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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 697 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it’s a new round of how would this be a movie? We’re going to look at four stories in the news and examine their cinematic essences. In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about kindness, Craig. The quality I feel like we’re undervaluing and sometimes confusing and conflating with other things is niceness and politeness. Kindness is different.

Craig: Yes, it’s sort of out of fashion, isn’t it?

John: Yes, it is. I think it’s an evergreen value. We’ll talk about kindness.

Craig: Sure.

John: Most crucially and fundamentally, we have big news today. We are officially announcing the Scriptnotes book. Long spoken about on this podcast, but it is now available for pre-order starting today as you’re listening to this podcast.

Craig: It’s an actual book.

John: It’s an actual book. You’ve seen the PDF of it in this typeset.

Craig: Oh, yes. The book is an object you could now hit somebody with in the head. It’s real.

John: It’s real. I don’t have a physical book in front of me, but underneath the laptop here, there is a copy of the German edition of Arlo Finch. That is the size and dimension of the book.

Craig: Perfect.

John: That’s what it’s going to feel like.

Craig: It’s a real book. For a long time, we bemoaned the state of screenwriting books. Yes, I think of all the screenwriting books on the shelf, at the store, the virtual store, I think ours is the best. I really do.

John: I genuinely do too.

Craig: Yes.

John: Our book is 43 chapters.

Craig: 43?

John: Yes.

Craig: But they’re short.

John: Yes, they’re short, but they’re important chapters.

Craig: Great bathroom book.

John: Yes, great bathroom book. It says so in the book that if this were to become your bathroom book, we would no higher flatter.

Craig: Thrilled.

John: Absolutely. 43 chapters, 335 pages. Responsibility for this, we have to acknowledge. It fell upon Drew Marquardt, our producer, Chris Csont, Megana Rao, our former screenwriter and producer, and Halley Lamberson, who was our former intern. They wrestled through a thousand hours of transcripts to pull chunks together to figure out what this was and then get it into a prose form that is not me talking or you talking, but it’s us talking, which was a difficult thing to do.

Craig: It’s like a duck press. Are you familiar with the duck press?

John: Tell me about a duck press.

Craig: It’s a little disgusting, but it’s very French. Duck press, you basically can put duck inside of this and squeeze. It’s like a huge lever and it squishes [crosstalk] all the juices out. It basically pulls out the most basic, concentrated form of script notes. We’ve put it through the duck press.

John: Oh, okay.

Craig: Certainly, you deserve acknowledgement. You’ve done a lot of work on the book.

John: I had this fantasy that between the four of them, they’d be able to get a written tone that feels right. Now I did have to run my fingers through everything and do it.

Craig: I deserve no credit, other than the fact that I talked for a lot.

John: You did talk for a lot.

Craig: A lot.

John: You created credits on the front of the book.

Craig: Listen, talking is really important. It is the essence that comes out of the duck press.

John: Let’s talk through what is actually inside the book. We have the topic chapters. There’s 21 of them and there’s guest chapters, which are 20. Should we just read through them one by one sort of what the chapters are, so people know what they’re going to be getting?

Craig: Sure, that’s quite a few chapters. We’ll talk about the top. My goodness, 21 topic chapters. I’m almost tempted to just rattle these off to overwhelm people.

John: We’ll alternate.

Craig: Oh, you want to alternate?

John: Yes.

Craig: I love it. The rules of screenwriting.

John: Deciding what to write.

Craig: Protagonists.

John: Relationships.

Craig: Conflict.

John: Dialogue and exposition.

Craig: Point of view.

John: How to write a scene.

Craig: Locations and world-building.

John: Plot and plot holes.

Craig: Mystery, confusion, suspense.

John: Writing action.

Craig: Structure.

John: The beginning.

Craig: The end.

John: How to write a movie.

Craig: That’s a good one. Pitching.

John: Notes on notes.

Craig: What it’s like to be a screenwriter.

John: Patterns of success.

Craig: Appropriately, a final word. John, that covers everything.

John: The goal was to cover the craft and the business. It’s more craft at the start and it gets more business towards the end.

Craig: Great.

John: Just the psychology of what it feels like to be a screenwriter. You’ll recognize some of these titles within titles of episodes, but nothing is basically just one episode, except for how to write a movie is very much your talk that you gave at Austin, which you did as an episode, which is in prose form.

Craig: It’s basically, you can just go boop with that one. I can see how a lot of different episodes have been combined and refined into these things. It is true that it’s impossible, really, to listen to all of the episodes of Scriptnotes at this point.

John: People do it.

Craig: It’s impossible to do it in a way where you would retain everything. This is pretty awesome that you could just go, or here, read this and then start listening to the show for the next 5,000 episodes and see where we go.

John: Published by Crown Books. One of the things that makes me excited about being at a big publisher is they have a whole academic arm, which is just about getting the book into universities.

Craig: Oh.

John: That feels good, because I feel like for a film student, this is a thing that you could use in a class.

Craig: Are they going to do that thing where they charge $5,000 for the book in a university?

John: No, it’s the same price as it is a list.

Craig: What is that?

John: It’s just nuts. It’s a special academic edition or something.

Craig: What do you mean? My God. What a scam.

John: What a scam.

Craig: Going back to the Scott Frank discussion, but we also have these amazing guest chapters where we boil down the best hits of so many great people that we’ve interviewed.

John: One of the fun things about the guest chapters was finding ways so that they are interacting with the chapters around them. If we’re talking about a certain topic, they’re generally related to that or there’s things they’re saying that are-

Craig: It’s like there’s a Segway man.

John: Built into the book.

Craig: Making sure– yes, makes total sense.

John: All right, let’s go through who our guests are.

Craig: All right. We got Christopher Nolan.

John: Michael Schur.

Craig: Lulu Wang.

John: Lorene Scafaria.

Craig: Sam Esmail.

John: Greta Gerwig.

Craig: Justin Simeon.

John: David Koepp.

Craig: David Benioff and Dan Weiss.

John: Damon Lindelof.

Craig: Rian Johnson.

John: Christopher McQuarrie.

Craig: The Daniels.

John: Aline Brosh McKenna.

Craig: Lawrence Kasdan.

John: Eric Roth.

Craig: Seth Rogen.

John: John Lee Hancock.

Craig: Mike Birbiglia.

John: Mike Birbiglia and Ashley Nicole Black.

Craig: What a lineup? Except for Mike Birbiglia, that is an incredible lineup.

John: Yes, just really all-stars and Mike Birbiglia.

Craig: Also- [laughs]

John: He’s so angry right now.

Craig: No, but he’s just like, okay, guys. I could see his face like, huh-huh, okay. We love Mike Birbiglia.

John: We love Mike Birbiglia.

Craig: Maybe more than anyone. When I say more than anyone, I don’t mean more than anybody else that’s on our show. I mean more than anyone on the planet. I mean more than his wife loves him, his child.

John: The shrine you have in your house to him is just a little bit creepy at times, but also, the way you pours the milk, it works.

Craig: A lot creepy all the time, but you know what? Love him.

John: Love him. There’s two special chapters. There’s a deep dive on Die Hard.

Craig: Oh, great.

John: We have that. It’s both our initial conversation and our subsequent conversation with one of the screenwriters of it and an oral history of Scriptnotes with Julia Turner. Remember that 10th anniversary episode?

Craig: Sure.

John: From behind the scenes.

Craig: Oh, yes. Great Julia Turner.

John: The book is available now for pre-order. If you go to scriptnotesbook.com, it’ll lead you to the right bookstores for it.

Craig: When will it actually be on sale?

John: If you pre-order now, you get it December 2nd.

Craig: Oh, this feels like a good Christmas gift.

John: It does feel like a good Christmas gift. You could order for yourself or tell your parent to order it for you.

Craig: Right, or tell your spouse, your partner.

John: Yes.

Craig: Honestly, if you are partnered up with a dork, they’re going to want this probably.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s very cool. I hope it’s a hit.

John: I would say it too. It doesn’t need to be the out-of-the-gate runaway bestseller, because it’s an evergreen title. There’s always been screenwriting, the fact that it’s not going to go out of date.

Craig: No, nor will it be the hot read over the Christmas break.

John: Would it be great if it were though?

Craig: Yes, sure. I’m not expecting to land on the New York Times bestseller list, but I think at a minimum, now there’s a book that’s worth buying. If your kid is interested in screenwriting and they’re in high school and they’re starting, this is just a simple, easy one. What does it cost, John?

John: The U.S. version I think is $32 or $35.

Craig: That’s reasonable.

John: Yes, and the U.K. version, I’m not sure what the final price is.

Craig: £400.

John: £400. It’s U.K., Australia, New Zealand. They all get one version. It’s largely the same. It’s like the format is slightly different.

Craig: Just colors has a U in it?

John: No. We’re actually not doing any text changes.

Craig: Oh, good.

John: Keeping it American.

Craig: Good.

John: Good. Good, but the cut of the book is a little different. We actually had a phone call, a Zoom about this. Basically, their printing prices just don’t work the same way.

Craig: Interesting. Still Gutenberg-ing it?

John: That’s what it is. That’s how it fits. If you are a listener and you are pre-ordering it today, thank you so much. If you send your receipt for it to Drew at askjohnox.com, we will send you something. We’re not quite sure what that’s going to be, but we’ll send you some of the extra thing for you having pre-ordered it.

Craig: Oh, that’s nice. Cool.

John: Cool.

Craig: Like an object or?

John: I think it’s going to probably be some sort of video of something. Some sort of acknowledgement and a thank you for your pre-order, which is nice.

Craig: What if there’s 10,000 people that pre-order it?

John: Drew’s going to be really busy.

[laughter]

Craig: Oh, Drew, Drew.

John: The other thing you can help us out with, if you are a listener of the show, we are going to be doing some press as we get closer to the time. We are making a list of, what are podcasts we can go on? What are live shows we could do in certain places? There’s limited availability, but there’s things we can do. If you have a podcast or a publication, you think like, oh, John or Craig or both of them should talk to them about this, also, email in to Drew and let Drew know, because we’re trying to get together that schedule for things.

Craig: Fun.

John: Fun. Cool. I will be talking more about this at the Austin Film Festival, but for today, just order your book.

Craig: Yes, we’re going to the Austin Film Festival, fantastic.

John: Scriptnotesbook.com.

Craig: We’re back.

John: All right. Our marquee topic today. How would this be a movie? Craig, can you recap this segment or set up the segment for people who are not familiar with this?

Craig: Sure. In this segment, we take some stories that have been in the news. Sometimes they’re news stories. A lot of times they’re essays. Sometimes they’re actually quite technical. One of them is today. We ask ourselves, okay, if we were running a studio and someone said, oh, we just bought the rights to this thing, how would we make it into a movie? This scenario plays out in studios every day, five days a week, year-round.

John: Absolutely happens in studios, but also happens with producers. Producers are reading, they’re talking to their assistants, their creative executives, there’s this thing, what could this be? Who would we get to write this? What does the actual movie feel like if we’re going to try to do this?

The four things we picked today, three of them are about sort of difficult personal things, and one of them is about a big scientific thing, which is a palate cleanser. Let’s start with A Mother’s Revenge. There’s several articles we could link to for this. The one we’re going to link to is in Slate. It’s as told to Christina Cotterucci, but it’s actually a first-person interview that’s been turned into prose form. It talks about Charlotte Laws, and she has a 24-year-old daughter named Kayla whose email was hacked.

Kayla had a topless picture in her email, which she never sent to anybody, but when she sent it to her computer to save it through her email, that topless picture ended up on one of the most notorious revenge porn sites, isanyoneup.com. Hunter Moore, who ran that website, called himself a professional life-ruiner.

Craig: Great.

John: He put that out there. The mother, Charlotte Laws, wants to get the picture taken down. She calls the FBI, tells her to file a report, so she takes it on herself. She calls everyone, including Hunter’s mother, trying to get this picture taken down. After nine days, it’s finally taken down. They think they’re done, but Charlotte continues to take on the cause of bringing this revenge porn website to justice and take down Hunter Moore.

Finally, the FBI does get involved. Hunter attacks Charlotte online. Anonymous steps in to dox Hunter, and Hunter is ultimately arrested.

Craig: Everybody doxes everybody.

John: This is the account that’s told the slate. I’ll also put a link in the show notes to a Guardian article that has a little bit more on the Hunter side of it all. Craig, what did you take of this situation, this place, and is there a thing about her specific story that’s interesting to you? Tell me what you’re thinking about.

Craig: Yes, this feels very sort of modern Erin Brockovich. A parent or an individual who isn’t necessarily empowered within the justice system, takes it upon themselves to force everybody that is to pay attention to something that’s a real problem. There is also a don’t mess with mom vibe to this, which I love. It is also interesting because it begins when this initial crime occurs. It’s 2012, so it’s a different time.

John: It’s a different internet.

Craig: She actually makes a really interesting point here. There is a ripple effect from what she did. One of the things that we’re always looking for when we’re saying, okay, like how could this be a movie, is how is it relevant? It’s relevant because the work that she did starting with this one picture, which in modern terms almost seems quaint.

John: It does.

Craig: One topless picture? I feel like everyone has everything [chuckles] I don’t.

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s like, it’s so much out there.

John: In a world of AI generated fake images.

Craig: Right, but because of that one picture and her, I think, brave pursuit of justice, eventually laws are created. There were no laws anywhere. Now there are laws in all 50 states against revenge porn.

John: You can imagine the end title card of the movie. It’s like, this law is now the law in 50 states.

Craig: Yes, and it’s got a great villain. You would have to figure out a little bit more about the villain, just so it’s not– I mean the thing is, from her point of view here, she’s talking about this, Charlotte Laws is relaying the story. From her point of view, she literally describes him as a monster and portrays him as such, and it sure seems like it from this account. Of course, as writers, we’re like, but who are you, Hunter? Why are you doing this? Who hurt you? To sort of just figure out who the other person on the side of this is, without taking away the villainy, it’s just really just more like making a real character.

