Search Results for: youtube

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: This is episode 686 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do writers and the characters who create handle the obstacles that they encounter? One’s approach to problem solving can reveal a lot about otherwise hidden mental processes. We’ll discuss ways to tackle pernicious problems in real life and on the page, and what it says about the problem solver. First, we have a lot of follow-up from previous episodes, including a master class on how to do the lunch order if you are a PA.

Craig: Oh, this is good.

John: Yes, so we asked our listeners, they sent in, and man, they delivered this time.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: Yes, so really good advice here. We also have a ridiculous and completely unworkable proposal about movie tariffs that will never actually happen. But we can use that as an excuse to talk about why we want to incentivize domestic production and ways a sane administration might try to do that.

Craig: Yes, somewhere inside the fog of crazy is a topic worth discussing.

John: Yes. Our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about tombs, because I am just back from two weeks in Jordan and Egypt, where I got to live my Indiana Jones fantasy. I’m here to answer any questions you have about relics and burying of the dead, and travel through exotic locations.

Craig: I just played the Indiana Jones video game, so I feel just as qualified.

John: Basically, the same thing.

Craig: Yes, if not more so.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I really went deep down there.

John: My question is, did most of the Indiana Jones game take place with like a bunch of tourists jammed around you in a crowded Egyptian museum?

Craig: No.

John: No. I’m surprised the museums in the Indiana Jones game are probably empty.

Craig: They are, unless it’s just you and a strange giant is attacking you. Yes, no, it’s remarkable how empty things are. You do move around the Vatican quite a bit.

John: Oh, sure.

Craig: In the ‘40s, during World War II, and you’re ducking various fascisti.

John: Yes, fun, exciting. Yes, we’re recording this way before the conclave has even started, so we don’t even know– People are listening to this in a time where there may be a new pope, but Craig and I have no idea who the pope is.

Craig: We don’t know.

John: No, we don’t.

Craig: Oh my gosh, I don’t care.

[chuckling]

John: I’m excited for some change. I like things to happen. No knock against the existing pope who died.

Craig: Be careful what you wish for.

John: Yes, it’s wild. It’s wild. Let’s get into some follow-up, because man, we got a bunch of it.

Craig: Okay.

John: We’ll start off with last week on the show, or maybe it was two weeks ago now on the show, Eric Kripke was on, so he’s the guy who runs The Boys and lots of other great shows. We were talking about a listener question on– And Craig, I’m curious what you would call this, an episode that exclusively follows one of the characters, that it’s not a normal episode, it’s a standalone. Do you have a term that you would use for that?

Craig: I don’t.

John: I don’t. We were trying to bat around some. Our listeners came up with two good terms that they’ve used in writers’ rooms. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Aaron writes, “In our writers’ room, we call it our Rosencrantz and Guildenstern episode, as a nod to the delightful Tom Stoppard play about the side characters in Hamlet.”

John: Which makes sense. You’re elevating people who would be on the sidelines instead of centering it around them. The second solution from a different Aaron I thought was even better.

Craig: All right.

John: I’ve been in a couple rooms that have called them silo episodes, as in one character is siloed away from the rest of the cast and given their own story, and really, their own specific role building. It felt like after Girls did the Marnie episode and then the Shosh in Japan episode, that it started a conversation, at least in rooms, about this unique episode format and what to call it.

Craig: That’s interesting.

John: I like silo.

Craig: Silo episode. What do you do on the show Silo, however?

John: Yes. There’s an episode of the second season of Silo that is basically a Silo episode that just follows one of the characters.

Craig: Solopsisode.

John: Yes.

Craig: I think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is decent, but it implies you’re following a couple of characters on the side.

John: It is, and also, to me, it implies a specific tone of what’s going to happen. It’s like a behind-the-scenes, that a normal episode is happening over on this side, and we’re just not noticing it.

Craig: Yes, like I really wanted to do a partner series to Game of Thrones that was just like a couple of soldiers who were posted somewhere out in Westeros, and things were happening in the background that they would occasionally hear about. You’d be like, “Oh, God, that’s the Red Wedding.” They didn’t really know, and it was mostly like, “Ah, gathering taxes, and my foot hurts.” The guys wouldn’t let me do it. That’s weird, yes.

John: That’s weird.

Craig: That’s weird.

John: That’s weird. All right, so those are some good suggestions from our listeners. The second bit of follow-up is a conversation you and I had. We were talking about how to make our phones less addictive and less interesting, and different techniques for that. I know you took social media off your phones.

Craig: Yes.

John: For this trip to Egypt and to Jordan, I was a little concerned, passing through security and stuff like that, and making sure, someone’s taking over my phone. I don’t want there to be anything on my phone. I almost went as far as to just get a burner phone that I could take with me and just not have all my stuff. What I ended up doing instead was going through and basically taking everything off my phone and really paring it back to just the essentials. I got rid of all the–

Craig: You just have the stock app and weather? [chuckles]

John: Exactly. You can take those off, too. You can take the stock app off.

Craig: Now you’re just down to tips?

John: Just weather. Then I also went through and changed the icon style and stuff like that to make the phone just less useful. Craig, here’s my phone now.

Craig: What in the world am I looking at?

John: Describe it to our listeners. We’ll put a screenshot in and just check out. [crosstalk]

Craig: Sure. To start with, I’m going to put my glasses on to really investigate here. It is a sickly mint green background, and it is monochromatic.

John: Yes.

Craig: Then the apps themselves are in gray/green scale. No color other than green, black, white, gray. There’s 10 apps total.

John: There are multiple screens, so you can swipe.

Craig: Oh, yes. This phone says, “Don’t look at me.” That’s what it says.

John: It was good. I actually did not look at it very much on my trip at all. In addition to going to the dark mode style and the larger icons, which also gets rid of the names of the icons, it makes the phone harder to use in a way that I actually found really useful. Based on location, you can figure out where the apps are. It broke me of my habit of constantly playing on my phone to check on a thing or to open Instagram.

Craig: It’s going to be wild when the next thing happens that makes this end, because something is going to happen that makes it end. We know that much.

John: What’s going to end?

Craig: The phone. It’s going to end, right?

John: It’s going to be that little thing that it’s, whatever they do on black mirror console, which is the little dot you put on your temple.

Craig: Something’s going to happen, and it will end. Then, boy, that’ll be a day. That’ll be an interesting day when it ends.

John: The post-phone era?

Craig: The post-phone era. Yes, but not yet.

John: We had talked an episode in 683 about long takes. That was before we saw a bunch of things that were about long takes. When we recorded the episode, it was before the Oner episode of The Studio, which I thought was delightful. This guy, Aidan wrote in and he had done a comparison of your Chernobyl scene with the rooftop clearing and a scene from Michael Clayton. Drew, talk us through what this post is. We’ll put a link into it as well.

Drew: The post is a comparison of those two scenes. They’re about the same. The Michael Clayton scene is 2 minutes and 11 seconds. The rooftop scene in Chernobyl is 2 minutes and 2 seconds. Despite the fact that they’re about the same amount of time, the subjective lengths, which is how long it feels like it lasts, is very different because it’s the assassination scene in Michael Clayton. The murder scene happens frighteningly quickly, whereas the rooftop scene feels agonizing and slow.

John: It’s just a nice comparison side by side.

Craig: That’s what I’m going for is agonizing and slow. I did get some additional feedback from Jack Thorne, who pointed out– And this is something that Seth Rogen pointed out as well. I did a LA Times roundtable with him that I guess will be coming out shortly. Both of them said the same thing, which is that planning for long takes, writing them into the script is a way to protect the writing itself, of course, because no one can really mess with it. It’s true. You can’t really decide what to do, say, with a script of Adolescence other than shoot it. That’s a fair point.

John: Yes. Last bit of follow-up here. In 682, we talk about words we don’t have in English, like words we could have wished existed in English, but it doesn’t actually happen. We had a couple of people write in with words that they’re looking for that are not in existence anywhere. Talk us through these. First, let’s start with Shauna in Vancouver.

