting on the page. Mei is the baby. It’s complicated that names are all very similar.

Craig: I get that. Mei’s the baby. Adam’s the two-year-old brother. The mom is Anne.

John: Is Anne.

Craig: Who’s Fei?

John: Fei is the woman who’s carrying the baby to visit family or something.

Craig: Fei’s character is 60s. That’s it. When Fei says, “She’s so sweet. What’s her name?” is Fei a flight attendant that is carrying the unaccompanied minor baby? Who is Fei?

John: It’s not clear who Fei is. I suspect we would learn that maybe on Page 4. It’s frustrating to me, because I read this three times and really had a hard time keeping it all straight. I’m not sure I actually did fully understand.

Craig: Maybe she’s hired her.

John: What the purpose, yeah, hired her to take, to see her family.

Craig: Yeah, because it seems like Anne, the mom, it says, “Severe school marm vibes.” Anne seems like she’s like, “Baby, yuck. Here, you take this baby to my parents. Here’s diapers. Here’s formula. Beat it. I’m not going to call you. I don’t need one last look. Just go.” I’ve learned something about Anne there. It doesn’t sound great. I would still need to understand the context of who Fei is to make sense of this scene. Otherwise, Sarah, the issue is, instead of me thinking the things you want me to think, all I’m going to be thinking is, who’s Fei?

John: What’s up here? Is she stealing the baby? I don’t get what it is.

Craig: Who’s this lady, and what’s her job, and why did she do this? Also, when, “Anne watches closely as the gate agent processes Fei’s boarding documents,” in italics, “Will this work?!” Okay, so there’s intrigue, but again, the intrigue only works if I understand who Fei is, because I don’t, so I don’t know what’s going on.

Then we get to the airport. Josie’s made her way to Narita Airport. “She makes her way slowly, with great effort.” What does that mean? Is she already hurt, winded? We haven’t seen any problems with her.

John: We saw her on the airplane. “She braces herself, wincing.” There was some problem in the scene before that.

Craig: Like a bad hip?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: It doesn’t sound like a heart problem or anything. Wincing is like, “Ow, my leg.” It says her POV blurs and distorts. Now it says, “Josie makes her way slowly, with great effort. From Josie’s POV: The Taipei departure gate in the distance blurs, distorts.” Why would she be looking at the departure gate when she’s arrived and is walking away from the departure gate?

John: She’s arrived in Narita, but then she’s going to Taipei. This was a stopover on her way to Taipei.

Craig: Was that established?

John: Not especially well. That’s a good thing that the couple could talk about at the start is, “Do we have enough time to get from that get to the next gate? It’ll be fine. It’ll be fine.”

Craig: “I’m just nervous because the layover was so tight.”

John: Exactly.

Craig: I think that’s the issue is I got confused there again. More importantly, she collapses. I’m like, whoa. Now I understand what’s going on. Both Fei, mystery 60-year-old, and Josie, mom, are heading probably to the same place. I think they’re going to the same place. They’re both going through Narita. They’re both trying to get to the next leg of their journey when Josie collapses, and then here comes Fei to be like, “Oh, help her.”

John: “Help her. Hold my baby.” Babies get mixed up.

Craig: “Hold my baby.”

John: Craig, before we get to the two-baby problem, which I’m assuming is going to be part of the log line-

Craig: Isn’t that Dan and Dave’s new show, two-baby problem?

John: The two-baby problem, yeah.

Craig: Two-baby problem.

John: From the creators of Game of Thrones is the Two-Baby Problem.

Craig: Comes Two-Baby Problem.

John: On Page 1, we have a two-prop problem. “From his pocket Daniel reveals a roll of Kodak film and a red macrame bracelet, centered by a jade ring.” This actor is how holding two props and will talk about one of them and do something else with the other one. No. You get one prop. Touch the one prop. Forget the roll of film. I think it’s a mistake to have two props that have to do two different things. We can only handle one piece of information at a time.

Craig: If you want to do both, just reach into your pocket after you do the one. Reach into your left pocket after you reach into the right pocket. That should work.

John: Going back to what stuff is in Mandarin, what stuff is going to be in English, brackets are a choice. My guess is that this is set up this way because these babies are ultimately coming back to the US, and so most of the film is going to be in English. With that as a choice, you might want to think about just italics for-

Craig: Completely agree.

John: … whatever the foreign language is, because it’s just easier to read.

Craig: So much easier to read. I completely agree. Italics is your friend here. Just go for that. It will just make the read so much easier. The brackets, it’s weird, even just subconsciously, even though you did a nice job of laying out for us explicitly what you meant by the brackets, what happens is, as you’re reading, everything feels like an aside, because that’s what brackets do in my head. It all feels weirdly un-emphasized, which you don’t want.

I’m curious to see where this goes and is it a two-baby problem. For me, the big issues is I want there to be more specificity and more honesty and truth in the relationship going on between husband and wife. I want to know who the hell Fei is. I don’t need much. I just need to know what is… I’m paying you to do this. Just do it. I get it. She’s paying a lady to go and do this. Okay, but I need something.

John: I haven’t peeked at the log line yet. If this truly about the babies getting mixed up, at some point we’re going to need to actually spend some face time on the babies. I think this script maybe should’ve spent a little more time on that, even just on the plane, or just other people commenting on the cute baby. Some face, some good fat baby face time could be really helpful in terms of setting up the stakes here.

Craig: I love a good fat baby.

John: Drew, tell us what this is actually about.

Drew: “A loner Asian American workaholic befriends a woman with whom she was unknowingly switched with as a baby. After seeing glimpses of a life that could’ve been, the discovery of their switch threatens to destroy the fragile identity she’s safeguarded all her life.”

Craig: It’s a two-baby problem. We were spot on there. I’m a little nervous, Sarah, that it is so telegraphed that we’re just waiting for it to happen, which isn’t great. You might even want to consider just showing one of them. If you were to, say, not show Fei. You just see… It’s Josie, right? Josie?

John: Yeah.

Craig: Josie. Josie’s got her kid, gets on the plane, gets off the plane, collapses. A lady with a kid hands her kid over to somebody else and goes, “Let me help you.” Then the switch happens. We’re like, “What? Oh my god. A switch just happened.” This whole thing with the bracelets, you’re like, “Here comes the switch.” You’re just waiting for it. That’s not what you want, generally, especially not right off the bat.

I’m also a little nervous just based on the lack of specificity of environment and dialog. The log line is describing a fairly sophisticated drama, I think. “Destroy the fragile identity she’s safeguarded all her life,” that’s heavy. That, I would just say as you look at the pages after this, that of course we don’t have, really be on patrol for that, because anything that undermines the realism is going to take away from the drama and can push it towards soap opera in a bad way.

John: I want to thank everybody who sent through Three Page Challenges, and especially the three people who we talked about today. So great and brave of you to do this. I think everyone learns when we can see what you guys did on the page. Reminder if you’d like to do this yourself, you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, and we will put out another call for adventure sometime in the weeks ahead.

It is time for our One Cool Things, Craig. My One Cool Thing is an essay that I think you will enjoy reading. It’s by Adam Mastroianni. Apparently, it’s a full research paper he presented, but you can read the blog post or the Substack-y post that he did, which is simpler and much more easily digested.

It’s called The Illusion of Moral Decline. What he wanted to study is, do Americans or people worldwide believe that things are worse now than they were before, that people are meaner, less kind, that morals are declining. The truth is, the answer is yes, they always do. They always have believed that things are declining and that things are worse now than they were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, until you drill down about their actual personal experiences, and the people around them, and like, oh, actually, not so much for me. It really digs into the studies on why that is and what’s really happening.

It has some interesting framing theories about why we always perceive that stuff is getting worse, and particularly that morals are declining. It’s not simply just that it’s a thing that happens as you get older, because even if you talk to people in their 20s, they think things are getting worse. It’s just a set point thing. It probably ties into the degree to which you tend to forget the negative things from 10 years ago, 20 years ago, and turn up the brightness on past memories. You can’t do that with the present. It’s a really well-designed paper.

Craig: That’s really interesting. I remember I took a sociology course in college. Was it Emile Durkheim? I can’t remember which famous sociologist it was, but wrote about, and I’m probably scrambling this also, but in my mind the concept was called scrupulosity. The idea was that over time, we confront moral crimes, and the ones that are the most offensive to us, the most upsetting, we drive out, we essentially make deviant. What might’ve been acceptable at some point, like, “Oh, yeah, you can go ahead and marry 10-year-olds,” we’d find that repugnant. In fact, we are now announcing that that is deviant and we’re not doing it anymore. It’s wrong.

What happens over time is that our desire to make behavior on the edges deviant never changes. It is simply moving. As we move forward in a closed-off society, we begin to reassign more and more behavior into a deviant category, because we just keep… We can’t stop and go, “Okay, we’re good now. Everything’s fine. We accept everything.” It’s a related concept. Fun stuff for a college discussion. I don’t know how much I agree with it, but it’s a thought.

I do have One Cool Thing that I guess is also this interestingly philosophical discussion that I also don’t know how I feel about it. I’ll share it with you. I don’t even know how I arrived at it. It may have been through Arts and Letters, which is one of my favorite websites. There’s an online publication called Evergreen Review.

It is a very long essay, long, so strap in, written by Yasmin Nair. It is called No, No, Nanette: Hannah Gadsby, Trauma, and Comedy as Emotional Manipulation. If you’re hearing this and going, “Oh god, no, not another article or essay, think piece yelling about Hannah Gadsby,” you might want to skip this, because it definitely does. She is very critical of Nanette.

However, what was interesting was really where she got. It was like Hannah Gadsby was her way in. Where she arrived, and this is the part that I found fascinating, was a discussion about both the costs and necessities of performing trauma in order to be perceived as authentic, which is a phenomenon that is way more salient to me now in this day and age than it was, say, when I was younger. When we were really young, trauma was not performed at all. It was hidden. You just didn’t talk about it.

John: Or maybe you would say you were processing it, but you were never performing it.

Craig: You were never performing it. Furthermore, no one assigned authenticity to people because they performed trauma. This is not to say that performing trauma is wrong or that you shouldn’t incorporate what’s happened to you in your performance as an artist. What it’s really talking about is us, the audience, and saying, what does it say about us that we assign more authenticity, and are we depriving people of authenticity if they don’t. That was a really interesting discussion.

I’m not familiar with Yasmin Nair, other than to say that she is one hell of a writer. I’m looking at her now. She is a writer and activist based in Chicago. She is also a co-founder, with Ryan Conrad, of Against Equality. What is Against Equality?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: It is “an online archive of writings and arts and a series of books by queer and trans writers that critique mainstream LGBT politics.” Whoa, so it’s LGBT inside of LGBT and self-criticism. It’s “an anti-capitalist collective of radical queer and trans writers.” All I can tell you is, I am not queer and I’m not radical, however I am impressed with Yasmin Nair’s ability to put a sentence together.

She is really good, and she made a very… It was just a really well put together thing. It’s worth reading, even just to see what something very cogently written looks like. I put it out there as food for thought and discussion. It is not an endorsement or a lack of endorsement.

John: Fantastic. Last little bits and reminders here. Weekend Read is now on the app store, so download that. It’s on iOS or for iPad as well. You can see all those Three Page Challenges there. Lastly, thank you to Vulture, who gave us a shout-out this week, for the Scriptnotes sidecasts that we’ve been doing with Drew and Megana.

