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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 687 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we answer listener questions on first films, adaptations, writers groups, and thematic questions on television. In our bonus segment for premium members, we will play a round of Strong Opinions, a new little game we play in the office.

Craig: Oh.
John: Craig, you have Strong Opinions.

Craig: What?

John: You know, strong opinions about mayonnaise.

Craig: It’s a hard opinions about mayonnaise.

John: Ventriloquism.

Craig: Hard opinions about ventriloquism. Ventriloquism is the mayonnaise of entertainment.

John: Yes. We have a list of, honestly, 300 other topics too. We’ll get to-

Craig: Amazing.

John: -most of these. It’s a-

Craig: We’ll run it down.

John: -free little game we’re putting out there in the world.

Craig: Very exciting.

John: Great. First, we have some follow-up. Craig, last week we talked about tariffs, which was a non-starter.

Craig: Yes.

John: This week, the MPA and all the guilds together have sent a very glowing letter to our president saying, hey, we would really love to have some sort of national film production incentive and other esoteric changes to the tax code, which makes it easier to make these things.

Craig: Yes. If there is a way to somehow backdoor in something that’s really great for our film industry, because the president was suggesting something that would literally destroy it within seconds, that I suppose is a net positive. I don’t think there’s been any discussion like this for quite some time.

John: No.

Craig: If there’s one gift this guy has, it’s that he shows up at your party with an enormous amount of dynamite.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s like, instead of blowing that up, maybe we could–

Craig: Here’s something like an uncomfortable topic no one else has discussed. Why don’t we do that instead of you just blowing everything up? Listen, fingers crossed. It would be a tremendous thing for, obviously, the crews here in Los Angeles in particular.

John: That would be great. Second bit of follow-up. Way back in 1999, I wrote a scene in the first Charlie’s Angels in which a bird alights on a windowsill, and Bill Murray interacts with a bird, and it’s overheard. Cameron Diaz recognizes the sound that that bird makes and realizes where Bosley has been kidnapped and taken to.

This scene that I wrote innocently has frustrated birders for 25 years because the bird that she says it is, it’s not the bird we see on screen. It’s not the bird we hear.

Craig: No. Birders are notoriously flexible people about this sort of thing.

John: They are.

Craig: That’s why they got into birding.

John: Yes. [chuckles] They’re like, it’s some kind of bird. It doesn’t matter. They don’t care about specifics. One thing I really respect about birders is they’re like, that’s some kind of bird.

Craig: It has wings. it’s a bird. It’s big.

John: It’s a bird.

Craig: Yes. What kind of bird? A big one.

John: I mean, if you confuse a bat and a bird, then they’re like–

Craig: By the way, I have done that.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: To this day, whenever I see swallows or something, Melissa’s like, “Ooh, swallows.” I’ll go, “No, those are bats.” It makes her insane because she’s a birder.

John: Oh yes. That’s good. Yes. Forrest Wickman is the writer from Slate who was first annoyed by what had happened here. This has already been a podcast episode of Decoder Ring, Willa Paskin’s great show. Now there’s actually an article we can link to, which is a much longer history of and more detailed about the work he did to figure out what went so wrong with my script and all the subsequent scripts.

I didn’t write Pygmy Nuthatch. Pygmy Nuthatch is funnier. I picked a bird that actually made sense. Then over the course of the 16 other writers who worked on Charlie’s Angels, it all drifted away. Then ultimately the bird that they picked for it, you cannot actually film because you’re not allowed to own the bird. They talk to the animal handlers, talks to everybody. It’s just a good lesson in sort of how, quote unquote, “mistakes” in movies happen.

Craig: Sounds like a whole lot of apologizing for some terrible behavior, John. Sounds like you’re making a lot of excuses for a very hurtful thing that you did. That– who’s this guy?

John: Forrest Wickman.

Craig: Is still talking about 20 years later.

John: Yes. When they reached out to me about this, this was almost a year ago-

Craig: Jesus.

John: -I did not remember that there was a bird in Charlie’s Angels. That’s how long ago it’s been.

Craig: I don’t even know what to say. There are a lot of problems in the world. It’s not that we can’t be frivolous, but there has to be some limitation to the frivolity, especially if you’re doing it under the guise of your professional work. I am going to spend a company’s time and money to chase this down. Pygmy Nuthatch is a very funny name.

John: It is a funny name. Ultimately that’s my argument. We can’t quite figure out who wrote Pygmy Nuthatch. It could have been Zak Penn or Susannah Grant or anyone of the other people who worked on this movie.

Craig: They won’t remember either.

John: No, but it’s the funniest name.

Craig: No, it’s very funny. Does he not get that that’s why that happened? [chuckles]

John: He does understand it.

Craig: Oh, he does?

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh, that’s great.

John: Also, then why is the Pygmy Nuthatch not the bird depicted there? Why is the bird called not even matching the bird that’s there?

Craig: He doesn’t know how any of this works?

John: Well, now, if you read this article, you’ll understand how Hollywood works.

Craig: Oh, he figured it out.

John: He interviewed everybody. He did the journalist’s job of actually going and figuring out– finding the answers.

Craig: Good. There are serious problems that need to be uncovered. [laughs]

John: There’s also trivial problems. Sometimes the trivial problems are good.

Craig: I guess.

John: Honestly, the puzzles you’re solving every day are just for your own enjoyment. This is enjoyable for him.

Craig: Yes, but I’m not convincing people to watch me solve– Maybe I should. Maybe I should go on Twitch. There’s a guy named FoggyBrume. I’ve probably talked about FoggyBrume. No? He’s the editor in chief of P&A Magazine, Panda Magazine, which every couple of months has a quite difficult puzzle suite. For the elite people, I think it’s sort of like– it’s medium.

Foggy, every now and then, will go on Twitch and solve a cryptic crossword puzzle by a publication in England called The Listener. The Listener’s cryptic is insanely hard, and people will show– I’ve showed up to watch him do it, and he struggles, and then he does do it. He’s very, very good. Maybe I should– yes, I’m going to start a Twitch channel. Solve Cryptics with Craig.

John: Honestly, we’re going to have a Scriptnotes YouTube channel now. That could be a place where you can solve some [crosstalk]

Craig: Let’s do it. I’m going to do it.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: We’re going to teach people cryptics, and we’re going to solve cryptics with Craig.

John: One of your big puzzle friends is a guy named Dave.

Craig: Dave Shuken.

John: Dave Shuken. I met Dave Shuken.

Craig: What?

John: I’m going to tell you this. I met him at Rachel Bloom’s birthday party. Rachel Bloom had a birthday party where she had a spelling bee, and Dave Shuken was the moderator for the spelling bee.

Craig: Dave Shuken seems to be at the hub of many moderated games of intellectual adventure.

John: A bunch of our people we know were there. I finished third.

Craig: Okay.

John: Yes.

Craig: Spelling bee, as in the New York Times spelling?

John: On, no, no. A classic grade school spelling bee.

Craig: Also the thing that Dave Shuken would be excellent at.

John: He was excellent at.

Craig: Dave’s knowledge of everything is startling. Everything.

John: I have to say, adult spelling bee is a good choice for a party theme.

Craig: That’s fun.

John: Yes, it was good.

Craig: Yes, I love that. Third. Who won?

John: Rachel came in second, and I’m blanking on the guy who won first. He’s a director who used to work on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

Craig: Okay, but that guy.

John: That guy.

Craig: Tip of the hat to him.

John: More follow up. We have one here on 36 Questions, which was a thing I brought up in a previous episode. Maybe you weren’t there, but 36 Questions– Oh, actually, it was in the Leslie Hedland episode that you weren’t here for. This sort of famous list of 36 questions to bring closeness between people. Questions to ask each other, so romantic partners but also just strangers to get to know them. We follow up on this from Kamel in Zimbabwe.

Drew Marquardt: Kamel writes in response to John’s One Cool Thing. “I wanted to make you aware of 36 Questions, the podcast musical with Jonathan Groff and Jessie Shelton. It’s my all-time favorite musical. I don’t want to spell the plot, but they use the 36 questions to follow two characters on an auditory journey.”

Craig: Wow.

John: Jonathan Groff.

Craig: Jonathan Groff. Never bad.

John: Never bad.

Craig: Always good.

John: Always good. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. All right, let’s do a little bit of news here. First off, we have a summer intern. Drew Marquardt, once upon a time, was our summer intern. He’s now our Scriptnotes producer. Our new summer intern is Sam Shapson. Welcome Sam Shapson.

Sam Shapson: Hey, guys. Good to be here.

Craig: Sam Shapson is hard to say thrice quickly.

John: It is. It’s a challenging name.

Craig: Sam Shapson, Sam Shapson, Sam Shapson. Yes, it’s hard.

John: Yes, you do it.

Craig: It’s hard.

John: One of the things that Sam is working on this summer is getting our Scriptnotes YouTube channel started up. We’ll have longer form episodes of things we’ve done. We’ll bring over your How to Write a Movie episode, which we put up on YouTube. Episode 99, the Psychotherapy for Screenwriters. Sam’s also cutting little short things, which are delightful for YouTube when you just want little blips.

Craig: Amazing. Welcome aboard, Sam. Happy to have you here. Do a good job this summer, you know. It’s crucial. It’s a crucial summer in your life.

Sam: I will try my best.

John: All right. Second bit of news, Craig and I are planning to attend the Austin Film Festival at the end of October.

Craig: Again?

John: Again. Why not? October 23rd through 26th is the screenwriting portion of that. We’ll be there. Drew will be there. We’ll probably have a Highland event there. If you’re thinking about like, what do I want to do? Do I want to go to Austin this year? If that helps sway you in the decision of Austin, great. It’s cheaper to book hotel rooms now than down the road. Just wanted you and people to know that.

Let us get to our questions. We have so many questions to get through. I pulled out two of them as more marquee topics. The first one is from Tyler. Drew, would you read this question from Tyler?

Drew: “I loved your Scriptnotes episode about writing a movie to argue a thesis. How do you adapt that method for television? Specifically, how do you break the show’s thesis into sub-theses that argue the show’s thesis across episodes while serving as theses for complete standalone stories within an episode? Moreover, how does this process differ between miniseries, where you know the whole arc and episode constraint at the outset, and ongoing series where you don’t?”

John: Great.

Craig: That’s a great question.

John: It’s a good question. This is referencing back to something we just talked about, which was your episode on how to write a movie. It was really about arguing a thesis, and so talk to us about what you mean by a thesis.

Craig: It’s a simple argument, some statement about something that people could disagree on or could argue either position for. Your movie is often about a character who believes one side of that argument. By the end of the movie, through the events that you’ve put that person through, they now believe the opposite side of that.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: We think of it as a character arc, but a lot of times character arc implies that they just went somewhere, but this is about, okay, everything along the way is getting to that argument. The people they meet show them other possible answers to that argument. They try to maybe dabble believing the other side of the argument. They get punished for it.

They end up in a terrible place where they definitely don’t believe what they used to believe, but they’re not brave enough to believe what they should be believing. Then through some climactic action, they behave in accordance with this new way of thinking, even at great personal risk.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s pretty standard across the board stuff.

John: The kinds of things we’re talking about are also the same space as a central thematic question, the central argument of a thing. It’s basically, what is it that we are grappling with?

What is the idea that we’re grappling with, and how are we creating characters and situations that grapple with this? What you’re speaking about specifically in a movie is that, generally, over the course of the movie, a person will enter with one perspective on this central dramatic question and leave change with a different answer to the same question.

Craig: The opposite answer, often. For television, it’s a bit different. I’ll be honest. I don’t know the answer to one of those questions, which is how do you do this when it’s an ongoing series where there is no planned end? I don’t know because I’ve never worked on a series like that. I know what the end for The Last of Us is, and I’ve always known. That’s different.

John: We’ve had guests on the show who have had to do this, and so I would reach back to some of the really talented showrunners we’ve had in these podcasts with us. They often talk about the blue sky phase at the start of a season, where they’re really talking about, what is it we want to explore this year? Ultimately, they are still wrestling with the same question that the show is fundamentally about, but how are we doing it this year, and what are the ways in which we’re exploring this question this year?

Whether it’s Frasier or The Good Wife, they’re going to be thinking about how it is they’re going to tackle the kinds of questions that their show is tackling in this next year and how they’re going to break that out over the course of the season.

Craig: Yes. it’s probable that people that are on ongoing shows do think just in terms of the season as a movement. There is a beginning, middle, and end to the season. If it is a drama or if it’s a comedy that is episodic, meaning one episode leads into the other story-wise, as opposed to self-contained episodes that don’t, then yes, there’s going to be something that gets pulled through. You’re thinking about a big circle for the season.

Somebody is going to go on this thing, and they are either going to go from I believe one thing to I believe the opposite, or they’re going to go all the way from I believe one thing to I still believe, and in fact, I believe it no matter what. The episodes themselves are like their own little circle. There’s circles inside of circles inside of circles. Every scene should have somebody changing somehow.

There should be a thesis at the beginning of the scene that gets disrupted through antithesis, and we have a new synthesis, and so on and so on. It’s just circles inside of circles. That’s how you do it.

John: Another distinction I would make is that, in a movie, the central character and the movie are trying to answer the question, at least answer the question for that character in the course of this story. In this series, especially an ongoing series, you’re not looking for the answer. You’re exploring the question, and exploring the question is a valid choice. You don’t have to get to an answer.

Craig: That’s right.

John: There’s no final answer. There’s no total victory. It’s just how do you wrestle with this question?

Craig: Television does allow you to give people the experience of going somewhere at length. When you go all the way through, at some point, you can see how the end is more about a wistful goodbye than it is about people learning things or concluding. In movies, you really do feel like, when there’s a happy ending, that the ending of the movie is the best and most important day of that person’s life, and everything will be fine from here on out.

John: Series can end, even like ongoing series can end. Six Feet Under has one of the best endings of any series ever. If I had to say what is the central question it’s grappling with, it’s like, how do you live when you’re confronted by death constantly? How do you live knowing that you’re going to die? The final episode, that grapples with that for all those characters in a way that’s thematically satisfying, but each individual episode is also about that.

That’s always the tension within the episode. The Wire, season by season, it’s about the systems we’ve built to help people betraying them, and it changes what that system is each time, but it’s still always grappling with those same questions. Listen, I think, Tyler, you’re asking the right question. It’s exactly the stuff that happens in a room as you’re trying to figure out what that thing is. The shows that aren’t working–

Craig: There’s no big idea there.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes. You need one a little bit. It needs to be about something, even if it’s just about one relationship or one family and how it’s being impacted by the choices that people make, whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be very involved. each season needs a thing because, when you get to the end of a season, you need to feel like you reached the end of something. There has to be something that concludes.

John: All right. Let’s move on to our second question. This is from Scott, who’s asking about his first feature.

Drew: “I just got my first feature film greenlit to the tune of a few million dollars. It’s a horror movie. I adapted from a book, funded through a private investor, and I’m both thrilled and terrified. What advice do you have for a first-time filmmaker jumping in at this level to avoid royally flubbing this? I’m also curious about setting expectations for the finished film. What should I be thinking about now to ensure the finished film is what I have in my head? Finally, as it moves into the marketplace, are there any insights to avoid getting screwed over?”

John: I hear Scott asking a series of questions. Basically, I hear him asking, how do I emotionally protect myself from what I know is going to be a difficult situation? I hear him asking, how do I make sure I make the best movies and don’t screw things up? I feel like there’s probably some imposter syndrome also embedded in all this as well. First off, congratulations. Great news. Great that you’re able to find money to make this thing. That’s fantastic.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: This investor is great, but you need to have somebody who actually knows what the hell they’re doing. You’ll need a line producer, but you also need a person, a producer on board who has made this kind of film at this kind of budget level and sold this kind of film at this kind of budget level, because it’s such a specific thing. I know people who’ve literally fallen into a bunch of money and made a movie and like, “I got to make the movie I wanted to make,” and had no plan for how to put it out there in the world. That is disastrous.