It’s funny because sometimes I think in real life, people are mustache twirling villains. It’s just that we don’t like them as much in our stuff.

Great crusade at the heart of it. I’d want to also dig in a little bit more of the daughter because she almost seems like a prop

John: What was interesting is that she’s 24 years old, which seems like if it’s a 16-year-old girl, an 18-year-old girl, then you feel different. A 24-year-old girl, I–

Craig: Things have changed, man.

John: Yes, but I wonder about the agency of Kayla herself and the degree to which her, and that’s actually an interesting point of conflict, the degree to which it’s like, no, it’s done, mom. It’s like, no, it’s not done. It’s like, stop dragging my name into this.

Craig: Yes, and I don’t know how that all went, but it does seem like the relationship there has to be figured out, because it is a part of it and it is a question. Naturally one would say, oh my God, maybe mom, stop, but as long as you could make everybody a bit rounded and no one’s too much of a white knight and no one’s too much of a mustache twirler, there is a pretty interesting story here. Now, it’s small.

John: There’s a Lifetime movie version of this. I think there’s a bigger version of this too. It’s a question of, can it get up to an Erin Brockovich? I’m not sure it can.

Craig: Erin Brockovich was trying to save lives and did. Where this gets interesting is, and she mentions that, there is a woman who’s a victim of revenge porn who commits suicide. Then you start to get real about it. I think the relevance really is now for parents who are struggling to figure out how to deal with this with their own kids, because this is the new playing with matches.

I think people would connect to it, at least parents would, but it feels like you’re going to have to either go all the way over into indie zone or mainstream. I could see a nice, shiny Netflix thing for this. [crosstalk]

John: Netflix makes sense for that too. We’re talking about this in the Erin Brockovich mold where this is based on a real person. We would likely get the life rights to Charlotte Laws. Basically, you’d want to have some ability to portray her and there’s a question of how you can handle Hunter Moore and to what degree, you don’t need his life rights, no. You don’t want his life rights, but there are going to be liable concerns about what you’re saying about him. You have to be able to back up everything you’re having him do with reality.

Craig: Doesn’t seem like it would be a problem, because in real life, he did all of this. He left a public record behind, like a trail of posts and tweets and all the rest and emails, and so forth and he was convicted. As far as those concerns, it’s as close to a layup as you’re going to get.

John: Now, if you were to do the fictional version of this where you didn’t have to use any of the real people’s stuff or you weren’t using any of the real people’s stuff, I think elevating Kayla over Charlotte and having the girl herself take the initiative in this thing feels probably right. It feels like it’s the more direct way to handle this in the sense of coming into ownership of your own story. Because in taking these photos yourself and then having them laid out there, you’ve lost the narrative and sort of reclaiming control over your life feels like an important version, if I’m not bound to reality.

Craig: Sure, you could absolutely argue that the value of the fictional version comes down to, I’m going to punish the person who punished me. Revenge against the revenger. Also curious, his site was a revenge porn. It didn’t seem like it was revenge, he didn’t even know Kayla. I think that also, there is something unique about mom going out there fighting on behalf of.

John: It doesn’t show in this article, but the other article, she’s physically small. She’s like Kristin Chenoweth’s size, and that feels right too.

Craig: Always interesting. There is something just about how powerless you can feel as a parent and how I can see as a mom just how fierce you can be. That is sort of the thing that makes this special, I think.

John: I think you’re right.

Craig: But in a fictional version, I think you have to make it about more than just, I’m trying to get a picture down, I’m trying to remove a topless picture. There has to be– in reality, she says years into this process, or it was months or years, it was quite some time, somebody out there committed suicide. I think this is, in a fictional story, that would be something you would realize very early on had already happened, perhaps more than once, which I’m sure is true, so that you understood this isn’t just about taking this picture down. It’s about taking this person down before they hurt anyone else.

John: Going back to the mother at the center of this, is thinking about her as a character, independent of this event happening, where is she starting from and where is she going to? How is this difficult process leading her to a better place or leading her to what they are, essentially? What is it that she is achieving independent of the outcome?

Craig: That’s a great point. You need there to be something wrong before this picture ever ends up on the internet.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Where I would start probably is relationship with daughter. I think if there is a flaw there, because what happens as a parent is you start to feel responsible for everything your child does, and in a story like this, you want to feel like, if only I had been a better mom, and for somebody to say no, but that there is something that is off in that relationship that her pursuit of justice exacerbates, until finally it is confronted and healed along with taking down a criminal.

John: All right, that’s the first one, and I think that feels like there is a movie to be made here.

Craig: Yes.

John: Someone’s going to write in and say like, oh, this actually did become a movie and we didn’t even know. Probably.

Craig: Oh, sure.

John: All right, next up, this is from another Slate thing, it’s in a Dear Prudence advice column. The title is, “Help. My husband’s manic pixie past has become a full-blown threat to my sanity.”

Craig: Here’s what this woman writes in. “My husband and I have been married for 10 years and generally have a happy marriage. He tells me marrying me was the best thing that ever happened to him, but there’s one thing from his past that is threatening to drive me insane, and it recently got a whole lot worse. I’m still deeply jealous of his feelings for his high school friend, Kate. For lack of a better word, she’s his manic pixie dream girl. We’re all on our 30s, but she still acts about 22,” I love the specificity of that, by the way, “and he’s utterly charmed by her. She lives a few states away, so we only see her about once a year, which is the only thing that keeps me sane. Kate is bright and charming and has about a million friends, so doesn’t have much time for my husband anymore. The second she gives him a crumb of attention, he drops everything.

We recently had a party, and she called him in the middle of it,” I love this part, “drunk and bored. He answered and then abandoned our guests to talk to her for 40 minutes. They never dated, but he had a thing for her all through high school and college. Their dynamic seems to be that he will give her money,” money?, oh, boy, “attention, whatever she wants, and she will give him attention when she feels like it.

Last year, we went on vacation together, and she got trashed and pulled me aside to tell me she was uncomfortable with how often he texts her and some of the things he says to her because she likes me so much, and I deserve better. Then the next day, she didn’t even remember having the conversation. What can I do about this?” Then I’m going to add in parentheses, (What can I do about this unbelievable, messy hurricane of a human being?)

John: What I love about this setup is that it has all the characteristics of romantic comedy, but from the Bill Pullman perspective. Basically, our letter writer is the Bill Pullman in a classic Meg Ryan romantic comedy.

Craig: The Baxter.

John: Yes, The Baxter. I think there’s a really interesting setup here. Obviously, you don’t know any of the specific people in here, but that idea of there is a woman from my husband’s past who, on the surface, is super charming, but I recognize how dangerous she is, and that is a threat. To what degree is she overreacting or underreacting? No one is being evil here. The villainy is just people behaving their own natural way.

Craig: Dangerous women have been a staple of cinema since they invented film, and there’s a good reason for that, because dangerous men have been a staple, dangerous staple. We are fascinated by people who are dangerous. Now, dangerous men tend to be violent. Dangerous women tend to be manipulative and cruel, at least that’s how we portray these things in film.
When it comes to situations like this, everyone goes immediately to being close and fatal attraction. It’s the ultimate, but we all have run into people like this.

John: Oh yes.

Craig: We all know somebody like this.

John: It’s also Jolene. It’s the Dolly Parton song, “Please don’t take my man.”

Craig: Sure.

John: The letter writer is questioning her own relationship, her own value to her husband, and the husband is giving her reason to be suspicious. If you take the sex out of it, if you take the, oh, he’s going to leave his wife for this woman, it’s like the annoying best friend who shows up and takes over everything, that’s annoying, but it’s not a threat to the marriage. It’s the, oh, this woman, if she decided to, could flick her fingers and take it over.

Craig: There’s the modern character of the simp, and the whole concept of simping. This guy’s a simp. He’s simping for this lady. Where this lady gets evil to me is when she gets “drunk,” and then says, “By the way–“ She’s going to play both sides of this marriage, because it seems to me like Kate enjoys chaos. You know like that game show they did on Saturday Night Live, What’s My Name?

John: Oh, it’s so good. Yes.

Craig: Then he goes, “Why do you do this?” He goes, “In a word, chaos.” That’s what some people, and they are fascinating people, they are bright and charming and smart. They don’t wake up in the morning deciding to do evil, this is just how they are. Figuring out how to deal with these destabilizing influences in your life is a challenge.

John: Let’s think about, [crosstalk] if it’s a movie scenario, who is the central character? Is it the letter writer, is it the husband? Is it the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, is it Kate? I can see good arguments for each of them. If it’s the husband, then it feels like, then it’s a rom-com, and he has to decide to leave his wife.

Craig: It is slightly rom-com-y. I could see a movie called The Simp. One of the things that’s interesting about situations like this is that the husband clearly has some stuff that needs fixing also, but it is almost certainly in the realm of self-esteem, some sort of damage.

John: If they’re in their mid-30s, it could be that early midlife crisis. He’s yearning for his youth where this girl was in his life more. There’s that aspect of it.

Craig: It’s possible.

John: He wants to feel handsome and attractive.

Craig: There’s something that Kate does for him that he needs to figure out, because it’s not anything real. People like Kate are drugs. They’re fentanyl. They’re not actually lack of pain. A story about a simp figuring out why he’s simping and losing the people that– That concept and that phenomenon, that’s a great title for a movie, by the way. Somebody should just make The Simp. Right? That’s a pretty good title. [laughs]
I could see people going to see that one. Who do we want in this? It’s got to be somebody younger.

John: It’s not Paul Rudd. It’s somebody younger.

Craig: Way younger, yes. Like?

John: It’s not Jesse Eisenberg.

Craig: No. He’s too old too now. We’re too old to know who it should be.

John: Yes, but it’s that guy.

Craig: It’s that guy.

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s that concept.

John: It could be his story. What kind of movie is it, though? Is it a comedy or is it a drama? What does it feel like? If it’s a drama, there’s a Chekhov’s gun there, but it’s not going off yet.

Craig: It’s a comedy, and of course–

John: It’s an act of comedy that we haven’t made.

Craig: Yes, exactly. Yes, it’s an uncomfortable comedy. It’s a cringe comedy. Obviously, the poor woman who’s writing in here is listening to us, perhaps. I doubt it, but she might be going, she didn’t write it to us, she wrote it to, you know, saying like, “No, this is not a comedy, this is my life. I’m crying all the time.” We’re sorry. We’re just trying to make a movie.

I do think that the phenomenon of that will-o’-wisp leading the simp off into– It’s The Sirens, right?

John: Yes, it is.

Craig: It’s a classic. Actually, the whole male simp thing is underexplored, I think, because those are the people we cheer for. Just could you love yourself enough, so that you wouldn’t follow this ding dong? That’s where we’re going.

John: Just to raise the issue, I think it probably is a movie rather than a series because it needs to get resolved, and if it’s not resolved, it’s going to drive you crazy. I could imagine this being an episode of an ongoing series where this central guy and this woman comes back, and that becomes the source of tension within an episode, and you have to close that character off and get rid of her.

Craig: Yes, in the old days of sitcoms, there could absolutely be a character that shows up once a season and everyone’s like, “Uh-oh, here we go again.” She blows into town, makes this one-side character, in the B-story insane and he promises he won’t do it again and then next time he does. I could see that.

John: All right. Third article here. An all-fan remarked about gold bars that secretly recorded upended his life. This is Brent Efron’s boring Tinder date who wanted to hear all about his work at the Environmental Protection Agency, so Mr. Efron talked. If only he’d seen the hidden camera. This is an article by Lisa Friedman writing for the New York Times.

The summary is that this guy is 20s, Brent Efron, goes on a Tinder date with this guy named Brady, who seemed to only want to talk about his job at the EPA. At the time, Trump was on the campaign trail promising to target climate change funding, so EPA was fast-tracking grants. Brent comes up with an analogy that the EPA was a cruise ship that hit an iceberg; they need to launch its lifeboats right away. Then he says, “It truly feels like we’re on the Titanic and we’re throwing gold bars off the edge.”

It turns out that Brady was an operative for Project Veritas and was secretly recording the conversation and posted the video online. The political right seizes upon the phrase “gold bars” and uses it to cancel EPA grants by the current administration. Brent lost his job, and as the article is being written, he’s trying to find his footing again.

Craig: I think he quit his job, because the odds of him continuing at the EPA after January 20th were pretty slim. We truly live in the stupidest timeline. This is dumb. Project Veritas, it’s funny, the opposite of Project Veritas is just everything.

[laughter]

Those people, the Trump people, don’t care. They’re like, “Yes, that’s right. I said it. Ha ha ha. LOL.” Then Project Veritas because people on the left, I guess, the concept is that they are more virtuous before they get trapped.

John: The entrapment thing is what’s so pernicious and makes me feel so gross about this.

Craig: Yes, it does.

John: Brent did nothing wrong. It’s that feeling that you cannot trust anybody in any situation. It echoes to me with the first story, in terms of just being fundamentally wrong, the violation that happens, the violation of trust that happens. Even though it is just a blind date, being secretly recorded is so invasive.

Craig: Yes, and of note, this took place in Washington, D.C., which does not have the consent law. You can do a one-party recording, which is creepy. I could see a version here that is also a romantic comedy.

John: Oh, sure.

Craig: The romantic comedy here is a guy goes on a date. He’s basically been baited into this by this other guy who’s working for Project Veritas. The problem for the Project Veritas guy is he’s starting to fall in love with him. You have to have it over a couple of dates, but he’s starting to fall in love with him, but he’s already got this footage that is the Project Veritas people have and are going to release.

This gold bar thing, it’s actually the most amazing analogy, in that it’s that blue dress, gold dress thing. If you look at it one way or the other, and obviously we know what he meant. What happens if Brady actually falls in love with Brent? What do you do now, Brady?

John: Is Brady even gay? Was the whole thing I set up from the very start, we don’t even know.

Craig: Oh, in this story? No. In reality? No way, because they also go after Brent for being gay. That’s all lumped into the same. I don’t think Project Veritas employs a lot of people on the LGBTQ spectrum.