Craig: Nice job.

John: It was really nice. They were just a short, little side project, but it’s nice that people are enjoying them. Thank you, Vulture, for that little shout-out.

Craig: Way to go, Vulture.

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: What?

John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our intern is Halley Lamberson.

Craig: Lamberson.

John: Outro this week is by Jon Spurney. Craig, it’s a good one. You’ll enjoy it. 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. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, links to the Three Page Challenges, and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts, and they’re great, and hoodies too. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on getting away with it.

Craig: Getting away with it.

John: Craig, we got away with it again. Thanks for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, last week we talked about things that our daughters never have to learn how to do, like drive stick shift, or that we never have to do, because we’re at a point in our lives where we can just, “Nope, I’m not going to do that, not going to learn how to do it. I just don’t care anymore.”

Craig: That’s exactly right. We’ve aged out of some things.

John: For me, an example would be calculus. I get calculus as a general concept. I understand it’s about rates of change. I’m never going to learn calculus. I’ve come to terms with that. It’s okay. I don’t need to learn calculus. Calculus is not going to enter into my world.

Craig: First of all, I like the way you pronounce the word, because you say calculus [KAL-kuh-luhs].

John: I said calculus [KAL-kyoo-luhs].

Craig: Oh, you did say calculus. This may be the interesting situation where [crosstalk 01:22:25]. Did you not take calculus in high school then?

John: I did not take it in high school. I took a physics class. I took physics for majors in college, which required calculus. I got the calculus book and read enough ahead so I could get my way through that physics class, which was just complete hubris for me to take. I never really fundamentally understood it. I can’t really do an integral or derivative or all that stuff. I get why they’re important. If I needed to land a rocket, I would use that, but I don’t, so I don’t.

Craig: I did take calculus. I remember none of it. In a sense-

John: We were the same.

Craig: … you got away with it, because we were exactly the same, even though I put in a whole lot of time and energy to get a really good grade in that calculus class.

John: We’re not so different, you and I.

Craig: It turns out, Mr. August, are we that different? This is a great topic, because it reflects our advancing age. When we were younger, like Lamberson, you want to keep up. That’s the point. You’re keeping up. Also, it’s easier to keep up, because you are not just swimming in the current of culture. You and your friends and your cohort are creating it. You are what’s current.

Somebody sent this to me, which is relevant to this topic, and it made me laugh so much. There’s a screenshot of a tweet and then a comment about the tweet. The tweet was from SB Nation. The tweet was, “Is Baby Gronk the new Drip King, or is he just getting rizzed up by Livvy?” Then someone named Damien Owens wrote, “I’m 50. All celebrity news looks like this: Curtains for Zoosha? K-Smog and Batboy caught flipping a grunt.” That is correct. I am 52, and that is in fact that Baby Gronk, Drip King, rizzed up, Livvy looks like to me, although I do know what drip is, I just want to say.

John: Yeah, but Drip King is a specific person.

Craig: I thought a Drip King was any guy that’s all glammed up with his jewelry and awesome clothes.

John: Apparently, the actual backstory on that specific quote is that Drip King is an actual lacrosse player somewhere in Massachusetts. It’s all an inside joke and stuff. You know what rizzed up is referring to?

Craig: No.

John: What is one of the key attributes in Dungeons and Dragons?

Craig: Oh, charisma.

John: Charisma. Rizz comes from charisma. Rizzed up, it means to charm, to seduce, charm, flatter, impress.

Craig: It’s like the glowed up, relative to self-improvement and beautification, [crosstalk 01:25:07].

John: When someone rizzes you up, then they’re charming. It feels like a thing that someone would do on Love Island.

Craig: Is Baby Gronk the new Drip King? What?

John: It’s all very debatable. Here’s the thing. We don’t have to hear it.

Craig: We don’t have to. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.

John: We don’t have to. We don’t have to care. You don’t have to keep up on all the slang. You don’t need to.

Craig: I don’t even care that people are laughing at us right now for how stupidly old and out of it we sound and are. That’s how great it is to finally get out of the current. They’re all laughing at us, like, “Oh my god, look at them. They don’t know. Oh my god, he thought Drip King was… “ Who cares? We don’t care. Go ahead. Make fun of us. We don’t care. We don’t even hear you. We’re too old.

John: My daughter makes fun of me because I don’t remember her phone number, but I’ve never had to call her phone number.

Craig: If you put a gun to my head, I could not tell you what either of my kids’ phone numbers are. I know my wife’s phone number because it was pre contacts consuming phone numbers.

John: I also have to fill in Mike’s phone number on all sorts of forms all the time for emergency contact stuff. Amy’s not my emergency contact.

Craig: No, and for good reason. Looks like you’re dying today.

John: In the office yesterday, Drew, Halley, and I were making a list of things that we don’t need to think about or worry about anymore, and things that we’re done with. How to repair a car, how to repair an engine, how to change the oil. Halley said she doesn’t need to know how to fix a tire. I still think you need to know how to fix a tire, because sometimes you are going to be in the middle of nowhere, and putting on a spare is a good thing. What’s your impression on tires?

Craig: You can get away with not knowing how to fix a tire, and here’s why.

John: Run flats.

Craig: Run flats are a thing. You can at least get yourself to somewhere with cell service, at which point somebody in a tow truck can come by. If you can do it yourself, that’s fine, but you know what’s more dangerous than not knowing how to fix a tire is almost knowing how to fix a tire. You can injure yourself. You can certainly injure your car. I watched a friend of mine jack his car up, and he did not have the jack in the right spot, and right through.

John: [Crosstalk 01:27:13].

Craig: Right through the bottom. Just right through the bottom of the car.

John: Oh, god.

Craig: It was brutal.

John: I’ve changed some tires in my life, and they worked.

Craig: I’ve done it. I didn’t enjoy it, but I’ve done it. I don’t feel a great need to do it anymore. A lot of cars don’t come with spares anymore because [crosstalk 01:27:31].

John: No, they don’t. It’s true. They don’t. My dad was an engineer. He had a slide rule that I remember loving. I would take out his briefcase and play with the slide rule, never understood how to use it. I’ll never need to use a slide rule.

Craig: Slide rules were already a thing that you and I didn’t have to worry about. Once calculators came along, that was it. Slide rules were done.

John: Christmas cards or holiday cards. Craig, your family doesn’t-

Craig: I’ve never worried about those. Melissa loves them. We don’t send them out, but she loves receiving them.

John: We just get them. We love getting the John Gatins family Christmas cards.

Craig: Those are always the best. I’m not joking about this. She will take every single Christmas card and tape it up to one section in the kitchen so that the wall is covered in people’s Christmas cards. I just don’t know. There are some things that are so fundamentally different between me and her as human beings, that I don’t even bother to say, “Why would you do that?” I’m just like, “Oh, okay.” Not in a million years. I get those Christmas cards. I read them, and I’m like, “Great. I’ve consumed the information. Now into the garbage you go.” Not her. She’s like, “I’m putting these… ” They stay up. They stay up until like January 12th.

John: They all go in a basket that we never look at again, and then we throw them all out, recycle them.

Craig: That would be perfectly fine.

John: A thing we did give up on that we used to do, we gave up on, was frequent flier loyalty. We’d only fly United, so we could be the premium tier of United. Then we got stuck. We got trapped taking flights that were less ideal because of that. It would get stuck in Chicago overnight. It was like, you know what? Stop. We’re giving up on loyalty to any one airline.

Craig: You guys, you are exactly what the point was, like, “How do we get these people to take this crappy flight? Let’s lock them into this loyalty program.” If I have a choice and all things being equal, I’ll fly American, because that’s where most of my points and such are. There are a lot of credit cards that are airline-agnostic. American Express, you can collect points that apply to anything, doesn’t matter, any airline, whatever, so I agree with you.

John: Craig, can you whistle?

Craig: I can whistle in a couple different ways. I can whistle by breathing in. I can whistle by breathing out. I can also whistle like (whistles), which is through my front teeth.

John: Can you do the hail a taxi cab whistle with your fingers in your mouth?

Craig: I cannot.

John: I’ve tried to teach myself that several times. I’ve looked at the videos. I’ve done the practice. It’s just not a thing that works for me.

Craig: I just end up blowing spit.

John: I’ve given up on that. It would be nice. I’ve also given up on Antarctica. I always wanted to visit all the continents. I thought at some point I really want to go to Antarctica.

Craig: That’s just you, dude. That’s just you.

John: Do you want to go to Antarctica?

Craig: No. Why?

John: Because it’s the bottom of the world. It’s exciting to me.

Craig: Are the restaurants good?

John: No, the restaurants are terrible.

Craig: Do they have a casino? Let’s put it this way. There are too many places I haven’t been, shamefully, that I will need to go to before I go to Antarctica. It would just be so insulting to the entire subcontinent of India if I go to Antarctica first. That would just be a slap in the face. One does not slap India in the face.

John: That’s a bad idea. Other thoughts from you about stuff you just don’t ever see yourself doing again? I have on the list mow the lawn. We got rid of most of our lawn, but we have gardeners. That’s fine. That’s good. I don’t ever need to own a lawnmower.

Craig: I mowed our lawn as a kid in hot New Jersey summers. It wasn’t the cool lawnmower. It was the bad lawnmower. It was bad. I don’t need to mow lawns anymore. There are some things I suppose that still in my mind I’m like, I’m going to get around to figuring out how to do. There are certain video games that I’ve just been like, “I’m skipping it.” So many people, including you, are like, “You going to play Diablo? You going to play Diablo?”

John: It’s so good, Craig.

Craig: I’m not saying it’s not. I’m sure it is.

John: It’s not for you.

Craig: At some point, I’m like, I can’t play everything. I know that Diablo is going to be crack. I need to save some crack space for Starfield, and I need to save crack space for the new Cyberpunk DLC, and I need to save crack space for some other things. Man, I’m trying to play Legends of the Tears of Zelda. Breath of the Wild did not grab me the way it grabbed everybody else.

John: That’s my Diablo. I’m not even trying. I’m not even going to try.

Craig: You know what? I am trying, but I’m like, “Oh my god. This is so big and so much.” There are certain things like that that I’m starting to let go. I have absolutely given up on keeping up with new music. I’ve given up. I’ve given up. I remember as a kid thinking, “Why do people give up on this? They should just stay with it.” I get it. You just get tired of keeping up, because you start to realize, there’s no reward for it. At some point it’s okay to just be okay.

John: I also feel like the stuff that is actually going to matter will just break through in popular culture, and I’ll know what it is. I’m going to know who Lizzo is just because I’m going to know who Lizzo is.

Craig: Lizzo breaks through. Lizzo absolutely breaks through. No question. The other thing is, there’s a lot of stuff that I think breaks through for let’s say my daughter, the younger one in particular, because the older one is into a lot of stuff that I’m into, and then such weird stuff that nobody’s into it. My younger daughter is into a lot of music where I’m like, I’m hearing it, and I think actually I’m just not going to ever enjoy it the way you do. It’s just because I think chunks of my brain were already given away to a thousand other bands, and I can’t get them back. They’re gone.

John: Does any of the music that Jessica listens to, do you have to stop yourself from saying, “This could’ve been written 20 years ago?” Some of the stuff that Amy listens to, I feel like, “Yeah, that’s just kind of Sonic Youth.”