Craig: Scott, I feel your fear, which is completely justified. I have felt it myself. I’ll try and be comforting. Then I’m going to give you the anti-comfort. The comforting part is there are some simple things that you can keep in mind as you go through this. The first is don’t expect that anybody is going to respect you when you start doing this. In fact, quite the opposite. People are very suspicious of first time directors.

The crews just presume that you’re going to suck, and you’re not going to know what you’re doing. You’re going to want to really get a good relationship with your first AD. The first AD is the person that’s going to help you move through your day. They’re going to keep you planned. You’re going to want to have an excellent relationship with your cinematographer because the first AD and the cinematographer pushing and pulling will have the biggest impact on how long your day is and how much you get done that day.

You’re going to want to create a little bit of a bubble for yourself and the actors because they’re the ones who end up on screen. You’re going to want to have a good relationship with the crew, but don’t be overly concerned if the crew doesn’t like the show itself, the movie, that’s not important. What’s important is that you have some sort of vision for it because you’re gathering pieces that you will put together later.

Those things, good stuff. Then keep in mind that there will be politics going on that will swirl around you and try to ignore them as best you can. If somebody gives you constructive criticism about how you can get more out of people or do a better job, listen to it carefully, take it in, be humble, but don’t get caught up in swirling political stuff between actors, between representatives, between the money and the producer, any of that stuff.

Now let me be uncomforting. There is nothing we can tell you that is going to prepare you for this. You are not going to be the same person when you’re finished. You will be smarter. You will know more, and you will be better when you’re finished. This is not good news because it means that you are not going to be the best you can be when you start. This is normal. It’s just normal.

Go in there understanding that you’re going to do your best, but you are going to grow and improve from this experience. You cannot forestall these things. There’s no way to prepare for a lot of it. It’s a little bit like having a baby. You can read a whole lot of books, but when you have the baby, you’re like, oh no. There will be some days, man. There’ll be some days, but it’s okay. Everybody who’s been a successful filmmaker has gone through this.

John: Here’s my pitch. Making a film is a creative heist. Think about it like it’s a heist. It’s like Ocean’s 11. How do you pull off a heist? First off, you have to assemble a team. Assembling that team is crucial. You’ve got to have the right people on board to make this with you. That is, you’ve mentioned it, the first AD. Cinematographer, I think is right up there at the tip top. That is the person you’re going to be sharing you vision for what it is you’re actually seeing on screen.

Your production designer, your editor, your casting director, and ultimately your cast, that is the crew that you’re assembling to pull off this creative heist. Then you’re going to have a plan. You’re going to have a really detailed plan. If everything goes exactly according to plan, you’re going to make the best movie. It’s all going to work perfectly, but it’s not.
That’s why you need to have a crew that you really can trust and smart people for when things don’t go according to plan. Your job is to be able to remember what is actually important. Because you wrote the script, which is great, but that script and reality are not going to match up very, very well. You’re going to have to have situations where, okay, we have lost this location. What do we do?

You’re going to have to be the person who figures out what to do in those situations. That’s by really understanding what those scenes are about. Therefore, if you have to set it someplace else, or if you lose this actor or whatever else, you make it work. Especially filmmaking at this budget level where you don’t have the padding and safeties, that’s the reality.

Craig: You aren’t going to make the movie that you have in your mind right now.

John: No.

Craig: That’s not possible. You will hopefully make a movie that represents enough of what you had in mind and has the essence of what you were looking for. You are going to constantly be wavering back and forth between not wanting to be too precious so that you can solve problems and make your days, but also not wanting to be too much of a good boy syndrome.

John: Obliging is not going to help anybody.

Craig: Yes, exactly. You have to figure out how to wander that middle ground. It’s tough. You may miss a few times. You may go too far one way or the other. AD, cinematographer, start there. Those two people are incredibly important. If you run into people, like a production designer or a costume designer, anybody that you suspect is just there to get paid, and I’m talking about department heads, putting aside the pure crafts like grip and electric, when we’re talking about the creative department heads, if they seem like they don’t care, they’re not right for this. You need people that care. You want them to actually be passionate about this. There’s no way to get through it otherwise.

John: I’m helping out with a movie that shoots this fall. Seeing the director assemble her team has just been so inspiring because she has such a specific, unique, singular vision. She will meet with 15 people, and I’ll be the 16th person, like that’s the one, and she’s right.

Craig: Yes, that’s nice.

John: Yes. [laughs] It’s also a luxury of being able to shoot in town and just having choices like that.

Craig: Exactly.

John: The last thing, Craig said you can read as much as you want to read about it, what would be probably helpful for you, Scott, right now, is to read accounts of filmmakers who’ve done something recently and who did things at your budget level and what they learned, what they would have done differently. Read those interviews or if there are longer form books or just stuff because that’s the stuff– you’re entering into a very specific kind of filmmaking and to understand how that works is going to really serve you.

Craig: I think there’s a book called My First Time.

John: Oh yes, there is a book.

Craig: Yes, and it’s a collection of interviews with directors about their first time directing. I remember reading it thinking, this is great. The whole point of the book, it was pitched like, okay, if you read this, then you could avoid the mistakes that all these great directors made. No, you can’t.

John: No, you make your own mistakes.

Craig: You’re going to make your own mistakes. You’ll be too worried about making their mistakes, and it’ll be too artificial and weird. You got to go be yourself.

John: You also recognize that all these people made these mistakes, and they’re now fantastic directors.

Craig: Exactly, and so you’re just going to have to experience this, and it’s going to be a wild ride. I will say, once you do it, and you come out the other end, you will look at movies and television in a much different and vastly more forgiving way.

John: Yes. I will remember when I was making The Nines and leading up to The Nines, before I brought on my cinematographer, I got way too obsessed with cameras, and then I realized I should not be thinking about the camera at all. It’s out of my purview. I should let the cinematographer decide what she wants to do for this. I gave her my poetic descriptions of what I’m going for, but let them decide this.

Craig: Ksenia Sereda, who’s our cinematographer on The Last of Us, before the second season, she was so excited. She’s like, “Okay, so I’m getting these special lenses that are going to be made for this season with this cool thing going on.” She tried to explain it to me, and I didn’t understand it. She goes, “But don’t worry, I’m going to run– I’m going to shoot a bunch of tests. I’m going to show you all these different things, and you’ll see the differences.”

I’m like, “Great.” Then she showed them all to me, and I was like, “These all look great. Which one is the one that you want?” She’s like, “This one.” I’m like, “Okie dokie,” because I don’t need to know. She was like, “Look” because it’s like, okay, the test footage is just some light bulbs turning up in a room. She’s like, “These will be great for these scenes and here’s why.” I was like, “Okay, I trust you on that stuff.”

When makeup people are like, here’s how we’re going to approach this, I’m like, great, because I don’t do that. You do need to trust your people. They will come to you with a million questions. Be prepared to answer four million questions a day.

John: That’s the reason why I didn’t want to direct for a while. It was just like, oh, they’re going to ask me a thousand questions a day, I won’t have the answers. Then I was like, oh no, I do have the answers.

Craig: You will. In fact, what’s frustrating is sometimes you’re like, I thought that was obvious from this. Okay, let me explain what I want to [mumbles] Of course, everybody who works on The Last of Us knows that I love meetings where the question that was asked 14 times gets asked the 15th time.

John: I think podcast listeners are very [unintelligible 00:25:27] [crosstalk]

Craig: Oh, yes. You know what? I get it. I get it. I get it. Yes, I answer it.

John: All right. Our next listener question comes from Selfish in Seattle.

Craig: Great name.

Drew: Selfish writes, “I belong to a six-member writer’s group. We meet regularly. Everyone in the group has been in the business longer than I have, and I’ve learned a lot, so I appreciate being invited to join. Here’s the issue. I have a proactive manager who makes lots of introductions for me. Anytime I share that I’m having a general with this person or that person reading my script, the other members pounce on me for the person’s contact information so they can reach out to them about some project of their own.

When I say I don’t feel right about sharing someone’s contact information without their permission, the other members assure me that, in this industry, contacts are considered community property and basically make me feel like a selfish person. Am I? What is the protocol when it comes to sharing hard-won contacts versus keeping them to myself?”

Craig: John, why are we putting our phone numbers on the podcast?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: It’s community property.

John: It’s community property.

Craig: Yes, it’s community property.

John: Before we answer this question, I do want to say that, at some point back when I was working as an assistant, someone called or texted me and said, “I have Tom Cruise’s phone number.” I’m like, yes, it’s weird that you have Tom Cruise’s phone number, but it’s not actually useful. I disagree with the premise of this writer’s group, like having that contact information is going to somehow fundamentally change what they’re doing.

Craig: They are not one contact away. I think the thing that I want to actually put my finger on there, Selfish in Seattle, is why you’re saying these things in the first place at all. This, to me, feels like writer’s group bragging. Like, “Oh, hey, oh my God, good news, everybody.” You’re proud of it, maybe, and it’s just driving them crazy and then they’re bothering you. Just don’t talk about it.

You know what? Here’s the thing, if any of those general meetings turns into a specific meeting, turns into a sale, if you want to talk about how you sold a script, that seems reasonable.

John: Yes, you should take everybody out for drinks.

Craig: Yes, but a general meeting?

John: Yes. Drew, you are a member of a writer’s group or two. What’s your instinct here? Would you say that you had a specific meeting about a specific project in a writer’s group? Maybe we just don’t know how these groups work, but.

Drew: I would say most of them start off with people talking about where they are with the project. If you’re like, oh, I had a meeting, and it feels like you’re moving forward, I think there’s a natural sort of space for that. Most of the time, people are encouraging, and I’ve never heard anyone ask or solicit contact information about stuff.

Craig: Then that’s why you’re okay saying, yes, I had a general meeting with so and so because no one’s going, great, what’s their phone number? If you’re in a group where people are like, give me your stuff, then just stop showing off your stuff. Take your watch off before you walk in the room.

John: Yes, that feels right. Let’s move on to John, who is stuck in the mailroom.

Drew: John writes, “I’ve been at a studio mailroom for three years, and it’s been great, but it’s also been impossible to get out. I’ve learned that there is a non-official policy of not promoting from within. As much as I’ve networked there, there’s only so much that can be done without being overly pushy. The worst part is that I’m not exactly gaining too many skills that other entry-level jobs are looking for, which makes it harder to find something.

I know it’s hard for everyone right now, but what do you guys think are the best ways people can break out from entry-level in the current environment where such a thing seems impossible?”

John: Let’s define our terms here a bit. Mailroom is like the classic, like you are a runner. You’re literally sorting stuff. It sounds like John is not on a desk for somebody.

Craig: No.

John: It’s not that first step as an assistant. It’s like a pre-assistant level. Three years is a long time to be in that spot.

Craig: What is a mailroom now? Because it used to be people would get scripts and contracts and things.

John: Photocopy a bunch of stuff.

Craig: Then they would show up in a mailroom, and they would be sorted. Then the mailroom people would wheel a little basket around through the hallways, delivering the mail to desks. What is it now?

John: Drew and Sam, can you talk us through what a mailroom is right now? Do you have a good sense of what a studio mailroom, which is where John certainly is?

Craig: In the era of the PDF.

Drew: I know friends who’ve worked in mailrooms, and they still refer to it as a mailroom, but I don’t know what they’re doing.

Craig: [laughs] Do you want to ask them? You just have no clue what they’re doing.

Drew: They usually get on a desk pretty quick, it seems like. You’re a floater. If someone’s out, you jump on the desk.

Craig: I see, floater. Got it. Okay, so a floater is somebody that fills in for assistance when they’re out sick or whatever, because they know the system of the place. Let’s get to the heart of the question. The heart of the question is, if you’ve been doing an entry-level position for three years, and nothing has shifted in that time, and there is no path forward to progression that’s provided for you, you need to go.

John: Yes.

Craig: What they’re saying to you is, we’ll let you work here in whatever this putative mailroom is for a while, but we’re not going to give you anything else. It’s a dead end. To me, it’s the definition of a dead end. To start with, maybe give them one last chance by going to the supervisor and saying, listen, when people come to work in the mailroom, presumably it’s so that they can go somewhere. Can you just let me know? Is that going to be happening within the next, I don’t know, six months to a year? Let’s just be honest.

If it’s not, if no one’s interested, if it doesn’t seem like a good fit, then I should probably look around for something else. I’ll go to a different mailroom. Maybe that mailroom, people will be like, oh yes, we do think there’s a future for this guy.

John: First, I’ll ask our listeners who are currently working in a mailroom or have very recently worked in a studio or an agency mailroom, can you tell us what your actual daily job is like? We clearly don’t understand what the mailroom actually means right now. If we are giving John wrong advice about to get out of there, but I don’t think you’re going to tell us that. I think you’re going to tell us like John should have left it a year ago or two years ago.

Craig: Yes. Three years is a long time for no movement when you’re on the bottom rung. Middle rung, sure. Bottom, no.

John: Our next one is an audio question.

Craig: Oh, okay.

Naomi: I’m a 17-year-old from Southern California, and I’m graduating high school next year. I’ve been really passionate about pursuing directing and screenwriting for a really long time. Now that I’m getting closer to actually entering the industry, I’m trying to figure out the best ways to prepare myself and get experience. It seems like everybody has a different opinion on what someone my age should and shouldn’t be doing in order to make it in film.

Of course, the industry is in a wild state at the moment. I’m trying to sort through the noise and find some stable ground to build up from. I’ve been researching, watching movies, taking cinema classes at community college, learning to edit and practicing photo and video with my own new camera. Obviously, there’s a lot more to it. I need to start making connections, working more on my own scripts and videos and getting internships once I’m 18 in addition to anything else I may be missing.

Based on your experience, how can I do this all efficiently and effectively? How should I approach the changing film industry as a beginner? I’m trying to make it my goal to learn from other people’s experiences and be proactive about my own decisions. I’d also love to know what changes you would or wouldn’t make looking back on your own career.

John: Great. This is Naomi.

Craig: Naomi, wow. What a well put together question. Great poise. It’s sort of related a little bit to the prior question. Even though Naomi’s just starting out, she hasn’t graduated high school yet, it’s all in front of her. Her question is not that different from the fellow who said, hey, somebody put up a couple of million dollars for me to make a movie. Both people are saying, can you help me not fall down pits and avoid the fire traps and take a safe route? The answer is not really because everybody’s path is different because everybody is different.

The people that are telling you, hey, the way in is this or this, anybody that’s being really prescriptive, anybody that’s being really rigid about what you should or shouldn’t do is wrong because the way John started is different than the way I started. It’s different than the way all of us, all of our friends, everybody seemed to start in a different way.

First things first is to acknowledge that your ambition and your intelligence are your best assets at this point. You have no experience, but you’ll get some. I love that you’re taking classes, and you’re learning editing. That’s amazing. My advice has always been to find a job. I don’t care how peripheral it is to the entertainment business. As long as it is sort of vaguely connected to the entertainment business, get a job, get paid.

Now you’re young, so it’s going to be difficult, but there are some internships you can apply to. The Television Academy is a wonderful intern– I am a graduate of the Television Academy internship program. We don’t talk about that enough. It’s a wonderful thing. Apply to lots of things. You’re in Southern California. That’s good. Find yourself a place that is within an hour drive of the place that you’re going to end up working at, and then just start doing what you do and learning and absorbing and listening.

You are very young. You can’t vote yet. You’re really young. It doesn’t feel like you are, but you are. The next four years you will be a very different and I suspect even more accomplished person than you are right now.

John: Let’s talk about those next four years because Naomi didn’t mention college at all.

Craig: Community college.

John: Well, she’s taking classes.