Drew: She writes, “I regularly think about how I wish there was a word, probably a German word, for the feeling you have when you get to the end of a mystery novel and it’s deeply unsatisfying.” She did with additional undertones of, “Now I’m angry and disappointed that you broke my trust and wasted my time.”

Craig: I think it’s just unsatisfied, isn’t it? [chuckles]

John: I get that she’s feeling a specific kind of unsatisfied because it just took so long, and there is an aspect of social trust in there, too. Yes.

Craig: Yes, but I think we have that word, actually. I don’t think an extreme version of an emotion qualifies for a new word. You just put the word very in front of it, and you’re there.

John: Yes, isn’t that like a thing they teach you in writing classes is that anytime you use the word very, there really is a better word out there for it?

Craig: Oh, most certainly, and it may not be necessary at all. There is that whole “I don’t like adverbs thing,” which, you know?

John: Yes.

Craig: Listen, sometimes very is great.

John: Yes. It’s an intensifier. You know that very comes from verily, that it comes from truly?

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes, which is just such a strange thing to think.

Craig: Yea, verily.

John: Yes, as an intensifier. It’s actually apparently very common in languages to say “Truly this” and that becomes the intensifier.

Craig: I actually often will say, truly. It’s a good one.

John: That’s true.

Drew: Is that what we’re doing with literally?

John: It is. The way that literally started as being true, and then it’s just an enforcement.

Craig: Yes, but that one’s wrong.
[chuckling]

John: Yes, it’s still feels wrong to us.

Craig: It’s wrong.

John: It’s wrong.

Craig: It’s just wrong.

John: More of words that don’t exist from Reed.

Drew: Reed writes, “You mentioned the Russian word tosca as a deep anguish that can never be resolved.” A word in Welsh that I’ve always enjoyed is the word hiraeth. It’s about a similar deep longing, but is a more positive spin on the feeling rather than an undefined existential despair. The rough translation is a profound longing for a home, place, or time that you can no longer return. A homesickness for something that maybe never was, the echo of our soul’s past.

Craig: Nostalgia.

John: Yes, but it’s a feeling of nostalgia for the moment you’re actually currently in, maybe?

Craig: He said past, did he?

John: It is past.

Drew: He said past, or it might not even exist? Just a vibe you wish you could go to. I feel like Ren Faires do this.

Craig: Oh, I see. It’s sort of like a nostalgia for something that is fictional, even. A longing to be in your memories of Middle-earth, even though you’ve never been there.

Drew: Seems like it, yes.

Craig: If that’s the case, then sign me up.

John: A script I read recently actually did refer to the sense of nostalgia for the moment that you’re in right now. I love this thing, and I know it’s going to escape me, and I already miss this.

Craig: I have a version of that, which is, I know I should be enjoying this moment right now. Later, I will look back at this wistfully and wish that I could be back there. Right now, I’m miserable. [chuckles]

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s a tricky one because sometimes I think back to when I was younger, you miss these things. I miss things that at the time, I wasn’t thinking about at all. In fact, in many ways, and almost always, my life is better now than it was when I was in my 20s, except, my back doesn’t hurt as much, and I’m not that much closer to death. I wasn’t able to enjoy that at the time, and there are things right now I know that I’m not, I’m just, I should be enjoying more.

John: Yes. A related concept is sort of second-degree fun. Yes. Things that are actually unpleasant in the moment, but then you look back at them with a fondness. It’s like, “Oh, yes, remember that horrible thing we went through and did together?”

I was commiserating with Scriptnotes’ Megana Rao about the Giza Pyramid, because she had done that with her family. We were texting afterwards, wasn’t that just the worst? Yes, it’s the worst. It is the most unpleasant experience to go inside the Giza Pyramid, because you are climbing up this ramp. You’re stooped down, almost on hands and knees, climbing up this ramp, and packed, sardine tight with a bunch of strangers. It is just the most claustrophobic thing. You get to the emperor’s tomb. What do you think’s in the emperor’s tomb?

Craig: A sarcophagus?

John: Nothing. Not even a sarcophagus. Everything’s been taken out of it. It’s just an empty room with– There is a stone box where the actual real sarcophagus used to be, but it’s so unrewarding, and yet the experience as a whole is still second-degree fun. It’s like, “Oh, yes, I went through that thing.”

Craig: Right. You have a great story of how awful it was.

John: Yes.

Craig: Oh, I’m not going there.
[chuckling]

John: What we should have done, and Mike was pointing out, is that, as we were lining up to get in, people are squeezing past you to get out at the same time. Some of them have this most horrified expression, and they’re sweaty, and they’re just exhausted. It’s like, “What am I doing?”

Craig: Right, like take a hint.

John: Yes.

Craig: I think it’s fair to say, as they’re coming out, “Should I get out of this line?” A bunch of them will be like, “Oh, my God, you need to get out.”

John: What would I say? I would be honest with them and say, “It’s not cool to actually, when you get up in there, but also, maybe you want the story.”

Craig: I would probably say something like, “We should all be home. Don’t go anywhere, ever.”

John: Yes, that’s a choice, too.

Craig: Yes. That’s just me.

John: Secondary fun, it’s almost a word in itself.

Craig: Do you know a tomb that you can go into where something actually is there, rewarding just to see? All of the tombs in the Indiana Jones video game. All of them. Everyone.

John: I need to speak up for the Egyptian tourism council. The pyramids are fantastic. Actually, going in that one tomb is just such a weird experience. The other tombs, the hieroglyphics everywhere, there’s still color on the walls. It’s actually genuinely impressive.

Craig: They’re not all–

John: No. Most of the tombs are spectacular. It’s just that the one that’s in the giant pyramid that you think should be the absolute coolest. No, it’s empty because everything was stolen out of there years ago.

Craig: Everything was stolen.

John: The reason why the King Tut is famous is because the tomb wasn’t opened until the ’20s.

Craig: That’s right. Yes. That’s when the curse happened.

John: That’s when the curse happened. Also, I just– The last bit of Egypt trivia here. They have photos of what the actual vault looked like in there. It was just a bunch of stuff piled up. It wasn’t like it was neatly arranged on shelves and stuff. It was all just a pile in the corner.

Craig: It’s a storage unit.

John: It’s a storage unit. It was like, “Here’s some chariot wheels for your sky chariot.”

Craig: Right. What do we throw in there? Oh, he loved chariots.

John: Yes. He loved bread. We need to make a bunch of stone things that look like bread because he loved bread.

Craig: Oh, you know what? You can get things like that at Pottery Barn.

[chuckling]

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s just Pottery Barn crap.

John: What it reminded me most of is my mom would go to Montgomery Wards or JCPenney’s to pick up her catalog orders, and they would have the refrigerators because you could buy a refrigerator there. You’d have the refrigerator, and some of them had the plastic food in there. I loved the plastic food.

Craig: Plastic meat.

John: Loved it so much.

Craig: Loved it. There was always a lamb chop. Oh, yes.

John: Yes. Oh, yes. We had a lot of lamb back in those days.

Craig: Yes, so much lamb.

John: We have one more missing word here. Let’s talk about Mitch’s proposal here.

Drew: Something that could be useful to have for describing an important feeling you want to attain in storytelling. I believe it was described by Rachel Kondo at the live Austin episode, but it’s a word for something that’s both surprising and inevitable. If anybody could get it to take off, it’s John and Craig.

Craig: We do talk about that all the time.

John: Yes. You want surprise and inevitable, but it is that feeling like, “Oh, of course.”

Craig: Maybe we just portmanteau to surprevitable.

John: I like surprevitable.

Craig: Surprevitable.

John: Let’s do it, Craig.

Craig: Done.

John: Done. Surprevitable. Let us talk about– Another bit of follow-up here, which is on first jobs. We’d asked our listeners, so many of you have worked as PA, so many of you have had to do the lunch run for an office or for a writer’s room. Man, there’s got to be so much shared wisdom out there about how to do it best.