John: Open the gay folks.

Craig: Oh, yes. Good point. They don’t employ a lot of open gay folks openly.

John: Openly, it’s a lot of work there.

Craig: Openly.

John: This is reminding me a little bit of Michael Clayton as well, where it’s just like, okay, this is a situation that happened. A question of timeline and what is the span of time of the movie? This is probably the inciting incident, but this could actually be deeper into a thing, and is this once part of a larger crisis? This could be a beat in a larger story rather than the main thing.

Craig: Yes, and one thing about this, and it comes up in the story about revenge porn as well, is it’s hard to dramatize viral moments.

John: It is.

Craig: Because we all experience them privately in our home, looking at our phone for five seconds, laughing about it through text and moving on. These viral moments are so ephemeral, and portraying them can be really sweaty. Anytime a movie’s like, and then it goes viral, just because you said so? No one knows why things go viral.

John: It ends up being a lot of cuts to cuts to. I’m thinking of the Ben Platt musical, Dear Evan Hansen, which has a viral moment that happens, but you get a song underneath that helps show what they build and they grow, and it’s organic, too.

Craig: It works on stage much better than it works on film.

John: It does.

Craig: It’s just the nature of that, because you can use your imagination, theater of the mind from stage, and then in a movie, you’re supposed to see stuff, and suddenly it’s, what else can you do, but cut to a lot of people looking at their phones and extras, like pointing at their phones and saying, “Look, I didn’t even know about this. It couldn’t have been that viral.”

John: I think it’s one of the things that was devastating to this guy and a small space, but also just think about what’s happened in the last six months. You can’t track anything.

Craig: No, but I do feel, on a personal note, very bad for Brent. He seems like such a sweet guy.

John: He seems like a sweet guy, and also, you can’t Google his name without that’s going to come up first.

Craig: In a way, I think he’ll be okay.

John: I think he’ll be fine, too.

Craig: You know what, Brent? I think you’re going to land on your feet, because you didn’t do anything wrong, as he says. You know what? That’s how I know he’s a good guy, because he repeats this theme a few times, like, “I didn’t do anything wrong,” which tells me that he’s been thinking, did I do something wrong? It’s that, I think good people tend to overestimate their own culpability in things, and bad people underestimate it.

John: My takeaway from this is, I think what happens to Brent is potentially a good first 10 pages of something that’s actually not the story at all.

Craig: What it hacks.

John: Yes, it’s a setup, but it’s not the engine of the story.

Craig: It’s not the meat.

John: Finally, let’s talk about the unseen fury of solar storms.

Craig: Boom.

John: This is Henry Wismayer writing for Noema.

Craig: Noema.

John: Noema.

Craig: Yes, that magazine we all read all the time?

John: 100%.

Craig: Great website.

John: Great website, really well done. This is about scientists at the Met’s Space Weather Observation Center who watch sunspots, solar flares, and solar storms, and they’re speculating on what threats space weather could have on our world. Space weather.

Craig: Space weather, somewhere, Roland Emmerich just sat up and went, “Huh?”

John: Yes. I was definitely like, Geostorm. It feels like that.

Craig: That’s very Geostorm, which was Dean Devlin, by the way, not Roland Emmerich.

John: Oh, I’m sorry, but they–

Craig: Roland Emmerich’s producing partner decided, I can also direct, and then Geostorm occurred. Boom. Storm is geo.

John: Yes, in 1861, there was what was called the Carrington Event, which was sightings of the northern lights were reported as far south as El Salvador, just 13 degrees north of the equator. Then, the southern lights, which I wasn’t even sure was a thing, came up all the way to San Diego. What happens is there’s a little flash and then just giant bright lights happening and things that would normally be just in the very poles you’re seeing everywhere.

Craig: It knocked out a lot of telegraph lines, but then weirdly, there were some Morse code telegraphy lines that were powered mysteriously by nothing.

John: Yes.

Craig: The insane amount of electrons and radiation and crap that the sun can barf on us in one of these massive– it’s like a volcano on the sun going off, basically. Back then, knocking out some telegraph lines, must have been very annoying for a day or two. Unfortunately, now, unplugging the world.

John: Essentially, our satellites have very little defense against this kind of stuff. It’s very hard to defend against that stuff in space. On the ground, we can do some stuff just to protect towers and certain things, but it’s expensive. As we’ve learned recently, people, if they have the choice not to spend money to do a thing, they won’t do a thing.

Craig: Even if they do, this is the weak link syndrome. It’s just one section that isn’t working quite right and the whole thing collapses. We would be flattened by one of these things. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. You can turn everything back on, but it’s going to take a bit.

John: It’s going to take a while because stuff burns out.

Craig: Yes, and people will have to walk outside and talk to their neighbors.

John: Obviously, the supernatural or in this case, natural, but a big giant event happens, the world and everything that’s upended is a staple in our big cinematic universes and in our series where things are happening where, in the pilot episode, something big changes and fundamentally society is altered by it. What’s interesting about this is that it’s not a zombie attack. It’s not a plague, and no one is hurt directly by it. Instead, it’s just all of our stuff is messed up for a while and the systems are broken, kind of like systems were broken during the pandemic, which is just we couldn’t do the normal things. Our supply chains get messed up.

Craig: But we could talk to each other.

John: We could talk to each other, which was crucial.

Craig: I’m still marveling at the fact that video conferencing sort of got figured out right when we needed I, which is amazing. There are plenty of movies where things happen and people can’t rely on the normal systems anymore. Typically, those movies portray people as horrible. This article suggests that people would be horrible and that very quickly things would descend into riots and violence.

John: Because we’re used to a very centralized media system where we just return our TV and we get the answers to things.
Craig: The centralized media system is the thing that seems to be causing problems more than ever before. Taking social media out of the equation, the question is, would it actually go well? I would argue that in a lot of places it would go well. That deprived of the ability to feed off of conspiracy theories and nonsense, no, people will not be running outside to shoot each other and take each other’s stuff. They will try and help each other.

That’s not to say that things won’t go wrong in certain places. They would. There would almost certainly be looting. That’s typical, but looting is not shooting people in the head. I guess the question is, how would this be a movie? My instinct would be very small character study of a tiny neighborhood where everybody has to suddenly meet each other for the first time, which would be interesting.

John: There was a movie that I met on over at Paramount. This is 15 years ago. It’s not an active development. It was centered around essentially peak oil, but essentially, if I’m remembering this correctly, and I don’t know if this is part of my picture or part of the underlying IP, was that basically a microbe had gotten out that had basically just ate oil and just destroyed all the oil. Basically, all the gas, all the oil just went away and society falling down around that.

Craig: Saving the planet.

John: Saving the planet, sure. Dead two sides of one coin. It’s just so interesting because 15 years ago, that was really scary. If that happened now, it’s like, yes, it would be bad, but we’re so much better. We just have the technology to deal with this, like how we had Zoom when the pandemic came.

Craig: Yes, there’s a, I wouldn’t call it anywhere like first tier Stephen King novel of his many, many novels, but I did enjoy reading The Dome. I don’t know if you-

John: Oh, Under the Dome, yes.

Craig: Was it called Under the Dome?

John: The CBS edition of it was called Under the Dome. There was a series.

Craig: Oh, they made a series of it? This is Dome-like.

John: A town that gets cut off from everybody else.

Craig: Exactly. That’s what an EMP would do to a small town. Now, in a city like ours, everybody would be talking to everybody, and we would figure stuff out. It would very quickly become who’s on your block, because that’s who you can quickly talk to. If the phones aren’t working and the computers aren’t working, you’re talking to the people you can actually see. That means people near you.

I think a lot of people would probably, like here where we live in our neighborhood, I could imagine in a situation like this, that we all decide, hey, we’re going to all stay in one person’s house for two days and then we’re going to all go to the other person’s house for two days. We just don’t want to be alone. We can be together and play games or whatever, and hope to God the food doesn’t run out. John, you could bring all of your guns.

John: Not having grown up in the South, I was not aware of hurricane parties, but friends were talking about hurricane parties.

Craig: I could see that.

John: Essentially, you know there’s a storm coming, you kind of know we’re going to lose power, but it’s not going to be so bad.

Craig: How would this be a movie? Avoiding the obvious, oh my God, and then someone like, “Well, you’ve got to get to so-and-so to turn the blah, blah.” I don’t think it’s a movie.

John: I think your approach to, this is the excuse for a hangout movie that otherwise wouldn’t happen, a snow day kind of thing, it’s a potential way in. I can see the pilot getting ordered for this as a series and what happens and the collapse of it all. I just don’t think it’s a successful ongoing thing.

Craig: No.

John: I guess wrong about things. There’s always this Netflix series that I can’t believe that anybody watches that, and it’s in its fifth season.

Craig: Who knows if anybody’s watching it, though?

John: They know somebody’s watching it.

Craig: I guess somebody must be watching it. We say this so many times. At this point now, I’ve given up even being ashamed. People are like, “Have you seen so-and-so?” I’m like, “I haven’t even heard of that.” They’re like, “What?” I haven’t heard of it.

John: I was talking to a 21-year-old woman in front of my daughters, and she’s like, “Oh, my dad loves Pretty Little Liars,” which is the most YA thing-

Craig: That’s so crazy.

John: -you obsess with.

Craig: At least I know about it. I know about that. That counts.

John: I know because it’s a good title, and that’s why I know about it.

Craig: It’s like every now and then, I’ll see something of so-and-so renewed for its 19th season. I’m like, “What? What is that?” Happens.

John: Happens. Let’s do a recap of our four movies here. I think we’re saying a Solar Storm’s, unless we want to make Geostorm 2, it’s probably not a big movie. It’s an interesting premise, at least. It’s a kickoff.

Craig: Yes, it could be used as a plot point.

John: Another thing I’ll say is, if you wanted to do a historical thing where we don’t know scientifically what’s actually happening, the fact that we suddenly have Northern Lights everywhere in a older scene would be spooky.

Craig: It would be a cool way if you’re doing– instead of the frogs raining down in Magnolia, the sky explodes.

John: The sky explodes. The Offhand Remark About Gold Bars, so Brian Efron, I think we think that is a setup to a different movie, or it’s a smaller beat in a bigger Michael Clayton-y story.

Craig: Agreed.

John: My husband’s Manic Pixie Dream Girl. You think there’s a simp movie?

Craig: I think there’s a simp movie. I think there’s a simp romantic comedy. That whole concept of simping, I think, is sad and true, but also funny.

John: Go back 20 years, and you put Seth Rogen as that guy.

Craig: Michael Cera.

John: Yes, totally.

Craig: I’m sure Michael Cera’s like, “Thank you, guys. Thanks. Thank you for putting me right there on the top of your simp list, you jerks.”

John: Finally, Mother’s Revenge, I think we both agree, is the most movie movie in the sense of an Erin Brockovich-y story about this specific thing and what she was able to accomplish against good odds and the fact that there’s a compelling villain figure in it.

Craig: Yes, it’s going to be a Netflix-y kind of thing. It’s going to be a streaming movie. It’s not going into theaters. I can’t imagine.

John: I think you’re right. Cool. Let us go to a listener question.

Craig: All right.

John: This is Brendan, who’s asking, “Way back in Episode 30,” good Lord, “John and Craig discuss emerging technologies like Avid’s ScriptSync and then speculate about when computers can auto-assemble a film and a near future dominated by “screenwriters and teams of robots.” Craig jokingly advocates for scanning actors and making movies “like a factory.” You were joking you were saying?

Craig: I was joking.

John: “Although Craig is obviously riffing here and isn’t serious, it occurred to me how that is now the future we live in. How has your optimism regarding perspective filmmaking technology changed over the course of your careers?”

Craig: So far, so good. Meaning, let’s talk about not perspective. Let’s talk about the things that didn’t exist when we were in Episode 30 that now do exist. So many of them are so great. We’ve talked about lots of them on the show. There have been tremendous advances in all sorts of things, the fact that we don’t need to use film anymore and things still look beautiful.

John: We still have the choice to use film, but–

Craig: Some people can choose to use it. There’s great arguments as to why it’s fully unnecessary, but–

John: You don’t need to email us.

Craig: Yes, don’t email us, Christopher Nolan. We get it. We know. All those wonderful things that we can now do in editorial, things that streamline stuff. There are also things that are frustratingly still stuck in 1990s. A lot of screenwriting software. The stupid schedule we get that the ADs use is still horrible. There are a lot of funky things that we’re still dealing with.

John: I think we recognize that. We still recognize that it’s because institutionalized systems are hard to change because everyone is used to a thing. Because of the weird freelance way we work, it helps to have standards, but those standards are holding us back.

Craig: It’s not exactly a massive marketplace for people to want to innovate in because it’s for 1,000 people and not 10 million. Perspective filmmaking technology is horrifying. Here’s the thing. I choose to not be horrified. I don’t like it. I see what’s going on out there. The question is, really, is that stuff a strange dead end unto itself? Is it actually going to do these wonderful things that people say? I think it’s not. I’m just going to– if I’m wrong, I’m wrong. Surely I will be assassinated by AI for this, but it feels to me like it is an increasingly elaborate dead end of stuff. It’s like every time I see, it’s like, “Look what it can do now.” I’m just like, “Yes, but I don’t like that.”

I’m not optimistic at all. I don’t think things are going well I think in part because all the attention and all the money is fixated now on AI and not on things that might actually make our lives easier as human beings.

John: Yes, I would say I’m not as optimistic as I was before. I also want to put things in context of where I think I was at in Episode 30. I went to see 28 Years Later, which I liked a lot. It took me back to 28 Days Later, which was shot on DV. It was like it looked so messy, but it was like that was the aesthetic it was going for. They had that choice to do it. It didn’t mean that all movies suddenly got shot on DV. It was a unique one-time thing. This time they were shooting on iPhones. It was a deliberate choice to do those things.

I think to where I still have optimism is that I think we as filmmakers and as companies that make films still have a choice about what it is that we want to do, and what technologies we’re going to use, and what technologies we’re not going to use. We can recognize what we’re giving up by swapping in technologies that are “good enough.”