Craig: Right. Summer classes.

John: I think you should go to college. I think you should go to college, not necessarily to learn filmmaking, but just to learn the kinds of things you’ll learn over the next four years between the ages of 18 and 22, which are crucial growing things, and to hang out with other people who are hopefully going to do the kinds of things you want to do. A film program is helpful because you’re with a bunch of kids who are also making movies, and you get to spend your time making movies, which is great. If it’s not that, like any sort of basic four-year degree, I think it’s probably the right idea. Don’t go to a crazy debt for it.

Craig: Yes. Community colleges are great.

John: Yes. If you’re in Southern California and if you’re as smart as you sort of sound like you are, if you can get into a UC or any California college, right.

Craig: Those are tough. Whatever you can do, I agree with John, what you can, for instance, at pretty reasonable costs, especially if it’s a community college, you can study literature, you can read great books. Nothing is better for you than reading. Reading the great stories and the people that wrote them and figuring out what they were trying to do and how they did it, all those things.

Think of it as a turbocharged version of whatever your English class has been in high school. That’s a good thing to do if you want to be a storyteller. While you’re in college, yes, if you can, sure, you can get a job. Get a job.

John: Get a job.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Yes. Listen, you hopefully don’t need to make a lot of money so you can do the kinds of runnery things or the shadowing and just visiting sets will be really good for you. I’m also thinking about like, you’re a writer as well as a director, thinking about what movies you actually want to make.

One of the things that always impressed me about Lena Dunham when I met her, which was right after college, was she was already making movies, but she was making movies about her life, people in her age. She wasn’t trying to make The Godfather.

She was trying to make things that were specific to her. I think, Naomi, if there’s a specific story that is yours to tell that a 17-year-old in Southern California can tell that, a 30-year-old can’t tell, that’s what’s going to be interesting and fascinating, and people are going to want to meet you because of that.

Craig: Keep yourself open to the idea that you don’t yet know actually what it is that you want to do or will be good at doing. I did not show up in Hollywood looking to be a writer. I didn’t. A lot of people say, I want to be a writer and director. They don’t necessarily know what that is yet because they haven’t done it. Sometimes people who want to be a writer and director start taking editing classes and realize they’re great at editing.

Great editors are worth their weight in gold. Some people end up being camera people. Some people end up being in advertising. Everybody finds something, but just keep yourself open because you don’t want to show up sort of locked off to the possibilities because you don’t know what they are yet.

John: No, exactly. Next up, let’s answer a question from Charlie.

Drew: Charlie writes, “I’ve recently been hired to write a screenplay and, yes, it’s becoming all the nightmare scenarios you guys have described a thousand times. The director and producer are in a cold war over ideas and both have dug their heels in. I am more closely aligned with the producer’s vision, but the director has threatened to quit. For the moment, he’s won. He’s been given carte blanche to move forward and is unwilling to collaborate on any points he previously argued.

I am fighting such a bad urge. I want to just stop trying. I want to just write the bad script so he can see for himself. I’m tired of trying to control my emotions. I feel like throwing in the towel and just writing the expository dialogue and unresolved story threads. But won’t that reflect so poorly on me? Isn’t it my job to be the adult in the room and do everything I can to guide this to the best possible place? How do I come out of this crap smelling like roses?

John: Wrong question to end with. There’s no roses here. Basically, how do you get through this situation with your vision as intact as possible and also a movie? I think these would be noble goals.

Craig: Isn’t this horrible? isn’t this embarrassing to directors? I hope that directors listen to this. I’m sure there are directors who listen to it. You and I are directors. We’re both in the DGA. This isn’t chauvinism. This is just a fact. It should be humiliating to directors to hear that somebody that is one of them behaves like this. It’s embarrassing. Just because there is this weird leverage of, well, we got a director and we can’t lose the director, to behave like this.

By the way, if the director is a writer, then why aren’t they writing it? If they’re not a writer, why don’t they shut up? Because they signed on to do a script, did they not? I’m just saying, directors, don’t be this person. Just don’t do it.

In a circumstance like this, I think it would be fair to go to the producer and say, listen, I don’t know how to do the things that this person wants me to do. I don’t know how to write them. I don’t think anybody would know how to write them.

Maybe he can write them. Maybe you should have him write it. I think we all know that it would be bad. The movie would be bad. Maybe do let him quit. Maybe let him quit. There is a point where you can’t just willingly– if you write the bad thing, you’re like, here, I did everything you said, look how bad it is, 98% chance he’ll be like, no.

John: No, it’s great.

Craig: It’s finally fixed. [laughs] I love this house with no doors and five chimneys that are sideways. I think you need to have a long talk with the producer. I would include your representative in this to say, let’s be serious. You cannot last forever biting your tongue. You can’t last forever being overly diplomatic. You can’t last forever trying to solve problems you shouldn’t be solving because they shouldn’t be there at all. At some point, it’s fair for everybody to go, “This is not what we want to do. It would be bad.”

John: I agree with that approach. I think another approach would be to continue to engage with the director. This may be a director who just needs to constantly talk through all the ideas and is not actually necessarily asking or expecting you to deliver the thing but basically needs to talk through all their bad ideas.

Craig: They did say that the director’s not willing to compromise or discuss.

John: Yes. If they need to see something, an alternative can be, never give them screenplay material, but you can sort of do a little beat sheet that puts down on paper for what these beats would be, what their vision would be, and why it wouldn’t work so you can actually show them. I understand Charlie’s instinct to just write the pages and say, “Look, this doesn’t work,” but the minute you’ve delivered anything that looks like a screenplay, you’re dead.

Craig: Yes. You can’t do that.

John: If you were to write down something that’s basically just bullet points, then you can have a thing that you can talk through and you can actually just look at like, “This is what we’re describing here, and this is why I think it’s not working, but I did listen to you and then you could see like, this is me showing you what this actually looks like.”

Craig: Why are we so concerned about these directors and their feelings? See, I listened to you. Nobody’s listening to us. No one. Why does this matter so much? I just don’t understand. I’ve never understood it. The emotional fragility of directors is such a problem in our business. I love the directors I work with, so many of them, but I have also worked with a lot of directors in the course of my career. As of you, so many of them have been remarkable and so many of them have just been so fragile, and everybody has to contort themselves to make sure that they feel good and that they aren’t hurt and that they are danced around and catered to.

John: Same could happen with movie stars too.

Craig: The movie star is a movie star. That’s the thing. Look, Tom Cruise is a movie star. There are certain kinds of movies that if Tom Cruise is in, people are going to show up. That’s money, right? I’m going to go out on a limb here and say this director is not that.

John: This is not Ridley Scott.

Craig: There are about 12 directors maybe in the world that matter and really probably only 3 when it comes to names, 3 maybe in terms of box office. I guess this is where I would suggest that there’s a long talk to be had with the producer, especially since the producer and you see eye to eye, and the producer’s going to be the one left holding the bag of this thing when all’s said and done.

There has to be adults having this discussion, and I do think you have to be willing to say, all right, I’ve gone as far as I can go. I matter too. I’m writing the script, the thing that says what everything is, all the things that happen, all the things that are going to be, what are they wearing, what are they saying, where are they standing, all of it. All of it, so yes, I think I matter too. I think my opinions matter too. They should matter at least as much as the opinions of this director, and maybe the director’s not right for this because they don’t seem to like the script very much.

John: Yes. Producers suffer from loss aversion, and I think they’re going to feel like, “Oh, if I lose this director, then everything is falling apart again,” but I agree it’s the right approach.

Craig: I’m going to quote the poster from Pet Sematary, the old one with Fred Gwynne: “Sometimes dead is better.” I believe that in my heart. I have seen this so many times. You just go, “Oof, we worked so hard, so hard to make sure this thing never lost a pulse, but it should have, because look at what we ended up with.” You just won’t survive, and no one will ever give you any credit for it. They just won’t.

John: We’re going to try two more questions. This is a longer one. Robert is asking about adaptations.

Drew: Robert writes, “The Netflix show The Residence is credited as an adaptation of the book of the same name. The series is a murder mystery alternatingly set behind the scenes at the White House with zany detective Uzo Aduba and a congressional hearing. Here’s the catch. The book is a nonfiction oral history style tell-all of what it’s like working at the White House. No zany detective, no C-SPAN, and no murder mystery. I have a hard time seeing how the book is anything more than a well-worn reference. I understand if it was thanked or otherwise footnoted in the credits, but how is this an adaptation?”

Craig: Okay, let me explain. This is a technical thing. It’s not a creative thing. An adaptation occurs when you as a writer in the WGA are assigned literary material at the beginning of your work. Now, there are two kinds of material you can be assigned. You can be assigned what’s called non-story literary material, newspaper articles about some crime or maybe a very non-fictional account. You can be assigned literary material of a story nature, which is almost all of it, which includes even songs that have little stories in them, and that’s why it’s an adaptation.

There are things that happen with the credits. If it is material that’s largely non-story, but the point is, nobody is getting this adapted from or based on the blah blah blah, because somebody decided it was. It’s legal.

John: Yes. I don’t know the whole provenance of this show, but my guess is that this book, The Residence, sold to Shonda’s company at Netflix to do an adaptation. Great. We have this thing. Ooh, we need characters and we need a plot. We need the whole reason. We have all this sort of background information, but we don’t have anything more.

Craig: There’s probably some material in the book that you can see, you can pull storylines out, so there are plotlines or storylines, settings, types of characters and things, and then you expand from there. For adaptations, typically there isn’t a story credit, but in cases where the story of the adaptation is markedly different or original to the source material or the source material wasn’t very story-oriented in the first place, you might get a story credit or screen story by for movies at least, but it is entirely a function of what the contract says when you sign it. It’s all listed, and they are required by the WGA to list all of the source material.

John: I’d be curious in case of some of the toy adaptations, Lego or other things like that, to what degree was it considered to be any story material other than just the name?

Craig: For the case of Lego, we could always ask Chris and Phil. My suspicion is they were not assigned any literary material because there is none. There is a toy, but there are no words to the toy. There’s no story to the toy per se. It’s just bricks. If there were certain toys that they did have storylines with, there would be something written. It’s all about getting assigned written material generally where that comes into play.

John: I suspect Barbie had written material, but I don’t know.

Craig: Maybe. Maybe.

John: Let’s answer one last question. This is from D, who’s writing about Scriptnotes T-shirts.

Drew: “Will you bring back orange T-shirts? Sadly, I outgrew my original orange T-shirt or it shrank. [laughter] In my opinion, guys seem to prefer black, blue, olive, or gray shirts, but we women would like more choices than just the white T with the typewriter. Help a sister out.”

Craig: Let’s help a sister out.

John: Help a sister out.

Craig: Why not?

John: We’ll add some orange T-shirts.

Craig: I love the orange T-shirts. Not big sellers, or?

John: Our original T-shirt was the orange T-shirt, very Scriptnotes orange. I just don’t end up wearing it that much.

Craig: Right, but you’re not a woman.

John: I’m not Dee.

Craig: Sisters want the orange shirt.

John: We are listening-

Craig: [laughs]

John: -and we are providing a T-shirt in orange for D.

Craig: Look at you. Look at you. See that? Look how we’re growing.

John: We are growing. We’re growing.

Craig: We’re growing, but actually, also, I like the orange shirt.

John: Thank you, Drew, for reading all these questions.

Craig: Yes, great job.

John: Thank you to all our listeners who sent in these great questions. We got through a lot of them. We didn’t get through all of them, so we’ll save some for sure for a future time.

Craig: For next time.

John: It’s time for One Cool Things. My one cool thing is something I’ve been using the last this six weeks or so. There’s actually two different programs. I’m going to talk about the newer one that I’ve been using called Aqua. It’s a voice dictation software. Craig, you probably remember like back in the day, there was Dragon dictation. There are ways you could talk instead of type into your computer. We had to train them. It was fussy. You had to do everything sort of exactly just right.

Somehow this last year, it just got incredibly, insanely good, so you can talk full speed, and it does a very good job of not only understanding what you’re saying but figuring out the context of what you’re saying and putting periods in appropriate places. It just got crazy better, like much better than the dictation on your phone.

Craig: Yes, which is not good.

John: Which is not good.

Craig: They’ll be buying this shortly.

John: For my trip to Jordan and Egypt, I handwrote my journal. After going to see places, I would handwrite sort of what I was doing. I didn’t open my laptop the entire time I was there, and so I had this handwritten journal, but it wasn’t actually all that useful because I can read my handwriting for about three days, but then it’s just like sort of indecipherable.

Craig: Then it has to go to the mail room.

John: The mail room has to handle it.

Craig: It’s paper.

John: I wanted a digital copy of it, so I was like, “Oh, God. I’m going to have to type this all.” It’s like, “No, I’m actually just going to dictate it,” and so I would just like dictate a lot. I could just go through paragraphs at a time.

It’s just really good. If you’ve not tried computer-based dictation software recently– originally, I was using superwhisper, which is also very good. Aqua seems a little bit better. It just figures out context behind things. I was naming temples in Egypt and it was spelling them properly.

Craig: Spelling them correctly?

John: Try it out. They’re free trials, and then it’s a subscription if you decide to keep using it.

Craig: Fantastic. That’s for cross-platform, or?

John: I know it’s on the Mac. I think there’s probably a Windows equivalent support. Again, dictation software is one of those things that was so important for accessibility for people who couldn’t type and so I typed. It’s just great that these tools, which were originally designed for people with these things, are now so useful for all of us.

Someone’s going to write in about this, so let me acknowledge this. There are privacy concerns with any tool that is basically taking the audio, sending it to the internet, and sending it back very quickly.

Craig: It could keep your stuff.

John: It could keep your stuff.

Craig: Have you looked at the–

John: I looked at the terms of service. They’re saying they’re not keeping your stuff, but do you trust them? At a certain point, I was like, “No,” but do I trust Dropbox, which has all my stuff? Do I trust anything?

Craig: Weirdly, I do trust Dropbox. I don’t know why I trust Dropbox.

John: I’ve just sort of given up. For mission-critical stuff or things that are truly secret, if I was Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy writing on Westworld or something, maybe I wouldn’t feel comfortable with it, but for what I’m doing, I just think it’s really good.

Craig: All right. Good to know. I’m also going to go down the tech road here. I finally experienced something in VR that made me go, “Oh yes, this is going to work.”

John: Oh great. What was it?

Craig: I use the Quest 3, which is from [sighs] Meta, stupidest name and evil. I was so excited because the Fireproof Games, which is the company that makes The Room games for iOS, has pivoted away into VR, which was bumming me out, but they did make a Room game for VR that was pretty darn good. It didn’t make me think like, [mumbles].

They have a game out now called Ghost Town. It is astonishing. It’s a good game, but also, it’s astonishing. For the first time, I was like, “I think I’m somewhere else.” I got close to the wall and was just looking at the texture of the drywall, and I’m like, “Yes, we’re here. It’s happening.” If they can do that now, 5 to 10 years, it’s going to be remarkable how similar it is to the actual visual experience. The next step then would be to add smells and texture and wind ruffling, but honestly, even if you don’t–

John: A direct brain interface at some point.

Craig: It was astonishing, and it’s really well done.

John: Remind us of the name of that.

Craig: Ghost Town.

John: Ghost Town, and it’s available on the Quest. Do you know if it’s available on Vision Pro or any other things?

Craig: I think it’s across all the VR platforms, I believe.

John: I have a Vision Pro. I might try that.

Craig: It should. I think so. I hope so, because it’s also just a really good game, but boy. There’s a little tutorial section, it’s like the first little setting, and I was like, “Eh, it’s pretty good.” [unintelligible 00:52:09] like, “Huh.” Then I got to the next bit, and I was like, “What?” Then it just kept getting better. It’s really something else.