Honestly, there was so much shared wisdom. We got– Drew, I don’t know.

Drew: Oh, dozens of emails.

John: Dozens and dozens of people. Rather than read through all of it, we’re going to put together a blog post we could link to so that it’s on the internet and everyone can always find it.

Craig: Great.

John: Drew, talk us through some of the section headers here and what some of the highlights were, things that were surprising even to you.

Drew: Sure. We start with just picking the restaurant because that’s a whole process. Simple things like making sure to ask about dietary restrictions, looking for restaurants that are good, balanced of healthy, and greasy. No tacos was a thing that came up because LA’s got great tacos and people probably want them, but they are, according to some people, the single-handedly, the most painstaking who ordered the place.

Craig: Everybody gets four different tacos, and then they all get mixed up, and no one knows which goes to what.

John: Also, I feel like tacos don’t travel well, fundamentally.

Craig: They don’t. Soft tacos, sort of.

John: Yes, but everything slides off across the [crosstalk]

Craig: It gets wet.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes. No, tacos is a bad idea.

Drew: Homestate seems like it’s an exception to that, according to some people.

Craig: Homestate’s solid. Yes, Homestate’s solid.

John: How about taking the order? That’s a thing you clearly messed up if the order doesn’t get taken right. Talk to us about that.

Drew: We got some good horror stories in here, too, on that. A great thing is just to make sure that you would include a link to the menu or a PDF copy, even if you have to make one yourself because some people, you can’t trust them to find the menu themselves. They’ll ask you to get items that don’t exist or things that are out of season, sandwiches that they used to have but aren’t available anymore. Double-check it when you place it over the phone.

John: Oh, I guess people still have to do phone orders for some stuff. Craig, on Last of Us, when you are doing a phone order, is it printed out and handed in front of you when you’re circling, or how are you getting your thing?

Craig: In our writing office that we have now, our PA sends us an email with a link. “This is where we’re getting today’s lunch from. Let me know by this time what you would like.” You click on the link, you look around, and you respond back. So far, so good. Seems to work.

John: That’s great.

Craig: We don’t have a very big workload.

John: That’s actually very small. How about when you’re actually in pre-production or any of that stuff, or if you’re going out on a location scout, what’s the order there?

Craig: Typically, I don’t participate [chuckles] because it’s good to be the king. I can get whatever I want. Typically, the office will– It’s like a choice of three things. There’s an app that people can log into, and my camera order is called Eatly or something like that. Then everybody puts their thing in, and it all gets delivered roughly around the same time.

John: Okay, so it’s more like what we do for D&D. For D&D, when we’re playing each week, we’ll send out a link and everyone pick their things and at a certain point, it’ll cut off, and will submit the order.

Craig: It’s a group DoorDash thing. It’s sort of like that except we’re going to say “You can pick from any one of these three today.” Typically, it is a somewhat curated menu as well because some of those restaurants are like, “Hey, we can do this, a lot of this, but we can’t do a lot of those things.” When we’re on scouts and stuff, we usually just pick a restaurant.

John: Yes, makes sense. This is too long to read through on the show, but we’ll include Kelly’s Quiznos horror story. The punchline of this was, there is a Quiznos order, it was like a big Quiznos order. Quiznos called like, “Is it really this big? I know it’s a big order.” The total was $409. They ended up making 4,000 sandwiches.

Craig: No. Wait. How did they even make 4,000 sandwiches?

John: I don’t know.

Drew: She doesn’t even know. They called to confirm, and they went through the whole order. Apparently, everything was fine, but they made 4,000 sandwiches.

John: An order of magnitude difference.

Craig: They were supposed to make 400 sandwiches.

John: The total was supposed to be $409, so it’s not even 400 sandwiches.

Craig: It was 40 sandwiches?

John: Probably. That feels right.

Craig: They were just like, “Well, they might need a few extra.” [chuckles]

John: Yes.

Craig: How did they do that? That can’t be right.

John: That’s the exception, but it’s the horror story that underlines why it’s so important [crosstalk]–

Craig: I have so many questions lis where is this Quiznos? How did they do that? Do they really have the ability to make 4,000 sandwiches on the spot? I don’t believe this.

John: It does seem possible.

Craig: This feels urban legend to me. I don’t know.

John: Timing is so important, and so we’ll have a little session on timing. Basically, based on the restaurant, do you need to put it in an hour ahead, two hours ahead, 30 minutes ahead? What is it going to be? I just know from the Mendocino Farms at the Grove, it’s like, Good luck. You have to be able to navigate that.

Craig: I would be so bad at this.

John: I like the suggestion to label everything at the restaurant, so that as you’re double-checking, you actually label whose things and what they’re at the restaurant, because that’s a way of verifying–

Craig: That you got everybody’s [crosstalk].

John: That you actually got everybody’s thing, and that everybody eats the right thing. Suggestions of getting a giant plastic bin from Target to put everything in, so it doesn’t slosh around inside your car.

Craig: Smart.

John: Hand everybody their lunch, so rather than laying it out on the table. I actually like put it in there in front of them. [crosstalk]

Craig: Yes, that is a nice thing to do.

John: Yes, because it also reconnects that you are the person who did this thing.

Craig: It keeps people at the table, and you don’t have this weird scrum, and somebody’s– Because, again, it’s like dealing with children, like kindergartners. They’re going to pick up the wrong thing. They’re not going to look at the name. They’re just going to see, “Oh, it’s a sandwich that I ordered,” except that that one was somebody else’s that didn’t have mayonnaise on it. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve ended up with the–

John: The mayonnaise sandwich. We know. Listeners know that Craig hates mayonnaise. Any white substance that’s spread on a sandwich–

Craig: Disgusting. We were talking about today in the room was the British nightmare, known as salad cream.

Drew: Oh, yes.

Craig: Disgusting. If you look at the Wikipedia page for salad cream, it describes it as something like a thick, pale yellow– [chuckles] It’s like, I’m already out. It’s like pus, basically. It’s disgusting. Sorry, Heinz.
[chuckling]

John: Then our last section is on general advice, which is good stuff, and it actually applies to a lot of the functions of being the PA in an office. It’s like, the stuff you’re doing doesn’t feel rewarding in the moment, but it is so important for the actual successful functioning of the room, the show, the whatever it is. Recognize that you’re not always going to get credit for the work that you’re doing, but know that you’re actually doing a great job.

There was a book I read over this break that was talking about custodians. This woman was feeling bad about her job, and she was a janitor at a place. They said, “No, you’re the custodian of the building.” It’s your job to make sure that this building actually works for everybody. That reframing was really important. In some ways, you’re like the custodian of the people who need to eat food.

Craig: Yes, and I will say that, and I hope this is true, that the PAs are appreciated when they’re doing this well, because I have been in circumstances where the person doing it wasn’t great at it. Every day, it was just, “I wonder who’s going to either not get lunch or get the wrong lunch. Who will it be today?” Every single day.

Thank you to all the PAs out there who are making sure we’re well-fed. By the way, let’s face it, we’re all in better moods. One o’clock rolls around, the hangriness that sets in, whoo.

John: It’s rough. It’s tough, we all know it. This was a very good experiment. Our next experiment, I would like to have our listeners talk to us about their best suggestions and tips for pitching on Zoom. It’s obviously a thing that started during the pandemic, but it’s now become the norm. I’ve been talking to a lot of writers recently who say like, “I hope to never actually pitch in person again because it’s just–“ They so much prefer pitching on Zoom and the ability to keep eye contact with the whole group and to have your nose at the top of the screen. I would love to hear people’s best practices for doing that.

Craig: Yes, you don’t have to memorize anything, I suppose, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s all there.

John: It’s there.

Craig: I like that.

John: It’s also tough because you don’t have the real feedback of a person paying attention or not paying attention, which has pros and cons.

Craig: Yes, and then there is– I’m still old school enough to believe being in a room with somebody, there’s a little bit of– I don’t know. You feel where they’re going one way or the other. You can sense it.