Craig: Yes. Definitely the K-pop stuff, I just think, “This was written 20 years ago.” There’s certain things where I think the song is pretty familiar, but the style is fairly new. One of the things that Jessie and I love to laugh about is indie singer voice, because we both find it hysterical. Whenever that comes out, she’ll send me something. Who was on Saturday Night Live and did quismois? Oh my god. It was so good. (singing) I’ll be home for quismois. Who was that? Quismois. I’m looking it up now. It was Camila Cabello.

John: Great.

Craig: She was on Saturday Night Live, and she sang I’ll Be Home for Christmas, and she said quismois. That may have been peak indie singer voice moment.

John: Love it.

Craig: We didn’t have that when we were kids. There was no indie singer voice. That’s new. I liked that. That was fun.

John: Sure, fun. One thing we won’t give up on is the Scriptnotes podcast, because it’s still [crosstalk 01:34:50].

Craig: Hold on a second. At some point-

John: It will never end, Craig. It’ll have to go on forever.

Craig: I don’t like what I just heard. That’s terrifying. That’s a little bit like getting into a spaceship and going, “Let us now return to the stars.”

John: Thank you, Craig.

Craig: Thank you, guys. Bye.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Weekend Read 2
• SKULDUGGERY by Matthew W. Davis (with bonus puzzle map,) SCRAP by Tertius Kapp, and ANOTHER LIFE by Sarah Hu
• The illusion of moral decline by Adam Mastroianni
• No, No, Nanette: Hannah Gadsby, Trauma, and Comedy as Emotional Manipulation by Yasmin Nair
• The Best Podcasts of 2023 (So Far) by Nicholas Quah for Vulture
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Jon Spurney (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our intern is Halley Lamberson.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 554 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it is a craft compendium. We are going back to previous segments, in which we talk about how to work with groups of characters. We’ll be looking at how pairs or groups of characters can work on separate pieces of the puzzle, then come together at the end, how to manage different storylines and the dynamics in smaller breakout groups, and how we capture the feeling of community and chemistry between multiple characters.

Our guide in this process is Megana Rao, who is not only a Scriptnotes producer but also a listener. Megana, help us out. Where are we starting?

Megana Rao: We’re starting on Episode 360, called Relationships. Craig often talks about how the most important thing is the central relationship in this story.

John: Not one character, but the relationship between those two characters.

Megana: Exactly. It’s not about the main character. It’s about who that main character’s central relationship is with. In this segment, you guys first of all talk about how to set up characters and establish backstories and the challenge of locating characters and introducing the dynamics that existed before the movie began. Then you get into how you actually evolve those relationships on screen and you go into some technical scene work.

John: Relationship between two characters is almost always about conflict. What is it that they are coming into the scene? What is the problem between the two of them? How are we seeing that grow and evolve and change? How are we exposing the inner life of not just the individual characters, but what their relationship was like before this movie started?

Megana: Yeah, and how you convey that through dialog and how people actually speak to each other.

John: Great. We have that first segment. What’s our next segment.

Megana: Then we get into Episode 395, called All in This Together. In this one, you guys are looking at how you structure a story where the team functions as the central protagonist. There’s a really interesting discussion on POV here where you talk about the challenge of this type of story is that you need to serve several different characters and execute satisfying arcs for each of them.

John: It’s not just The Goonies. It’s any movie in which you have a team of characters who are working together, so the Avengers or the Fast and Furious movies. Yes, each of those characters might have individual arcs or things we know about them, but really it’s the group dynamics that are going to change over the course of the story, so how we handle those.

Megana: Exactly, yeah. It’s not just the individual, but how the whole is going to transform.

John: Fantastic. What’s our third and final segment?

Megana: Our last segment is Episode 383, Splitting the Party. I just want to warn everyone that this is a D and D-heavy chat.

John: As all chats should be, heavy D and D.

Megana: I promise it’s worth it. In this one, you guys are talking about how to split up a group of characters and the questions that writers should be asking themselves so that it’s meaningful when those characters come back together.

John: Fantastic. We will be back together at the end of these three segments to talk about what we’ve learned a little bit but also to do our One Cool Things and all the boilerplate stuff. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we are going to be talking about Stranger Things Season 4.1 I guess we’d call it, which is all about group dynamics. If you’re not a Premium Member, for the love of Steve Harrington, you have to become a Premium Member, because Megana has some very strong opinions about the characters and what’s happened in Stranger Things this first half of Season 4.

Megana: Incredibly strong opinions. By the time this episode airs, everyone should have watched it.

John: You have no excuse for not becoming a Premium Member so you can hear the Bonus Segment. Now, let’s travel back to Episode 360 and get started with our group dynamics.

And so when we first started doing the podcast I remember there was some episode early on where I said like, “Well it’s not like you and I are friends outside of this podcast,” and you were really offended by it. And I remember I was like, oh, I hurt Craig’s feelings. And Craig has feelings. And we’ve become much better friends over the course of doing the podcast, but also–

Craig Mazin: Do I have feelings? I guess I do.

John: You do have feelings.

Craig: I guess I do.

John: But we weren’t playing D&D at the start. Like all that stuff came.

Craig: No, we have become friends through this podcast. I mean, whether I was legitimately hurt or not. You had a fair point. We weren’t really that close or anything. But our relationship is a function of the work that we do together. That’s how it’s happened. And that’s by the way how relationships must happen, if I may Segue Man myself into our main topic–

John: Go for it.

Craig: Relationships have to be functional. I think sometimes people make a mistake and they think a relationship is just two people who like to chat together or sleep together. That in and of itself is not enough function.

John: Yeah. So in framing this conversation about relationships, I think there’s two challenges screenwriters face.

One is how you get the audience up to speed on relationships that began before the movie started. And so this is trying to figure out like literally letting the audience know how these two people are related. Are they siblings? Are they friends? Are they a couple? Are they ex-spouses? Getting a sense of what are the underlying conflicts that started before the movie started. And really who wants what. That’s all stuff that you as the writer hopefully know and you have to find ways to expose to the audience if it’s going to be meaningful to your story.

The second challenge screenwriters face is how do you describe the changes happening in a relationship while the movie is going on. And so it’s really the scene work. What is the nature of the conflicts within the scene? How are we showing both characters’ points of view? What is the dialogue that’s exposing their inner life and exposing the nature of their relationship?

And they’re very related things but they’re not the same things. So what Craig and I just described in terms of our backstory, that’s kind of the first part is setting up the history of who we are. But so much of the writer’s work now is to figure out how within these scenes are we moving those relationships forward and providing new things to study.

Craig: Yeah. That’s exactly right. The screenwriter has certain tasks that are homeworky kind of tasks. You do need convey information. We have this wonderful opportunity when a movie begins to have fun with that. The audience is engaged. They’re leaning forward in their seat. They haven’t yet decided that this movie stinks. So, you can have fun and tease along or misdirect what relationships are. And then reveal them in exciting and fun ways. And that’s I think really enjoyable for people.

So there’s an opportunity to maybe have – maybe it doesn’t have to be quite busy work when we’re establishing how people relate to each other factually. But the real meat of it, as the story progresses, is that fabulous space in between two or three people. The relationship I generally think of as another character. There’s what I imagine this person like alone. There’s what I imagine this person like alone. But when they’re together there’s that other thing between them. And if you think that sounds a little foofy, well, just consider the word chemistry and how often we use it to apply to actors who must perform these relationships. Because when it’s there what do we describe it as? Sparks, or whatever. It’s that thing in between.

And when it’s not there, there’s nothing.

John: Yeah. Chemistry is fundamentally the mixture of two elements that by themselves would be relatively stable. And you put them together and they create something new. And that’s what we’re really talking about in a relationship is that new thing that is created when those characters are interacting and challenging each other.

So, let’s talk about establishing these characters and I think you’re right to describe at the beginning of the movie the audience does lean in because I think partly they’re trying to figure out who these people are and sort of what slots to put them in. People approach movies with a set of expectations and there are certain kind of slots that they want people to fall into. And they’re looking for like, OK, well what slot are they falling into? And if you are aware of what the audience’s expectations are that can be really helpful.

So, some of the slots people are looking for is, well, who is the hero, the protagonist? Who is the love interest? Who is the best friend? Who is the rival? Who is the mentor? Who is the parent? That’s not to say you should have stock characters, but it’s to be aware that the audience is looking for a place to put those folks essentially. A sense of the relationship geography of the central character and the people around them.

And so be aware that the audience is trying to find those things and help them when you can. And if you need to defeat those expectations or change those expectations be aware that’s a job you’re assigning yourself.

Craig: Right.

John: That you have to make sure that the audience understands this isn’t quite what you think. You think that this person is the father, but he’s actually a step-father who has only been married to the mother for a year. If that’s important, you’re going to have to get that out there quickly so we understand.

Craig: That’s exactly right. And similarly there are times when just like you and the audience, one of the characters onscreen will also not quite understand the nature of the relationship, and so it’s important then to tie back to our perspective and point of view episode. If I’m in the perspective and point of view of somebody who has a basic understanding of what a relationship is, and if I want to subvert that I first must lay the groundwork for their wrong understanding. And create their expectation.

So, in Training Day, we have an understanding because we share a perspective with Ethan Hawke that he’s been assigned the kind of badass older veteran character who is going to train him and be his mentor. And so that’s his understanding. And then the guy just starts doing some things that are a little uh, and he goes eh, OK, and we’re all a little bit like uh. And then it gets much, much, much, much worse. And we understand that we, like Ethan Hawke, completely misunderstood the nature of this relationship. And then a different relationship begins to evolve.

John: Yeah. So, let’s talk about some of these expectations. So Ethan Hawke had a set of expectations going into it. I think so often as I read through Three Page Challenges or moments in scripts that aren’t really working I feel sometimes the screenwriter is trying to do a bunch of work to explain something that could have just been done visually. And so they’re putting a lot of work into describing something that could be done as sort of a snapshot, as an image.

So, I want to give a couple snapshots of things you might see in a movie and as an audience you see these things and you’re like, OK, I get what’s going on here, so all of that work is being done visually and therefore the dialogue can just be about what’s interesting and new and is not establishing these relationships.

So, here’s the first snapshot. You see four people seated at a table in an airport restaurant. They’re all African American. There’s a woman who is 35 and putting in eye drops. There’s a man who is 40, a little overweight, who is trying to get a six-year-old boy to stay in his seat. There’s a girl who is nine and playing a game on her phone.

So, you see these four people around a table, you’re like, OK, they are a family. They’re traveling someplace. That’s the mom. That’s the dad. Those are the kids. That’s your default assumption based on the visual I described. So therefore anything you want to do beyond that, or if you need to clarify exactly the nature of these relationships between people, that there’s like a step relationship or one is actually a cousin, you can do that but that visual sort of gave you all that stuff for free. And so therefore you can spend your time in dialogue on doing interesting things with those characters rather than establishing that they’re actually a family and they’re traveling someplace.

Craig: Yeah. You suddenly don’t need to do things like have a character say, “Mom, or “Son,” or any of those annoying things that people do to hit us over the head with this sort of thing. But you’ve put some thought into how to create a relationship in a realistic way.

The fact of the matter is that many writers who struggle with this only struggle with it when they’re writing. If I take any of those people and bring them to an airport and walk them through the airport and just say you quietly look around and then describe to me the relationships you infer from what you see, they’ll get it almost all right.