John: This was months ago, but what if the Marvel series did a thing for the Vision Pro, did like, basically, an episode that’s sort of inside the Vision Pro? Remarkably well done, just incredibly effective use of the tools and technology. I’d have no idea how much it would cost. It must cost so much money, but the market for it is like, “Did 50,000 people see that?”

Craig: Right, exactly. That’s the thing.

John: The chicken-egg problem of it is a big thing.

Craig: This was the first time where I was like, “Yes, this is going to happen.” It’s been a while. We’ve had these headsets for a while now.

John: Great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt-

Craig: I don’t know.

John: -with help from Sam Shapson.

Craig: No.

John: It is edited by Matthew Choleli.

Craig: If you say so.

John: 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 like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links for things about writing.

We have T-shirts, even orange T-shirts, and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. [music] You’ll find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the e-mail you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you again to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Strong Opinions. Craig, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, Strong Opinions is a game that we sort of came up with in the office. Nima, who you know, our coder– we love Nima. Nima has a strong opinion about everything. The thing is, you can’t predict what it would be, like pickles, “Ah, pickles are the worst,” or, “Pickles are the best.” You just don’t know, but you know he’s going to have a very strong opinion.

Craig: He’s going to have a hard opinion on every possible yes/no.

John: One day in Slack, I just made a list of 15 things and I had us all vote on, what do we think Nima thinks about each of these things? Then we went through it and [unintelligible 00:54:39], so I built it out into a little bit of a game now called Strong Opinions. It’s a good kind of game for– if you are having a game night, it’s like sort of the first like warmup kind of game.

Craig: Little icebreaker?

John: Yes, a little icebreaker. Let’s do a new game here. We’re going to play.

Craig: This is exciting.

John: Drew will play with us. Here, we’ll do three rounds, and we’ll go start. We’ll start with Craig, so it’s your turn. You just got microwave ovens. Now, Drew and I have to decide what Craig thinks of microwave ovens.

Craig: Got you.

John: All right. If we’re playing this in person, you have a Heck Yeah or a Nope card. Heck Yeah is a testament to–

Craig: Loving something.

John: Yes, and it’s a reference to Megan McDonnell, our Scriptnotes producer, who says, “Heck yeah,” so that spirit, or “Nope.”

Craig: All right. Would I theoretically have to write this down so you would trust me?

John: Yes.

Craig: But just trust me.

John: We’ll just trust you here

Craig: It’s the honor system.

John: Drew, why don’t you go first? Craig and microwave ovens.

Drew: I think it’s a nope.

John: I think it’s also a nope.

Craig: Heck yeah.

Drew: Really?

John: You’re heck yeah? Okay.

Craig: I use a microwave almost every day. I love a microwave oven. There are things that microwaves do so well. I had a breakfast burrito this very morning. It was a frozen breakfast burrito.

John: Where is your microwave oven? Because I’m picturing your kitchen.

Craig: It’s buried in the cabinetry to the left of the refrigerator. It’s sleek. I looked on the directions and it was like, “If you want to make this in an oven, it’s 19 hours. If you want to put it in an air fryer, it’s a million years, or it’s one minute and 30 seconds in the microwave.” I was like, “I’m going to go with microwave.”

John: Two of our D&D friends do not have microwave ovens.

Craig: It’s crazy.

John: I was astonished by this.

Craig: Crazy. No, I’m going to heck yeah microwave ovens.

John: All right. Drew, your topic is tiki bars. I actually know this about Drew. Craig, do you think Drew is a fan or an anti-fan of tiki bars?

Craig: I’m going to say that it’s a heck yeah because who has a hard no on that? How many times have you experienced one?

John: I’m actually a hard no on tiki bars.

Craig: I’ve never been to one.

John: Yes. But I know that Drew is a fan of tiki bars.

Craig: Okay, I got it right.

Drew: I’m a heck yeah.

Craig: Heck yeah.

John: All right.

Craig: That’s so strange. Where– I don’t even want to know. The only one I know is the tiki room in Disneyland.

John: All right, mine is composting. What do I, John August, think about composting?

Drew: It’s a heck yeah.

Craig: It has to be a heck yeah. He’s so green.

John: I’m actually going to be a nope.

Craig: Ah, what?

John: This is surprising, but because we actually tried composting and it was such a disaster.

Craig: Why?

John: We got one of these cones that you throw all your compost bits in and it becomes overrun with ants and other bugs and stuff, and so I would shudder every time I needed to do it. Now we have the green bin and we throw stuff out there, but honestly, Mike is more often the person who’s emptying the compost into the green bins.

Craig: So you are composting.

John: Yes, but I don’t like it.

Craig: It doesn’t sound like you have a hard opinion on it one way or the other. Nobody likes composting.

John: Yes, I’m not anti-concept of it. I just don’t like the process of composting.

Craig: Alright, interesting. I thought you would’ve been more enthusiastic about composting.

John: All right, going back to Craig. What do we think Craig thinks about pineapple on pizza? Okay. Drew, you’re up.

Drew: Oof.

Craig: Everybody has a hard opinion about that, I think.

Drew: I’m going to say heck yeah.

John: I’m going to say nope.

Craig: Nope is correct. I’m from Staten Island. Do not dare violate a pizza with that nonsense.

John: Yes, and one of the tricky things that comes up with this game sometimes is like, “Well, am I thinking just for myself or for other people?” Bird-watching came up and like, I don’t believe in bird-watching, but also, I’m not opposed to other people bird-watching. If Julia Turner wants to bird-watch, I support that for her.

Craig: Or Melissa.

John: Yes, but I don’t–

Craig: I make fun of it all the time because it’s stupid.

John: All right, Drew’s is, well, how does Drew feel about artificial Christmas trees?

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting. It’s funny that you brought up the– for me, because I love an artificial Christmas tree myself, but I think that Drew is a nope on that.

John: I think Drew is also a no on artificial Christmas trees.

Drew: I think I’m a nope now, but I was a heck yeah for a very long time.

Craig: But you’ve converted to nope.

Drew: I’ve converted to nope just in this last year because I have been informed of like the microplastics that these trees end up sort of becoming, and then [unintelligible 00:58:35].

Craig: By the way, nope converts are the hardest nopes of them all. Everyone knows that.

John: Yes, absolutely. They once believed it and now they’re– no, that’s fair enough.

Craig: Yes, now they’re just like, now they need you to know. Making me feel guilty.

John: What do I think about flavored sparkling water?

Craig: Nope.

Drew: I think John is largely a nope.

Craig: I’m a nope.

John: I’m a heck yeah.

Craig: I was trying to remember if you drink like-

John: Yes, LaCroixs I do. I’m not like the Topo Chico fan that you are or used to be.

Craig: Topo Chico’s not flavored, though.

John: It’s not flavored, but like the idea of sparkling water as a thing-

Craig: Yes, I love the sparkling. I like the hit.

Drew: John only likes one flavor of sparkling water.

Craig: What is it?

John: I like the Pamplemousse [unintelligible 00:59:07].

Craig: Pamplemousse.

John: I was at your house. I was at your house and from your refrigerator, I pulled a Peach-Pear.

Craig: Melissa loves that.

John: Oh my God. It had like a texture to it that I just did not enjoy. Water should not have a texture, but it created something.

Craig: Oh sorry, we keep old milk in those. I should’ve mentioned. That’s where we put our compost. [laughter]

John: It was a very meaty water, so.

Drew: Gross.

John: Whoa. What does Craig think of tuna salad?

Drew: Nope.

John: No, it has mayonnaise in it. Absolutely nope.

Craig: No, of course not. Also, the way that they’ve abused the word salad, this perfectly fine word. [laughter] Just, oh, it’s salad, or it’s something that isn’t salad that we put this snot on top of. God.

John: What does Drew think about Christina Aguilera?

Craig: I’m going to say heck yeah.

John: I’ll say heck yeah also.

Drew: I’m a heck yeah.

Craig: Yes, because she’s great.

John: Talented.

Drew: Very talented.

Craig: An amazing singer.

John: Yes.

Drew: Yes.

John: What do I think about podcasts on YouTube?

Craig: Well, you just said that you’re putting us on YouTube, although you’re not putting us as a podcast on YouTube, per se. I’m going to go with nope because I think John is– he likes the proper podcast delivery systems, so I’m going to say nope.

Drew: I’m also going to say nope because I feel like this is watching people talk, and I feel like that’s not up John’s alley.

John: Yes, I’m going to be a nope on that, too, and I feel like it’s absolutely fine to make videos of people doing stuff, but it’s fine to have a talk show kind of thing, but I think it’s no longer a podcast. I think a podcast is about an individual listening to a thing, and a visual podcast at a certain point just becomes a talk show.

Craig: Just a tiny talk show. I mean, I’m okay with when they put the audio podcast on YouTube because some people do listen. Then it’s fine.

John: That’s time. That was it.

Craig: Great, well that was a fun game. I learned a lot.

John: If you wanted to play this for yourselves, it’s just johnaugust.com/strong-opinions.

Craig: Amazing.

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes for it.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: Craig, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Thanks, Drew. Thanks, Sam.

Drew: Thanks.

Links:

• Scriptnotes on YouTube!
• Strong Opinions game
• Hollywood Unions letter to President Trump
• The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch by Forrest Wickman
• Foggy Brume on Twitch
• 36 Questions, the podcast musical
• Austin Film Festival
• My First Movie: 20 Celebrated Directors Talk about Their First Film
• Orange T-shirts are back!
• Aqua voice dictation software
• Ghost Town by Fireproof Games
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt with help from Sam Shapson. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: Okay, so. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 688 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome back a seven-time guest.

Craig: Oh.

John: He is a comedian, filmmaker, and podcaster whose new special, The Good Life, debuted this week on Netflix. It is the legendary Mike Birbiglia. Welcome back.

Mike Birbiglia: Hey, guys. This is my favorite podcast. I, on the flight here, listened to the Taffy Akner Moneyball episode. As a fan of the show, I request-

Craig: More?

Mike: -more breaking apart a movie.

John: Oh, yes. The Deep Dives? Yes.

Mike: Oh my gosh.

Craig: I think he’s right. I think he’s right. We don’t do it enough. I guess what we do do enough, or maybe too much of, is having Mike Birbiglia on the show.

John: No.

Craig: Seven-time host. We should give you the jacket, the robe that SNLers get.

Mike: The Seven Timers Club.

Craig: The Seven Timers Club.

John: Here are the episodes he was on. First was in 2013 for My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend Screenwriter. That’s way back to your first film. Then, Austin Forever in 2014. That was an Austin Live show, which I had forgotten that we actually– that’s where you first–

Mike: My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend Special. Then, what was it? We talked about Sleepwalk with Me, the movie? My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend wasn’t a movie.

John: It was number two. Yes, okay. That was a special, wasn’t it?

Mike: That was a special, yes.

John: That was a special, right. I think I first saw you– Joss Whedon interviewed you at the Writers Guild Theater for Sleepwalk With Me.

Mike: For Sleepwalk With Me. 2012. Woo.

John: 2014, Austin Forever. 2016, Don’t Think Twice. Your movie, which we all loved.

Mike: Thanks.

John: It was so early on the dissection of how comedy groups work and how improv works and all that stuff. It’s held up really well.

Mike: Oh, thanks.

John: We had you on in 2019 for The New One. We had you in 2020. You were part of a big episode with What We’re All Up To during the pandemic. We checked in with you there. I was a guest on your show, which we also aired on this very podcast. Your show called Working It Out, your podcast, is phenomenal. I recommend it to–

Craig: I have seen it. That’s the thing. That’s why I like the idea of maybe putting this on video because I like watching you-

Mike: Oh, wow. Thanks.

Craig: -more than I like listening to you.

Mike: That’s fascinating.

Craig: I actually turn the sound off.

Mike: Oh, you turn the sound off?

Craig: Yes. I just watch you.

Mike: I’m like a silent film podcast star to you?

Craig: I blow it up and I just look at you mouth. Yes, Sexy Craig likes your podcast.

Mike: Oh, I’m so glad that we’re recording this.

John: Recently on your podcast, you had Gary Simons, who works with you on that podcast.

Mike: Yes, true.

John: He’s also a stand-up comic. You were talking through the process. It was so good in terms of answering questions about what it’s like to get a career started as a stand-up comic in the way that I think we’re trying to answer those questions for aspiring screenwriters. It was just so, so smart.

Mike: Thanks a lot. It’s funny. There were two episodes back-to-back that were Scriptnotes-esque but in the comedy space. The Gary Simons episode, which we basically speak to what do you do in the first three to five years of trying to be a comic? Then the week before Ira Glass comes on and decides, “Hey, I want to try to do stand-up comedy.”

Craig: I was impressed by this. I really was.

Mike: It was like, “Well, what happens if you’re not a stand-up comic? You want to try it. I perform 10 minutes. What is your critique of these 10 minutes? It’s not unlike the three-page challenge.

John: What I’d like to do with you on the podcast today is talk about how you write a joke for the stage, for a sketch, or for a scene. We have some scenarios. It’s like how would this be a movie, but how would this be a joke? We have some scenarios we’re going to talk through and figure out what is the comedic premise for each of these types of writing and how different they are. A joke you tell on stage versus a sketch versus a scene, they’re really different needs even though they are all potentially finding comedy in a situation.

Mike: That’s great.

John: Cool. We’re also going to answer listener questions on breaking a story, using an idea, TV remakes. In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about video and social and all the infrastructure behind the scenes and stuff, because you and your team do an amazing job with video for your podcast, the marketing without making it feel like marketing. You must have email lists that are managed. I’d just love to know what all that’s like, because it’s just–

Craig: Because we want to beat you.

Mike: Sure.

Craig: Teach us your ways so that we may overcome you.

John: I just want to know more about that.

Mike: That seems great. I love that.

John: Cool. Drew, we have some news.

Drew Marquardt: We do. We realized that Spotify had comments on the podcast episodes.

Craig: Oh.

Mike: No idea.

Drew: So we turned them off. Oh, we have yours too.

John: The Spotify comments we were getting on Scriptnotes episode, and the reason we turned them off, they’re all about The Last of Us, Craig.

Mike: Oh my gosh.

Craig: Great. I’m sure the people that take time to leave comments on Spotify love the show and all the decisions we’ve made.

Drew: Very measured feedback.

John: Mike, yours are still on. You may not realize this, so we have a sampling of some of the comments on your Ira Glass episode.

Mike: Amazing.

John: Rory wrote in and said, “Maybe the best episode of the show feels like the core of what this podcast should be about.”

Mike: Oh, wow.

John: String of Numbers says, “Props to Ira for being open and vulnerable in his work. It was interesting to see Mike pointing out where the punchline should go and Ira being less sure how to approach that.”

Mike: Sure. All right.

John: Elise says, “Love this show but “Hiking is walking” is a joke made on Sex and the City-

Mike: Oh.

John: -by a character played by David Duchovny 20 years ago. It’s not original.”

Mike: Fair.

John: Then we also looked at the YouTube clip for that and it said, “You don’t know this, but in my brain, you’re my dad.”

Mike: Me or Ira?

John: Yes, to you.

Mike: All right.

Craig: You wanted it to be Ira, didn’t you?

[laughter]

Mike: He is in some ways, I said this on the episode. He in some ways feels like my dad.

Craig: He’s a very paternal.

John: He is, yes.

Craig: Yes, he gives that vibe.

John: Yes, but I think there’s a lot of dad energy in this podcast right now. We’re all very in that dad–

Craig: Even you. Even you, Drew.

John: Yes. He’s a young dad. Young dad. He has a young child.

Mike: Oh, you have a young child?

Drew: I don’t. No.

Mike: Okay. Perfect.

[laughter]

Craig: Because he seems so ambivalent about it?

Mike: Yes, exactly.

Craig: I know I have five kids, but I don’t know if I’m real.

John: Drew looks like he could be pushing a stroller, though.