I had a conversation this past week about a potentially very expensive tentpole movie. The producer’s like, “If we wait a year, I think some of those VFXs are going to be less expensive to do. I had to say, that’s probably true. That’s probably some of the things that would have cost $10 million, might cost $7 million or $5 million with time. That I can see. I’m torn based on what I feel because I don’t want to spend $200 million on visual effects. I just don’t think that’s a great use of money and time. We can make more movies. I’m recognizing that money spent on visual effects is largely being spent to pay people to do visual effects.

Craig: I think that depending on the visual effects you’re doing, it can really go directly to people when you’re dealing with smaller visual effects houses as opposed to some of the large ones, which overhead and all the rest of it, those are big businesses. Yes, it’s true. There are things that are happening in the visual effects space that will be invisible to us. We won’t know why some things are happening faster and better. The answer will almost certainly be AI because those things are probably quite rote.

John: We didn’t talk about it on the podcast, but maybe it was two years ago now, science fiction film, The Creator, visually gorgeous, but also cost so much less than anything it costs because the director had a sense of how to do things on a budget in ways that were smart. No one’s knocking spending less money on a movie, but it becomes a question of AT what point are we making a movie or not making a movie based on a budget, which we know is the deciding factor so much of the time.

Craig: I guess the long and short of it is, here we are at– what episode are we on?

John: This is Episode 697.

Craig: 697. We’re in Episode 697. 667 episodes later, we definitely scan actors. That’s something we do, but we do not make movies or [unintelligible 00:48:07] the show like a factory.

John: [inaudible 00:48:08] yes.

Craig: In fact, it’s quite the opposite. It is as painstaking and laborious as it has ever been. Maybe even more so because the audience has come to expect a certain scale for so many things. If you’re aiming for that quality segment, oh man, it’s expensive. It is exhausting. We’re not quite– yes, I’m not very optimistic that it’s going to get easier.

John: One of the things that has changed if you talk about scanning actors is, yes, we started scanning actors, and the actors unions pushed back against it. There are now more rules about what you can scan, when you can scan, and how you can use it, which feels appropriate.

Craig: The way we have scanned actors was already in line with what SAG wanted and got, which is we scan an actor for this show. We don’t use it for anything else. We really just use it if we need like, “Okay, in this shot, we’re going to change your face because you’re on fire.” Then we have it, but we don’t scan actors so that we can replace actors. I don’t know anybody that is.

John: I think the times we have heard those issues being raised where an actor will argue like, “I was not in that episode, but my face, it has me saying something.”

Craig: That would be bad.

John: It would be bad. I think we need to raise a stink when that happens.

Craig: I do acknowledge that Hollywood is full of jerks. Then there’s para-Hollywood, which is the worst place of off-Hollywood Hollywood where there are no scruples. There are absolutely people right now who are the same schlockmeisters that always existed, who used to say, “You don’t have to worry about safety. Just throw them in the car and light it on fire.”

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Yes. Right? Those guys are like, “We don’t need to get it. Just get me an AI thing that sounds like them, and it’s good enough.” We’re going to have to be dealing with cockroaches forever. We always have, we always will.

John: To the degree I’m optimistic, I feel like we will acknowledge and wrestle with these situations as they come up and we’ll set some standards or practices around them. Sometimes it’ll be comfortable, sometimes it’s really, really uncomfortable, but we can’t pretend they’re just not going to happen.

Craig: No. Ultimately, there will become some sort of understanding of how to ethically employ AI within the human artistic pursuit. Right now, no one knows what the hell that would be. No one. Everyone is either guessing, or is terrified, or is way too excited.

John: That’s why I think we need to have smart people who are actually working in those fields right now having the conversations about what it is because otherwise, it’s going to be made by businessmen.

Craig: It’s ultimately businessmen that will– if we have a prayer, it’s going to be because the businessmen align themselves with us because AI is attempting to eat everyone’s lunch. I don’t know why Hollywood continues to miss this simple fact. The technology industry despises ownership of information. They hate it. They hate ownership of information. They hate ownership of content. It disgusts them. What they love is being the people you pay to go get everything. They don’t want you as a– you write a song, they don’t want you to own that song. They want somebody to pay them to play that song for them. That’s what technology wants, and they will forever undermine the basis of what makes Hollywood tick, which is ownership of artistic expression.

John: All right. Let’s do our one cool things. My one cool thing is a piece of technology that is in front of Craig right now. It is called TRMNL.

Craig: TRMNL?

John: It is this very minimalist e-ink display. You buy it off of usetrmnl.com, and you can set up for what things you want it to display. It’s just a simple website, and you can have it display the weather. I have right now displaying how many days until the Scriptnotes book comes out.

Craig: 136.

John: As we’re recording this. You can set up your little dashboards. It’s fun for nerdy gadgeteers like me. It’s just like a very good version of something that I just wanted and the fact that someone made it was great.

Craig: It can display anything?

John: Anything.

Craig: It looks like it’s a nice little side thing for D&D.

John: Totally. It switches between screens, but it updates itself once every 15 minutes. The reason why it does it so slowly is because it goes for six months on a charge.

Craig: I’m thinking, you know how for some players, their action economy, how they’re supposed to do and the things that they can do, they forget. Especially as you level up, it gets more and more– to have a flowchart-

John: Oh, totally.

Craig: -would be very cool to have. I just want everything to be about D&D, but it’s like this thing’s adorable. I love that it’s called TRMNL with no vowels. It’s TRMNL.

John: TRMNL.

Craig: TRMNL.

John: If you are curious about a little device, so it has a stand, but you can also hang it on a wall.

Craig: How much does it cost?

John: Let’s take a look. I think that was–

Craig: TRMNL.

John: TRMNL.

Craig: It looks like the kind of device that wants to make you happy like in the Toy Story world. It’s really sweet.

John: The version you’re seeing, it’s $139. They come in different colors. There’s a limited edition, which is $154. I got the developer one, which is a little bit more expensive, so I can program my own dashboards.

Craig: Developers. Developers.

John: Developers. Developers. I like it. It’s not going to change my world, but I do like it.

Craig: I love that. We should throw on a link to Steve Ballmer doing the developers, developers, developers speech just because–

John: It’s incredible.

Craig: It’s the greatest thing of all time.

John: It’s an early nerdy meme. I just love it.

Craig: It’s just insane. It’s wonderful. My one cool thing this week, you want to talk about nerdiness?

John: Please.

Craig: John, I’ve gone back in time approximately almost 20 years back in time with Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered.

John: I remember playing Elder Scrolls way back in the day. Talk me through which one this is so that I don’t get confused.

Craig: Elder Scrolls IV is the one before Skyrim.

John: Okay.

Craig: This is back when they made these games not once every 30 years. Skyrim came out in 2011.

John: I think that was maybe, actually, the first Elder Scrolls I played.

Craig: Okay, yes. That was the first a lot of people played. That’s 14 years ago. We still haven’t seen six. They’ve said maybe there will be one and no one knows what’s going on with it. I think maybe I want to say four years prior to that Elder Scrolls IV came out. If you didn’t play it, it was excellent.

It was the first Elder Scrolls I played. I didn’t play Morrowind. I hadn’t played the prior ones. I didn’t know anything about that world. I think it was the first Bethesda game I played. It’s outstanding.

They’ve done that remaster thing, which they’re remastering stuff from 2013 now. I’m like, go back to the 2000 and aughts. What I love about the way they did it is they didn’t remaster it so it doesn’t look like– it’s still those janky faces. It’s like that weird– but it just still looks really good. I’m playing it on the Steam Deck, and I’m having a blast. Because it’s been– what year did Oblivion come out? 2006. Just shy of 20 years. I don’t remember anything from 20 years ago. This is awesome, but–

John: The fact that you can play it on a handheld device now too is great.

Craig: It’s so cool.My daughter was just four, and she would sit on the couch and watch me play Oblivion. We have these great memories of her getting so excited when there would be trouble. I’d say, “Oh, the music’s changing. There’s going to be trouble.” Then she was like, “Find trouble, find trouble.” It was just a great game. John, do you play the Bethesda games?

John: I played Skyrim and Fallout a lot, yes. Most of them have a very similar mechanic.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: You’ve complained about that that they’re a little too similar.

Craig: Starfield is where you start to feel, A, it’s really getting old. No people when you talk to them should not look directly into the lens of the camera. That’s insane. B, compared to Oblivion, which is essentially 20 years old, Starfield is empty. It is devoid. Oblivion is packed with so many people, and so many stories, and so many places to go and things to see. When you go into a town, there’s, I don’t know, 18 houses in one district that you can knock on a door and talk to people. Starfield is like five people live in this city. I don’t know what’s going on, but I would urge Bethesda, look back, look back to your roots. I’m having an absolute blast.

John: That’s great. I’m glad to hear it. We’ll put a link to that in the show notes. On top of your games. Birdigo, which is the game that I made with Corey Martin, which is a cross between Wordle and Balatro, is going to be out this week. If you are listening to this episode as it comes out, take a look for that on Steam as well. You can put that on your Steam deck.

Craig: You guys are pumping stuff out left and right.

John: Yes, more stuff coming.

Craig: Factory.

John: Nothing could top the Scriptnotes book, which is available for pre-order.

Craig: Nothing today? Today.

John: Today.

Craig: It’s happening right now. People, it’s happening.

John: Adam– I’m going through the– Boilerplate, people can just pull up on their phone right now scriptnotesbook.com and pre-order the book.

Craig: Just-

John: You can pre-order it from-

Craig: -pre-order?

John: -your local bookstore through bookshop.org or through one of the big services, whatever you want to do.

Craig: We’re not going to judge you.

John: Do what you want to do.

Craig: Do what you want to do.

John: Do you. If you live in the Los Angeles region, we are planning to do live shows for the book on the week it comes out. Just still pre-order it. If there’s an extra book you get there, you can give away one of your copies of your book.

Craig: Listen, if you get eight or nine of these, then just think of everywhere you go, just hand a book out to someone.

John: Do you have more than one bathroom?

Craig: Yes. It’s a great way to tip people.

John: Absolutely. Not to replace– give them money– Then, also–

Craig: -then also be [unintelligible 00:58:08] here.

John: Yes, absolutely. Listen, I know you are a waiter. I know you are a valet, but you’re also probably a screenwriter. Here’s a book for you.

Craig: Great job.

John: Great job.

Craig: It’s a great way to get punched in the face.

[laughter]

John: Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also a place where we can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We have t-shirts, and hoodies, and drink wear. You’ll find us at Cotton Bureau.

You’ll find the show notes with all the things we talked about today on the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all those premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes all the way back to Episode 6. What did I reference?

Craig: 30.

John: 30, yes. Bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on kindness, scriptnotesbook.com. Order your book and send Drew at ask@johnaugust.com the receipt from that, and we’re going to send you something. I don’t know what that’s going to be yet, but it’s going to be fun.

Craig: Amazing.

John: Craig, thanks for a good show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Craig, I want to talk about kindness.

Craig: Shut up, John.

John: It could have been from, Into the Woods. I think I may have heard that [unintelligible 00:59:34] recently like, “You’re so nice. You’re not good. You’re not bad. You’re just nice.”

Craig: “You’re not bad. You’re just nice.” It’s one of my favorite lyrics.

John: It’s so good. He’s a very nice prince, and he’s nice.

Craig: It’s the last midnight.

John: Yes, so good. Kindness is not niceness, and it’s also not politeness. I just wanted to separate that out both in terms of the real world, but also how we’re thinking about our characters. I think so often we have characters who we think about as being good, but what is it that they’re doing good? Do they have a good nature? Are they friendly? Are they helpful? Is their niceness transactional? I think kindness has a non-transactional quality to it that I think is a crucial distinction.

Craig: Yes, nice almost implies not nice. It’s absence of trouble. “Oh, you’re nice.” Kind does imply deeds.

John: It implies action for sure. It’s not just a good spirit. It’s not pity, because pity can make you feel condescending. Kindness is not pity. It can be related to love, but you can be kind to somebody you don’t love. You can be kind to somebody you despise.

Craig: Nice is seeing somebody crying and saying, “Hey, are you all right?” and they’re like, “Yes, no, I’m fine. I’m fine.” You’re like, “Okay, just checking on you.” Kind is sitting down with them and going, “How can I help? Is there a way for me to help?”

John: Exactly. Compassion would also be recognizing someone else’s pain, but not doing anything about it.

Craig: Kindness implies an attempt to connection, going out of your way. Nice people can ignore trouble. That doesn’t make them not nice. It just means that they’re not bad.

John: There is a CS Lewis quote talking about how your goal is not just that someone is happy, but they’re better on a deeper level. There’s comforting, but that comforting isn’t necessarily kindness. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. There is an aspect of that that is actually a little bit true that you have to speak to the actual truth of things and not just paper stuff over.

Craig: Then think of the great Tennessee Williams line, “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers,” meaning the things they give me, the way they take care of me. It’s an interesting thing to think about is, characters who are kind oftentimes feel they don’t have main character energy-

John: Yes, I think you’re right.

Craig: -because they’re mentors, they’re the neighbor, they’re grandma, priest, buddy.

John: To some degree is that because I think of kind people as having completed an arc or being a little self-actualized. I think there’s something about that feels a little complete about a kind character and they have to learn to do that. There’s situations where I’m thinking of Cinderella who is kind, but she’s also— she starts the story just really weak and disempowered.

Craig: Cinderella is not a good character. Cinderella’s character is victim. That’s it. She’s a perfect person who is kind to the animals. She is a victim of mean people. Then a fairy godmother just goes, “Boop, boop. Have a great night.” She’s like, “Okay.” Then the prince is like, “Love you.” Then she wins.

John: There’s no great arc. There’s no–

Craig: No, it’s a fairy tale. It’s a fairy tale designed to punish the wicked as many of them are. There are morality plays as and apparently stepmothers were a huge problem in like 1500s Germany.