John: Yep.

Craig: That’s how it works as humans. Therefore that’s what we need to do when we’re writing. I wish that writers would spend more time in their visual minds, I guess, rather than trying to just begin or stop with words, if they could maybe walk through the space in their heads and experience it. It’s amazing what you see when you do that. And then you don’t have to use dialogue.

John: Yeah. All right, so here’s another snapshot. So, next table over there’s a man and a woman. They’re sitting across from each other. They’re both early 30s in business suits. He’s white. She’s American-born Chinese. He wears a wedding ring which we see as he drinks his scotch. His eyes are red and puffy, maybe from crying. She doesn’t look at him. All her attention focused on the spreadsheet open on her laptop. So that’s the visual we’re giving to an audience at the very start.

We know there’s a conflict there. We know that something has happened. Something is going on. The nature of their relationship between each other is probably fraught. There’s something big happening there. And I think we’re leaning in to see what is the first thing that somebody says. What just happened that got them to this place?

Are they having an affair? Are they business colleagues? Something big has happened there. And you have a little bit of an understanding about their jobs, or sort of that it’s some sort of work travel. So that visual gives us a sense of who those two people are before we’ve had any words spoken.

Again, if you saw those people at the airport you would probably get that basic nature of their relationship and you’d be curious. And so I think the thing about sort of establishing people visually is that you want there to still be curiosity. You’re not trying to answer all the questions. You’re just trying to give a framework so that people are asking interesting questions about these characters in front of them.

Craig: You’re building a mystery. Right? You’re giving us clues. I have clues here. OK, these are the clues you’ve given me and I’m looking at the situation here. OK, I’ve got this man, I’ve got this woman. He’s wearing a wedding ring. He’s drinking scotch. He’s crying. He’s sad. She doesn’t seem sad at all. That’s a huge clue to me. Whatever he’s crying about, it’s not about her, because she’s looking at a spreadsheet. It’s not that she’s looking down nervously and shutting him down. She’s busy. She’s looking at a spreadsheet. This guy seems pathetic. I’m guessing his marriage has blown up and he’s crying about it for the 15th time to his associate who is subordinate to him therefore can’t tell him to shut the hell up.

She meanwhile is trying to get the work done that they need to get done so they both don’t get fired by the boss above both of them. I don’t know if that’s true. And I don’t know if you even thought it through that far.

John: I haven’t.

Craig: Right. It’s just that’s the bunch of clues there. And that’s how fast we start to assemble clues. Here’s the good news for all of you at home. What I just did is something that you can use to your advantage if you want people to get what you want them to get. It’s also what you can use to your advantage if you want people to assume something that is incorrect.

For instance, in the first scenario we see a man, a woman, two kids, they’re all sitting together in the airport, playing on a game. They’re all the same race. They all therefore technically can be related. It feels like a family. And that’s a situation where at some point you could have the nine-year-old, turn, wait, see somebody pass by and then hand 50 bucks to the man and the woman and say, “Thanks. We weren’t here.” And then she takes the six-year-old and they move along, right?

Like what the hell? Who is this little spy? But that’s the point. By giving people clues we know reliably we can get them to sort of start to think in a way. We are doing what magicians do. It’s not magic. It’s misdirection and it’s either purposeful direction or purposeful misdirection. This is the way we have fun.

John: Absolutely. And so the example you gave where they pay the money and leave, it would be very hard to establish the normalcy if you actually had to have characters having dialogue before that. We would be confused. And so by giving it to us just as a visual, like OK we get the reason why everyone around them would just assume they’re a family. But if we had to try to do that with dialogue or have somebody comment on that family, it would have been forced. It would have felt weird.

So, you have to think about sort of like what do you want the audience to know. What do you think the audience will expect based on the image that you’re presenting and how can you use that to your advantage?

Most times you want to give the audience kind of what they’re expecting so the audience feels smart. So they feel like they can trust their instincts. They can trust you as a storyteller. And maybe one time out of five defeat that expectation or sort of surpass that expectation. Give them a surprise. But you don’t want to surprise them constantly because then they won’t know what to be focusing on.

Craig: Right. Then they start to feel like this really is a magic show and they lose the emotional connection to things. So, in the beginning of something you can have fun with the details of a relationship because those are somewhat logical. And you can mess around with that. The more you do it, the more your movie just becomes a bit of a puzzle. And, by the way, that’s how whodunits work. But those are really advertising nothing more than puzzles. And that’s why I recommend all screenwriters spend time reading Agatha Christie. Just pick a sampling of two Poirots and two Marples. And just see how she does it. And see how clever she is. And see how much logical insight and brilliance is involved in designing these things, particularly in such a fashion where it works even though you are trying to figure it out while it’s happening.

John: Yeah. And so it’s not like those characters are realistic, but those characters are created in a very specific way to do a very specific function. And they have to be believable in doing their function the first time through and then when we actually have all the reveals you see like, OK, that’s what they really were doing. And I can understand why everybody else around them had made the wrong assumptions.

Craig: Well, that’s the beauty of it is that you start to realize by reading those whodunits how much stuff you’re filling in that isn’t there. You make these assumptions that that girl must be that woman’s daughter. That’s just a flat assumption you made and at no point was that ever stated clearly and why would you believe that? So, it teaches you all the ways that our minds work in a sense. So, that’s always great. But I think once you get past the technicals of portraying and conveying relationships, then the real magic and the real fun is in watching two people change each other through the act of being together, whether it is by talking, or not talking, or fighting, or regret. Whatever it is, that’s why I think we actually go to see these stories.

I don’t think we go to movies for plots. I think maybe we show up because the plot sounds exciting. We stay in our seat for the relationships. Lindsay Doran has an amazing talk about – did we – that’s going to be my One Cool Thing this week for sure. I mean, I’m sure I’ve said it before, but Lindsay Doran has a Ted Talk she’s done. It’s available online for free. That goes to the very heart of why relationships are what we demand from the stories we see.

John: Yeah. And too often you think about like is this a character moment or is this a story moment. And, of course, there is no difference.

Craig: Right.

John: You have to make sure that the character moments are married into fundamental aspects of story that are moving the story forward. Because if you have a moment that is just like two character having a witty conversation but it doesn’t have anything to do with the actual forward trajectory of the plot, it’s not going to last. And if you have a moment that just moves the plot forward but doesn’t actually have our characters engaging and interacting and changing and their relationship evolving, it’s not going to be a rewarding scene either. So, moments have to do these two things at the same time. And that’s the challenge of screenwriting. It’s that everything has to do multiple things at once.

Craig: That’s why they’re doing them, right? I mean, the whole point is you’re in charge. You can make anything happen. You can end the movie right now if you want. So, why is this happening? And if your answer is, well, it’s happening because I need it to happen so that something else happens, no. No. Stop. Go backwards. You’re in a bad spot.

John: So often I think we have an expectation of what the trajectory are going to be for these characters also. Because we’ve seen movies before, so we know that the hero and love interest will have a fight at some point. They will break up. They’ll get back together. We can see some of these things happening. And that doesn’t mean you have to avoid all those things happening but you have to avoid all those things happening but you have to be aware that the audience sees it coming. And so if the audience sees it coming and kind of feels that you’re doing that beat just because you’re doing that beat, like, oh, now they’re going to break up because of this misunderstanding and, ugh, I saw that happening way ahead of time, that’s not going to be rewarding.

They’re going to have an expectation that attractive people will fall in love. That families will fight and splinter but ultimately come back together. So, all that stuff is sort of baked into our expectation of these stories from the start. So, be aware of that and so if you get to those moments understand what the stock version of that moment is and figure out how you push past that. How do you get to a new moment between these two very specific characters, not the generic archetypes of these characters? What is it about them that makes this scene, these two people being in the scene, so unique and special?

And when you see those things happen, that’s what makes your movie not every other movie.

Craig: It strikes me that nobody really talks about relationships when they’re doing their clunky, boring screenwriting classes and lectures. I mean, I’m sure some people out there do. But so often when I skim through these books they talk about characters and plot. They don’t talk about relationships. And I guess my point is I don’t care about character at all. I only care about relationship, which encompasses character. In short, it doesn’t matter what the character of Woody is until Buzz shows up.

John: Completely.

Craig: Woody, until Buzz shows up, is – well, his character I could neatly fit it on a very small index card. Woody is the guy who is in charge and has sort of a healthy ego because he knows he’s the chosen one. So he’s kind of the benevolent dictator. OK. Boring. Don’t care. That’s why movies happen. We don’t want that to keep on going. What we want is for Shrek to leave the swamp and meet Fiona. Then the characters become things that matter because there in – go back to our conflict episode. Everything is about relationship. They should only talk about plot and relationships as far as I’m concerned. We should just stop talking about character. It’s a thing that’s separate and apart.

I think a lot of studio executives make this mistake when they take about character arcs. I hate talking about character arcs. The only arcs I’m interested in are relationship arcs.

John: Yeah. Shrek is not a character, but Shrek and Donkey together is a thing. Like that’s–

Craig: Right.

John: There’s no way to expose what’s interesting about Shrek unless you have Donkey around to be annoying to him. So you have to have some thing or person to interact with. Yes, there are – of course, there exceptions. There are movies where one solo character is on a mission by him or herself and that’s the only thing you see. But those are real exceptions. And I agree with you that so many screenwriting books treat like, “Oh, this is the hero’s journey and this is the arc of the hero,” as if he or she is alone in the entire story. And they never are. And it’s always about the people around them and the challenges.

Craig: Or an animal.

John: Or an animal.

Craig: You know what I mean? There’s some relationship that mattes. And the only place I think you can kind of get away with learning and experiencing something from a character in the absence of a relationship in a kind of impressive way is in theater and on stage and through song, but in that sense you’re there with that person, the relationship is between – so when Shrek sings his wonderful song at the beginning of “A Big, Bright, Beautiful World,” the beginning of Shrek the Musical which as you know I’m obsessed with, he’s singing it to you in the audience. And you’re with him in a room. So that’s a different experience.

But on screen, then when you watch – OK, great example if I can get Broadway for a second, Fiddler on the Roof opens in the most bizarre way any musical has ever opened. The main character walks out and starts talking to you in the audience, immediately breaking the fourth wall. And he does it occasionally and then sometimes he talks to God. And he’s alone. And then there’s the song If I Were a Rich Man. He’s alone the entire time and he’s singing it to himself and to God, who is not visible.

And when you’re in a theater watching it it’s fun, and it’s great, and you get it. Then you watch the movie, which is not a bad movie at all. I like the Fiddler on the Roof movie, but when that song comes around you’re like what is happening.

John: Yeah. Who is he talking to?

Craig: Why is he? Who are you talking to? Why are you doing this? Why are you standing in a field singing? It’s bizarre. It doesn’t work in a movie. You need a relationship.

John: Yep. You do.

John: So our main topic this week came up because yesterday I did a roundtable on a project and this project we were working on had not one hero but a big group of heroes. Or, not a big group, but four people who were sort of the central heroes of the story. And that wasn’t a mistake. That really was how the movie needed to work.

And it got me thinking that we so often talk about movies being a journey that happens to one character only once, and we always talk about sort of that hero and that hero protagonates over the course of the story and sort of those things. Even though we are not big fans of those classic templates and sort of everything has to match the three-act structure that tends to be the experience of movies is that you’re following a character on a journey. But there are a lot of movies that have these groups of heroes in them and I thought we’d spend some time talking about movies that have groups and the unique challenges of movies that have groups as their central heroes.