Craig: Oh, for sure.

Drew: I’m going to take that as a compliment.

Craig: Drew, are we allowed to ask you how old you are by law?

Drew: I don’t think legally, no.

Craig: Okay. I’m not asking you. If you volunteer it, I’m just curious.

Drew: I’m 35.

Craig: I already had a five-year-old and a two-year-old by that point. I would say yes, he’s stroller age.

John: Final comment on your YouTube. Why do I just now realized Mike looks a lot like Matt Damon? Do you get the Matt Damon comparison?

Mike: Yes. Cross between Matt Damon and Bill O’Reilly.

Craig: Oh, wow.

John: Oh, wow. That’s it.

Craig: I would adjust that to just Bill O’Reilly.

John: Now, once it, you can’t unsee it. It’s crazy.

Craig: You are young, kind Bill O’Reilly.

Mike: Every time– so over the years, I get Paul Rudd. The one I got for years was James Van Der Beek.

John: [crosstalk]

Mike: When I was on Late Night with Seth Meyers once, and James Van Der Beek was there, I was like, “People tell me I look like you.” He was just like, “I don’t see it.” Anyway. Now I never say what people compare me [unintelligible 00:07:02]

Craig: The next time you’re on O’Reilly, you should bring it up.

Mike: Oh, God.

John: Where is O’Reilly now? Is it a podcast or is it a video? I don’t know. He’s not on a network anymore.

Mike: I think it’s probably some a self-release thing, right?

Craig: Podcast thing. From his bunker.

John: Yes, it’s wild. Mike, talk to us about this special. I saw versions of this along the way. I saw you had Mike Birbiglia and Friends, where you did some of the material in this. Then I saw the full thing on stage, and I saw it last night in its finished Netflix form. I think we’ve talked on previous episodes about your process, which we can see as a bunch of note cards up on a board.

Mike: Sure.

John: What was the inception of this, and when did you find the pieces fitting together?

Mike: The inception of it was two years ago when I finished The Old Man in the Pool, which was at Lincoln Center, and we filmed it for Netflix. I always talk on my podcast about this concept of obsession. What is the thing you’re obsessed about, can’t stop thinking about? As a writer, it’s like, “Well, just write that. Just free write on that. This Is My Journal, it’s like I’m free writing on that at breakfast this morning.

Two years ago, it was just like, “Oh, this is weird. My daughter is eight years old now, and I don’t know a lot of the answers to the questions, because kids just always ask so many questions. I was knocking it out of the park till age eight. Then all of a sudden, it’s like, “Oh, these are tricky questions.” I just went– my first thing is always like I go to the comedy cellar. I go to small 100, 200 seat comedy rooms, try out a ton of jokes. Those jokes eventually become stories. At a certain point, I start to form the stories into having, similar to how you guys talk about it all the time, of so-then causality versus and-then lateral movement story-wise.

About a year into the process, my dad had a stroke, and so much of my life became about taking care of my dad. I started to think in relation to, “Okay, what if the show was about how do I explain things to my daughter?” and also, “What is my relationship with my own dad?” It becomes this– the title is The Good Life, but it becomes a meditation on the question that my daughter asked me when she looked up at a smoke shop called, The Good Life, “Dad, what’s the good life?” It opens the special with an existential question, “What is the good life?” It makes the audience wonder that. Then I go through a lot of stories with my daughter and with my dad, and then it arrives at a thesis at the end of what is the good life.

John: Yes. Great. When you’re figuring out these pieces, one of these things you get to do as a stand-up comic is just constantly test the material and constantly see what actually resonates with the audience. When we’re writing scenes, we’re writing scenes but they just exist on a page. We don’t hear them. We don’t feel them. We don’t get a reaction. You’re constantly getting the reaction. What was the culling process like of like, “Oh, I think it’s this idea.” How developed are jokes you’re telling in those initial rooms?

Mike: The jokes at the beginning are– they’re developed insofar as I’ve run them by friends who are comics, usually. Our listenerships are similar in the sense of it’s a lot of creative people who are either working as creatives or want to work as creatives. I always say, try to build a community of the people around you. I look around at the people who I started with, and we were all broke and struggling in our 20s. I look around and go, “Oh, they’re doing really well now.” ‘You know what I mean? There is a thing to creating your own community of people who are at your level.

I feel like now it’s like people like Pete Holmes and John Mulaney are people who in my 20s were trying to figure it all out, and we would run jokes by each other. Now everyone has a really good career, but still you run jokes by each other. Then even, I think it was one of those Largo shows that you were at and Mulaney came on and he gave me a joke that ended up in the special. There’s a line where I go, “I’m a comedian. My wife is a poet. Together, we’re a sculptor.” I came off stage and he goes, “What about this?” He goes, “It doesn’t make sense, but what do you think of this?” I was like, “Yes, I’ll try that.” It somehow does make sense in the context of the special.

That’s what it is. It’s like, you start out with, you bounce jokes off friends, which is what my whole podcast is. Then when you figure out something that you think is worth an audience seeing, you put it out there. Then I go on tour, and that’s really instructive bringing it to all different cities because you see like, “Oh, yes, this isn’t just a provincial sense of humor in New York City. This is something that plays everywhere,” or it doesn’t play. I think a huge part of being a comedian is figuring out what doesn’t work.

Craig: Yes, I wish that we had that. Although I suppose what we do– we don’t quite have it on the granular level that you do because I don’t think any of our friends would just go, “Hey, here’s a scene.”

Mike: Yes, sure.

Craig: It starts on page 37. You don’t know what happened before. We will share scripts, and we will look at– maybe even it’s more common to happen deeper into the process where we’ll say, “Okay, here’s a cut of.” You, actually, you had that testing procedure for your movie-

Mike: Don’t Think Twice, yes.

Craig: -Don’t Think Twice, where you would have a reading and people would there and then discuss it, which was really smart.

John: It’s hard to iterate. Long form writing is just hard to iterate overall.

Craig: It is.

John: You can’t watch this whole thing. When I was doing Big Fish, the musical, we could iterate. Every night, we could see the show like, “Oh, this is what’s working. This is what’s not working.” I can swap out jokes. We could move whole scenes around. In film and TV writing, it’s not really possible.

Craig: Yes, it is a little scary to know that you’re chiseling in stone and then sending it out into the world. What I love about what you’re saying, it’s what– we talked about writers’ groups last week, I think. Part of me gets itchy when people write in and they’re like, “I’m part of a writer’s group,” because I think, “Well, what if all the writers in that group aren’t very good?” because the odds are they’re not.

Mike: Sure.

Craig: Then they’re all giving each other advice, and it’s maybe bad. Then I think, “Okay, if you do find yourself hitting a mark, getting a job, entering, to look around for people that are also like you, and what I think has changed, I don’t know if you agree with me, John, when we started in Hollywood, it felt like you were isolated and that, in fact, we were all meant to be in competition with each other. We were like horses in our stall before the gate opens.

I think as the internet brought everybody together, that went away completely and became more like, Okay, I’m going to pick up a phone, “Have you worked with this person?” or, “I have an idea. Do you think this is a good idea?” I love that you can do that with– does it ever hurt?

Mike: Which part of it?

Craig: When you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to try this show. Okay, Mulaney, I’m going to run this by you,” and he just stares at you and he’s like, “No.”

Mike: No, I don’t think that hurts. I don’t say– Look, I think not doing well with a joke with friends, it’s hard in that moment. Not doing well with a joke on stage is hard in that moment. I think you have to, like there’s an imperative to view it as I’m getting feedback for something that will be finished later. It’s like the wisest thing that almost anyone ever taught me is my editor, Jeffrey Richman, who edited this special, he edited both of my movies, he edited Severance, he did Escape at Dannemora, he does a lot of stuff with Ben Stiller. On both movies, I had moments in the edit where I go, “What are we going to do? This is a disaster.”

Craig: Oh, sure.

Mike: He just goes, “Oh, we’re not going to hand it in till it’s done.” It’s so simple of an idea, but I think that that’s– all artistic process, you just don’t hand it in till it’s done.

Craig: What I think people that work in comedy have, that people who have never worked in comedy don’t have, is this, which is, sometimes I describe it as a work ethic, but what I really think it is humility. Comedy humiliates you.

Mike: [laughs] Yes, sure.

Craig: Humiliates you. Then, as part of the process, you must get re-humiliated over and over and over-

Mike: That’s right.

Craig: -to the point where you don’t even see it as humiliation anymore. You see it as part of the process towards turning it in before it’s done.

Mike: That’s right.

Craig: A lot of people who come in drama have this opposite point of view. Their point of view is, “I need to treasure my instincts. That is my voice, and what I have done, therefore, is correct, regardless of what people think.” I think having a little bit of that isn’t such a bad idea, but I’m far more admiring of the humiliation sequence.

Mike: Liz Gilbert has this, who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, and many other great things, has this TED Talk that’s so good about the idea of not being a genius but having a genius, and holding it, and fostering it. That way it doesn’t become about you, or you, or you.

Craig: Oh, yes.

Mike: I think that that’s really key as a comedian. You can never think, “I am funny.” You have to think, “I want to create something that is funny for these people.”

Craig: That’s brilliant. I think that’s absolutely brilliant. Now, also, you probably need to then do the same thing for whatever the opposite of genius is, the self-loathing, the critic, I guess, which is sometimes hard for me. I should imagine like, “Okay, it’s easy for me to imagine there’s genius over there. That’s not me.” Now I have to figure out like, “Okay.” Also, there’s a critic over there not in here. That can be difficult. I like that.

John: I want to talk to you about how you bring yourself to your work. As writers, we’re always putting ourselves in our scripts and in our pages, but it’s all disguised. It’s never really exactly us. We’re never identifying like, “Oh, this is me doing this thing,” versus your stand-up, which is all about what has happened to you. All of your comedy is very centered on your experience of things that happened to you, and the people around you, which is a challenge because your wife, Jenny, your daughter, Una, they’ve been part of all of your specials. We know a lot about them even though we’ve never met them.

Mike: My parents, yes.

John: Your parents, especially in this one, and your dad, who’s unwillingly dragged into this story.

Mike: Oh, yeah. So you’ve been talking to him about it?

John: Oh, yes. Can you talk to me, as you’re developing this material and trying it on stage, how do you find the boundaries of like, “Well, this is me, Mike Birbiglia, as the individual person, versus me, the performer, who is creating this funny thing that’s not me”?

Mike: That is probably the most challenging part of it. I think that’s part of the reason why I’m going to take a few years off from autobiographical storytelling right now, because my daughter is 10, and she’s entering those years where I feel like you don’t want to make someone more self-conscious about all their stuff.

Craig: Yes, and you probably don’t want to be looking too closely at it either-

Mike: No.

Craig: -having gone through it twice.

Mike: Oh, yes.

Craig: It will be a great story for you 15 years from now.

Mike: Sure, yes. That’s what Jenny– My wife is a poet, brilliant poet, but she always says, whenever we’re going through something that’s really hard, she’s like, “Write it down. Just don’t release it now.”

Craig: I like how concise that is, have you ever checked to see if she’s constantly speaking to you in haiku and you just don’t remember?

[laughter]

John: It’s been a long constant this entire time. We’re going to wind back to the table, and I’ll think, “Oh, everything was a haiku.”

Craig: That would be the most brilliant thing ever.

Mike: She’s very wise and poetic person. Yes, that is hard. I’m pivoting over to the thing I’m writing right now. It’s fictional. I’m writing a movie and hopefully shoot next year, in the vein of Don’t Think Twice, a small-budget indie comedy. Yes, I’m going to take a few years off from it because I do think it’s hard. I’m talking about my dad. My dad’s in his final stage of life. He could go tomorrow. He could go in a year or two years, but it’s the final stage of life. It’s so hard. Yes, that side of it, I’m always juggling what am I saying and am I depicting the person well. Am I trying to find myself as the joke of the story-

John: Exactly.

Mike: -as opposed to just taking on people?

John: Absolutely. In this last special, you’re talking about how terrible nine-year-old girls are, which is just true, nine-year-olds are terrible. There’s a reason why you go to the jumpy gym where everyone’s going to get hurt because everybody gets hurt. All that stuff is very relatable, but none of it is directed. Your daughter comes out well in all of it.

Mike: True. I love my daughter, I hate her friends.

[laughter]

John: Yes, absolutely. A class of people is great, but the focus of the humiliation is always you. It’s your hard nipples.

John: That’s right.

Mike: It’s all-

Craig: I get that too.

[laughter]

Mike: The thing that’s funny about that, about the autobiographical side of that, is the hard nipple story is basically, I’ll paraphrase it for the audience, but it’s when I was 12, I had hard nipples. Sometimes something happens during puberty. I was always a hypochondriac, so I thought it was cancer. I went to my dad– he’s a doctor– and go, “Hey, Dad. I have hard nipples.”

John: On your special you say like, “Dad, I have cancer.”

Mike: I have cancer. He goes, “Why do you think that?” “I have hard nipples.”

Craig: I loved how calm he was. Why do you think that?

John: Exactly.

Mike: He’s a neurologist. No emotion.

[laughter]

Mike: I was like, “Well, see for yourself.” I take off my shirt. In the living room, he feels my hard nipples. Then he gives me the briefest medical diagnosis I’ve received to this very day. He goes, “Nope.” That was the end of the conversation.

[laughter]

Craig: What a comforting presence in your life.

Mike: Yes, exactly. This is a great example of when people ask me, “Are these stories true?” Sometimes they’re not true in small ways that you would never guess. When my dad felt my nipples, it was in his bedroom.

Craig: Oh.

Mike: I took it out.

Craig: Yes, that’s smart.

Mike: I relocated it to the living room because the audience–

Craig: You don’t want them going where you don’t want them going. You want them going there a tiny bit, which is, LOL, my dad’s feeling me up.

Mike: LOL, yes.

Craig: If he’s feeling me up in his bedroom, that’s not LOL.

John: What’s also crucial, though, is that you had already set up that your dad would come home from his two jobs and sit in his chair and read his war novels. You’re able pull it back to war novels. He sets down his war novel and puts his hands on your hard nipples.

Mike: That’s right.

John: You already created the image for us, which is why it’s so much better than what it is.

Craig: Apparently we have the same dad.

Mike: Yes, exactly.

Craig: I love dadness. I have to say it’s underappreciated in our society. We make fun of the fact that the dad comes home sits there and reads the war novel or watches the History Channel or plays a very long version of some World War II simulation with a friend. It’s wonderful. Let’s celebrate that.

Mike: Yes, sure.

Craig: Let’s celebrate that guy.

John: The last thing I want to talk to you about before we get to these “how would this be a jokes” is transitions. We talk on the show constantly about transitions and how you move from scene to scene. I’d seen your special on stage, but watching it filmed, I was very aware of when you’re transitioning from one idea to the next idea, from one tone to the next tone, from we’re in this world, now, we’re in this world. I’m sure it’s a thing that you worked out doing the show again and again live. You were able to pivot on such small spaces. Sometimes it’s a gesture, it’s a single word repeated, and pull us along to a completely new thing.

Mike: Sure.

John: Are you writing that? Are you thinking that or is just how it works on stage as you’re feeling it out?

Mike: I would describe that as the final stage of the development in a two-year process. It’s probably the final six months just figuring out how is this story, so then this story, so then this story, so then this story. My director, Seth Barrish, who also directed the special and– it’s a confusing title for people, but he is a dramaturgical person. He works through the script with me and the logic of the script. We’ll spend an extraordinary amount of time. He’ll go, “When you go to the hard nipples story, and then you go to but actually your dad wasn’t physically affectionate, but you are physically affectionate with your daughter. You hug her, you say, I love you. I don’t understand the connection between those two ideas.”