John: I’m not trying to steel-man stepmothers [unintelligible 01:03:24] some other issue, but I think they were actually much more common back in the day of when women died in childbirth all the time.

Craig: Sure, but why were they so mean?

John: On some genetic level, isn’t it the right choice to push aside your husband’s previous children so that he will spend his time and energy on your children? That’s a Hansel and Gretel.

Craig: It must’ve happened quite frequently, or it just happened to the Brothers Grimm.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: They just had a horrible stepmom and they were like, “Well, what should the villain be this time? Can we do stepmom again?”

John: Yes. I think we can do a little twist on it.

Craig: I don’t think we’re done with that.

John: Take her to a witch at a candy house.

Craig: Yes, let’s do that. That’ll be great. What about in this situation? Also stepmom. The problem with the archetype characters like Cinderella is they’re pointlessly kind to the extent that we don’t really care. We’re looking for main characters who are kind, who are almost punished for it in a way. Not that they started victims. They help someone. I’ve seen this in comedies. You help somebody and then you can’t get rid of them. Now what do you do? It’s that kind of thing.

John: Yes, it is. It is that kind of thing. I wonder how kind end up being both-

Craig: Sort.

John: Sort-

Craig: Type and-

John: -and characteristic. The etymology of that, that’s probably fascinating, but–

Craig: Yes, let’s look it up.

John: All right.

Craig: Here we go.

John: All right.

Craig: Here we go. There’s only one way to find out. Before the 12th century, it just all comes from middle English kinda from old English kind, akin to old English kin. Oh, okay.

John: Oh, so it’s coming from kin. Okay, great.

Craig: It’s like how you would treat kin in this kind way. You would treat them like family and also it’s family. It’s of a sort. That actually makes a ton of sense.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I like the idea of kindness as treating someone not family-

John: As family.

Craig: -as family, as kin.

John: Absolutely. It’s recognizing the shared experience of this and being able to put yourself— It’s beyond empathy, because empathy, again, is just compassion, seeing a thing but actually not doing a thing.

Craig: This is more like I’m forging a connection with you that I don’t need to, but I will.

John: Altruism, I think, is just more of a platonic idea. It’s a general approach to things, but it’s not specific to it.

Craig: This is why etymology is great.

John: I think it is actually a good example. It’s like, “Oh yes, that’s right.”

Craig: This is why you look things up.

John: Yes, look things up. That’s a lesson we’ve learned after–

Craig: Way to go, [unintelligible 01:05:57]?

John: After 679 episodes. We could just wonder about it, or we could just look them up.

Craig: We’re at 697. What happens at 700?

John: We haven’t–

Craig: Does the ball drop? What happens?

John: We haven’t discussed what should happen. I don’t know. It’s three weeks away.

Craig: Oh my God, this is a lot of pressure.

John: It’s a lot of pressure.

Craig: Although it’s a weird. 750 is a number, right?

John: 750 is a bigger number than 700.

Craig: 750 is insane.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s a real number.

John: We’ve got a year to worry about that.

Craig: That’s DCCL. That’s exciting.

John: I’m impressed that you were able to pull that off in your head, Roman numerals.

Craig: Standard puzzling thing. Oh, that’s right. You’ve got to know Roman numerals. Got to know them.

John: All right.

Craig: John, I’d like to thank you for being kind.

John: Craig, I’d like to thank you for being kind as well.

Link:

• Preorder the Scriptnotes book!
• Send your pre-order receipt to Drew at ask@johnaugust.com
• A Mother’s Revenge as told to Christina Cauterucci for SLATE
• Charlotte Laws’ fight with Hunter Moore, the internet’s revenge porn king by Carole Cadwalladr for The Guardian
• Help! My Husband’s Manic Pixie Past Has Become a Full-Blown Threat to My Sanity, Dear Prudence column for SLATE
• SNL’s What’s That Name
• An Offhand Remark About Gold Bars, Secretly Recorded, Upended His Life by Lisa Friedman for NYTimes
• The Unseen Fury of Solar Storms by Henry Wismayer for Noema
• TRMNL
• Steve Ballmer: Developers
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
• Birdigo
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 696 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what do screenwriters need to know about working with directors? This question is so foundational that producer Drew Marquardt has cut together a new compendium on just this topic. Drew, what are we hearing today?

Drew Marquardt: We’re going to start all the way back in Episode 4 from September 2011. We’re going to talk about working with directors as a screenwriter. It’s everything from that working relationship to set etiquette and all the way through post.

John: I love when we go back to the very early episodes where Craig and I have just no idea what we’re doing in a podcast.

Drew: Craig sounds bubbly in this one almost.

John: Yes. Weird. Yes. Yes. What happened to Craig Mazin?

Drew: What happened?

John: So much happened to Craig Mazin. He’s still fine. What’s the second episode we’re going to talk about?

Drew: Then we’re going to go to Episode 176. It starts as advice to a first-time director. In this case, it’s our own Matthew Chilelli. It’s how to run a set. It’s how to prep your shot list. It’s working with actors. It’s all that good stuff. Then from there, we’re going to look at the perfect director. We had that The Perfect series for a while. This outlines just sort of the ideal qualities of that writer-director relationship.

John: Fantastic. It’s weird that 172 episodes later we’re coming back to that topic. That’s still 10 years ago.

Drew: I know.

John: Just so much time has passed.

Drew: We’ve touched on directors a lot.

John: I think we’ve talked about directors a lot, but we haven’t done sort of special segments on them because I think we covered it pretty well. Now we are unearthing it from the archive and talking about it today.

In our bonus segment for our premium members, you, Drew Marquardt, are just about to be a director, again, yourself. You’re about to go off and direct a project. You suggested we talk about something that you’re experiencing for the first time about trying to cast actors.

Drew: Yes. I got my first round of rejections, like roundly rejected. It’s a strange feeling. I’d love to talk through it.

John: You were an actor before this. You’ve been rejected before, but now you’re being rejected by actors.

Drew: In a totally new way.

John: It’s a whole new way. This industry is mostly about rejection and it’s sort of on one side of the fence or the other.

Drew: Truly.

John: All right. We’ll dig into that. Listen to these two compendium bits from previous episodes. We’ll be back at the end for one cool things and then an other wrap up business. Thanks, Drew.

Drew: Thanks.

(Episode 4)

John: Today we want to talk about directors and how screenwriters deal with directors, and what that relationship is like. Some templates for thinking about how you would work with a director on a project. You’ve had many movies shot and have all of your director experiences been fantastic?

Craig Mazin: No. [laughs]

John: That’s weird.

Craig: No. I mean I think I’ve had more good ones than– I really only had one weird one. Mostly though they’ve been good, I would say. Mostly good.

John: Yes. I’d say most of mine have been pretty good, and some of the good ones were ones where I wasn’t all that involved with the project from the beginning. I just came in and did some work and helped them out. They went off and shot the movie and good luck and Godspeed.

Other times I’ve been on board the project from the very beginning, and a director comes on board. You’re trying to get them up to speed with where you’re at. So let’s aim more towards that from-inception kind of relationship because I think that’s more what our audience is listening for.

Also, we’re talking about movies. That relationship between a writer and a director in television is very, very different. The writer in television has more power but also has responsibility to the overall continuity of the show. The director is there to get what needs to be shot on the page, onto film, and into the episode.

Craig: Yes, in television the director doesn’t have to determine who is going to be playing these roles, what they’re dressing like, what the sets should look like, what the tone of the product is. All those things have been determined already. I mean that’s the massive gulf between feature directing and television directing.

John: Well, all those things we talk about are the crucial things that a director is doing while the director is getting up to speed with the script and thinking about making the movie. So let’s just start talking about all the stuff that a director needs to do because it’s tempting to think about, “Oh, the director is responsible for the story and for getting the story told.”

Yes, that’s one of his or her jobs, but so much of a director’s time as you’re approaching making a move is really dealing with completely different things that have nothing to do with the script itself. So recognizing that you as a screenwriter are essentially a department when it comes to making a movie.

You are going to be one of his meetings over the course of the day, but he’s also talking to the costume designer, the production designer, the cinematographer, the editors, the producers, the casting directors. As a giant village who’s come together to make this movie, he’s the village chief and you’re one of the villagers. Recognizing that difference is a hard thing to sometimes to get up to speed with.

Craig: Yes, we are very focused in on what we are responsible for. Like you said, that’s the story. As it turns out, that is the most important part of this whole thing. The story is more important than the costumes, the locations, where the lights are going to go, and what the makeup should look like. But all those things flow from the story and are mission-critical to making a good movie.

You have to look at every department as necessary. The story is the thing that’s driving everything. It’s just a question of time. Throughout the day he still has to sit there and figure out what the cars should be in the scene where, okay, and then she pulls up in her car. What car? Here, I got pictures of cars for you. That’s where you want to blow your brains out as a director.

Or we have a scene where there’s a party, and he’s going to crash the party and deliver a speech to the girl. Okay, well, how many people are at the party? What ages are they? Are they different races? How are they dressed? Is it upscale? Is it downscale? The billions of questions that start to bury the director in quicksand soak up so much time, and they all have to be answered. They’re all theoretically part of some cohesive vision.

John: A crucial thing that a smart screenwriter pointed out to me once is that as a screenwriter, you’re the only person who’s already seen the movie. So when you approach your first meeting as the director you have to remember that you already made the movie in your head. You can see the whole thing.

The director, he or she, hasn’t seen the whole thing yet and is still trying to figure out what the movie looks like and is starting to answer those thousands of questions ahead of time. If they want to go through every page of the script with you, it’s not necessarily because they have a problem with it. They’re just trying to figure it out.

Your job a lot of times is to almost be like an interpreter as if the script was written in some other language, and you have to help talk it through with them so that it can be understandable in their language and they understand what your intention was, who are these characters in the scene, what is important, and how they’re going to get through that.

Because ultimately the smart directors realize that they’re going to be on the set at four in the morning after very long days of shooting. They have two hours until the sun rises, and that actor is going to come to him and be saying like, “What am I supposed to be doing in this scene?” They have to be able to have an answer.

So the times where I’ve been most exhausted with a director, I’ve always tried to remember that, “Okay, that’s right. They’re trying to figure this all out, too.”

Craig: Yes, and you’re smart because you’re putting the movie first. It’s tempting to put your own ego and what you’ve invested in the screenplay first, but the point of the screenplay is the movie. What you’re talking about is helping the director do the best job they can do in realizing their vision and your vision and your intention. So obviously, part of that is explaining your intention and defending your intention.

Another part of it is recognizing that they have to do it for real. The movie that you saw in your head? That can’t ever be a movie because in your movie people move like they do in dreams. They’re on one end of the room. Now they’re on the other end of the room. Time speeds up and slows down in accordance with the importance of the moment.

But in a movie, time moves at one second per second. [laughs] You can’t speed it up, really, or slow it down. I mean, you can a little bit here and there, but there are demands of production that force the director to, frankly, make a less amazing, wonderful, kind of translucent thing than you have in your brain, which is this kind of shimmering dream of whatever your movie was.

That said, the more specific you are in your head about the movie — Like I wrote a blog piece once that says, “You can’t just walk into a building.” You should know if your character walks into a building, see the building. You may not want to waste a bunch of space on the page describing the building, but sooner or later someone’s going to say, “What building did you have in mind?” It’s good to know.

If you drop your jaw and go, “Uh, I don’t know. A building,” you’re expressing a different philosophy than everybody else in the movie. Because they have a job to actually shoot something. If you start saying, “Ah, who cares, it doesn’t matter,” or implying, “Who cares, it doesn’t matter,” you’ve put this thing between you and them.

John: You should be able to have an answer for any question that comes up. So rather than having generic type of like, “This is a police station.” Well, what kind of police station is this like? Where are we at in the police station?
The very first movie I was involved with, the first movie of mine that got produced, was Go. On that movie, fortunately Doug Liman had me super-involved. I was not only on set every moment, but every moment of pre-production I was there, too.

It was a great experience for us to get in the same brain space about what was important, what kinds of things we were going to see. But I always had an answer. It wasn’t always going to be the same answer as Doug’s, but when asked, or occasionally when not asked, but when I saw something going in the opposite direction, I could volunteer my opinion of like, “This is what the intention of this was.” Always couched in terms of like, “These are the other options I could see being out there, but this is what the actual intention of this thing was.”

From casting, from what locations we’re picking to, just the style of the world. Like how rundown of a grocery store are we at, and where are we at in this grocery store. The script reflected a lot of those things, but you’re not ever going to be able to have all those details on the page. They were in my head, though, like I had filmed it well enough in my head that I could at least give them my answer for how things were supposed to be.

Craig: Yes. That’s important. By the way, that is a help for a director.

Look, I’ve worked primarily with two directors, David Zucker and Todd Phillips — both incredibly different guys, very different filmmakers, different kinds of movies. But they’ve both been very generous with me, and they’ve included me as a partner. One of the parts of that contract that I honor is if they don’t get it — let’s say I express my intention as best I can, and they just don’t get it — it’s important for me to stop and go, “Here’s the deal.”

It doesn’t really matter if I get it. If they don’t get it, I have to figure out something else that they do get that satisfies whatever this intention is, because they have to do it. They’re the ones that actually have to relay it. Just as I think when you are directing, and your actor looks at you and says, “I just don’t get this,” you got to think about how to either make them see so that they can internalize and perform it, or find another way in.

The director has to be an adult enough to sublimate his own desires and ego to make the moment with the actors work, and the writer has to do the same for the director. Everybody ultimately has to be subordinate to the movie.

So when I work with those guys, they’re kind enough to let me on their set — and it’s their set — and they want me there, and I am respectful enough to help them. By help them, I mean help the movie, not the script.

John: Let’s talk about being on the set, and let’s talk set etiquette. I found a range of experiences on being the writer on the set. With Go, I was at the monitor for every shot. I had the contacts on, the little ear pieces on. We had a little hand-held monitor so if I needed to walk away from the camera, I could see what they were setting up and run back if something was not going to work right.