Craig: Smart topic because I think it’s quickly becoming the norm actually as everybody in the studio world tries to universe-ize everything. You end up, even if you start with movies with the traditional independent protagonist, sooner or later you’re going to be smooshing everybody together in some sort of team up. So it’s inevitable.

John: We’ve talked before about two-handers where you have two main characters who are doing most of the work in the movie. And sometimes it’s a classic protagonist/antagonist situation. So movies like Big Fish, Mr. And Mrs. Smith, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Romancing the Stone, Chicago, while there are other characters there’s two central characters you’re following and you could say either one of them is the main character of the story.

But what you’re describing in terms of there’s a big group of characters is more on the order of Charlie’s Angels, The Breakfast Club, X-Men, Avengers, Scooby Doo, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Lord of the Rings, Goonies, Go, all The Fast and Furious movies. These are movies where characters need to have journeys and make progress over the course of the story but they’re a part of a much larger team. And we really haven’t done a lot of talking about how those teams of characters work in movies.

Craig: Yeah. I actually wasn’t really a team movie writer until I guess The Hangovers, because those three guys kind of operated as a team. And then when you throw Mr. Chow in there it’s a team of four. It’s a crew. Now you’ve got a crew.

John: You’ve got a crew.

Craig: You got a crew.

John: We’re putting together a crew.

Craig: And you got to figure out how that crew works, because it is very different than just – even like a typical two-hander like Identity Thief. I mean, there are other characters but it’s just the two of them on a road trip. That’s pretty traditional stuff.

John: The movie is about their relationship. And so I’m sure people can argue that one is the protagonist and one is the antagonist. And, great, but really it’s about the two of them and how they are changing each other. Wicked is a two-hander.

Craig: Right. When you say, OK, now it’s really about three, or four, or five, or in Fast and Furious there’s like 12 of them at this point now, you kind of have to present them as this team. It’s a team sport now. So writing for a team requires a very different kind of thinking I think than writing for a traditional protagonist and let’s call them a sub-protagonist or something like that.

John: Yeah. So if you think about them as a group, if you think about them as one entity this should still be a one-time transformational event for this group of characters, for this team of characters, for whatever this party is that is going through this journey that has to be transformational to them as a group.

But within that bigger story there’s probably individual stories. And in those individual stories those characters are probably the protagonist of that subplot or at least that sub-story. So they’re all going to have relationships with each other, with the greater question, the greater theme, the greater plot of the movie, and it’s making sure that each of those characters feels adequately served by what the needs are. Bigger characters are going to have more screen time and probably take bigger arcs. Minor characters are at least going to enter into a place and exit a place that they hopefully have contributed to the overall success or failure of not just the plot that the characters are wrestling with but the thematic issues that the movie is trying to bring up and tackle.

Craig: Yeah. There’s a kind of a Robert Altman-y trick where you take an event and he would do this a lot in very good Robert Altman movies, but we see it in all sorts of movies, where there’s an event. And the event is so big it encompasses everyone. And so we kind of – we play a little bit of the soap opera game. So soap operas traditionally would have about three or four plots going at once. You would see a little bit of one, then it would switch over to the next one. And you’d have to wait to get back to the one you liked. At least that was my experience when I was home sick with grandma.

So in say a movie like Independence Day there are multiple stories. There is a president. There is his wife. There’s an adviser to the president who has an ex-wife. There’s his dad. There’s Will Smith. There’s a bunch of stories going on. And each one of them gets a little slice of the story pie, but ultimately it’s all viewed through the prism of this event. And in the end everybody kind of comes together in some sort of unifying act which in Magnolia was a frog rain.

John: Yes. Yes.

Craig: And we see that in fact as different as all these stories were everyone was connected and kind of working as a team. So individuals are the heroes of their mini-stories. And that’s in fact how those movies tell the story of the big story through mini-stories.

John: Yeah. Now, in some of these stories the characters enter in as some kind of family. They have a pre-existing relationship. In other movies they are thrown together by circumstances and therefore have to sort of figure out what the relationships are between them. In either situation you want those relationships to have changed by the end of the story. So just like as in a two-hander, their relationship needs to have changed by the end. In a team story the relationships need to have changed by the end and you need to see the impact they’ve had on each other over the course of this. So independent of a villain, independent of outside plot, the choices that they individually made impacted the people around them.

Craig: And that’s the matrix of relevance. So in a traditional movie it is about me. I have a problem. And I go through a course of action and at the end of the movie my problem is solved. In this kind of story the group has a problem. And what we’re rooting for is the group to survive. And in that sense very much it is a family. And we know that about the Fast and Furious, because they’re always telling us.

John: [laughs] It’s family.

Craig: They always tell us. This is a family. But it is. And so the hero of those movies is the joined relationship of them all in the family. And what the problem is in the beginning of the story is not a problem with one individual. It is a problem of family dynamic. And that is what needs to be figured out by the end of the movie.

John: Yeah. So let’s talk about the real pitfalls and challenges of doing a story with a team protagonist or with a big group at its center. The first and most obvious one is that sometimes certain characters just end up being purely functional. You see what their role is within this group and what their role is within this plot, but their character isn’t actually interesting in and of itself at all. And sometimes if it’s a minor character, OK, but if it’s a character who we’re putting some emotional weight in that we actually want to see their journey at all, they have to be more than purely functional.

The challenge is the more you – in a normal movie you can say like, oh OK, well I need to build in some back story for this character. I need to see them interact with other people and get a better sense of who this person is and what they’re trying to do, but you can’t do that for every character because the movie would just keep starting again and again. It would never get anywhere. So, finding ways that one character’s progress is impacting another character, which is sending the next thing forward. The jigsaw puzzle aspect of getting all those characters’ changes to happen over the course of the story can be really difficult.

Craig: It can be. Because, you know, the movie starts to turn into a stop-and-start. Action, quiet talk, backstory, my inner feelings. Action, quiet talk, backstory, your inner feelings. And it’s one of the reasons by the way these movies are so long. They are so long because everybody needs a story. It’s hard to justify why you have seven characters when only three really have lives and inner worlds and the other four are standing around doing stuff.

John: Yep.

Craig: So everybody has to have it. And they can get really long. You know, it wouldn’t kill these people to maybe, you know, kill one of them. If it’s not going well we’ll just kill them. No big deal.

John: I’m going to argue without a lot of supporting evidence that Alien is essentially one of these kind of group movies, and a lot of horror movies are those kind of group movie, and they winnow down the characters so that one person is left standing. But you couldn’t necessarily say that that person was the protagonist at the very start of the story.

Aliens is not really kind of what we’re talking about with the team movie. Even though there’s a team of great people in it, it is Ripley’s movie and it is her journey. You can clearly see her protagonist arc over the course of it. So, that’s a distinction. Even within the same franchise those are two different kind of setups. I would say – I’m arguing that the first Alien movie is kind of what we’re describing in this episode whereas Aliens is much more a classic, here is one character on a one-time journey.

Craig: Yeah. Don’t be afraid, if you need to write fodder characters you write fodder characters.

John: Oh, go for it.

Craig: I mean, people need to die. Somebody has to be the red shirt. But when you think about – Star Trek is a pretty good example I think of a kind of team story. All their movies feel like team stories to me. And in part it’s because, I mean, take away the science fiction aspect, they’re just sailors on a boat. And so we’re rooting for the boat to survive. That means everybody on the boat is important. However, if something blows up, a few people on the boat can die and we won’t miss them. It’s the people that we have invested in emotionally. Those need to be justifiable to us. They all need to be important. They’re all doing jobs that are really important. I don’t care about the janitor on USS Enterprise. They do have an important job. Really important. But not during your crisis.

John: Absolutely. And we should distinguish between, in television shows by their nature tend to have big casts with a lot of people doing stuff, so Star Trek as a TV show you say, oh well of course, there’s a big cast, there’s a team. But the Star Trek movies which I also love, that is what we’re talking about here because it’s a family. It is a group of characters, the five or six key people. They are the ones that we care about. And we don’t care about the red shirts. We want to see them come through this and survive and change and interact with each other. That’s why we’re buying our ticket for these movies.

Craig: You know what? I just had an idea.

John: Yes?

Craig: You know, so occasionally we do a deep dive into a movie. And I do like the idea of surprising people. I don’t think we’ve necessarily been particularly surprising in our choices. They’ve all been kind of classics. But you know what’s a really, really, really well-written movie?

John: Wrath of Khan?

Craig: It is. But that’s not the one I’m thinking of.

John: Tell me.

Craig: Star Trek: First Contact.

John: Oh great.

Craig: First Contact is a brilliantly written script. It is a gorgeous story where everything clicks and works together in the most lovely way.

John: Nice.

Craig: I would deep dive that. I’d deep dive the hell out of it.

John: It’s on the list. Nice.

Craig: Put it on the list. Put it on the list.

John: Put it on the list. Getting back to this idea that there’s sort of a jigsaw puzzle, there’s a lot of things happening at once, you and I have both worked on Charlie’s Angels films. I found that to be some of the most difficult writing I ever had to do because you have three protagonists, three angels, who each need their own storylines. They need to be interacting with each other a lot. They have to have a pretty complicated A-plot generally. So every scene ends up having to do work on more than just one of those aspects. If it’s just talking plot then you’re missing opportunity to do Angel B-story stuff, but you can’t do two or three Angel B-story scenes back to back because then you’ve lost the A-plot. They’re challenging movies for those reasons. And more challenging than you might guess from an outsider’s perspective.

Craig: Well, you’re spinning plates, right?

John: Yeah.

Craig: You watch them when they’re actually spinning plates. They spin the plate and then they move over and they keep this plate. This plate is slowing down, spin that one faster. The one you were just spinning, it’s in middle. That one over there is slowing down, get to that one. It’s the same thing. You kind of service these things in waves. When you feel like you’ve had a good satisfying amount of this person, leave them and move onto another side story or another aspect of this group. That person can hang for a while.

If you have left somebody for a while when you come back to them it’s got to be really good.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You’ve got to go, oh, you know what, it wasn’t like we were away from that person because there was nothing for them to do. We were away from them because they have a bomb to drop on us. And so that works, too. But just think of it as just servicing plates. Spinning plates and looking for the ones that have kind of been a little bit neglected for a little too long. Because you can’t do them all at once. It’s not possible.

John: Yeah. And so this, we talk about art and craft a lot. Some of that is just craft. It’s recognizing having built a bunch of cabinets you recognize like, OK, this is what I need to do to make these cabinet doors work properly. And I can’t, if I don’t measure this carefully those cabinet doors are going to bump into each other and you’re not going to be able to open them. It’s a design aspect that’s kind of hard to learn how to do until you’ve just done it a bunch. And recognizing the ins and outs of scenes and how long it’s been since we’ve seen this careful. What are we expecting to happen next?

And while doing all of that remembering like, OK, what is it thematically these storylines are all about. What is the bigger picture that these can all – how are we going to get everybody to the same place not just physically but emotionally for this moment.

Craig: Yeah. You find as you do these things that you can get away with almost nothing. I think early on you think, well, it’s been a little while and this person hasn’t said anything, but whatever, it’s fine. These scenes are good. And then you give it to people and they go, “So why is this dead weight hanging around here? That was weird.” And you go, well, you can’t actually get away with anything.