It’s almost like he’s making– what Seth is doing is he’s making his brain blank and — or attempting to — over and over and over again, making, trying to imagine what it would be like as someone who’s never seen the show, getting rid of the curse of knowledge. Getting rid of the curse of knowledge. We have these long, drawn out conversations. I’m sure you guys deal with this in television and films all the time, which is like, you’ll end up taking something that was 150 words, and then at the end of the edit, it’s four words. But those four words are the right four words.

Craig: Absolutely.

Mike: That’s a lot of what we do.

John: Last night, we were also talking about how a thing you do really well, which you see other comics do, but I was really struck by it last night, is we’re on one thread, and then you take a diversion, and we’re on another thread, which is really, really funny. Then you pull us back to the main thread, and we’d forgotten that we were on that thread, and yet we’re like, “Oh, yes.” You get a jolt of energy because you’re back on the main thread. You had forgotten that you’d taken a detour. It’s not a recall. We’re just rejoining the story that we were already on. It’s really well done.

Craig: You get to be a genius, because if you’re talking normally with people, you cannot maintain 12 spinning plates, including a hidden one up your sleeve, that you then go, ah-ha, and ah. You plan your own brilliance so that when you do come back around to things, it’s magician stuff. Right?

Mike: It’s a very strange art form, in the sense that, as a comedian, when you meet people, you are always a letdown because you look like that guy on stage, and your voice is the same as that guy on stage, but there’s less jokes, there’s less causality story to story. The transitions aren’t great.

Craig: No big surprises.

Mike: No big surprises.

Craig: No full circles.

Mike: Yes, nothing comes full circle.

John: No natural segues, no.

Craig: Just a lot of stammering, and then, and sweat.

Mike: Also, what I’ve noticed through the years is, I think comedians are people who are frustrated at parties because when we perform, people laugh or don’t laugh. They don’t interject. They don’t go, “Let me tell you about my sleepwalking story.” ‘You know what I mean?

Craig: “No, no. Sir, sit down.” Heckler.

Mike: This is the best one-

Craig: Yes?

Mike: “I’ve got the best sleepwalking story here. Everyone shut up.”

Craig: You do. You should just bring somebody with you to parties, who can tell other people to shut up.

Mike: Yes, can you imagine if comedians showed up at parties, and we’re like, “All right, everyone step aside.”

John: Yes, we do.

Craig: Yes, all of your stupid stories, wrap them up.

Mike: With your banter.

Craig: We’ve got a good one that’s crowd tested. Yes, that must be really frustrating. That’s like being, I don’t know, you play in the symphony, and then you go to somebody’s backyard where everyone’s like, “Oh, we’re going to do a quick jam. What do you play? Violin?” “Yes.” The guy banging the pot lid is really loud and–

Mike: You guys must have that, though, with movies, because people– everyone has a take on movies and television. Then you come in, and you’re like, “Okay, here’s my take, and mine’s right.”

John: Yes, but also, the movie is not happening in front of you. No one’s expecting, “Craig, make a movie right now.” There’s not that performance.

Craig: If it were that.

Mike: Yes, it’s–

Craig: If it were a party where the idea was to write a short scene, then I suppose that would be really frustrating.

John: Yes, I suppose, beautiful people who are photographed, they’re still beautiful in real life, but they’re not as attractive, they look immortal.

Craig: The wind machine is on and so forth?

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, but you’re absolutely– you guys are in the worst spot. Congratulations.

Mike: Thank you so much.

[laughter]

John: Let’s take a look at writing some jokes. We have three different stories that I’ve pulled from recent news things. We’re going to start with the Run Club Haters. This is a story in Curved Magazine, a New York magazine, by Melissa Dahl. Drew, can you give us a short summary of the lead here for this story?

Drew: One Saturday morning in April, Amy was running along Kent Avenue in Brooklyn, one of her usual routes. It was a sunny spring day. The sidewalk was crowded with runners, some running alone like her, and others in big groups. At some point, she realized one of those big groups was headed straight towards her. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Amy, who’s 31 and has been running in New York since 2015.

It was, in her memory, a group of young women running five to eight abreast. They were completely across the sidewalk, she recalls. This is the most runners she’s ever seen taking up a path, but she’s gone head to head with run clubs before.

Usually she moves aside, even if it means briefly stepping into the street or a bike lane. This time, she wanted to test something. She didn’t change course, and neither did they. It was something of a game of runner’s chicken, which ended when Amy ran straight through the pack, colliding with one of the women. “Neither of us fell, but I think she was definitely shook,” Amy says. The woman started apologizing, but Amy didn’t stick around to.”

John: This article goes on to talk with organizers of run clubs, including some who accidentally started a run club because they just posted on Instagram, “Oh, I’m going for a run if anyone wants to join?” and then 100 people show up. They’re also talking about parks that are now requiring permits, costing $1,000 for people to do this. This is as a story space, and I was wondering, let’s first start talking about, where are the jokes? Where’s the comedy we could find in this-

Mike: If we were Amy.

John: -if we were Amy or if we were anywhere–

Craig: I don’t want to be Amy.

John: If we were anywhere–

Craig: I don’t want to be in the run club.

John: We could be any of the characters in the story, but if this is something that happened to us or around us, where are some of the jokes? Where are the comedic premises there?

Mike: I think, first of all, you’d have to be Amy in the story. If you’re one of the big group of bird people who essentially wallop someone in the street, that’s not going to be very relatable, but we’ve all been the Amy of the story, which is– I would say, if this were my story, if this were something that happened to me, it would be talking about the observation in general of when people take up the whole sidewalk. You can bring up different examples.

One of my examples that drives me nuts is people with dogs where they’re on one side of the sidewalk, the leash goes across. It’s essentially a trip wire created by them and their evil dog, and they don’t act like they’re taking up the whole curb. I would go into observational things about that, and then I would go into, how do you feel about walking? Are you afraid of walking? How do you feel about walking in the city?

Ira Glass, in some ways, taught me how to tell these types of 7 to 10-minute stories. He always thinks of it in terms of a story, non-comedically, is a little bit of plot, how do you feel about the plot, a little bit more plot, how do you feel about the plot? In my case, as a comedian, it’s a little bit of plot, some jokes about the plot. A little bit of plot, the jokes about the plot. In order for us to care about Amy’s story, or “my story” walking down the street and running into a herd of runners, is you have to know that pushes my buttons as a character. Right?

Craig: Not enough to know that anybody would feel particularly annoyed. You really feel.

Mike: That’s right.

Craig: If this were in a very broad movie, there’s the classic escalation technique. It begins with, I’m running, and there’s one guy just staggering, “I got to go run.” All right, and then there’s the guy with the dog, and then there’s two runners, and then there’s just a wall of runners, and then there’s a Zamboni.

Mike: Yes, that’s right.

Craig: You just keep– it just gets stupider and stupider if it’s–

Mike: That’s straight from Naked Gun.

Craig: That’s Naked Gun. I do think there could be a sketch version where you are part of the run-

Mike: Oh, the runners group? Yes.

Craig: -where the run club is the most heinous, horrible group of people. It’s not just runners, it’s people in stretchers, and it’s– I could see that.

John: It’s taking me back to– on safari and you’ll see a bunch of animals stampede, and it’s like, “Oh shit.” One runner by themselves is not threatening at all, but you see a pack moving towards you, they just– all of your instincts kick in. It’s like, “Oh, this is a dangerous situation.” I also want to get back to what you talked about, humiliation and Amy being humiliated or being the source of– the problem is her is also, I think, really important too. What is it about me that I decided like, “Today, I’m going to be the person, I’m not going to move.”

Craig: Today I decided is really good. Maybe the setup is like every day I see the run club, I turn around and flee. Today I’m not going to because a friend told me to stick up for myself and my therapist. I’m going to hold my head high, and I’m not going to move, and she’s killed. That’s all, they kill her, which is a really good lesson.

Mike: I have an analogous story years ago that I do as stand-up sometimes that’s never found its way into the special. It’s a similar city scenario, which is years ago, I’m rushing down subway steps at the West Forest stop. One of the jokes I make is, I’m always in a rush, I have nowhere to be. I’ve never had anywhere to be. I’m always in a rush. I trip on my lace. My dad taught me how to tie my shoes when I was a kid– he was never around. As I’m not good at it, and so I trip fourth step from the bottom, fly in the air, I land on the ball of my shoulder.

Craig: Argh.

Mike: I know. I often tell people growing up, I know. I was that guy writhing on the floor.

Craig: Dirty subway floor.

Mike: Dirty subway floor. People blowing past me-

John: Of course.

Mike: -just like, “Are you okay?” “No.” “Good,” or “Yes, good,” and then they’re gone. Then, what I sometimes say– nobody’s like, “Oh– “ “If you’re laughing, you’ve been one of these pigs. I want you pigs to know, we’re not fooled by your faux generosity.” It is a similar scenario where, essentially what you’re trying to explain is what your point of view is, what your status quo is. It’s not dissimilar to movie writing. Then what happens, and then what happens because of that.

John: Because of that, there’s a chain of events, there’s a causality like this was not the end of the story. It’s moving to the next thing.

Let’s try our next thing. This is a story from Slate’s Care and Feeding. The advice is from Michelle Herman, but the letter writer is anonymous. Drew, help us out.

Drew: My mother and father divorced more than 10 years ago when I was in eighth grade, after my mother learned my dad was cheating on her. Once my parents split, my father married his affair partner, Ruth, and moved out of state. They ended up having two kids who are now eight and five. After my dad moved out of the house, he never paid a penny in child support, and I didn’t hear a word from him again, until now.

My dad told me that my five-year-old half-sister, Amelia, was undergoing chemotherapy for cancer. Her medical team wanted her to undergo a bone marrow transplant, but neither he, his wife, nor my half-brother was a match. He asked if I would be willing to undergo a screening to see if I am. Long story short, I am.

I find myself utterly conflicted. This man, who was supposed to be my dad, to love and provide for me, shattered my family with his selfishness. He abandoned me for the woman he cheated on my mother with. He wasn’t there to teach me to drive or to see me graduate from high school or college.

While I spent a decade dealing with the pain and rage his walking out on me caused, he started a new family and forgot I existed. Had his daughter not needed a donor, I doubt I would have ever heard from him again. Here he is, crawling to me, hat in hand. Part of me wants to tell him and his wife to leave me alone and never contact me again. I’ve never met my half-sister. I feel no connection to her. But then, there’s this stupid part of me that says that my father and Ruth were the ones who hurt me and that Amelia is innocent. That denying her a potentially life-saving treatment as a means of taking revenge against her parents would be wrong.”

Craig: That’s the stupid part? Okay. Because this guy cheated on my mom and left and didn’t pay child support, I now have a golden opportunity to murder a little girl.

John: Oh my God.

[laughter]

Craig: It was pretty awesome, actually. I also like that she said “affair partner,” by the way. There’s a whole side bit on that, like partner, the way that partners become a thing. In our society, it was just husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, and now everyone says partner. I never know if people are gay or not. I have no idea what’s going on. I don’t know if they’re working together or romantic.

Mike: It’s a startup?

Craig: Affair partner.

Mike: It’s an app they’re working on.

Craig: Yes, exactly. An affair partner is incredible. That’s like granting status like cheating– Anyway.

John: There’s lots of things to unpack and potential comedic things to hold on to, even though this is not obviously comedic. There’s some good stuff here.

Her rage to this disappearing dad, that conflict and that my expectation of what this man is versus the reality is great comedic fodder. Obviously, her relationship to whatever this donor, her half-sister is fascinating. The space of bone marrow donations and would you help out a stranger? The trolley problem of it all is also fascinating. Mike, what’s your way in?

Mike: Yes, I think the way in, with anything that dramatic, I always say to people like, “You need to find one joke that works because the one joke that works indicates to the audience, ‘We’re all okay laughing about this.’” The way that Drew read it, and it was beautiful, was a little bit like a eulogy where it’s a sad story. That’s a tough story. If you just told it like Drew told it on stage in the first person, people would not know to laugh. They would go, “Well, what’s the funny part?”

I just think you need to find a joke. It’s like I have a joke in my special where I go, “My dad was a doctor and in his free time, he got his law degree. That’s how much he didn’t want to be a dad.” The audience knows that my point of view is I’m over that part of it. I’m okay with that part of it.

I had bladder cancer when I was 20 and the first joke I figured out was like, I had bladder cancer, but it’s funny because I’m a hypochondriac. I think the funniest thing that can happen to a hypochondriac is you get cancer because it affirms every fear you’ve ever had. “See, I told you. Remember last week when I thought I had rickets? I was probably right about that too. There’s going to be a lot of changes around here.”

Craig: “When I showed you my nipples–“

Mike: Exactly, yes. If someone wanted to do a comedy bit of this, it’s like, “Well, where is the first joke that indicates that this is okay?” That joke has to be really good. Probably nothing I could come up with now, but it’s like, “My dad wasn’t around as a kid, and then he called me because he wanted my bones.” Just something where just you break open how outrageous the scenario is, and then it turns on itself. I think you can do like, “My dad wasn’t around, and then he wanted my bones,” and then try to come up with a joke around that and then say, “But actually, I’m torn on it because this girl deserves this, and she needs this, and I could help.”

I think with a story that inherently has such high stakes, you have the ability to both have jokes and have dramatic moments. In The Good Life, there’s four or five times where it goes to a dramatic moment just because the audience– a lot of it is, the audience doesn’t see it coming at a comedy show. In some ways, it’s the ultimate surprise. I think the back and forth of jokes in comedy, I think jokes and dramas, it is the potential there.

Craig: You could also– I could see occupying a character and the character is a woe-is-me character, who’s like, “Anyway, my dad left, and cheated on my mom, and then married this other lady. They had a great family that was incredible. He never talked to me ever until his daughter was sick and he came for my bone marrow and I thought, ‘He loves me.’”

[laughter]

Mike: That’s good.

Craig: It depends, like occupying– I do enjoy comedians who occupy characters.

Mike: I love that.

Craig: I love that weird space. It’s always interesting meeting them afterwards and going– like Natasha Leggero occupies a character. Then you talk to Natasha offstage and you’re like, “You are the opposite of that person.” It is–

Mike: Then you can heighten that and be like, “Then he asked to borrow $75,000 and I was like, ‘Maybe this isn’t love.”

Craig: “Wait a second. As the marrow’s leaving me, I thought, ‘Wait. Wait.’”

[laughter]

John: Let’s talk about this as a scene. I would say it could be a movie, which is a whole dynamic, but you could also imagine a scene where you’re talking to this girl at a party and it gets to the point where it’s like, “So now I don’t even know if I should donate marrow to this kid.” It’s like, “What are you talking about? You are going to kill a small child.” There’s that, it’s a good build up for like, what kind of monster are you?

Craig: Or you’re like– Obviously, you all know where this went, I didn’t do it.

[laughter]

Mike: Right, exactly.

Craig: She’s been dead like, I don’t know, three or four years now.

John: Oh God. Oh my God.

Craig: I got to go tell you, it feels great. They tell you it won’t, but it does. Revenge is awesome.

John: Yes.

Craig: Got ya.

Mike: A lot of that is– Those are like three different POV takes on the same–

Craig: With different tones.

Mike: Yes, a lot of it’s persona. Anthony Jeselnik gets away with a different type of joke than I get away with.

Craig: I wish we could send him that. Oh my God, Anthony Jeselnik. Can I just–?

John: Again, occupying a character’s place. [unintelligible 00:40:43] area.

Craig: Completely, but I just want to salute–

John: Oh, I assume that. He’s not actually like that, is he?

Craig: Oh God, I hope not.

Mike: Not that I know of.

Craig: Yes, no, that would be insane.

Mike: I’ve never had an interaction with him like that.

Craig: The mathematical precision. He’s the closest thing that comedy has to Agatha Christie. You know there’s going to be a twist and you’re trying to figure it out-

Mike: Yes, that’s right.