With those, I could always talk directly to Doug, and I had to talk directly to Doug because the camera was on his shoulder. So there really were no private conversations. Like I had to come up to him and say like, “What Sarah did was great. It’s going to be a problem when we cut to this next thing here, because we’re setting the expectation…” I would try to give a note that both validated what just happened, but also explain why I was coming up and talking to him. So that he could then turn to Sarah and say like, “Yes, what he just said,” and shoot the next take.

Other cases, like on Big Fish, first day of shooting we’re in Montgomery, Alabama. Tim picked a really easy day of stuff to shoot, which is a smart choice. A really simple thing where Billy Crudup is coming to talk with Jessica Lange.

So I’m watching on the monitor, and I see one little thing, “Oh, I should tell Tim that, that there’s a little moment, opportunity there.” I go up, I pull him aside, it’s like, “Tim, that was great what she just did. But there’s also the chance here when he’s there, and there might be a little moment here.” And I could see like these garage doors go down in front of his eyes.

Craig: [laughs]

John: I realized, this is not going to be the kind of set relationship we have. He doesn’t want me to be chumming with those notes, and it’s a very good idea for me to go back to Los Angeles.

Craig: [laughs]

John: There wasn’t a problem. There wasn’t a disagreement, there wasn’t anything like that. But that wasn’t the way he wanted to work, and I wasn’t going to be able to have a lot of input on the choices made on the set.

Craig: Well, surprise surprise, the directors are as different to each other as we are to each other. I mean, David Zucker and I essentially would co-direct. We sat together at the monitor — I don’t think we would ever move on unless we both agreed to move on. Occasionally, he wouldn’t even care if I gave notes to the actors. We walked through the setups together in the morning. We set the blocking together. We very much worked hand-in-hand.

Not at all the case with Todd Phillips, who is a very different kind of director, and certainly a more traditional one. Todd is the captain of the set 100 percent. As he’s pointed out, I think the way he’s put it is, “I don’t need you to be here.” [laughs] “I’ve made plenty of movies without you. That said, if you’d like to be here, it could be helpful.”

So I take that to heart. I mean, I don’t think I maybe…With that relationship, it’s really just about picking those moments where you think I’m going to just say, “Okay, this is something that matters to me that’s really important, and I’m going to share that with him.” Either he’s going to go, “Shut up, stupid,” or, “Yes, that’s a good idea.” But I pick those moments carefully and few and far between. Frankly, he’s pretty good at what he does, and he’s the sort of very independent director.

One thing that I want to make clear about directing: so much of it has to do with confidence. You need to feel confident in your own vision. Some directors, their confidence goes up the more direct and obvious help they get. Other directors, their confidence goes down.

I understand that. I’m kind of that way myself. You and I write on our own. We don’t have writing partners. I always feel like I should be able to move this boulder myself. So you have to learn which kind of director you’re dealing with. If it’s a director that likes moving the boulder himself, just pick your moments carefully, and don’t be a nudge.

John: One of the luxuries of being a writer on the set is if you’re watching the monitor and you see something that you can fix and you have a good idea, you can speak up and have a good idea. If you see something that’s not working and you don’t know how to fix it, you can just sit there and shut up.

Craig: [laughs] Yes, exactly.

John: Versus the director, who every time he calls, “Cut,” there’s 20 eyes looking at him saying, “Okay, what are we going to do next?” And the director has to figure out who he needs to talk with, about what needs to change, has to figure out what wasn’t working about that moment.

Craig: Yes.

John: So giving that person the space to be able to do that and hopefully help where you can help him or her make that next thing happen.

Craig: That’s a good point. I will say — I don’t care who the director is — give them a little bit of time to find it. No director is going to get it on take one. Well, occasionally magic happens. But the point is, if you watch a take and you go, “Oh, no,” after watching that take, it’s for the same reason people would say, “Oh, no,” if they read the first thing you typed in the morning.

It’s beginning. The process is beginning. Don’t overreact. Don’t jump in there and say, “It’s not working. It’s not working.” Believe me, they know. Everybody knows. [laughs] It’s fine. You have all day to shoot two and a half pages, let the director do what they do.

The only times I ever discuss things with Todd, for instance, is if I thought, “Okay, here’s just another way of approaching this.” Someone once said, “Don’t ever show up with problems, just show up with solutions.” Give them an alternative. If they like it, they’ll do it.

John: Another director who I’ve worked with twice is McG. I love McG. McG can be frustrating at times, but I do love McG. What I love about McG is his energy and his passion. It’s hard to connect with McG on a story level often, but it’s easy to connect with him on a, “This is what it’s going to feel like,” level.

I think no matter who you’re talking with as a director, early on in those conversations, have conversations about tone and feeling, and what this is like to you. A lot of times you end up watching other movies with directors or talking about references. With Tim Burton I could just go into his office, and he’ll have water-color painted a lot of scenes from the script. It says, “Okay, I get what this world is like as he sees it.”

Like for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I was very specific about a lot of the stuff in it, but like the Oompa-Loompas, how is he going to do the Oompa-Loompas? Then you go into his office, and you see he has this scale drawing of what the Oompa-Loompas are like standing next to all the different characters. You can just see everybody in their wardrobe, it’s like, “Oh, okay. I get what this movie is like to Tim.” Then every other conversation I have can be about supporting that vision of how he sees the world of Willy Wonka versus what I might have had in my head originally.

Craig: That’s a good way in with directors who aren’t also prominently screenwriters. In working with David and Todd, I’m working with writers, because they’re screenwriters in their own right. That, actually, also dramatically changes the way you approach that relationship. Because with both of those guys, I’ve been writing partners.

So I don’t have to do quite as much ambassadorship with the script to them because we all wrote it together. That also takes an enormous burden off of me — or I guess not even a burden, because there’s no burden on me, it’s just a worry that I don’t have to have. Because the truth is I know that they actually sat here and worked through this scene with me. We made it together. They’ve seen it in their heads. It makes sense to them. That’s a big relief.

John: It’s great when you have that opportunity to work with a writer-director who actually can generally understand the writing process on that. I think there’s a misconception that because of the perils of auteur theory is that all directors really come from a place of story, and understand story, and have a great grasp of what the narrative of something is. A lot of them don’t.

Some of the best directors, I think, are the ones who are very upfront about that’s not their strongest suit. Just like we don’t expect every director to be a master of cinematography, we don’t expect every director to be a master of visual effects. There are some who are great at figuring out all the pieces of a story and how to move from the beginning to the end, and there’s others who are really good at getting that story up onto the screen. Recognizing which kind of director you are working with early on is crucial with that.

One of the places where I feel like I think I’m good at, which I think a lot of screenwriters will tend to be good at once they have some experience with it, is editing. We’re often the right people to come into the editing room after there’s a director’s first cut to help talk through, “This is what’s not working, and this is what we may want to talk about changing.”
We talked about that first test screening, which is just incredibly nerve-wracking. Especially if you’re the director, of course, because you’ve been staring at this thing on an Avid screen for eight weeks, 12 weeks, trying to get things to work, and you have no idea if it actually works.

As a screenwriter, you’re watching it a lot of times blind. You just don’t know what movie it is that they ended up making. Where I’ve been most helpful to directors, I think, honestly, is being that first set of notes after the test screening and saying like, “These are the things that were awesome. These are the things that worked great. These are the things we had challenges with, and here are some ways we might want to talk about changing them.” Being that first person with the best notes is a helpful role for a screenwriter, I think.

Craig: I totally agree. To that end, here’s just a bit of practical advice. If you want to be a screenwriter that collaborates with filmmakers beyond just, “Congrats, we’re making your movie. See you at the premier,” you need to understand the process of editing. You can’t approach it like you’re just sitting there watching a show going, “I don’t know. I didn’t get this part,” or, “Why…it’s just boring here.”

You have to understand how editing works, and you have to be able to speak the language of editing. Because ultimately, you need to — if you’re going to give advice, and it’s going to be a solution-oriented advice — you need to be able to say, “In this scene, how about just cutting the head” “How about taking this much off, and just keeping that line there?” “I know that you might have a problem with that because let’s say they’ve been talking up to that line and it’s all one shot, but do you have any coverage where you can establish them quietly and then just go in for that line?”

If you can talk like that, then your advice is usable, and it’s also clinical. Because remember, the director is going to be about as fragile as a human can be when they’re showing that cut for the first time. It’s truly nerve-wracking. So try and get some kind of handle on how editing actually works.

The other thing I was going to add was just when you were talking about directors who write and don’t write, comedy, it’s very rare — I don’t know why, it’s just the way it is — I don’t know any successful comedy, or repeatedly successful comedy directors, that don’t write. I don’t know if you can direct comedy if you don’t write. I’m not sure you can.

John: I’m sure if we spent a few minutes on that we’d find some really good directors who aren’t writers, but all of my favorite comedies I can think of have writer-directors behind them.

Craig: Yes. I mean, if you look at the guys doing it now, Phillips, Apatow– I think Dobkin writes. Dobkin may be an example, actually. Because Wedding Crashers is awesome. I don’t know if he writes.

John: I don’t perceive him as being a writer.

Craig: Yes, well, then maybe I’m wrong.

John: [laughs]

Craig: Look at that. There you go. [laughs] Mazin’s wrong again.

John: We’re out about time, but let’s talk through some general advice for screenwriters dealing with directors. First off, the question of when a director becomes involved. Like, I may come on board this project which it’s the director’s idea. So I would be coming in, working very closely in collaboration with him, which can be really great and exciting, but can also be exhausting, because you feel him trying to shoot the movie while it’s still being-

Craig: Yes, yes.

John: -while it’s still at a very raw state. It can be great because it can be a really good collaboration. It could just take a lot of time. More often, you will have written something, and now a director comes on board. Your responsibility is to have a meeting of the minds where you can instill what was going on in your head to him or her, and she can communicate back to you like what she sees for the project.

That’s where I’m at right now with Susan Stroman on Big Fish, where I’ve had now 12 years to work with Big Fish in various forms, and she has to process what I’ve done and pull out of me what she needs to make it on the stage.

Craig: Yes. If the director isn’t writing with you, I think it’s best to give yourself a little distance. Just like they need to get takes one through three in before anybody starts yapping in their ear, I feel like the writer needs some space to just write the script.

So if the director’s not writing, as long as everybody is connected on the vision and the rough idea of what the story is, you just…Yes, it’s not a good idea to have them over your shoulder while you’re doing it. Look, even editors get to do an assembly.

John: Yes. They give everyone a chance.

Craig: Everybody needs their shot. Yes.

John: As you get closer to production, you have to accept the fact that you are going to become another department. Whatever close, one-on-one relationship you have with the director, it’s going to be a little bit more distant just because his or her time is going to be divided between a bunch of different people who need answers out of him — line producers, ADs, every department head wants as much time as they can possibly get.

So hopefully most of the big issues have been solved. Hopefully you feel like you really have a movie. If you get a chance to do a table reading, that’s awesome, because it’s the only way you’ll ever know that the actors read the script at least once. [laughs]

Craig: Well, and it’s your chance, too, to kind of…It’s your last shot at rewriting before they start shooting.

John: Yes.

Craig: Start to hear what works and what doesn’t.

John: And if there’s lines that an actor literally can’t say, you have to change them. You can’t make an actor say a line that he or she doesn’t understand.

Craig: Yes. They’re human beings. Use your actors to the best of their abilities. They’re all unique, and they’re there because they can do something we can’t, so make the best use of them. You’re right, as you approach production, understand that you’re a department, but be the best department. Be the department that the director turns to at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. Be the safe port in the storm.

You are technically — not technically. If you do it right, you’re really the only person that they can look at and say, “You and I both get this. Everybody else is looking like the blind men at the elephant. They’re feeling the piece of the elephant they feel, you and I can see the movie.” Be that person.

John: Sometimes I’ll have a producer on set who actually has the whole movie in his or her head, but more often, you’re going to be the only person around who has a understanding of what the whole story is, and how this little piece fits into the whole bigger piece.

Craig: That’s right.

John: The classic stories are always like the director decides to, “Oh, I really like that actress. Let’s throw her into this scene, just in the background.” The screenwriter says, “No, no, you don’t remember! She’s already dead!” A lot of times you are that person who remembers that. There’s a script supervisor who’s there, and his or her job is to check for some things like that, but you’re the person who remembers why everything is the way something is.

Craig: Yes. I love script supervisors, but they’re not narrative supervisors. That’s the difference. They’re supervising the day’s work on the page and making sure that when you shoot things out of sequence, “Okay. Show me the Polaroid of what they look like in the scene before so I can make sure they match up.”

John: “Coffee cup right hand, coffee cup left hand.”

Craig: Yes. Exactly. “You should be looking camera left and not camera right.” But we are the ones that technically we should know the narrative better than anybody.

John: We’re the story supervisors.

Craig: So to speak, yes.

John: Then I would say, whatever your function is on the set, you’ll go away for a while, and the director will do his or her cut. You’ll get a chance to see it, and that’s hopefully a time where you can be a real help and a real ally to the director in getting the best version of this movie done. Because you had your shot at making the movie when you wrote the script, he has his shot shooting it and doing that first cut, and that final product is what you’re pushing to.

You’re always trying to write a movie, you weren’t trying to write a script.

Craig: Exactly, exactly. So just let the document go. Once the cameras are rolling, let it go. Every morning you take that piece of paper, the two and a half or three pieces of paper, look at them, love them, and then say goodbye to them. Because by the end of the day, they’re just paper, and now it’s movie. So service the movie.

John: Definitely.

(Episode 176)

John: Our first is a question that comes from Matthew Chilelli who is the person who edits this podcast. So, he wrote this question and I said, you know what, we’ll answer your question on the air and you’ll get to hear it first because you’ll edit the episode that has the answer to your question.

So, Matthew Chilelli and his writing partner are directing a movie that they raised money for on Kickstarter. His question was what advice would you give to a first-time director of his own script. I’m like that’s a great question. I had some thoughts, and I’m sure Craig will have some thoughts, too, because we both directed and we both learned a lot.