John: Yeah. We talked before about how a character who doesn’t talk in a scene can be a challenge, especially if they haven’t talked – if they’re just hanging in the background of a scene for a long time and haven’t said anything that becomes a problem. But if a character has been offstage for too long and then they come back it has to be meaningful when they come back and you have to remember who they are. There’s not a clear formula or math, but sometimes you will actually just do a list of scenes and recognize like, wow, I have not seen this character for so long that I won’t remember who they are. And so I’m going to have to remind people who they are when they come back. It’s challenging. And you’re trying to do this all at script stage, but then of course you shoot a movie and then you’re seeing it and you’re like, oh man, we dropped that scene and now this doesn’t make sense. That’s the jigsaw puzzle of it all.

Craig: Yeah. It’s why writers should be in charge of movies.

John: Yeah. I think so.

Craig: Just telling it like it is.

John: Well, we go back to the sort of writer-plus that you’re always pitching which is that aspect of writers sort of functioning as showrunners for films is especially important for these really complicated narratives where there’s just a lot of plate-spinning to be done.

Craig: Yeah. I think television has proven this. Really it’s empirical at this point. The other thing I wanted to mention, one last pitfall, when you’re dealing with a group dynamic and you’re writing for a family you have to make sure that no one person – no one person’s personal stakes outweigh the group stakes. We want to be rooting for this whole team to survive. And they’re working together. But if you tell me also that one of their little mini-stories is that they’ve discovered the cure for cancer now I just mostly care about that person. That person has to get out of the burning building. Everybody else should just light themselves on fire so that person can get out.

So you just want to make sure that no one person’s stakes overshadow or obliterate the other ones in the group. And really the biggest stake of all which is us staying together.

John: Yep. 100%. So some takeaways. I would say if you’re approaching a story that you think is going to be a team story I would stop and ask yourself is it really a team story or is it more Aliens where it’s one character’s story and there’s a bunch of other characters as well? Because if it is one character’s story that’s most movies and that is actually a good thing. So always ask yourself is there really one central character and everyone else is supporting that one central character? If that’s not the case and you really do genuinely have a family, a group, a series of characters who are addressing the same thing you’ve made your life more difficult but god bless you. That could be a great script. But recognize the challenges you’re going to have ahead for yourself and be thinking about how do you make this group feel like the protagonist so you feel like there has been a transformation of this group by the end of the movie.

Craig: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And I do believe that after this episode people should be able to do this. All of them.

John: Oh, all of them. Easy-peasy. Nothing hard to do there.

Craig: I mean, what else do you people want? We’ve almost done 400 of these.

John: Wow.

Craig: They should all be at the top of their game. There should be 400 Oscars a year for screenplay as far as I’m concerned.

John: Moving on, our feature topic today is splitting up the party, dividing the party. It’s that trope that you often see in – well originally in sort of Scooby Doo things. Let’s split up so we can cover more ground and so therefore everyone gets into trouble because they split the party. But it also happens a lot in D&D where it’s that idea of you don’t want to divide up the party because if you divide up the party you’re weaker separately than you are together. And it’s also just really annoying for players because then you’re not – you’re just sort of waiting around for it to be your turn again.

But as I thought about it like dividing the party is actually a crucial thing that we end up having to do in movies and especially now in the second Arlo Finch just so that we can actually tell the story the best way possible. So I want to talk about situations where it’s good to keep characters together, more importantly situations where you really want to keep the characters separated, apart, and why you might want to do that.

Craig: Yeah, it’s a really smart idea for a topic because it’s incredibly relevant to how we present challenges to our characters. And the reason that they always say – and it’s maybe the only real rule, meaning only real unwritten rule of roleplaying games – is don’t split up the party. Don’t split the party is really in response to just a phalanx of idiots who have split the party in the past and inevitably it doesn’t work because as you point out you are putting yourselves in more danger that way. But that is precisely what we want to do to the characters in our fixed concluding narratives because it is the very nature of that jeopardy that is going to test them and challenge them the most. And therefore their success will feel the most meaningful to us.

John: Absolutely. So let’s talk about some of the problems with big groups. And so one of the things you start to realize if you have eight characters in a scene is it’s very hard to keep them alive. And by alive I mean do they actually have a function in that scene? Have they said a line? What are they doing there? And if characters don’t talk every once and a while they really do tend to disappear. I mean, radio dramas is the most extreme example where if a character doesn’t speak they are not actually in the scene. But if a character is just in the background of a scene and just nodding or saying uh-huh that’s not going to be very rewarding for that actor. It’s going to pull focus from what you probably actually want to be doing.

Craig: Whenever I see it it kills me, because I notice it immediately. And it’s so fascinating to me when it happens and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this great video. Patton Oswalt was a character on King of Queens. He was – I didn’t really watch the show, but I think he was a neighbor or something, or a coworker, so smaller part.

So there were many times I think where he was included in the scene in their living room, which was their main set for the sitcom, but other than his one thing to say at the beginning or the end he had nothing to do. And he apparently did this thing where through this very long scene he held himself perfectly still like a statue on purpose in the background. And you can see it on YouTube. It’s great. He’s amusing himself because the show has absolutely no use for him in that scene other than the beginning or the end.

John: That’s amazing. A situation we ran into with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is in Roald Dahl’s book Charlie Bucket gets the Golden Ticket and you’re allowed to bring two parents with you. And so Charlie only brings his uncle, but all the other characters, all the other little spoiled kids bring both parents. And that would be a disaster onscreen because you would have 15 people at the start of the factory tour. And trying to keep 15 people in a frame is really a challenge of cinema and television. There’s no good way to keep them all physically in a frame.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And that is a real problem. So what we did is basically everyone could bring one parent and it turned out the original Gene Wilder movie did the same thing. We made different choices about which parent. But then even when you get into like the big chocolate river room I’m splitting up those people and so they’re not all together as a pack because you just can’t keep them alive. You can’t get a group of more than four or five people together and actually have that moment be about something. And so they’re immediately splitting apart and going in different directions just so that you can have individual moments.

Craig: Even inside a group of characters where you haven’t technically split the party in terms of physical location, as a writer you begin to carve out a weird party split anyway because someone is inevitably going to lean in and have a quieter exchange with somebody else, or whisper to somebody else, or take somebody aside, even though they’re all still in the same room, because ultimately it is impossible to feel any kind of intimacy when you do have 15 co-equals all yammering at each other. Or, god forbid, three people yammering at each other and then 12 other people just standing there watching. That’s creepy.

John: Yep. The last thing I’ll say, the problem in big groups, is that there are conversations, there’s conflicts that you can really only see between two characters, maybe three characters, that just would not exist as part of a larger group. You’re not going to have an argument with your wife in a certain public place, but you would if it’s just the two of you. And so by breaking off those other people you allow for there to be moments that just couldn’t exist in a public setting.

And so that’s another reason why big groups just have a dampening effect often on what the natural conflicts you really want to see are in a story.

Craig: Even beyond the nature of certain conversations, there are certain aspects of basic character itself that change based on the context of who you’re around. Sometimes we don’t really get to know somebody properly until they’re alone with someone else. And then they say or do something that kind of surprises us because they are the sort of person that just blends in or shies away when there’s a lot going on. And they only kind of come out or blossom in intimacy.

Quiet characters are wonderful characters to kind of split off with because suddenly they can say something that matters. And you get to know who they really are. By the way, I think people work this way, too. We are brought up to think of ourselves as one person, right, that you’re John. But there’s many Johns. We are all many of us and we change based on how big of a group we’re in and who is in the group. So don’t be afraid to do that with your characters.

John: Yeah. So that ability to be specific to who that character is with that certain crowd and sort of the specificity of the conflicts that’s something you get in the smaller groups. But one of the other sort of hidden advantages you start to realize when you split the party up is that enables you to cut between the two groups. And that is amazingly useful for time compression. So basically getting through a bunch of stuff more quickly and sort of like if you were sticking with the same group you would have to just keep jumping forward in time. But by being able to ping pong back and forth between different groups and see where they’re at you can compress a lot of time down together. You can sort of short hand through some stuff. Giving yourself something to cut to is often the thing you’re looking for most as a screenwriter.

Craig: It is incredibly helpful for the movie once you get into the editing room of course, because you do have the certain flexibility there. You’re not trapped. There is a joy in the contrast, I think. If you’re going back and forth between let’s call them contemporaneous scenes. So they’re occurring at the same time, but they’re in different places, they can kind of comment on each other. It doesn’t have to be overt or meta, but there’s an interesting game of contrasts that you can play between two people who are enjoying a delicious meal in a beautiful restaurant and then a third person who is slogging her way through a rainy mud field. That’s a pretty broad example. It can be the tiniest of things.

But it gives you a chance to contrast which movie and film does really well and reality does poorly, because we are always stuck in one linear timeline in our lives. We never get that gift of I guess I’ll call it simultaneous perspective.

John: Yeah. So I mean a thing you come to appreciate as a screenwriter is how much energy you get out of a cut. And so you can find ways to get out of a scene and into the next scene that provide you with even more energy. But literally any time you’re cutting from one thing to another thing you get a little bit of momentum from that. And so being able to close a moment off and sort of tell the audience, OK, that thing is done and now we’re here is very useful and provides a pull through the story where if you had to stay with those characters as they were moving through things that could be a challenge.

But let’s talk about some of the downsides because there’s also splitting up the party that’s done poorly or doesn’t actually help.

Craig: Right.

John: So if you have a strong central protagonist, like it’s really all on this one character’s back, if you’re dividing up then suddenly you’re losing that POV. You’re losing that focus of seeing the story just from their perspective. And so the Harry Potter movies, the books and the movies, are all from Harry’s perspective. He is central to everything. And so if they were to cut off and just have whole subplots with Ron and Hermione where they’re doing stuff by themselves it would be different. There’s a way it could totally work, but it would be different. You know, if you’re making Gravity you really do want to stay with Sandra Bullock the whole time through. If you cut away to like on the ground with the NASA folks that would completely change your experience of that movie. So, there are definitely times where it does make sense to hold a group together so that you can stay with that central character because it’s really about his or her central journey.

Craig: Yeah. In those cases sometimes it’s helpful to think about the perspective character as a free agent. And so you still get to split the party by leaving a party to go to another party. And going back and forth. So Harry Potter has the Ron and Hermione party, and he has the Dumbledore party. And he has the snake party. And so he can move in between those and thus give us kind of different perspectives on things which is really helpful.

I mean, I personally feel like any time you’re writing about a group of people, basically you always are even if it’s a really small group, you should already be thinking about how you’re going to break them apart. Because it’s so valuable. It also helps you reinforce what they get out of the group in the first place. Because a very simple fundamental question every screenwriter should ask about their group of friends in their show or the movie is why are they friends.

We are friends with people who do something for us. Not overtly, but they are giving us something that we like. So, what is that? What are they doing for each other? And once you know that then you know why you have to break up the party. And then if they get back together what it means after that has been shattered.

John: Yep. I think as you’re watching something, if you were to watch an episode of Friends with the sound turned off most of the episode is not going to have the six of them together. They’re going to go off and do their separate things. But generally there’s going to be a moment at which they’re all back together in the course of the thing and that is a natural feeling you want. You want the party to break apart and then come back together. You want that sort of homecoming thing. That sense of completion is to have the group brought back together. That is the journey of your story. And so you’ll see that even in like Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another example of like let’s split up, let’s do different things. But you are expecting to see Xander and Buffy and Willow are all going to come back together at the end because that’s sort of the contract you’ve made with your audience.