John: You do. There’s been cases where I’ve really misread a thing where I felt, “Oh, that went terribly,” and I’m driving off a lot. I get the call, they want to make a deal.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes, so it’s crazy. I’d love to hear people’s suggestions, things they’ve learned, tips and tricks, but also, I love the horror stories. [chuckles] If you have your equivalent of the 4,000 Quiznos sandwiches, I’d love to hear that, too.

Craig: I assume it’s going to be, I shared my open browser tab with something, something.

John: Yes. I’ll say a pro of pitching on Zoom, I think, for up-and-coming people is that you can have more people in the room. You can have an assistant listening in and actually gleaning from that stuff, which is if they were in the room themselves, it would be distracting, but if they’re just an extra person on the little screen, it’s fine.

Craig: True.

John: All right, let’s get to our marquee topic. I want to talk about problem solving because this actually came up because a listener was writing in about a different thing. She mentioned this technique called rubber ducking, which I’d never heard of before, which is talking through a problem, especially like it comes from my coding. Talking through a coding problem to an inanimate object, like literally a rubber duck, saying “Okay, first I’m doing this and then I’m doing this.” You’re explaining it to a non-animate object to really think through your logic and verbalize it, and express it aloud.

It got me thinking about us as writers, but also our characters are often having to solve problems that are put before them. Looking at how people solve problems, it’s a great way of exposing how their brain actually works and how they’re forming a mental model of the world around them. I wanted to talk through some techniques for solving problems, but also why it’s important to show characters solving problems in stories.

Craig: Ultimately, there is a problem. If the character doesn’t have a problem, then I don’t care about the story. There is a problem, and then there are sub-problems and sub-problems. We know we’re invested in them solving things. The first question I like to ask when it comes to this particular topic is are they any good at it? It can often be, I don’t know, engaging watching somebody that is terrible at solving a particular problem who has to solve that problem.

John: You’re asking, does the character have expertise in this? If they don’t have expertise, are they good at being able to communicate with others and find out and solve a problem even if they don’t actually have the information themselves? Can they find the information? Can they find the expert? Can they draw from various sources to get to the answer that they need? In so many of our shows, I’m really thinking of procedurals, but also even the Buffy the Vampire Slayer, different people have different strengths and they have to work together to come up with an answer to the problem that’s facing them.

Craig: There are two kinds of problem-solving that we engage in as storytellers. One kind is a process problem. It’s straight up logic or insight. If I solve this problem, I will have information needed to do something, but I will not be changed. The process of solving this problem does not require me to grow or push past a boundary.

Then there are the problems where, in fact, the only way to solve it and the only way to unpack it or see the insight is to grow as a person, or in the solving of it, it changes you. We need to engage in both levels of problem-solving all the time. The non-character-y problem solvings, those are the ones we just have to be careful about because down that road sometimes is what David Zucker would call, “merely clever.” Clever sounds good. Clever is clever, but no one gives you a ton of credit for it unless it’s really clever. Otherwise, it’s meh. “Oh yes, you figured it out.”

John: Yes, so you’re talking about the problems that characters are solving that it’s not their fundamental flaw. It’s not a thing that’s going to transform them. We were talking about Michael Clayton earlier, and Michael Clayton is a problem solver. He comes in there to fix a problem, and so seeing him fix those problems is one of the rewards of that story. It’s saying like, “Oh wow, look at the expertise and competence, the social skills, his ability to read the situation, to read the room, crucial and fundamental.” Ultimately, it’s all in service to a greater arc and journey for him, but it’s great to see that level of expertise.

Craig: Yes, and that’s why that problem solving is fun to write and it’s fun to watch, but there are times where we think, “Oh, somebody just needs to get a clue about where to go next.” We have to create a problem for them to solve. The problem can’t be too hard to solve. The problem should be a fair problem to solve, so that people at home theoretically could have solved it also, but didn’t. Then we need to always ask, “How would this person do? How do they react to frustration, to not being able to see the answer?”

John: That’s what I think makes creating the right problem and showing their solution to the problem so rewarding for us as writers is that it lets us illuminate what’s actually going on in their head. It forces them to interact with the environment around them, with the people around them to solve the problem.

What I thought we might do is talk through– I think I have a list of 10 classic problem-solving techniques, and how that might work on seeing, but also for worth of words that you’re going to hear that really involve this thing. Rubber ducking is just there to describe that while you’re talking to an inanimate object, and it forces clarity because you have to explain something clearly, it slows you down. It externalizes the problem which is good.

In real life, the thing that I found I stopped doing a lot, especially when I’m talking through with my team on some software stuff, is I’ll say, “Let me explain back what I think I just heard.” You’re probably doing a similar thing, too, as you’re solving problems on your show. It’s like someone has dumped a bunch of information, and you’re trying to synthesize and process it back. In some ways, you are serving as the rubber duck to them. “I heard all this stuff, this is what I got out of it.” You’re showing it back to them.

Craig: Yes. I will sometimes– I guess this is the Socratic method. I will just start asking questions. Somebody has laid something out, and I think, “Okay, here are the parts that made sense to me. Here are the parts that are confusing.” I’m just going to start asking questions about every single thing that is either confusing to me or doesn’t feel right or feels incomplete until I know everything, until I don’t have any snag anymore.

John: That can seem argumentative, but it’s argumentative in the classic Socratic method of basically it’s exploring something together.

Craig: It’s interrogative. I think it’s interesting to watch people question. The questions that we ask and the way people answer things is in and of itself a great opportunity to learn about character, but it’s also a great opportunity to get information across without feeling lamely expository. It’s questioning. This is an interview. I like that.

John: Next technique would be free association. This is where you don’t censor the unworkable ideas. You swing bail, “Just tell me everything.” It’s when they say “No bad ideas.” It’s often used in comedies because like some of the ideas are just truly horrible, awful, terrible, bad ideas. At some points in some stories, you actually need that crazy solution because in proposing the crazy solution, then the other character says, “No, we can’t do that, but we could actually do this thing.” You find connections just because you’re willing to go crazy.

Craig: [chuckles] It is sad in a way how we tend to punish the big swingers in fiction because they take these big idea swings, and people are just, “Shut up.” Then one of them goes, “Everything you just said was insane, but wait.” [chuckles] They just existed to make you angry enough with their bad idea that your brain finally barfs up a good one. But in real life, it’s necessary because sometimes the answer to the problem is to realize you were trying to solve the wrong problem entirely.

John: Yes, and that’ll come up occasionally in these other approaches. Third one is to refactor or rewrite it from scratch. It’s basically rather than try to fix this thing, we actually just need to replace it completely. When a character proposes that, it does tell you about their instincts, which could be the right instinct because basically, you’re trying to fix an unfixable thing. We need to scrub it, or that they are so perfectionist, they’re idealists in a way that it’s not practical. I love to hear when people are like, “Oh, do we need to throw the whole thing out?”

Craig: Yes, I’m a big believer in throwing the whole thing. It’s the Gordian Knot solution, right? Just chop it in half, done.

John: Yes. All right. Decomposition, which is to take a problem and break it into smaller, more addressable chunks, which is so often the right solution that people are trying to just tackle too big of a problem, and you break it into smaller things. You’re like, “Oh, I know how to solve each of these little individual things. It’s just the big thing that seems so daunting.”

Craig: There are so many wonderful examples of this in movies. When people are explaining something that’s seemingly impossible to other people, they break it down. Maybe my favorite is in Ocean’s Eleven, where Danny Ocean is explaining, not yet, how they’re going to do it. He is explaining what the problems are and he is going little by little by little, one by one by one. It’s this, it’s this, gets worse, gets worse, gets worse. In doing so, you understand that he’s laid the groundwork for the solutions. We now know all the things that we’re going to have to solve.

John: Absolutely. The Martian is another great example that’s like every character in it is basically taking this giant, unsolvable problem and break it into solvable problems. The minimal viable solution, which is rather than try to get a perfect answer, let’s just get an answer that solves the issue okay for now, so we can at least– By getting something that works kind of, that we can see what we need to do next. That’s when you get characters say, “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.” It’s just something that works.