My quick bullet points of advice is to remember that you’re not there to throw a party. One of my sort of first real worries about directing a movie is I wanted everyone to be happy. I wanted to make sure that the set was comfortable and that everyone was having a good time. Then I realized, you know what, this isn’t a party. It’s not my job to make sure everyone is having a good time. It’s my job to make sure that everyone has the information they need so they can do their jobs really, really well.

Once I stopped thinking about myself as host and started thinking of myself as the person who is directing the movie, things got much happier and better and everyone was happier.

You will be facing a thousand questions. I was terrified of the thousand questions. Should it be a green shirt or a red shirt? Like this? Like this? Do you want a wider lens, a tighter lens? Here are some things: you will usually have an answer. And just pick an answer. And answers are great. Although you can also say, “I don’t know.” And you can solicit their opinions. You can figure out sort of what the choices really mean.

You can also say, “None of the above.” And if the none of the choices that are presented to you are the correct choices, say none of the above and let them come back to you with more choices.

While you’re directing, always remember what the intention is of the scene and what the intention is of the moment. Because when you’re in the middle of directing a scene and things are going crazy and you’re turning around shooting from one side to the other side and things are just nuts, it’s so easy to forget what the scene is actually about. And so making notes to yourself before the day starts, like the scene is about this is incredibly useful. Like the minimum viable scene will be about this, rely on that.

If you are directing actors, directing actors I find works best with verbs. So, it’s very hard for an actor to be happy, be sad, be angrier. Give an actor a verb to play. So you can say don’t let him walk through that door. Or, you can sort of give them a simile. Can we try that same moment but as if he’s just said the most horrifying thing imaginable to you? That’s something an actor can do. An actor can’t be an adjective. So, those are my quick run throughs of advice.

Craig: All spectacular suggestions. I agree with every single one of them.

John: Cool.

Craig: I’ll only add the following.

John: Please.

Craig: When you’re directing a movie that it’s your first time and you’ve written the script, you will have a natural tendency to want to be the person that is defending the guy that came before you, the screenwriter. So, in other situations where we’ve written a script and somebody else directs it we go, oh my god, what are you doing to my screenplay, and it’s bad. And you think, well, when I get in there I can defend this.

However, that’s not the person you should be worrying about. When you direct, the person that you should be solely concerned with is the you in the future who is in the editing room. That’s the person you’re taking care of. That is the person who needs you right now to figure this out.

So, give that person options. When you’re a first-time director, you may think I’ve figured out, I know exactly what I want to do with this. And you may think that’s the name of the game. But sometimes the name of the game is collect options. And then you’re going to find this movie and write this movie in editorial. And Matthew is an editor, so he understands this better than most. To that end, I believe in shot-listing, particularly for a first-time director, and especially if you’re dealing with limited time which typically a first-time director is.

You don’t have a lot of days where you can go, “Yes, we didn’t figure it out today, I’ll figure it out tomorrow.” It doesn’t go that way for you. You’ve got to get the day’s work done. So, shot-list.

As a writer we are obviously absorbed with all writerly things: character, dialogue, theme, scenario. As a director, take a moment to just think about aesthetics. Think about your color palette. Think about movies that look the way you want this movie to look. Think about how you want to move the camera. Do you want long lenses, wide lenses? By the way, if you’re not sure what those things are, pick up a book. There are all sorts of instructional things online now so you can learn.

But really think about how you want it to look, how you want the camera to move and feel, because that is essentially the directorial equivalent of theme for the screenwriter. And without theme as a screenwriter we tend to just wander without some sort of unifying visual concept as a director. You’re just collecting footage and making a big TV show.

So, work on all of those things, but most importantly really, really care for your future self who will be in editorial because that future self is the one who is going to — every director, first-time, 20th time, at some point in editorial will curse themselves for what they didn’t do. So, you want to try and limit the amount of cursing of yourself you end up doing.

John: I think that’s fantastic advice. Let’s talk about what shot-list is, because I think sometimes people get confused about that term. So, there is storyboarding, and storyboarding is when you are sort of sketching out what you think the shots are going to be like to build a sequence. A shot-list is a much more practical thing. It’s literally a thing you’re probably holding in your hand, which is like a bullet point list of these are the shots I need to make this scene.

Craig: Right.

John: And that’s something you probably would do in preproduction. You’d figure out like what the shot-list would be for a scene. But honestly it’s a thing you might do in the morning before you’ve started that day’s work and you’re going to hopefully have people you can trust and talk through that shot-list with.

The people who are so crucial are your first AD. And your director of photography. And I found it to be so useful to like walk through with Nancy Schreiber, my DP, and my line producer, like these are the shots I need in this scene. And she could tell me like, “Okay, well let’s prioritize this and prioritize this because of light.” That was so useful.

Also, when you’re making your shot-list, prioritize within that. Because there are going to be some shots you’re just not going to get. And so you need to be able to tell the scenes, even if you never got that second close-up that you really wanted, okay, but that’s why you put that at the bottom of your list. So, no matter if you’re making a tiny movie or a giant movie, there is going to be stuff that you just don’t get. And protecting that future editor self, you want to make sure you get as much of the stuff you do need and this extra stuff is just gravy.

Craig: That’s absolutely right. That is a perfect description of a shot-list. And what you find as a first-time director is that directing — whatever you thought about directing is wrong. And that a huge amount of what directing is is breaking moments down geometrically. It is literally figuring out how to capture a moment through angles. And the angles could be moving and they could be different sizes, but ultimately you’re fracturing a moment into various geometric angles that will be repeated so that you can edit them together.

And understanding the geometry of your scene is really important before you shot-list, because sometimes if you think about it you’ll say I don’t want to break this down. I actually think this is a one-er. I think that’s how this works. I don’t want coverage here. I want this to be about these two people playing something in the moment together. And if it’s a one-er and you know it’s a one-er, no problem. Everything is a tradeoff, right? You’ll probably do nine takes of that, but there’s no more coverage, so you’re done with it, right.

If you’re doing traditional coverage with two people talking, you’ve got yourself a master, and overs, and closes. Okay. So, you don’t have to do as many takes of each one, but there’s a lot more setups.

So, one thing to do as the first-time director of your own screenplay is to go through your screenplay and start asking yourself this question: how would this moment be best broken down geometrically? What do I want to see and how? It will help you make your shot-list. And then as you said your DP and your first AD will have all sorts of great ideas to add to it and to make it more efficient.

John: One last thing, thinking about that future person you’re going to be when you’re in the editing room, a lot of times as you’re watching a shot happen before you you say like, oh, that was good, but this thing wasn’t good, that thing — like it was almost right, but this wasn’t quite right. If you know you’re going to be cutting it, it doesn’t have to be flawless all the way through. It would be great if it were flawless, where you had that one take that’s fantastic, but pushing for that eighth take to try to get one perfect take through on one person’s coverage is almost never worth it.

Craig: Yes.

John: If you know you have the moments, if you know that I can see and feel what this is like, then you’re wasting a lot of your day to try to get to that perfect eighth take when you have the stuff you need in those earlier takes.

Craig: It’s why you need — before you direct anything you must have experience editing something. You must. You need to know where the scissors come in and where the scissors can’t come in. You need to know when something is married to something else so if one half of it is no good and one half of it is good, it’s no good.

But Matthew happily has that experience, so that’s a huge part of it. It’s how you figure out how to break a moment down very often.

John: Yup. So, a great segue to our next topic which is our Perfect Series. And this time it’s the Perfect Director. So, I want to take a look at the perfect director from the writer’s point of view since we’re a mostly a writer’s podcast. But also from what a perfect director looks like from an actor’s point of view, from different department heads’ point of view. Because how does a director do her job the best and what are the tools and techniques she’s using to make the best movie. So, obviously a very wide topic, but Craig how should we start?

Craig: Well, let’s start with what we’re most comfortable with, I suppose, which is how — what we want from a screenwriting point of view when we work with a director what do we want. And I’m going to dispense with the obvious ones. We want them to be good. [laughs] We want them to know how to shoot. We want them to be visually interesting. We want them to know how to work with great actors. We want them to be really specific, make terrific choices. But, of course, what a lot of screenwriters will say is we want them to shoot the script.

Well, I don’t want the director to shoot the script. I want the director to shoot the movie of the script. But here is what I want most of all: I want the director to presume respectfully that if something is in the script it’s there for a reason. I think the biggest mistake directors make vis-a-vis screenwriters is when they read a screenplay they presume that some of it is just whatever. There’s moments that have to happen, but then there are moments inside of the moments that are like, eh, you know what, I actually would love to do this, or I’d love to do that or it would be more fun if the camera was here, more fun if the camera is there. This just feels like a waste of time.

And, not always, depending on the quality of the screenwriter, but I would argue if it’s a good screenwriter 99% of the time that is a huge mistake.

John: Yes.

Craig: It is not a mistake to ask the screenwriter how can we do this differently. It is a mistake to say quite arrogantly, “Some of this isn’t important.” It is as much of a mistake as it would be to open up a human body during surgery, grab a hold of some little gibbet and go, “Eh, this probably doesn’t mean anything,” and just pull it out.

Because we put things in on purpose. Then, of course, what happens is, three or four weeks later, you might get a call like, “Oh, this doesn’t make sense.” Yes, well, because you took that thing out and you didn’t realize, because you hadn’t lived in it the way I did. When you want to change things in a screenplay, and it’s perfectly fine to say, “Look, we’re changing it, we must change it for the following reasons, even if one of the reasons is my directorial taste.” Tell me, how can I change this so that I don’t hurt anything? First, do no harm. That’s what I want from a director more than anything else in terms of how they interact with me. That involves, obviously, a certain amount of respect and acknowledgement that the screenplay isn’t just a suggestion or even a blueprint, which I’ve never understood, but rather is a conceptualized movie.

John: What I’m looking for in a director is that someone who can come in and channel this vision of a movie onto the screen. It’s really a person who can experience the movie internally and then has the skills to be able to put that up on a screen. That is such a unique skill set. There are people who are just amazingly good at it and who can do things that I would just never think of to do. That’s what gets me so excited, is when a director who can just do these amazing things. I cannot underscore enough is that I don’t want this person to make my script.

I want this person to make my movie and make her version of my movie. I want that movie to be fantastic. When there’s suggestions or changes or concerns or things they don’t like, that’s awesome. Let’s talk those through, but don’t try to change them on the set without getting some feedback, because yes, everything that’s in the script was there for a reason. There’s a reason why this whole carefully constructed puzzle fits together one way. There’s other ways it could be assembled, but there was one way it was supposed to work. If you can talk with me about that beforehand, that’s awesome.

In those first conversations, a lot of those first conversations with the director is basically just talking through the whole movie so I get a sense of what the movie looks like in the director’s head. Sometimes that really does mean as a screenwriter, I’m explaining scenes and like, well, I wrote it and now I’m actually talking through the whole explanation of it, but it’s so important that we’d be on the same page, literally the same page written, but also the same idea about what the intentions are of those scenes.

The times where things have gone not especially well have been cases where the director really thought the scene was about something completely different than what I thought the scene was about. It’s fine for us to have a difference of opinion, but we didn’t even have a difference of opinion. He just shot a different scene than what I meant that scene to be. Then that scene no longer shows up at the movie, and there’s problems.

Craig: Absolutely true. The other thing that I think the perfect director exhibits is patience. Now, directing, I’ve said this before many times, directing a movie, a feature film, is the hardest job in show business. Directors cannot be patient with everybody. In fact, most directors really have only a very tiny amount of patience that they reserve entirely for their actors. They must be patient with their actors because if they yell at their actors or are impatient with their actors, they’re getting bad performances.

Of course, this is all about what they’re getting on screen from their human beings, unless they’re all computer-generated robots. I would ask the perfect director to extend that patience to actors, to writers, that we need actually the same amount of patience. The reason I say that is not because we’re sensitive flowers, but rather because you will get a better movie if you’re patient with the screenwriter. Frankly, there are a lot of directors who are least patient with the screenwriter.

They find the screenwriter and the screenplay to be this offensive reminder that this world that they’re creating is not entirely their world. It’s disruptive of their confidence. I understand that. There are screenwriters who get fussy about changes. The perfect director is patient with the screenwriter because they will get better work, and they will make a better movie if they are. I always tell my fellow screenwriters to be patient in return to the director. They need us at our best in order to survive, and we are all in the same boat of trying to make a good movie. A good director is patient with the screenwriter.

John: You talk about how incredibly hard the director’s job is, and I completely agree. It’s like you’re a general leading your troops into battle. The crucial thing is that you have to have the trust of your troops. Your crew has to trust and believe that you have a vision for how you’re going to win this fight, how you’re going to succeed in doing this thing. That means that you had a lot of planning. You really knew what you were going to do ahead of time.

You’re able to read the lay of the land and see, like, okay, on the day we’ve arrived at this location, this location is different than how I expected it to be. I’m flexible enough to roll with what needs to actually happen because the directors who are inflexible, who everything has to be exactly the way that they had storyboarded it, are not going to be able to roll with the changes and roll with the punches. The great directors can also recognize and really remember the intention of the scene.

If an improv moment comes up that’s actually better than what was there, they will be able to incorporate it and be able to both have the version of the scene as it existed, but also recognize this new version is better, funnier, more dramatic. It does something unique and wonderful. I’m so glad I’m going to have that in the editing room as well.

Craig: Right. Yes. That reminds me, just another bit of advice, going backwards for Matthew Chilelli as he approaches his first movie. A good director leads the crew, but also understands that the crew will not be able to tell her or him that they’re making a good movie. All the crew sees are dailies. That’s what they see. They see live dailies going on, and they may see funny moments, and they may see an actor do a hysterical thing or a beautiful thing. As the old saying goes, there’s nothing better than your dailies, and there’s nothing worse than your first cut. They don’t know what the movie is.

John: They don’t.