Craig: -and you can’t. It just happens over and over and over and over.

Mike: That’s right. Yes, that’s right.

Craig: He’s just, the craft there is pretty remarkable.

John: Great. This last one, we don’t have that part to read, but this is a New York Times article by Heather Knight and Loren Elliott, with great photos and video by Elliott. It’s about the coyotes of San Francisco. Basically, there were no coyotes in San Francisco, but 10 years or so ago, they started coming back in, and now there are more than 100 coyotes in San Francisco, and they’re letting them be, largely.

One case, they were going after a young child and they went after that coyote. Basically, they do keep down rodent populations and other things, so there’s a reason to be there. It’s just so jarring to have coyotes in the city that never had them.

Mike: Wow.

John: Coyotes are cool. Obviously, in Los Angeles, we’re used to coyotes in our neighborhood. We have coyotes all the time. The comedic space of predators in an urban environment and like how a person interacts with them, what the moment is.

Craig: This is in San Francisco?

John: In San Francisco. Hacks this last season has a coyote episode where Jean Smart’s character is hearing the coyotes howl all the time. She’s putting out bear urine to scare them away. She has a showdown with a coyote at the end. Let’s talk about what can we imagine the comedic premises are for talking about coyotes on stage? What are the handles for that?

Mike: For me, it would have to be story-based interacting with a coyote. I’m trying to think if I have– Do you guys have any good animal stories of interacting with animals?

Craig: My mind goes to just right off the bat, but what is–? Isn’t a coyote just an asshole dog?

John: Yes. [crosstalk]

Craig: Why have we put it in this special category? It’s just, I’ve looked at them. They’re hungry dogs. That’s all they are.

John: It’s a sense of like, what’s a dog off leash though. We have a sense of like, “Oh, dogs are wonderful,” but when you see in a dog in a place you don’t expect to see a dog or a dog who doesn’t seem to have an owner, that’s–

Craig: You call it a coyote. Right. They’re like the hobos of dogs.

John: I was just in Egypt, and Egypt is just like, there’s just dogs everywhere. There’s street dogs.

Mike: That’s right.

John: I was like, “Oh, wait, why don’t dogs get hit?” Mike pointed out like, “Oh, we’re seeing that’s the logical fallacy. Basically, we’re seeing the dogs that survived and–

Craig: You see the dogs that aren’t hit.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes. Coyotes in San Francisco probably, I think the hacky version would just be to start making fun of San Francisco. It’s like, “Oh, now the coyotes keep moving into our neighborhood and the rents are going up.” I wonder where [unintelligible 00:43:29] Coyotes don’t seem funny to me.

Mike: I feel like I would break it–

John: Come on, Wile E. Coyote is an incredible character.

Mike: [laughs]

Craig: The thing is, Wile E. Coyote is, we’re laughing at him, I suppose, but he’s not doing anything irregular. I’ve never seen a coyote use an Acme product.

Mike: If I were going to go into animals, which I ever, if I ever did, it would be the inherent contradiction. So much of comedy is about inherent contradiction. The contradiction is similar to what you’re saying, it’s like, we eat animals, we own animals. We shoo away animals. How are we deciding? Yes.
Who made up the rules on this?

Craig: I think Gaffigan’s got–

Mike: Oh, did he have–? [crosstalk]

Craig: He’s got a pretty good one of like, we eat the animals that aren’t cute.

Mike: That’s right. That’s right. Contradictions would be the thing that would go down, and also the personal story, but I always tell people, one of the probably the smartest things I did artistically was like 25 years ago, I had been doing set up punchline, set up punchline, set up punchline based on things in the news, things happening around town. Then, at a certain point, I was like, “If I wrote about my own experiences, then no one can steal that idea.” Really, no one has that idea. No one’s lived that.

The first thing this makes me think of is like, there’s animals in the walls of my apartment that just run over us. Sometimes Jen will just be like, “Mo,” she calls me Mo. She goes, “Mo, what are we going to do about the animals?” I’m like, “I don’t think you know who you married. I don’t really know. I have no plan for the animals in the ceiling, and I’m not going to have one.” You know what I mean?

Craig: Right, and, “You know that about me.”

Mike: Yes. I don’t know. I do think like finding the what’s your story, the thing about standup comedy and in relation to storytelling, is that the more you have examples of things of your experience of dealing with something, the more people can see themselves in the story. They’re not judging it as, “Oh, this is another guy or lady with a hard take on coyotes,” or this or that or whatever.

I always just try and think, “What’s the personal way in? What’s the personal way in?” Because ultimately, you actually, by telling stories are exhibiting a point of view. Because it’s in the form of a story, the audience isn’t as suspicious of the point of view.

Craig: Yes. Also to give you credit, it’s not a persona. This is actually you. You’re incredibly likable. You’re incredibly likable in no small part because you’re not afraid to be vulnerable. A lot of comedians, their persona is, “I figured it all out. I figured it all out. Let me explain the world to you idiots.” Right? Your persona and your personality is I haven’t– I’m on a journey. I often don’t know what to do. I’m scared a lot. I’m confused. Everyone’s like, “Okay, I’m with you now on this.”

Mike: It’s so funny you should say that because the other day, I did an interview for Time Magazine and she goes– The reporter was great. She goes– It’s a funny question. She goes, “What’s your appeal?”

[Laughter]

John: I love that. That’s so good.

Mike: I’ve never been asked that, “What’s your appeal?”

Craig: Oh my God.

Mike: It forced me to look inward.

Craig: Oh my God.

Mike: She goes, the appeal of Jim Gaffigan is that he’s clean and he’s relatable. The appeal of this person is that she’d go there. I go, “Huh.” It’s so funny what I–

John: It’s amazing.

Mike: What reminded me of it is that my answer is similar to Craig’s.

Craig: There you go.

Mike: If I really had to think about it, I think people think they’re on the journey with me because I’m cataloging these eras of my life as honestly as I can. The audience, I think, trusts that I’m trying my best. I think the people who like me are trying their best. It’s weird to say that that’s my “appeal”, but I think it is probably close to that.

Craig: When she asked the question, was it–? There’s two different meanings to that question. One is, “I’m curious, what do you think your appeal is?” The other one is, “What is your appeal?”

John: Yes, there’s two different reads of that.

Craig: “I’m just so confused why anyone likes you. Can you explain why people like you?”

Mike: It was generous though. I think she’s a good writer. We’ll see how the article comes out.

John: It’s reminding me of when we were doing Big Fish on Broadway, after the Wednesday matinees, sometimes we would do talk-backs, where people could stay in the audience and talk back. It’s always really old people who stick around, who’d go to the Wednesday matinees in the first place.

It’s me and several of the actors at the front of the stage talking to people who stuck around. This one old woman, she asked me a question, she’s like, “Why are you so confident?” I’m like–

Mike: Oh my gosh. Why are you so confident?

John: Yes, and it’s just–

Mike: Wow.

John: It was actually just.

Craig: What a confident-shaking question.

John: Yes, and it sort of put me on my heels, like, “I guess I am con–“ I had to sort of do introspection, like, “I guess I am confident, but why am I confident?” Like, “Who is this person who is speaking right now who is confident doing this thing?” It was a while. It really did shake me a bit.

Craig: Yes, of course. It’s a rattling question. “Why are you so confident?” It’s suspicious.

John: Yes, it’s a challenge to it.

Craig: Yes.

Mike: I think to go back to this point of view and comedy concept, it was like, why is Jeselnik Jeselnik, and me me, and Gaffigan Gaffigan? Is a majority of what you do if you’re trying to be a comedian is you try to figure out who you are on stage in relation to the audience.

Craig: What’s your appeal?

Mike: Yes, it’s what’s your appeal?

Craig: What’s your appeal?

Mike: It’s like, “Oh,” and it takes years. Sometimes it takes a decade or more.

Craig: It is interesting seeing comedians early in their careers as opposed to where they end up. Sometimes it’s sort of unrecognizable.

Mike: Absolutely.

Craig: It is a fascinating thing to watch them evolve into the groove. Sometimes I think like, “Oh, do people get trapped? Because they get very successful, and then suddenly, that fake accent and get ‘er done thing that you’re doing, you can’t stop doing it.

Mike: Are you speaking of someone specifically?

Craig: No.

Mike: Just in general?

Craig: No, just in general, like–

[laughter]

Mike: Hypothetically, if someone was like, said a joke and they’re like, “Get ‘er done,”-

Craig: That would be like–

Mike: -that would be a thing that you’re leaning on a crutch.

Craig: They were like had a job that isn’t really a job anymore, like a cable guy, [crosstalk] or a plumber, or whatever.

Mike: Yes, exactly.

Craig: Yes, like what do you do then, because you’re stuck making all that money?

Mike: What if you never were a cable guy?

Craig: Or had that accent.

[laughter]

John: So good. [crosstalk]

Craig: Then, what do you do? Then what do you do?

John: A crisis of inauthenticity.

Mike: This is like a three-page challenge of personas.

John: What if Mike Birbiglia had a heel turn, where I actually just like, it goes off for a little while, then it comes back, and it’s just like this shock comic, this– I would love to see it.

Mike: It’s funny–

Craig: “Hickory dickory dock.”

John: Yes.

[laughter]

Mike: No, I do think that there is a version of the next few years, where I’m leaning a little bit away from personal stuff, where I do something that takes on the religion, politics, world events, but in an evergreen way. I think what drives me crazy about topical comedy is that you just go, “Okay, this isn’t relevant today, even. It was relevant 24 hours ago,” but I would like to see something that has a wide-spanning, like the last 20 years of living in America.

Craig: It sounds like something that O’Reilly would do.

[laughter]

Mike: Yes, a cross between Matt Damon and Bill O’Reilly would do.

John: As we wrap up our discussion of coyotes, I do want to share one photo, which I think is a great comedic premise. This little white dog is wearing, it’s called a coyote coat, and it’s basically, it looks like a life jacket, but it has all these little plastic spikes on it, so that a coyote can’t bite it and carry it off into the woods. I can just imagine like having to buy the coyote coat for my dog, or just like my dog having to wear the coyote coat. It’s like you’re in a war zone now.

Craig: I think that is, some people might think that that disrupts the Darwinian process, but I think that it is an example of the Darwinian process. You become so cute that a larger, stronger animal dresses you in special things so that you aren’t devoured. It’s a strategy.

John: It’s a strategy.

Craig: That’s a strategy.

John: Yes. Let’s tackle some listener questions. We have one here from Chris.

Drew: Let’s say I heard an idea for a short film expressed on a podcast by a working actor, writer, comedian,-

John: Mike Birbiglia.

Drew: -and wanted to make that film, but was not able to make contact with said person to ask permission. Could that film still be made and shown publicly? Is there credit to be attributed? What if there’s a line spoken by an actor that is nearly identical to what was expressed in the podcast? In this case, this would be 60-second film for social media, just for context.” I can already hear Craig saying you can’t copyright an idea, but maybe the person or podcast details are important.

Craig: Yes, I will say you can’t copyright an idea, but that doesn’t mean you should be doing this.

John: It also feels like stealing a joke. It feels like–

Craig: There’s legal lines and there are moral lines. Legally, could you get away with it? Always remember, legally getting away with it means you were sued, spent money to defend yourself, and won, which is not ideal. In this case also, it’s just, yes, come up with your own idea. That’s my feeling, is if that person wanted to do a 60-second short bit about that, they would. It’s a little odd. I don’t think I would recommend that.

John: The fact that you’re doing this on a podcast with a working actor, writer, comedian, it’s their thing, they may actually do a thing with. If you heard it in a conversation or your brother said something, it’s a different kind of thing. You could also just ask their permission.

Mike: I also think, yes, building on what you were both saying, is as creatives, if you’re pursuing a creative profession, it is so oversaturated. There are so many things being made simultaneously. I actually think the only chance any of us stand is to have our work be so much ours and not something that’s already filmed, recorded, and out there in the universe that you’re actually– It’s a weird case against the argument. The idea is that it’s out there. Even if it’s not a short film already, someone said it, so it’s a little bit less original than you’d want it to be.

John: Going back to what we were just saying about hiking is just walking, that idea, what’s out there, is it’s not an original idea, and so great, do something else that is specifically to you.

Mike: 100%, and by the way, to speak to that person’s note, that’s an oddly helpful piece of feedback, is like, once that person says, “Hey, that’s out there in blah-blah-blah way,” sometimes people, along the tour for two years, people will say to me, “Hey, this line you have is similar to this comic’s thing you have.” Often, I’ll go and I’ll dig it up and I’ll try to find it, and then you have to make a judgment call. Is it too similar? If it is, can I write it in a different direction?

I had one a few specials ago where someone, when it came out as a special, was like, “That’s my joke,” and I was like, “I don’t know what to tell you, I never saw your joke, and it’s filmed right now, so I don’t– It’s parallel thinking, and I feel bad that that’s the case, but there’s nothing I can do.” It’s definitely best efforts to not do that.

John: Dylan in Little Rock has a question.

Drew: “I’m feeling myself getting a little bit paralyzed. I’m feeling that I need to start writing in order to feel accomplished and hold onto some momentum, but I’m not feeling that I have really broken the story in a satisfactory way, and I don’t feel that I know the characters as well as I could or maybe should. I’ve considered that the process of writing may help me to come up with new ideas and fill in some of the gaps, but when do you consider a story broken? How do you know when your characters are developed enough and how much character development work do you do before you write?”

John: Yes, so breaking a story means different things in different contexts. In a TV writer’s room, you break a story, you’re figuring out all the beats on a big whiteboard, you’re doing that stuff. The process of writing a feature film, it could be more experimental and you’re sort of putting things together as you’re doing them. I often won’t have the full thing broken as I start. I’ll just feel it out along my way. There’s probably not a perfect answer for this. You’re writing something right now, is what you’re writing broken? Do you know what all the beats are?

Mike: It’s so funny. Whenever people say this term, breaking a story, I’m always like, it’s not my process. Mine is, I have an idea for a story, I write it out in an outline. At a certain point, I take it as script. At a certain point, this is where I am right now, I take it back to outline because I’m trying to isolate all the individual character arcs, and I can’t do it in a script form. That’s literally what I am right now. My brain can’t do it.

How do you guys deal with that, actually? That’s a question from me to you. How do you deal with managing, like in the case of my movie, it’s like, there’s eight characters. It’s akin to a movie like Four Weddings and a Funeral where not everybody has to have a meaningful arc, but unless they have like a little miniature arc, I do feel like there’s some threads that are unfinished.

Craig: I think I probably wouldn’t start writing until I understood all of that.

Mike: All of it.

Craig: Yes, but that’s me. I think your process clearly works for you, and it’s perfectly fine. Anyone’s process is fine if the outcome is good. I think breaking the story is actually, I agree with you, it’s not a useful term. It comes really from writer’s rooms, from 14 writers eating Mendocino Farms and hashing out, “Okay, this episode, this happens. What’s the A story? What’s the B story? What’s the C story?” It is procedurals, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: There isn’t a mechanism to it, which is important for that process. For a movie, I never use the phrase, “breaking the story” for a movie. Really, I would say, outline. I start with a very broad outline. Who’s the main character? What is the thing that needs to happen at the end? What would be an interesting beginning for that? What is the premise of this thing, and what’s the journey?

Mike: I think one of the best things you can have in terms of breaking a story or to use that term is like figuring out, can I pitch this in 25 words or 50 words? And is that compelling? If I told this to a friend and I said it in the first person, are they interested? I think that if they’re not interested is when you start to go, “Okay, let me figure out where I’m losing their interest.”

John: Yes, I just pitched a project yesterday, and in the early conversations with people, it wasn’t fully broken. I sort of knew what the beats were, but by the time where I was actually pitching it to a buyer, it really had all the beats. You could feel what the entire movie was and that’s, I guess, what I would consider broken. It’s like you really can have a sense of what all the sequences of the story were going to be.