Craig: It’s probably the thing that you would want to then replace with the good answer. It feels like a duck, not a rubber duck, but ducking. Evasion and unwillingness to face the problem in and of itself is a fun aspect of how characters approach problem-solving.

John: Analogization, basically saying, this thing is like this other thing. It’s recognizing that this specific situation may never have occurred, but it’s like other things that have occurred. It’s a case for generalists. It’s a case for people who’ve done other things, and a specialist may not see a thing that a generalist can recognize because they can pull from history or other fields.

Craig: Harold Ramis, describing the situation with the ectoplasma container in terms of a giant Twinkie. This is my favorite example. “Tell them about the Twinkie. It’s a big Twinkie,” but it’s essential. I didn’t really get into analogization. I said, “Well, I did in Chernobyl in the sense of like, I described a nuclear reactor like a car, like gas pedal, brake pedal. You do have to figure out how to make it relatable to somebody that doesn’t know the specifics and doesn’t need to.

John: Absolutely. Metaphors are how we communicate knowledge. It’s finding what the right metaphor is for this thing. That can be a useful metaphor for what the problem is, but also a metaphor for what a solution would look like. Very related. It’s just finding earlier solutions. I get frustrated by people who assume, like “This is the first time this has ever happened.” I always say like, “No, this must’ve happened a thousand times. Someone else has solved this before. We just need to look for the right way to find the answer that they came up with, because it’s probably the right answer.”

Craig: Or in their attempts to solve this, we see what we should not be doing, or we deepen the mystery. Why didn’t that work? It should have worked.

John: That’s a very good point. If there’s not a solution that’s out there, there must be a reason why there’s not a solution out there.

Craig: Right. It helps define your particular problem as a character as difficult.

John: Stepping away or letting something incubate, which is basically, rather than try to solve the problem right now, we are going to take a break, let our brains rest. We’re going to take a shower, which we often mention on this podcast. We’re going to come back to that when we are rested or when the situation has changed. That the problem may be that there’s actually not a solution in front of us because of where we are right now at this moment, but there may be an answer to this down the road.

Craig: Yes. This is an opportunity for epiphany, which can be a little silly sometimes, but a good epiphany.

John: Love it.

Craig: Worth its weight in gold. Typically, an epiphany comes when someone’s given up. RIP, Val Kilmer, Real Genius, a movie that all nerds and fans of comedy and people of the ‘80s love. He is trying to solve a problem with a laser. Because the laser is sabotaged, it explodes, and he’s out of luck. He’s not going to graduate, he’s not going to get the job, and he’s in absolute despair. He gives up. In that moment of giving up, he beats up a refrigerator, some ice falls out, he looks at the ice, and he goes, “Oh my God, I got it.” He solves the problem.

John: Sometimes it’s the recognition that the obstacle is you. The obstacle is your own pride, your own stubbornness. It’s only by taking a step back, you would say like, “Oh, this was the solution there.” Only by creating some space is a solution possible.

Another technique is what’s called test-driven development or contradictory development, which basically, first you establish what the thing should do, what it needs to do, and then you can test whether you succeeded. Then you can think about how to implement it. Rather than first trying to find a solution, find like, well, how will you know what the real solution looks like, so we’re not passing it by?

Craig: Just so people are clear, this is not just applicable to obviously defined problems. You can apply what you just said to romance. I look at those two people, that’s what I want. Now, problem, how do I get to that?

John: It really comes down to– We often talk about it. What is the thesis, and challenging that thesis, basically. How will I know that this thesis has been sustained or disproven? You got to define those terms first. Often, we’re looking for a solution without actually looking for how we’ll know a solution is satisfactory.

Last one is related to rubber ducking. It’s the Feynman technique. It’s named after Richard Feynman. Basically, you try to write an explanation in a way that a child could understand it. This is a thing we do all the time in movies, is basically simplify it to another character, and you’re finding metaphors, you’re finding ways to explain a thing so that you can actually get a non-expert to understand what it is that they need to be looking at.

Craig: Which requires you to really understand whatever it is and really be able to break down the problem. Ideally, a character can break a problem down and describe it in this matter very quickly. There are times in movies where somebody comes along, you’ll see this in movies that involve military confrontations, where somebody gets in there and there’s chaos all around, they’re like, “What do we got?” Ba-dup, ba-dup, ba-dup. Fast. No one has time to go on and on. If you have somebody in the middle of chaos taking their time, that’s just comedic.

John: It is. The thing I hope to never hear again is explain it like I’m five. It’s just so cliche.

Craig: Redundant and everybody should be explaining everything like we’re five.

John: That instinct is correct. It’s like finding the way to have a character explain something in a very clear way to a person who’s not an expert in it is incredibly valuable. Yes, you can overdo it at times, but you look at shows like Succession that we love so much, they’re able to take really complicated things and sometimes they’re talking up at the very high level so we don’t actually understand, but also fundamentally, they’ll bring it down when it’s important. The Big Short does it so well.

Craig: The Big Short was designed to teach us something important that was complicated. When you have shows like Succession, people like Jesse Armstrong are really good at understanding when they should not talk to you like you’re five because they want you to be impressed with these people who all know stuff you don’t. But when they need you to understand it for you to connect to the drama, somebody’s going to explain it to somebody like they’re five.

John: There’s times where they’re talking in high-level technical jargon, equivalent of like science-y. It’s gobbledygook to us, but we believe that they understand what it is. What’s crucial is that when there’s a problem to be solved, they’re able to then put it in terms where you can actually understand what the stakes are and what the solution feels like even if we don’t understand exactly how it all fits.

Craig: Yes. I don’t know why getting this person to call that person is going to make a difference. All I know is I have 20 minutes to get that person to call this person and the first person is in space, and the second person is in a submarine. What do I do?

John: Yes, exactly. You’ve made it really clear. All these techniques we’re talking through are ways you can think about solving problems in real life and that’s why they feel real and meaningful. Here, because of Scriptnotes, we’re really talking about how you have your characters address problems and create scenes where they’re solving those problems in ways that are interesting and engaging and hold the audience’s attention, and let us into our character’s thought process, which is so hard to do sometimes.

Craig: Yes, let us experience the frustration. Let us experience false celebration. Sometimes our characters have figured it out. No, they haven’t. That’s a terrible feeling. We’ve all felt that in life where we thought we solved it and then we’re like, “Oh no, we did not.”

John: It crosses every genre. It’s in comedies, it’s in mysteries, it’s in dramas. Everything is going to have problem solving. Every horror slasher movie is like, “How are we going to get through this?”

Craig: How are we getting out of this woods?

John: That’s what makes it so universal and so relatable. It’s making sure you’re setting up those problems in ways that can force our characters into really good problem solving. Cool. Speaking of problem solving.

Craig: Segue man.

John: Segue man. We’re recording this on Tuesday. Who knows what the status of the world is at this point.

Craig: What world?

John: This president has proposed a 100% tariff.

Craig: I like that, “this president.” That’s a great way to do it.

John: A 100% tariff on movies produced outside of the United States. As we were recording, Jon Voight came out with this other thing which is explaining more about it. Craig, can you briefly for people who are not aware, what is a tariff and why does it actually not make any sense here at all?

Craig: A tariff is a tax that is levied on imports.

John: Imported goods.

Craig: When some product crosses our border, it goes through customs. At that point, the government can levy a tax upon it. The people who are selling it, sell it to us, but when we buy it, that purchase price, there is a tax. We, on our side of the border-

John: The consumer of it.

Craig: The consumer pays the tax on that material. That is the cost of getting stuff from another country. If there is a tax on, for instance, steel from China. China does not pay more. They don’t pay that tax at all, but the people who import it do. The idea, of course, is to say, “See, we’ve made it too expensive to import this. Now you have to use the steel here.” Of course, what in the [inaudible 00:44:42] is that? The price goes up dramatically because they can, because the supply goes down and the demand is the same. Importantly, tariffs are on products.