Craig: Exactly. And that is something that’s very different about recurring episodic television as opposed to closed end features or closed end limited series. You can’t really break up the party in any kind of permanent way. Whereas in film and limited series television sometimes, and a lot of times, you must. You must split up the party permanently. I mean, there’s a great – if you’re making any kind of family drama it’s really helpful to think about this, the splitting of the party concept. I’m thinking of Ordinary People. Ordinary People ultimately is a movie about what happens, you know, the party and whether or not the party is going to stay together. And, spoiler alert, it breaks up. The party splits up permanently and you understand that is the way it must be.

John: You know, Broadcast News. And so if you want to take that central triangle of those three characters, they could stay all working together as a group, but that would not be dramatically interesting. You have to break them apart and see what they’re like in their separate spaces so you can understand the full journey of the story.

Craig: Precisely.

John: So let’s talk about how you split up a party. The simplest and probably hoariest way to do it is just the urgency thing. So the Scooby Doo like we can cover more ground if we split up, or there’s a deadline basically. We won’t get this done unless we split up. There’s too much to do and so therefore we’re going to divide. You do this and then we do that. The Guardians of the Galaxy does that. The Avengers movies tend to do that a lot where they just going off in separate directions and eventually the idea is that they’ll come back together to get that stuff done.

Craig: Yep.

John: That works for certain kinds of movies. It doesn’t work for a lot of movies. But it’s a way to get it done. But I think if you can find the natural rhythms that make it clear why the characters are apart, that’s probably going to be a better solution for most movies. You know, friends aren’t always together. Friends do different stuff. And friends have other friends and so they’re apart from each other.

People work. And so that sense of like you have a work family and a home family. That’s a way of separating things. And there’s people also grouped by common interest, so you can have your hero who is a marathon runner who goes off doing marathon-y stuff, marathon people, marathon-y stuff, who goes running with people which breaks him off from the normal – the group that we’re seeing the rest of the time. You can find ways to let themselves be the person pulling themselves away from the group.

Craig: Yeah. There’s also all sorts of simple easy ways where the world breaks the party apart, walls and doors drop down between people. Somebody is arrested and put in prison. Somebody is pulled away. Someone dies. Dying, by the way, great way to break up a party. That’s a terrific party split. Yeah. There’s all sorts of – somebody falls down, gets hurt, and you have to take them to the hospital. There’s a hundred different things.

And I suppose what I would advise writers is to think about using a split method that will allow you, the writer, to get the most juice out of this new circumstance of this person and this person together, which is different than what we’ve seen before. So where would that be and how would it work and why would it feel a certain way as opposed to a different way.

And you can absolutely do this, even if you have three people. I mean, you mention Broadcast News so let’s talk about James Brooks and As Good as it Gets. Once you start this road trip it’s three characters and the party splits multiple times in different ways.

John: Yeah. The reason I think I was thinking about this this week is I’m writing the third Arlo Finch. And the first Arlo Finch is a boy who comes to this mountain town. He joins the patrol and there are six people in his patrol. His two best friends are sort of the central little triad there. But there’s a big action sequence that has six characters. And supporting six characters in that sequence killed me. It was a lot to do.

In writing the second book, which is off in a summer camp, you got that patrol and that is the main family, but I was deliberately looking for ways to split them apart so that characters could have to make choices by themselves and so that Arlo Finch could have to step up and do stuff without the support of his patrol. But also allow for natural conflicts that would divide the patrol against themselves and surprises that take sort of key members out of patrol.

And that was the central sort of dramatic question of the story is like will this family sort of come back together at the end.

And then the third book is a chance to sort of match people up differently. So you get to go on trips with people who are not the normal people you would bring on a certain trip. And that’s fun to see, too. So, you can go to places that would otherwise be familiar but you’re going into these places with people who would not be the natural people to go in this part of the world.

Craig: Yeah. You get to mix and match and strange bedfellows and all that. That’s part of the fun of this stuff. We probably get a little wrapped up in the individual when we’re talking about character, but I always think about that question that Lindsay Doran is lobbing out to everybody. What is the central relationship of your story? And thereby you immediately stop thinking about individual characters. OK, this character is like this and this character – that’s why maybe more than anything I hate that thing in scripts where people say, you know, “Jim, he’s blah-blah-blah, and he used to be this, and now he’s this.” I don’t care.

I only am interested in Jim and his relationship to another human being. At least one other and hopefully more. So, I try and think about the party and the relationships and the connections between people as the stuff that matters. Because in the end mostly that’s what you’re writing.

John: Absolutely true.

We are back now in 2022. Craig is gone, because Craig was never actually really here. He just, through the magic tape, was here with us. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Megana, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

Megana: I do. My One Cool Thing is the Hydroviv under-the-sink water filtration system.

John: Fantastic.

Megana: I drink a lot of water.

John: I can testify you do drink a lot of water, which is good. It’s healthy.

Megana: I do, yeah. My favorite type of water is room temperature tap water. Living in LA, it’s sometimes hard to drink straight from the tap.

John: To clarify, it is safe to drink from the tap. Sometimes it’s just not what you want.

Megana: In my new apartment, I was drinking from the tap, and it just tasted like I was drinking from a pool. I feel like I always had this metallic tang in my mouth. I was like, “Oh, it’s not great.” I was looking at different options. The Brita filter is just one step too many for me.

John: Absolutely. That’s where you’re filling the pitcher again and again. We used to have those in the house.

Megana: There’s just never enough water. I was looking at under-the-sink systems, because that seemed like the best option. I found this company. I originally found out about them on Shark Tank. Because of that, I wasn’t going to go with that.

John: I wouldn’t.

Megana: After doing research, I felt like they were the best option. They’re a little bit pricier. Their pitch is that they design filters that respond to city-specific needs. I put in my zip code, and then they would send me a customized thing back. I installed it myself. It’s been a couple of months. My water’s delicious.

John: That’s great. How often do you change the filters on this system?

Megana: Every six months.

John: That’s not so bad. That’s not bad at all. Here at the house, the whole house is on one water filter system, which has been really nice and convenient. We used to do Brita filter pitchers, and we don’t need to anymore. The water in our house though is okay for you, right?

Megana: Yeah, it’s so delicious. It’s one of the many reasons I look forward to coming to work.

John: My One Cool Thing is called BLOT2046. It is a manifesto. I’m really not sure what this website is I’m sending people to. It’s mysterious. There’s a signup for a mailing list. I haven’t signed up for it because I’m not sure if it’s a cult or what it is. Basically, on this page there are 46 bullet points. They were intriguing and sometimes opaque and mysterious. I’ll give you a sampling of three of them. Point 16 is, “Hypnotize yourself or someone else will,” which I get, is that if you’re not able to introspect and see what is it that you would get yourself to focus on, someone else is going to take that attention and pull it through.

“Work in the semi-open. Translucency, not transparency,” which I think is actually applicable to a lot of stuff we do in film and television is that you cannot be completely transparent about the things you’re working on, because they’re not ready to be seen by the world. Yet if you’d want to lock everything down where it’s completely opaque and impossible to see too early on, no one’s going to have a sense of what it is you’re working on. Translucency feels like a good word to be using there.

The final point, point 42, “There’s no away, no elsewhere, not really.” We think, “Oh, if I could ever get away,” but you really can’t get away. You have to find a way to get away within yourself.

Megana: I feel like that’s a strong theme in film and TV. Is this a manifesto for how to live your life, or is that unclear?

John: It’s really unclear. I think some of them are actually about manufacturing and sustainability. Really any of them felt like good prompts for writing, actually, that you could take any of these ideas and use them as a thematic touchpoint for a piece of storytelling.

Megana: Cool. It’s a cool, spooky website.

John: It is a very spooky website.

Megana: I would recommend the click.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is a vintage track by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We also have hoodies, which are lovely. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all of the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on Stranger Things.

Megana: I cannot wait.

John: Megana Rao, thank you very much for joining me and for putting together this episode.

Megana: Of course. Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Speaking of group dynamics, there is one group we love more than any other. It is our Premium Members, so thank you for supporting the show. We are joined for this segment by Drew Marquardt, who is helping us out this summer working on the Scriptnotes book. Drew, welcome to the podcast in audio form, not text form like you’ve been dealing with.

Drew Marquardt: Thank you so much, both of you, for having me.

John: Great.

Drew: Am I Craig now?

John: You are in the Craig spot, so you have to have a lot of umbrage about all things. That’s good. That’s a good sigh.

Megana: That was a great impression.

John: It’s nice. We all just finished watching the first half of Season 4 of Stranger Things. Relevant to this episode about group dynamics, there were a lot of group dynamics at play within this first half of the season. There was a lot of place setting. There was a lot of just groups being put together and pulled apart and spread out all over. I thought, let’s talk about what we think so far of the show. Maybe start with a thumbs up, thumbs down. Megana Rao, are you thumbs up or thumbs down for this first seven episodes?

Megana: I am two thumbs up.

John: Two thumbs up. Drew, where are you?

Drew: I’m more of a single thumbs up, but I’m thumbs up.

John: I’m maybe one and a half thumbs up, if you can split a thumb, if you can divide a thumb. I liked a lot of this. I felt like the episodes were long, and longer than they needed to be in cases. I felt like they could’ve cut many of these 90-minute episodes down into 60 minutes and they would’ve been better episodes. Still, I wasn’t upset with the episodes I was watching.

Megana: I don’t know, it still felt like not enough for me.

John: You want more and more.

Megana: More and more. I love hanging out with these characters.

John: Let’s talk about the characters we’re hanging out with, because obviously this is going to be spoiler-heavy throughout. If you haven’t watched it and you aren’t planning to watch it, maybe pause this right now and come back after you’ve watched 19 hours of television. We start the season with our characters really spread out in very different places than we’ve seen before. They’re not all in our little town of Hawkins. Some are in Hawkins. Some are in California.

Megana: Some are in Russia.

John: Some are in Russia. People are spread out. Megana, controversially, you did not like any of the Russian segments?

Megana: Oh my gosh, I don’t know if I’m ready to publicly air that.

John: I think you were talking about friends of yours who had fast-forwarded through all the Russian stuff.

Megana: Friends of mine did. I watched everything. I did not fast-forward through any of the Russian plot lines. I don’t know, just where we are right now, I’m just not really interested in Russia as a villain. I just wanted everyone to be back together in Hawkins.

John: Drew, how much did they need to catch you up on who the characters were and where they were at the start of the show?

Drew: A little bit. It’s been three years or something like that.

Megana: Oh my gosh.

Drew: I felt like they did a good job jumping you right into the story. I initially felt like I was going to be confused by why Hopper was still alive. Even when Papa comes back, I thought there was going to be quite a lot of… They did a good job, I thought, of just giving you enough information to justify why it’s there and then move the story along, because we don’t really need to dwell on it.

John: I think I had a hard time remembering why was Eleven with Winona Ryder’s family and all that stuff. I knew they had left. That first episode was a lot of just putting the pieces on the table…

Megana: Totally.

John: …and reminding, okay, all these characters are still alive, and this is why they’re spread out. I thought centering it around spring break made a lot of sense, which was great. It was a lot of just reminding us who these characters were and where they are and the dynamics.