Craig: Don’t ask them what they think, and don’t be encouraged or discouraged if they offer their opinions. No one except for you and your editor has any sense, really, of the movie that is going to result. You’re the only ones that have seen the completed jigsaw puzzle. You’re just making pieces now, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: Don’t overreact to that whole thing. In comedy, we called it dailies laugh, where the crew just goes, “Oh my God,” and they’ll come up to you at lunch. “That was so funny.” In your heart, you know, “Ah, it’s getting cut out of the movie.” There’s something about those moments, those moments that are so funny in the moment, so often just do not live in the matrix of the put-together film.

John: Yes. Any last bits of summary for our perfect director? I don’t think there’s one– I would say there’s not one perfect archetype for a director, and I’ve worked with directors who I love who are vastly different from each other, and that’s fine, that’s okay. They all have different ways of communicating their vision to their department heads and to me, and to everybody else who has to see what it is. Sometimes it’s not immediately clear to me, I have no idea what you’re doing, but it all works.

The directors who I admire as a viewer, I don’t necessarily know what they’re like on the set, but if people are working with them again and again, there’s probably something that they’re doing that’s really, really good. They’re probably treating their crews with respect. They’re probably able to communicate what it is that they’re trying to do, so people can do their very best jobs. They’re able to inspire the best work out of people, and that’s how you make great movies.

Craig: Yes, I think that frankly, the best directors, the directors that I love, as I run down the list in my mind, they’re either writers or they really respect writers. The directors that I find ultimately are disposable, who disappear or who just make stuff I don’t like, are directors that are notorious for not giving a crap about the script, that the script is a ha-ha-ha, I’m a director.

[music]

John: All right. We are back in 2025. I had to actually think about what year we were in.

Drew: It’s a weird year.

John: It’s time for one cool thing. My one cool thing is also very nostalgic-driven. Way back in the day, I loved HyperCard. I’ve probably talked about this on the show before, but, Drew, you’re probably too young to remember even what HyperCard was.

Drew: I don’t know what HyperCard is at all.

John: HyperCard was not a programming language. It was a thing that came with Macintoshes for a certain number of years that you could build these things called stacks, which were– Before web pages, but they were things you could build to do cool things. You could build games out of them. You had buttons and fields you could drag around. It was how a lot of people got started understanding programming, and also the sense of objects that had scripts. It was a really foundational, important way of how I got to appreciate computers.

Drew: Now that you say that, I think I was there when you and Jordan Mechner were talking about HyperCard.

John: Fantastic. HyperCard was great. There’s a new app called Scrappy, which is a web app, which reminds me a lot of the things I loved about HyperCard, because in the back of my head, I always thought like, “Oh, it would be fun to build something that was like a new HyperCard.” These folks went out and did it. It is a very bare-bones, but surprisingly clever demonstration test project that talks through things you might want to build in Scrappy that are just one-purpose, one-time things. It’s a fun little toolbox.

Drew: Oh, I love these things. These are the things that I feel like, especially for kids, getting the sort of foundational building blocks of working with computers, and more than just pointing and clicking kind of thing. I am terrible at this, so I should probably do it.

John: One of the things I loved about HyperCard is that the distinction between building a thing and using a thing are very minor. It’s not like you have to commit to a build, and then you run it and see if it works. You just click on either your pointer, like a finger, or your arrow. Either you’re editing it or you’re designing it, you can do both at the same time, which was a thing I loved so much about HyperCard.

Drew: It’s the computer equivalent of potato clocks.

John: Yes. Oh, yes, great, simple. Fun things to play with. If you’re nostalgic for old school programming or just feel like something to spend some time on, Scrappy, and I’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

Drew: I love it.

John: What do you have for us?

Drew: I, last weekend, went to Mount Wilson for the first time, which, if you’re in Los Angeles, Mount Wilson is an observatory that– It feels high above us and far away, but it’s actually really close, and it’s really, really cool. It’s where all of the early physics discoveries were made in the early 20th century. Einstein was there and all that stuff. It’s a place that I’ve heard about so many times, but when we had the fires earlier this year, it was severely threatened. It was one of those places that, actually, I ended up only thinking about when we would have fires, being like, “Oh, I need to go to Mount Wilson before that’s gone eventually.” It’s so cool.

John: Talk to me about the experience of visiting Mount Wilson. Did you have to get tickets because there was timed entries or anything like that?

Drew: There’s timed entries on the weekends. They said to get there early that they sell out. We didn’t have any issue with that. You don’t get to look in the telescope for the weekend tours. Those are specific nighttime tours, and those ones you have to be hawkish and look online, and that kind of thing. We’re going to do that now. They just do tours of the grounds on the weekends, and it’s a working research facility still. One reason, though, that I would encourage everyone to see it is because of all the cuts to the NSF.

They’re hurting for money a little bit, even though they’re basically a national park with these incredible telescopes and towers and working scientists. One scientist just has her dog sitting there. There’s a lab dog, and you just get to go through, and they get to talk to you about space and the universe and all that stuff.

John: How many people that were touring this place were adults versus families with kids?

Drew: It was mostly adults. There was one family with kids. It was the best tour group I’ve ever been with. It seemed like a lot of people who had jobs at JPL-

John: Oh, sure.

Drew: -or local scientists, so people were curious and asking really good questions. I think part of the reason I had such a great time is because our tour group was actually adults, and it wasn’t just like awe and clap. It was thoughtful, and it was considerate, and it was really cool.

John: One thing I often forget, but I think people outside of Los Angeles may not even be aware of is that in addition to Hollywood, Southern California is also the home to the aerospace industry, and so we have JPL and other big manufacturers of satellites and things like that, so we also have a bunch of smart people here, and it’s fun sometimes going to see smart people in their domain.

Drew: Yes, going to that space. Also, so Mount Wilson does movie screenings up in their things, so they’re showing Contact soon and all sorts of stuff. There’s fun reasons to go up there. I think they have musicians come up and do stuff. I just loved it, and I’ve been here for a decade and never made my way up.

John: I’ve been here for multiple decades, and I’ve never been up there, so we’ll put that on the list. It’s worth the trip. Cool. Drew, thank you for putting together this compendium episode.

Drew: Of course. It was really fun.

John: It’s Scriptnotes. It’s produced by Drew Marquardt, with segments this week produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions that we often answer on the show. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You will find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube, just search for Scriptnotes.

We have t-shirts, hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find all those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. As always, we really do appreciate our premium subscribers. You make it possible for Drew and Matthew, and everyone else to do this show every week. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on casting as a director, as opposed to being an actor–

Drew: Getting very rejected.

John: Drew, thanks so much.

Drew: Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Drew Marquardt, you’re about to head off and shoot a short film. It’s a short film that I’ve read the script of. It is delightful. You have two lead roles in this short film, and you are trying to cast them. Talk to us about the process of casting a short film in Los Angeles.

Drew: The first thing we did is we hired a casting director. You can go out to breakdown services yourself if you’re doing it. The main mistake I did is I didn’t take your and Craig’s advice of writing to the things that I have, and I wrote a short film about two elderly people, basically. Which was exciting to me because it felt like a thing I hadn’t seen before, but I don’t have those things. I think first thing is, if you’re in Los Angeles, write for your actor friends and don’t go out and cast.

We hired a casting director, partly because I had hoped to get names, or faces if not names.

John: Actors you’re like, “Oh, yes, I’ve seen them in things.”

Drew: That person.

John: Yes.

Drew: Great character actors. Sure. Because there’s so many great character actors, especially, so I’m looking in the 75 to 90 range, and I was like, there’s so many of those people around.

John: They won’t do the nudity required in the role.

Drew: They won’t do the nudity for the role. [laughs]

John: I’m kidding.

Drew: My casting director reached out to them, and I wrote cover letters for all of these people who I’ve seen for decades. Another factor here is we don’t have any money, and short films don’t have any money. I’m learning that all of these confluences of factors really play into it, because I had naively thought like, “Well, what else are they doing?” This is just a good weekend thing, and it would be hours towards SAG Health Insurance or something like that. We could come at it from that angle. In reality, I think they’ve got nothing to prove. They’re very comfortable, and getting them interested is a little bit more difficult than I thought it was going to be.

John: Yes. You had come at this from the other side. Back in the day, you were auditioning for things, stuff was coming your way, and you were passing on some things. As an actor, what were things you would pass on? Is it things like, I don’t want to go to [unintelligible 00:56:22], I don’t want to–

Drew: [laughs] No, I think at the time, I would’ve loved to go to [unintelligible 00:56:26]. I think it was not being confident in the director. It would be usually someone– I’m going to flatter myself and say young, like me, but who might be slightly inexperienced, and wondering where the funding was coming from, especially if it’s low-budget. I did a few low-budget things because I liked the script so much.

John: How did they turn out?

Drew: They turned out okay.

John: Yes, I’m realizing now, I’ve never actually seen any of your cinematic work.

Drew: Can you imagine? It was just all very bad. There was one I did for a bunch of students in Bournemouth in the UK, and at the time, they had a producer from The King’s Speech attached on the stuff, and the script was really cool. It felt like a young Trainspotting-y thing. Then, it turns out that they just loved smoking pot, and we shot a whole thing all summer, but it morphed into something. They lost that producer, so there wasn’t a ton of money, and we just had like a Canon D5, or whatever they were shooting stuff with, and there was all the enthusiasm, but…

I think just the thread of the story got lost. It’s out there, the scenes make no sense, sort of, it’s just a jumble of things. That one was probably one of those ones that honestly felt like a cautionary tale, because I’d come at it with this enthusiasm, then you see how it falls apart, especially if people don’t have their shit together. From that point on, I was weary of everything that came across my desk, so to speak, that felt like that. Yes, I understand people’s reticence with a smaller project like this.

John: I think about casting on short films I’ve done. The first short film I shot was beyond film school, but the first real short film I shot was God with Melissa McCarthy. Melissa was someone who I had seen in an early cut of Go. She was cast in a very minor role in Go, and I’m like, “Wow, she’s phenomenal. I need to write something for her immediately.” I wrote that for her. We talked about writing for what things you feel like you can control, and that was, I think, I could control it, and I could cast around her with other very smart, funny people.

During the first writer’s strike, I shot a short called The Remnants. Both of these are online, we’ll put links in the show notes to both of these. The Remnants was an interesting case where I wrote this thing not for any specific people; we actually had to cast it. I went to a casting director, Robert Ulrich, who I’d worked with on some TV projects, and we just cast it, but it was a weird time to be doing anything because it was during the strike, the WGA was encouraging other weird little indie short films to shoot, because why not?

We got together a really good group of actors, but it was weird to have written this thing without having a sense of who was going to be playing these parts from the very start.

Drew: God, I’m sure. That one seemed to come together pretty well, too, because I feel like you had locations and stuff, reading the script on that, and then also seeing the short. It feels like it was pretty similar.

John: On the outside, it does seem similar. They’re both written for mostly a single location and all that tracks, but the first one was literally in my apartment, so I could shoot it there. The second one, I didn’t have that apartment, so I was just finding somebody’s apartment we could borrow for the two days it took to shoot the thing.

Drew: I will say, so with this project that I’m working on, other than casting, it’s been pretty charmed. We’ve had a lot of people donate some really wonderful stuff, and with Film Independent giving us fiscal sponsorship. There’s been a lot of wonderful things coming in.

This is what I wanted to ask you about. Another thing that a casting director does really quick is they send out an avail check to people, saying, “Are you available for these dates?” For everyone, they’re like, “Yes, and we’re ready to work.”

We said, “Here’s the script, and here’s how much money we have,” and they said, “Never mind.” It’s teasing apart for me what’s the problem– I don’t want to compromise the idea of the short, and that is its own thing. But do I take this as feedback or not?

John: Oh, I would not take that as too much feedback. I think it may be a sense of– I think you have the right internal model for what some of these actors are saying no to. I think they’re saying, “It’s not worth it for me to go do this.” You only need two actors, and the right two actors will be out there and will be the right people to do it. The whole tech avail versus not actually available check is fascinating because I’ve also heard that happen in Broadway, where we’ll reach out on tech avails for people, and then you follow up, and it’s like, “Oh, but they really don’t want to play that smaller part.” That becomes the issue.

Drew: Sure. That makes sense. Once you get the details, it changes how things go about that.

John: The other thing I would keep in mind is that sometimes actors may say no because they’re trying to keep themselves open for another thing, like a TV thing that will actually pay some money, and you get that.

Drew: Totally.

John: As you get closer to the dates, in a weird way, things may open up a little bit.

Drew: That’s helpful. Yes, I think when you don’t get the people in your head, do you feel that changes things for you down the line, into production? Do you feel like–

John: Yes, sometimes you have to adapt with the batch of people that you’ve cast and what their abilities are, what their strengths and weaknesses are, whether you believe them in that part, but I don’t know. You didn’t write Yeti. These are really recognizable Midwestern humans. I don’t think it’s going to be a challenge for you to find these people down the road. If not, I’m reaching back to the Robert Eggers episode because he was talking about his short film where they had a puppet-

Drew: Puppets.

John: -[crosstalk]. Maybe it’s just puppets. Maybe that’s really the secret that we didn’t consider. Some Henson folks who come in there and give you some puppets.

Drew: I keep having fantasies. I’m like, “I should just do this animated.” I’ll just animate it, and then I can get someone in a booth for a day to just give a couple lines and don’t have to worry about it.

John: Yes. Right now, people are crashing their cars and saying, “Animation is not easier.” [crosstalk]

Drew: No, it’s not.

John: It takes so much of your time. I think aiming a camera at these things will be the right choice, but puppets are pretty great, too.

Drew: Puppets will be fun.

John: Well, good luck, Drew. We’ll obviously keep the Scriptnotes listenership posted on updates as the show progresses.

Drew: Thank you so much, and thanks for your help.

Links:

• Episode 4 – Working with directors
• Episode 176 – Advice to a First-Time Director
• Scrappy
• HyperCard
• Mount Wilson Observatory
• John’s shorts God and The Remnants
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Segments produced by Stuart Friedel. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.