John: Things that were put on a ship and they crossed it– it went through customs. A DVD that was manufactured overseas and brought in, you could apply a tariff.

Craig: Yes, you can. What you can’t do is put a tariff on labor that has occurred entirely in another country. Look, we can talk about how horrible runaway production has been for California in particular. Right now, finally, Sacramento seems to be taking this seriously. Seems to be. I just want people to understand, when somebody goes to make a movie in the United Kingdom, they fly there and then everybody who works there is paid there. All the things that they use to build sets, to dress people are there. The thing that comes back is a card with digital information? What is there to tax exactly?

John: That’s one of the reasons why specifically when power was delegated to the president to enact tariffs and things like that, movies were excluded as were books, things that are just intellectual property.

Craig: It just don’t work that way.

John: All that said, let’s talk about–

Craig: I can’t believe Jon Voight doesn’t know this.

John: Let’s talk about the instinct to make movies and television shows in the United States, which is not a bad instinct. No, we love that. To incentivize production within the United States through incentives, through taxes or other incentives, and to make sure that we have a sustainable industry so that continue to make things in the United States.

Craig: This is a good topic for a show about problem solving. Let’s start with what is going on. What has happened? Places outside of California, in the United States, notably New Mexico, Georgia, Louisiana, provide tax incentives. The way those generally work is that they say, “Hey, everybody that works here and all the money that you spend here on things, the sales tax and the income tax so that the people earn from labor, we’re going to provide back to your production. The thing is you’re powering the economy just by being here and by putting income in people’s pockets. We want you to come here, so we’re not going to tax you on that stuff. We’re going to give that back to you.”

Those schemes, they’re literally called schemes, function in various ways. Typically, there is a percentage that they give you back, and there is often a cap. The state, or whatever the municipality says, once we’ve covered this much money in this stuff, we stop, we’re done because we just don’t want to give everybody everything. What ensued and what has ensued is a race to the bottom. This is the problem.

Listen, people get very angry about globalization. Well, that occurred. I understand the anger at the underlying problem, which is capitalism will draw everything down to the cheapest number, which means drawing labor down to the lowest amount of expenditure and enriching corporations as much as possible.

This is why California has resisted this sort of thing for a while, and it’s why a lot of people fundamentally are uncomfortable with this because what we’re saying is the only way to help working people, especially the working crews in California is to just give a ton of money to rich corporations.

John: Let’s talk about when incentives work properly and how they’re structured. If I can find a link to it, there was a representative from the DGA who explained on Kim Masters’ podcast in a really good way, what the new California incentives are supposed to be. The incentives are paying people back for their labor costs. Basically saying, “You employed these people in the state of California. That’s a good thing. Therefore, we are going to refund money to you based on that.” That’s really what it comes down to.

One of the challenges we face is that California labor costs are higher than they are other places. Sometimes that’s why you move to cheaper places to shoot, including overseas, which is really what this focus is of this, which is becomes hard to do. When you’re shooting a movie that is set in Philadelphia, but you’re shooting in Croatia because it’s just cheaper to shoot in Croatia, that’s a harder problem to solve.

Craig: It is. That said, there are costs inherent to shooting far away. A ton of people have to be shipped out there, including most of your key cast.

John: Your department heads.

Craig: Your department heads. There’s also just typically a duplication of efforts. You’re going to want to find what’s called a services company. If you’re shooting something in Croatia, you have a production company, you have your script, you have your production, and then you need to hire a Croatian production company that puts you in touch with the Croatian folks that you’re going to need to work on your movie or your show. People don’t want to do this.

Unless you’re making a movie about Croatia, nobody wants to go far away from the setting of the movie. It is disruptive, and it has really hurt so many people who make their living off of these production trades here in Los Angeles. Listen, it’s dollar to dollar at some point, who knows?

John: Cost of currency, everything else.

Craig: It’s impossible to figure this stuff out, except on the largest level. What we know is the argument’s not even close for the companies. For my show, it was like, this is the difference. You either can make it or you can’t.

John: With Canada, the dollar exchange is part of it, but also the incentives.

Craig: The exchange rate is definitely an issue, and that fluctuates, but the incentives are absolutely a part of it. What happens is you start to get even inter-provincial competition to see, okay, well Alberta knows that they don’t necessarily have as wide and deep a pool of crew as BC does. They increase their incentives to bring stuff, in comes The Last of Us, more people are trained, more people are hired, better for Alberta.

We need to do something about this, and the one thing I think we just can’t afford to do anymore is clutch our pearls about the fact that this is putting money in corporate pockets because they’re doing it anyway. No matter what we do, they are either keeping the money in their pocket and not giving it to us, or they’re getting money to replace the money they give to us. One way or the other, it’s happening. I would rather that we replace the money in their pocket and have them give it to us here in Los Angeles.

By us, I mean all of our grips, all of our electric, all of our catering, all of our teamsters and our seamstresses, and every single person that works on– construction is an enormous part of this, and it will power our economy. It’s important to do. No, we’re not going to get there by tariffs. We’re going to get there the other way, it seems.

John: I want to end this on a happy note, which is a movie that I’m helping out on is a very low budget, but based on low budget, was going to probably need to shoot in Mexico, even though it’s set in Southern California, and went through a whole bunch of stuff and then was able to get the California tax credit, and so is now going to be shooting in California, which is incredible. It’s the right thing for the movie, it’s the right thing for the state. It shows off an underappreciated part of our state. I’m incredibly excited for it. It was a slog to get there, but it happened.

Craig: It’s lucky because it’s a lottery right now.

John: It is.

Craig: You literally win or lose randomly.

John: It’s also in tiers based on what size production you are.

Craig: That’s the other catch here, because the way the new schemes that are being proposed are structured, it really does aim more towards lower budget or middle budget things. I think there’s a great argument to be made that the large budget things employ more people. It’s one of those things of like, “Well, do we want to give five different people X units, or we would like to give one person 10 X units?” I don’t know.

John: It’s really tough. The other reason why we can’t say tariffs mean a different thing, if we’re going to slap a fee on things that were shot overseas, they’re going to slap a fee on anything that we try to show overseas too. Nobody wants a trade war over this.

Craig: It is literally other than– I’ll even take it back because we don’t really export technology. We import it because we build it all overseas.

John: Our film and television industry is a giant exporter of culture.

Craig: It is the only exportation that we have beyond some limited crops, I think, and in some limited cases, some fuels. I can’t think of an industry that is just so exportive. We don’t need sledgehammers to fix this. We just need will and the unions need to buy in. It seems like they are. Unfortunately, they have to agree to somehow make the corporate paymasters happy. Talk about not letting the perfect get in the way of the good.

John: All right. It’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a person, her name is Hannah Ritchie. She has a great blog called Sustainability by the Numbers. She also has a podcast called Solving for Climate. She is a data scientist and writer who mostly talks about climate change, sustainability, all those things. She’s a person, as a data scientist, she actually crunches the numbers to figure out what is useful and what is not useful. She can talk about solar panel productivity and where the changes are there and the choices you can make individually, but also the choices systematically that governments make about doing things right.

She’s Scottish. Craig, you will love her accent.

Craig: Oh, Scottish.

John: She’s a really smart Scottish person.

Craig: I love the Scots.

John: I love them so much. Specifically this last week, she wrote about ChatGPT and there’s this meme going around of how much energy a ChatGPT query goes up, and it is so incredibly negligible. people say, “Oh, it’s 10 times as much as a Google search is.” A Google search is nothing, it’s a grain of sand.

Craig: Aren’t statistics fun?

John: Statistics are fun. I’ll point people to this blog post, but really I’ve learned so much reading her, but also listening to her podcast, talking about things like they’re putting sales on freighters now. Which is so cool.

Craig: Smart.

John: They retrofited because–

Craig: You save that much. If the wind blows, you turn your engine off, you save some money.