Megana: Who’s died and who’s recovering from what trauma.

Drew: I thought Jonathan had died, for some reason. I knew that Billy had died in Season 3. When he was back, I was like, “I thought he was long gone.”

John: I was ready for Jonathan to be long gone. Let’s jump forward then to the end of these seven episodes. One of the things I was talking with Megana about at lunch was I was really impressed by, when we get into Episode 7, the reveal of who the big bad is and how the big bad came to be and all that stuff. They’re actually doing the reveal split across two different plot lines and different timelines.

Megana: And dimensions.

John: And dimensions, basically, just to really expose who this character was and that this character was created by Eleven, and some strong misdirects along the way that Eleven was responsible for this horrible massacre that starts everything off this season.

Megana: I really loved the villain of the season. I think previously the villains from the Upside Down had been just these generic monsters. I love how personal this one is.

John: Keeping the characters separated though, from California to Hawkins, has been a little awkward. Eventually, it looks like they’re going to be trying to bring these characters back together. We have the California crew. Eleven is split off from them and is in a completely different environment. We have the main Hawkins group that’s sometimes in groups of two or three, small groups within there. We’re going to the sanitarium or places. Then we have all the Russia business, which is self-contained, the Alaska Russia business. It was a lot of juggling. I was noticing that most episodes would try to touch on every plot line except for one. There’d always be one group that was dropped out of it. There’d be episodes in which none of the California crew were part of it.

Megana: The one thing that I… Maybe you guys can explain this to me. I had trouble locating the Will-Mike relationship and why there was so much strife there and felt so bad for Will, because he’s been gone in the Upside Down for years.

John: He wasn’t gone for years though. Will? No.

Megana: Wasn’t he gone in the first and second season? Am I misremembering?

Drew: I think just the first season. Then he was a shadow walker in the second season, where it’s going mentally back and forth.

Megana: Got it.

Drew: I think he has a crush on Mike, right?

John: Yeah.

Drew: That’s what I was being telegraphed.

John: I think they’re trying to tap dance around his being gay or not being gay. It’s left up for audience interpretation. It feels like it’s inevitably going to come out. They’re not afraid of having gay characters, based on other gay characters they have in the show.

Megana: Then why do you think Mike was such a jerk to him?

John: I’m not quite sure why Mike is the way he is in this series at all?

Drew: That was less motivated to me. Mike hasn’t had as strong of a character, but maybe because I felt like they had abandoned Will or they didn’t know what to do with Will after Season 1 for quite a long time. At least in this, there feels like there’s much more a thrust for his character, and he’s going after something. Mike is good. Mike is moving along the plot, but he’s not really.

John: He’s not moving along the plot very much. Curious what he does in the second half of this. Let’s talk about the new characters who were added, because it’s already a giant cast, and they add just a lot of new people in. Some of them are going to be like, oh, you were established in this episode, and therefore you’ll be dead by the end of the episode, which is a classic trope. Some of those people look like they are going to be sticking around, which is surprising to me, and yet this is where we’re at.

Megana: I love Argyle. I know some of you have very strong opinions on him.

John: Argyle is pizza guy?

Megana: Pizza guy.

John: I cannot stand Argyle.

Drew: I like Argyle.

John: You like Argyle?

Drew: Yeah.

John: To me, he feels like just the broadest stereotype.

Megana: He’s California.

John: He’s California. Tell me why you like Argyle, Drew.

Drew: It might be a fondness for the actor. He was in Booksmart too. He’s great. Something about his personality I just enjoy. For some reason, he feels like a nice foil to that, because they really do make that plot line, especially when the soldiers come into the house in Episode 4 or something like that. It’s nice to have him having a bit of levity, because otherwise I think that would be very heavy.

John: It can be very heavy. I thought these soldiers storming into the house was actually one of the most effective things they’ve done all season, where they’ve established a plan for what they’re going to do, and then suddenly all bets are off, and then suddenly there are people storming in. The thing you did not expect to happen at all suddenly happens, which is nice to see. Do I believe that the army is after their own people in that way and that that one guy’s being tortured? Not really. I did like the surprise of suddenly there’s armed weapons in the house.

Drew: I may be most confused by that little bit of storyline. Then the torturing, the one survived, the guy afterwards, I’m not quite sure what that’s all about.

John: I wasn’t expecting for them to be burying bodies in the desert, that our little high school kids are burying bodies in the desert. That’s a shift there.

Megana: They seemed to move on really quickly from that.

John: These kids have been through a lot of trauma. I think there’s just so much to work through. A thing we were talking about is that in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there’s a metaphysical explanation for why no one in Sunnydale ever talks about the weird stuff that happens in Sunnydale. There’s not a lot of acknowledgement in Hawkins that they’ve been through a tremendous amount. Somehow, nobody recognizes that something horrible is happening here. The biggest we have is the angry pitchforks mob meeting that happens. It doesn’t feel like they’re acknowledging all the stuff that we’ve seen happen in Hawkins.

Megana: I feel like if I were one of these characters, I would have a harder time keeping up all these lies that my friends and I are telling the rest of the town.

John: It’s true. Also, what’s happened to the mall? Did they rebuild the mall? What’s going on there? We never get back to the mall.

Drew: They mention the mall fire a few times. I couldn’t even remember how Season… I remembered Billy died at the end of Season 3, but I didn’t remember that that burned down.

John: Also, this season, I was impressed by… I felt like Eleven in California was really awkward. It was useful to see that she can’t do normal teen things, and she’s actually not perceived as being gifted there, but actually being slow, and so she’s undereducated and really struggling. The stuff once they actually brought her back into the lab was impressively handled. The handoff between her and the little actress who’s playing the younger version of her was very smartly done.

Drew: Do you feel like they’re challenging her character in a way that they haven’t done before? That was something that struck me but I didn’t remember in Season 2 or Season 3. It feels like this is a good escalation for her character between Vecna and all of these different things and bringing Papa back too.

Megana: I feel like I was most interested in her at school struggling, because I think the stuff with Papa and all of that… I love that she is facing and unearthing that stuff, but it feels like a place we’ve seen her before, where she’s isolated from the rest of the group, figuring stuff out with her own powers.

John: Drew, because we have you on the show, you are an actor, and so you are young enough that you could play one of these teenage characters.

Drew: That’s being very kind.

John: Are you noticing any things that they’re doing to try to seem young? They are considerably older than the characters they’re supposed to be playing.

Drew: I haven’t picked up on anything. I haven’t been acting for a while. I see them as the professionals and letting the professionals do that. I’m trying to remember. I’m really impressed with Lucas’s little sister, who I forget her name.

Megana: Erica.

Drew: Erica.

Megana: Love her.

Drew: She rules. She’s not trying to play… She’s clearly not 11 or however old she’s supposed to be in that. She’s just playing it as her age, which I think is smart, because I think to an 11-year-old too you are at the top of your intelligence all the time. She’s the person who’s coming to mind as an example of doing it correctly. I don’t really notice anyone playing younger in an awkward way or bumbling way.

John: One of the things they have to do in that first episode too is establish the baseline of this is how the characters are and how they’re going to act. We’re getting set that these characters are this age from the rest of this on. The fact that Steve seems a lot older than the rest of them, but he’s only supposed to be two years older than the rest of them, which is just… We’re going with it, for me.

Megana: He’s a couple years out of high school now.

John: He’s that old, supposed to be?

Megana: I thought so, because he graduated and is now working around town, or am I misremembering?

Drew: I’ve also lost the timeline on Steve and on Nancy, because I assumed that she had already graduated, she graduated with him, but that is totally wrong.

Megana: I think she’s still in school.

Drew: She’s still in school, because she’s doing the paper.

John: She’s still supposed to be in high school or in some sort of local college?

Megana: That kid Fred is definitely in high school, the one that she works with. I also have no idea how old Robin is. Do we ever see her at school?

Drew: That’s a good point.

Megana: I love her character.

John: I don’t know if she’s still in school or not. I don’t think we’ve seen her at school at all. We’ve seen her at school, because she is in the marching band. She’s still in school. We’ve now stalled long enough that Megana can talk about Steve Harrington and why the show should entirely be about Steve Harrington and everyone else is just there to pass the time.

Megana: I feel like I had a major funk last week where I was reading fan theories and people were like, “Steve is definitely going to die.” I’m embarrassed by how I processed that. I love Steve Harrington. I think he’s so charming. As I was telling John, he’s a big part of maybe the biggest reason that I watch the show is to get to a Steve scene.

John: Are you hoping that Steve and Nancy get back together? Is that a goal for you, or you just want Steve and whatever?

Megana: That’s interesting. I don’t know. I think Nancy and Jonathan are a good fit. I just love Steve’s friendship with Robin. The Steve-Dustin relationship/Steve and Eddie fighting over Dustin is now my favorite thing to watch.

John: Can you explain Jonathan and why Jonathan’s a character that anyone cares about?

Megana: I don’t know how I’ve gotten myself into this position. He’s a loyal older brother. I think that he’s burdened with this responsibility of taking care of his family, and he’s struggling to do that. He was more of a creep in the first season. I found him really compelling for that reason, just this misunderstood, lovesick boy who’s taking these creepy pictures of Nancy. I feel like we’ve lost that bit. Maybe him being a protective older brother.

John: I get that. Let’s wrap up with our Deadpool. Who do we think is not going to make it through the end of the full Season 4? I’ve got my opinion, but I’m curious what you think.

Drew: I hope we don’t lose Eddie, but I think we might. They’ve done a great job. I don’t know, I fell in love with him from Episode 1. I’m a big Eddie fan. I think that’s only to rip my heart out, which would be too bad, because I think he’s a really good addition to the cast. I might say Steve.

Megana: No.

Drew: I know. I’m so sorry. I think they’re going to go for it.

Megana: I think so too. I think that’s why I’m so heartbroken.

John: I’m going to guess Mike, who hasn’t done a lot this season, but I think will actually pick up a little bit. I feel like he wants to leave the show too. It doesn’t seem like he’s going to be sticking around.

Drew: That’s good.

John: I don’t know. We’ll see.

Megana: Anyone but Steve.

John: Anyone but Steve. Dustin they can’t lose. It would be very surprising to lose Dustin. I think they could lose Eleven. It would be a big shock to lose Eleven, but you could.

Drew: Maybe Will, because I think they’ve been vamping with his character for a few seasons. Now they have a little bit, but if we-

John: The problem is, you kill Will, then you’re back into the kill your gays meme, bury your gays, and that’s not good.

Drew: That’s [inaudible 01:19:15].

Megana: I did read an interesting thing about maybe Jonathan dies and then Will becomes evil or turns evil. I think that also would fall into the same meme of having a gay character as the villain.

John: That’s Willow from Buffy.

Megana: As long as Steve’s there.

John: As long as Steve’s there, it doesn’t really matter what happens to the rest of the group. Just the Steve show. Thank you guys.

Megana: Thank you.

Drew: Thank you.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Scriptnotes Episode 360: Relationships
• Scriptnotes Episode 395: All in this Together
• Scriptnotes Episode 383: Splitting the Party
• Stranger Things on Netflix
• Hydroviv Water Filter
• Blot 2046 Manifesto
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao (ft. our summer intern Drew Marquardt and segments by Megan McDonnell) and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.