Mike: It’s funny, you hear terms like breaking story or industry terms, and in so many ways, the work I enjoy most is people trying to reinvent what their artistic process is. If you look at Last of Us, for example, I think my favorite thing about it is it’s not like other television shows. That it is, in some ways, weirdly, doesn’t resemble a TV show. That it feels like life, it feels like we are in this apocalyptic scenario and oh my God, what is that? What would I do? What’s she going to do?

Craig: Oh, it’s definitely not like other shows.

[laughter]

Mike: Don’t you think that’s part of it is like making things that don’t feel like other things?

Craig: Yes, I do think so. I think that’s become more and more important because there are 14 million television shows. The trick is to find a way to both be different and also compelling. It is very easy to be different and bad because a lot of difference were considered by our forebears and tossed aside because they were bad. I would say to Dylan, you need to slow down a little bit and ask yourself if maybe the story that you’ve come up with, any of the things that you think of as fixed in position should be fixed in position.

Sometimes we get stuck. We build a column and a load-bearing wall, and then we’re like, “I can’t fit the rooms I want around this.” Maybe the problem is the column and the load-bearing wall. Those things that we think of as immovable, maybe start moving them.

Mike: I also think you look at things that we admire, I was saying like Last of Us, another one would be like the films of David Lynch. It’s like if you try to put Mulholland Drive into the story-

John: No.

Mike: -the story format,-

Craig: You create that story.

Mike: -of McKee or something, it’s like,-

Craig: Or you could-

Mike: “I don’t know what that is.”

Craig: Pitch that in 50 words.

Mike: Yeah, I don’t know.

Craig: That would be the pitch.

Mike: Yes, exactly, that’s the pitch.

Craig: “What’s it about?” “Yeah, I don’t know.”

[laughter]

John: All right, let’s do our one cool things here. I’m going to call an audible, and so I’m going to pivot from what I was going to recommend to in terms of just like breaking the form and spinning a bunch of plates. John Mulaney’s show, Everybody’s Live, it’s just gotten really, really good.

Mike: Oh yes, it’s great.

John: If you’ve not watched it at all, go back and watch the episode, guests are Sarah Silverman and Patton Oswalt, but the show is just nuts, and Mulaney’s blindfolded through the whole episode. 19,000 things are happening, and it all holds together really, really well. It’s postmodern in the sense of like, there’s a theme kind of, but it’s just crazy. it’s just I’m really admiring what they’re able to pull off once a week on Mulaney’s show, Everybody’s Live, on Netflix.

Craig: Amazing. What about you?

Mike: I was thinking of young comedians and newer comedians. There’s this great comic named Chris Fleming who came on my podcast recently, and he just kills me. He’s a Massachusetts guy like me. He — talk about burning it all down — he just has no allegiances to anyone, specifically in culture, and so he’ll say things where I’ll just– I said to him on my podcast, “Do you know that–?” the person he’s referencing? He’s like, “No.” I go, “You don’t know that person you said that crazy joke about?” but he’s great.

Craig: That’s awesome.

Mike: He’s super funny, and to speak to the kind of David Lynch with The Last of Us of it all, of creating a thing that hasn’t existed before, when I look at Chris Fleming, I don’t go, “Oh, that’s like this.” I just go, “Whoa, that’s Chris Fleming. I love that.”

Craig: Yes, who is this?

Mike: Who is this?

Craig: That’s my favorite. I’ve been on a roll for one cool thing for games, so I spoke to Inevitable Foundation, which is run by Richie Siegel, and it was a lovely group of folks. He was kind enough to send along some of the feedback, which was all bad, and [laughs] not really. They were very happy. One person in their feedback said, “Oh, and by the way, since I know Craig likes these sort of things, he really needs to play Blue Prince, if he hasn’t.” Blue Prince is as in blue, the color, and then Prince, P-R-I-N-C-E, but of course, this is a pun on blueprints. The game is so simple and so hard, which I love.

Mike: Oh, wow.

Craig: You have inherited a mansion from your mysterious uncle. Your job is to go through and explore the mansion, which has 45 rooms, find the 46th room, and you will be able to keep the mansion. The mechanics are every day, you start in the foyer, and there are three doors, and when you open a door, it gives you a choice to draft what room goes there, and there are like 40 types of rooms, and you pick it, and you start to move through, and every time, the house is different, and some rooms just stop, and you know if they stop or not.

There are costs, and keys, and methods, and puzzles, and it’s roguelike, because then the next day, you’re like, “Okay, that didn’t work, let me try this.” It’s early on for me, and I’m so beautifully frustrated.

Mike: Wow.

John: Love it.

Craig: Yes, it’s really, it’s like when you come across a fresh idea like that, it’s really cool, yes. Blue Prince, and it’s developed by Dogubomb.

Mike: Great.

Craig: You can get it on PlayStation, Windows, Xbox, your Steam Deck, which is where I play it, and so forth.

Mike: Very nice.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help this week from Sam Shapson. 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 like the ones we answered today. Don’t leave comments on Spotify because we turn those off, but you can leave comments to our YouTube videos, which we have a Scriptnotes YouTube channel.

Mike: You do?

John: Yes, we just added this week.

Craig: Another place for people to yell at me about Joel. I’m Scriptnotes Premium, by the way.

John: Thank you very much for that.

Mike: I joined recently. I love it.

Craig: Oh– [crosstalk]

John: You get all those back episodes.

Mike: I love it. Two of my faves are Dennis Palumbo of course and the Craig Mazin, Here’s How to-

John: How to Write a Movie.

Mike: -How to write a Movie. It’s so good.

Drew: Those are both available on our YouTube.

Craig: We should probably charge extra for them.

John: We should. Yes, yes, how do we charge extra?

Mike: Yes, supplements.

Craig: Because we got to get these cool new microphones.

John: You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with the signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You can find those at Cotton Bureau. You get the show notes with all the links to the things we talked about today in 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 every week. For Craig to dream of new microphone setups in our office studio here.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back episodes, like episode 99 and How to Write a Movie. Bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the infrastructure of being a standup comic and doing all the things that you have to do to actually make a living. With that, Mike Birbiglia, thank you so much for being on the show.

Mike: It’s such an honor. I love this show. My favorite podcast.

John: Aww.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Mike, one of the things that impressed me when I came to record the podcast at your place is that you do video, you’re promoting the podcast, but it’s also part of your bigger machinery because you have to, as a touring comic, you have to plan all that stuff, you have to do marketing, you must have a giant mailing list. I want to talk to you about sort of the infrastructure it takes to be a comic who’s doing the kind of stuff you’re doing.

Mike: It’s funny, I was on The Town podcast the other day, which is really good, and we had this discussion of this thing where Matt says, “Do comedians need Hollywood anymore?” The answer is they don’t.

Craig: Not at all.

Mike: Weirdly, they don’t, and I think that that’s good. I think the things to make comedy and get the comedy to market are less and less expensive and more easy to access. It puts the onus on you to make something that’s great and sets itself apart from all other things, but also, you have to get it to market and market it, really. There’s a lot to that.

John: Getting it to market, there’s Instagram, there’s YouTube, those are crucial channels for comics. What else?

Mike: Weirdly, sometimes I’ll say, because Mabel and Gary and Peter and Joe, that’s my company, and we all produce the podcast together. Mabel and Gary are in their 20s, and so sometimes they’ll point out things to me that I’m just going, “Oh, I wouldn’t have thought of that at all.” For example, at a certain point, like two years ago, Mabel goes, “We have to have the podcast on video. I’ve never listened to a podcast.”

[laughs]

John: Yes, that’s my daughter too.

Mike: I was like, “What do you mean you haven’t listened to a podcast?” She goes, “I’m sorry, I just I put it on. I don’t look at the video, but it’s on. Sometimes I’ll reference it, I’m like, ‘Oh’.” There is a degree of rolling with, so then we did it. Rolling with where culture and media is going. Then the other side of that is, sometimes I’ll say to Mabel and Gary, I’ll go like, “We have to be aware of what are the platforms that are next. Because when I was coming up in the 2000s, it was Myspace. Myspace is gone.”

Craig: It is? I’m spending so much time on that.

[laughter]

Mike: Your premium membership on Myspace is $49 a month?

Craig: Yes.

John: I have a friend request, and you never get nothing.

Craig: It’s the only place people don’t yell at me about The Last of Us.

Mike: Of course, Zuckerberg is spending billions of dollars every year to make sure that Instagram is still relevant, still relevant, still relevant. Cut to, at a certain point, it’s not going to be.

Craig: It’s the opening credit sequence of Silicon Valley, just watch them go up, watch them go down.

John: That’s right.

Craig: Explode, implode, come back, grow. You have to have– Well, really, it sounds like part of your infrastructure is youth.

Mike: It’s youth. Yes, it is. Yes.

John: A mailing list. Is there a mailing list people subscribe to and you send out blasts with all your upcoming tour dates?

Mike: That’s right, and I’ve been doing that oddly since I was in college. I would do shows at the Washington, DC Improv, and I would have comment cards on the tables and say, “If you have your email address, I’ll send out a newsletter once a month.” I think the infrastructure is Maichimp and one of the companies that does it–

John: Mailchimp is so effing expensive.

Mike: I know.

Craig: Mailchimp is expensive?

Mike: It’s on the pricey side.

Craig: Also, then everybody, their podcasts are sponsored by Mailchimp, so Mailchimp is just like rotating the money around.

Mike: Yes.

John: Yes, it’s a money cycle.

Mike: No, it’s true, but I do think the relationship between artists and audiences has just gotten closer and closer through the years, and such that things that are massive, and it’s a comedian who’s playing Madison Square Garden, you might mention that person’s name to someone else, they go, “I’ve never heard of that person.” They’re playing Madison Square Garden, and it’s just them talking into a microphone, you’ve never heard of them.

Craig: That’s right.

Mike: It’s astonishing.

Craig: That’s happened a few times recently to me, where I don’t know, and that’s part of getting old. I actually love the way the world is slowly getting cottony and sealing me off in preparation.

[laughter]

Craig: I don’t mind that, but I do love talking to the people that work for me that are younger because– Riding back and forth from location every day with Ali Cheng, who used to be my assistant, and now she’s a writer on The Last of Us. Ali was able to explain to me in deep detail the whole Kendrick and Drake thing as it was happening, because I was like, “I don’t know– What is going–? First of all, who’s Dot?” She was like, “Oh my God. Okay.” But then, I was so into it.

John: Yes, sure.

Craig: Then I was deep in, and I was– Then the next day, I’ll come in, I’m like, “Oh my God. Did you see?” It keeps you plugged in, but you’ll need somebody to help you.

Mike: Yes, I think the key thing about entertainers in this moment is continuing to be open to where everything is going and nonjudgmental about where it’s going. Because if you become the judgmental person of like, “Oh, back in my day,” blah-blah-blah, I think you’re toast, or you will be toast.

John: Someone like Gary, who’s working for you, or Mabel, they have their own careers, they’re developing their own online presences.

Mike: Absolutely.

John: They have their own analysts. They have to figure out all that.

Mike: Directing things and short films and all kinds of stuff, yes.

John: Yes, so who teaches you? Basically, you just have to learn. You get in the crowd and see what everyone else is doing, because it’s not like you can go to film school, you can theoretically, learn how to write a screenplay. If there’s no comedy school, I guess you could go through-

Mike: UCB-

John: UCB.

Mike: -or improv and stuff like that. Yes, there’s no path to be a comedian, but at the same time, there never was a path, right?

John: Yes, it was always figuring out how early in a career does a person need a manager or an agent who’s doing mostly standup?

Mike: I’ve always thought– People ask me who are starting out all the time, how do I get an agent? When I think back to my agent now, Mike Berkowitz, who I’ve worked with for I think 25 years, he was starting out. I was like one of his first two clients. He started out at a management company, but he was doing the side, booking thing on the side. We’re the same age, and so we came up together. Now, he represents Kevin Hart and John Mulaney, all biggest comics on the place. He’s a huge agent, but I think part of it is surrounding yourself with people who you respect, who are in your roughly age group, and even level.

I think there’s a sense of like, “Oh, I need to sign,” I’ll throw out someone who’s dead, but it’s like, “I need to sign with Bernie Brillstein.” It’s, “No, no, you don’t need to sign with Bernie Brillstein. He doesn’t have time for you. You need to sign for someone who’s three rungs below Bernie Brillstein.”

John: Yes, absolutely. Signing with an agent who was really a peer and who I was grinding with together was incredibly helpful, because he just knew the right people. He knew what was actually happening.

Mike: The people who are young, while you are young will be the stars of tomorrow across the entire field.

John: Absolutely.

Mike: -and so making friends and making bonds and collaborations with people who are in your peer group and investing in those people, and hopefully, they invest in you. That’s, I think, one of the best things you can do.

John: How much of your work time is devoted to writing, figuring out the comedy, figuring out that work versus the career of like setting dates, and doing social media, and doing all the other stuff? What is the split?

Mike: I would say like it’s 2/3 the art, 1/3 marketing, but I would say, there are periods in my career where it is like 70/30 marketing. It’s miserable, but it was because there wasn’t enough work, and so it’s like, “Oh, I have to advertise my work more. I have to market my work more.” It’s like, you’re always rest always, and I think this is true of everyone.
It’s like the next hurdle is like, “We got to figure out the key art.” The next hurdle is, “We got to figure out the trailer.” The next figure, “We got to figure out what the Instagram tile is that conveys the idea of this whole project.” All that kind of stuff. It’s like, it is important. Yes, I try to minimize it, but it’s like, I don’t think anyone gets out of doing that.

John: I think one of the big differences between a pure screenwriter and what you’re doing is that we talk about like a screenwriter has to be entrepreneurial, but it’s like that whole level of magnitude is greater. You literally are responsible for how much the money’s coming in, whether you’re getting that date, whether you’re getting that thing to happen. Your income is so directly tied into how much promotion and everything else you’re doing for yourself.

Mike: Yes, and also, I feel like you have to have an awareness or try to have an awareness of where the business is going, where it’s been, where it could go, where we can’t possibly imagine it’s going. The AI discussion right now is so interesting because it’s like, it’s some people going like, “All right, easy on the AI stuff,” it’s every other conversation, but it’s like “No, no, it literally could change everything.”

John: Oh, absolutely.

Mike: Everything.

John: Yes, next week or a week after, I do once a full episode where we really just look at it because you look at not just the, how it’s impacting writing, but you look at the new video production things that come off, which is like, “That looks completely photorealistic, and the speech lines up,” and I just don’t what we’re going to do.

Mike: It’s astonishing.

John: Because like, maybe you won’t have to tour anymore because you could just press the button and there’s Mike Birbiglia. You’ll be this age forever.

Mike: Yes, we can only hope.

[laughter]

Mike: I got to lock in age 46, because it’s not getting any better.

John: This is the good life. Congratulations to get on the special, and thank you for coming on.

Mike: Thanks for coming to the screening last night, it meant the world to me.

John: Cool.

Links:

• Mike Birbiglia
• The Good Life on Netflix
• Mike’s previous episodes: 121, 168, 261, 427, 443, and Working it Out: Screenwriting Advice You’ll Actually Use
• Episode 660 – Moneyball
• Ira Glass on Mike’s podcast Working it Out
• Elizabeth Gilbert TED Talk
• The Run Club Haters by Melissa Dahl for Curbed
• I Hadn’t Heard From My Dad in Over a Decade. Now He’s Returned With a Brazen Request. I’m Actually Considering It. from Slate’s Care and Feeding
• The Coyotes of San Francisco by Heather Knight and Loren Elliot for NY Times
• Coyote Vest
• Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney
• Chris Fleming
• Blue Prince
• 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 with help from Sam Shapson. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.