John: The expert they had on to talk about it was talking about how right now they’ll optimize for speed a little bit because sometimes it’s like, “Well, we’ll burn less fuel and go slowly and it’s worthwhile,” but with the wind blowing, when you don’t need it in a hurry, use the wind.

Craig: Absolutely. Imagine that.

John: It’s some stuff that feels like science fiction, but it’s actually people, actual scientists are doing it. Hannah Ritchie, Sustainability by the Numbers is her blog, but the podcast is called Solving for Climate.

Craig: I love that. I’ve got a delightful one cool thing, and it really is. It’s so cool. Our good friends at Rusty Lake-

John: Oh, yes. It’s another game. Another-

Craig: A surprise. [crosstalk] Yes. Our friends at Rusty Lake out there in the Netherlands who make all the wonderful Rusty Lake games, it is their 10th anniversary. To celebrate, they released a surprise game called the Mr. Rabbit Magic Show. Those of you who play these incredibly surreal games know that there’s Mr. Crow and Mr. Owl and Mr. Rabbit, and they are all very sinister. True to form, they just knock it out of the park.

It’s just like, hey, Mr. Rabbit’s Magic Show. There’s going to be 20 little puzzles and each one is– it’s just really, they’re really easy and you’re like blowing through them and then shit gets weird. Of course they supply a whole other game inside the game with incredible challenges to do. Getting and completing the whole thing, it felt like a full complete meal and extremely Rusty Lake, very intertextual. They’ve built quite a culture over there. It seems like such a nice place. I want to work there.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It seems like they have fun. They seem really cool. Congratulations to Rusty Lake. You guys and Fireproof Games who make the room games are my favorite iOS game makers.

John: Fantastic. I forgot to mention this before it actually happened, but I will say thank you to everybody who stopped by our booth at PAX East, the big game convention this last weekend in Boston. We were there with Birdigo, which is our game on Steam right now. I’m going to say great because it actually hasn’t happened as we’re recording this. I’m resuming it went fantastic, but I want to thank everybody who visited our booth and signed up and downloaded our demo for Birdigo up there.

Craig: Oh, I love that.

John: It’s so much fun. We made a little banner or something.

Craig: Nice work.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced my Drew Marquardt and Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you need an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. There’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. Actually, we didn’t answer any questions today.

Craig: No, we didn’t.

John: We did some follow-up, though.

Craig: We must have an incredible backlog of questions.

John: Drew talk to us about the question backlog we have.

Drew: We do. We have some great ones that I’ve got in store.

John: We had four on the workflow today, which we didn’t get to because I’m always keeping an eye on time.

Craig: Sure. You know I love an all-question episode. It’s so much fun.

John: We’ll get there. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a weekly newsletter we have called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about on the episode today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you to all of our premium subscribers. You let us do this every week, which is so much fun. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. You get all those back episodes and the bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on Egypt and Jordan and my troubles through the tombs. Craig, it’s nice to be back with you here in person.

Craig: Welcome home, John.

John: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. I am back from two weeks off the grid. I actually, literally, I put the out of office email thing. I didn’t check my email. I didn’t open my laptop.

Craig: Love it.

John: It was good.

Craig: I need that.

John: You should do that. I know you traveled to Spain for last of–

Craig: To work.

John: It was work work stuff. Craig, I’m going to encourage you to find a time and just say– because the world did not fall apart and like Drew and everybody else, they stepped up and they just did stuff. I just said like, “Just to handle stuff as best as you could handle.”

Craig: Or maybe the world falls apart.

John: Maybe it’s fine.

Craig: Whatever. I’m not funding crucial research into chromosomal repair. I admire you for flinging yourself across the globe. I have come to find travel so exhausting, so exhausting to the point where just even like, “Oh, we’re just going to do a one hour hop somewhere, a short flight.” I’m tired. There’s nothing about going up and down that exhausts me and going this last trip to Spain and then the UK and then back to LA again, I was just– oh man, I was knackered.

John: You were knackered.

Craig: I was knackered. You fling yourself. It was just you and Mike.

John: Just me and Mike. I thank God– This is our 25th anniversary. That’s the reason why we took this trip and thank God we get along well because we were with each other for 17 days solid. Literally never apart.

Craig: Melissa and I, I think our secret because apart–

John: You never see each other.

Craig: 17 days out of the year, I would say we love our independence and then we come together and then we like to go to our corners and then come back together again. I don’t know if I can spend 17 days straight with anyone. I love being alone. Oh my God, I love it. You guys close quarters, 17 days straight, grouchy, I assume from jet lag.

John: Not that grouchy.

Craig: Not that grouchy.

John: No, we don’t get that grouchy. We also we can recognize each other when like stuff’s happening. Here’s what I’ll say was different about this trip is it was– generally Mike plans our trips and he’s responsible for everything. This time we went to travel agents like, “Make this happen.”

Craig: A travel agent.

John: We went to the travel agent, who then went through a safari company, Expedite company for that. We had handlers at every set because we were going to the Middle East and we’re two gay men going to the Middle East. I was going to ask put us in a bubble wrap. You expressed some concern.

Craig: For you. I can envision concern for me.

John: I’ll say it all went really well.

Craig: That’s great.

John: We had to make choices to help us.

Craig: Yes. You weren’t wearing rainbow t-shirts.

John: We weren’t. Honestly, it’s helpful that Mike and I can be red as brothers. We weren’t pretending to be anything, we weren’t.

Craig: Nor were you necessarily in a situation where you thought, “Oh, we’re going to attract unwanted attention.”

John: Yes. We also had somebody with us at all times. We had a handler who could meet us at the airport and we also always had a guide for where we were. In Egypt, that’s an Egyptologist, and that’s a whole fascinating thing where it’s a licensed thing who you have certifications and tests and stuff like that. They could do things that people can’t do. That was great. I wish we had equivalence of that here because our tourism industry is just nowhere near as sophisticated as Egypt is.

Craig: It’s so funny you say that because every time I find myself driving along Hollywood Boulevard and I see how many tourists are there, I think “Why. Why are you here?” Did just dumped them out of a plane and we’re like, “Enjoy.”

John: We stick them on a van and unlicensed undertrained-

Craig: Good luck everybody.

John: -with maps to the stars.

Craig: With maps to the stars. It is true, in other countries there is because tourism is so vital. Obviously there is tourism to United States. I think New York must be and San Francisco’s probably huge.

John: LA’s probably number three.

Craig: LA’s up there.

John: Orlando’s also probably high.

Craig: Orlando must be. LA/Anaheim, the LA metro area must be pretty big and people go to– but it’s not as big of a wedge of our economic pie as tourism is probably for Egypt.

John: I will confess that, while I was in Egypt, I did a ChatGPT question, an 03 and one of the detailed questions, “Can you compare tourism into Egypt as a share of the economy, versus specifically Los Angeles or New York?”

Craig: What did you get?

John: It’s like 20%, 25% of Egypt’s economy, tourism it’s crazy.

Craig: It’s insane.

John: It’s 1% to 2% of LA County.

Craig: No wonder there’s a rather robust tourism industry there to help people. I think it’s great. Sometimes because I hate traveling, I don’t like people that romanticize traveling and people who are like, “I just like going places and I don’t know where I’m going. I just like find things.” I’m like, “I want to know where I am.” I’ll love to wander, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t want to just guess. I’d like to have a vague sense of wander.

John: This sounds like an advert on ChatGPT, but I’ll tell you the one other thing I did do-

Craig: Oh my God, you’re ruining the climate.

John: We had this PDF that travel agency had put together. Like, “Here’s basically all the stuff that’s happening. Here’s the itinerary for things.” The PDF was such a nightmare to read through, where are we? I gave it a ChatGPT and it’s like, “Read this, tell me what I’m doing tomorrow.” It would come back with an answer. Like, “Here’s what happens tomorrow.” It’s like, “Thank God someone can actually just tell me the answer to this.”

Craig: Someone?

John: Someone. Someone told me. I didn’t have to ask Mike. I could ask this. This animated object.

Craig: One day Mike will be as good as this.

John: As this. I also point by the camera on my phone and say things like, “What is this thing I’m looking at?” It could tell me. God, that’s the near future here.

Craig: I am so dedicated right now to going nowhere. I think in part it’s a reaction to how much travel I do because of the show. A lot of it is this weird inside Canada travel just all over. Boy, a year of it.

John: I’ll say, I haven’t had to travel for work a lot yet. That’s probably why I actually had some buffer in me where I could sustain it. It was 25 hours of travel to get back from Egypt yesterday. That’s a lot.

Craig: Wow. Cairo flies direct to–

John: Cairo to Dubai, the wrong direction, then Dubai to LA.

Craig: Oh, that hurts.

John: It does hurt. Ouch but we made it.

Craig: You made it and you’re back home.

John: It’s great. I will say that as I said in the main episode, the tombs are great. The wonders of the world, I get why they’re a wonder of the world. Petra is gorgeous. I was in the Wadi Rahm, which is the Red Sand deserts of Jordan where they shot Lawrence of Arabia and The Martian. It’s incredible. It’s mars. It’s nowhere on earth. It’s great to be able to do that. The other thing I did on this trip, which was helpful is every day I would just write down what actually happened.

I would just write and write and write and write pages of it and actually just helped me process what had actually happened. Sometimes just a thing happened and I couldn’t even tell you afterwards, and now I actually do have a recollection if I could cross as what it actually felt like.

Craig: Oh, it’s so healthy.

John: It felt healthy.

Craig: This is what I did when I got to Madrid. I got into bed. And then at some point–

John: You brought with you your game.

Craig: My steamdeck. Oh, by the way, John.

John: Yes.

Craig: This is what this segment should have been about.

John: Please.

Craig: I’ve completed Baldur’s Gate 3 on honor mode.

John: At D&D. Before I left you were trying to do it. Congratulations, Craig.

Craig: It is now complete. I did everything. No cheating took on every boss did it all.

John: Congratulations.

Craig: Golden dice. Actually matters more to me than pretty much anything else I’ve done.

John: Craig, one thing I genuinely admire about you is that you do not feel any shame about pursuing your hobbies and interests and spending time on those.

Craig: Oh my God, no. I don’t know why I don’t do it more. Granted, a huge part of it is dissociating.

John: It’s a way of coping, but I honestly feel like even if you– you’re in a no show.

Craig: Some people get very guilty about saying that, how much time they spend on a video game. I’m like, “Why are you feeling guilty? What better way?” People don’t feel guilty about watching television shows.

John: One of the books they read on this trip was Four Thousand Weeks, which you’ve probably heard of. Four Thousand Weeks is basically that’s how long your life is just 4,000 weeks, which is scary when you think about it. It’s like, “Oh, that’s not that long.” That’s 80 years and that’s how long you have. It’s become a test of like, “Well, is this the way I want to spend one of my 4,000 doing this thing?”

What the argument the book really makes is that the thing is you’re doing as hobbies, which is you’re just doing them because you enjoy them, those are probably things you should be spending your time doing.

Craig: The stuff. Also we’re just ill-equipped to handle it. We cannot mentally handle this problem. Our own fatality just short circuits everything. Because if you really stop to smell the roses, you will go insane. If you really stopped to go, “I am present in this moment and feeling my life slipping by as time elapses and I move closer to the 4000th week,” you’re going to fall apart.

John: I did some of that though on this trip. There were times where just like, we’re on a Nile cruise and so for four days I was just looking everyone go by on the Nile. A river cruise, rivers are like trains but slower.

Craig: Slow trains.

John: What’s also different is that people build things right next to the river. People live next to the river. The trains, you’re going through places like no one wants to live next to the train.

Craig: It goes by so fast you can’t see anything anyway.

John: Here you can see like, “Oh there is some guy washing his clothes in the river. There are some kids playing. Look, there’s some goats.” That was great.

Craig: You occasionally will dock and one of the passengers will mysteriously be murdered.

John: We watched Death on the Nile in the hotel where Agatha Christie wrote Death on the Nile which is so much fun.

Craig: First of all, amazing. Congratulations. That’s the first part of this trip I’m envious of, fully. When you say you watched–

John: I watched the old one.

Craig: Thank you. No offense to new one.

John: Michael Green and everybody else.

Craig: The old one is spectacular.

John: Just the silliest movie.

Craig: Ridiculous. So campy. Crazy.

John: Just wild. Also like Hercule Poirot has no reason to be. It’s all accidental. Doesn’t seem particularly concerned about how many people die in the movie.

Craig: Never. He’s a full sociopath.

John: The movie was actually shot at the hotel we were staying at.

Craig: Amazing.

John: We watched like the first half of it and then we had dinner and I was like, “Oh, this is right where they shot that thing.” It was so much fun. They’re like, “Oh, they’re at Abu Simbel.” We were there this afternoon.

Craig: Is that where the rock falls and smashes?

John: That was at Temple of Karnak.

Craig: Temple of Karnak. Yes.

John: Abu Simbel has the two giant Ramesses the second. It’s where Mia Farrow is crazy and he yells at them.

Craig: Mia Farrow. Boy, I love a classic Mia Farrow. I love a Death on the Nile. I love a Rosemary’s Baby.

John: It was fun. Anyway, Egypt. Jordan, great. Taking time off. Great. Love it. Huge fan of taking some time off and just doing things you want to do.

Craig: Glad you’re back.

John: Thanks.

Craig: Time to play some D&D.

John: We’ll do it. Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.

Craig: Thank you. Bye.

Links:

• The Production Assistant’s Guide to the Lunch Run
• Indiana Jones and the Great Circle
• Note On Long Takes by Aidan Moretti
• Video tour inside the Great Pyramid of Giza
• Donald Trump Says He’s Pursuing 100% Tariffs On Movies Produced Outside U.S. and John Voight’s proposal
• Sustainability by the Numbers by Hannah Ritchie
• Solving for Climate
• The Mr. Rabbit Magic Show by Rusty Lake
• Birdigo
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Spencer Lackey (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August and you’re listening to episode 685 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, screenplays and stage plays are superficially similar. They both consist of scenes with characters talking to each other, so why do they feel so different and why is it often so challenging to move something from one format to another?

To help us explore these questions, we are joined by writer, director, showrunner, and playwright, Leslye Headland, best known for creating Russian Doll on Netflix along with the accolade on Disney Plus. She wrote and directed Bachelorette, adapted from her own play, and she’s coming off of a Broadway runner for acclaim play, Cult of Love, which I got to see in New York and absolutely loved. I’m so excited, Leslye, to get to talk with you about all these things. Welcome, Leslye Headland.

Leslye Headland: Thank you. What an intro. Gosh, it’s so nice to be here. I didn’t realize you’d seen the play.

John: I saw the play. Here’s how I saw the play. I was in New York because we were doing a new version of Big Fish, and we were there for the rehearsals and the 29-hour reading basically of Big Fish. Andrew Lippa, who is the composer lyricist of Big Fish, is a Tony voter, and so he said, “Oh, hey, I need to go see a bunch of stuff, come with me.” I’m like, “Great. I’ll go do anything you want to see.”

We show up and I’m just talking with them and I literally walk in the theater and I have no idea what the play is or who’s in it. I didn’t even look at the signage to see who was in the show, and so literally I come into the theater and there is this gorgeous set, the prettiest set I’ve ever seen on a stage play. I absolutely loved what I saw on that beautiful set.

Leslye: Oh, yes. The set was designed by John Lee Beatty, who is an absolute legend in terms of set design. I had a really, I would say, clear vision for what the set would look like, that it would have that Fanny and Alexander touch to it. There was a play by Annie Baker called John that took place in a bed and breakfast that was also like just stuffed to the brim with coziness. All of that just directly contrasts the darker content of the plays, and those plays as well as mine.

John: I want to get into that because we’re actually– I want to take a look at the very first page of your play because you actually lay out in the same description what it’s supposed to look like. It’s so different than how we would do it in a screenplay, and it’s so effective on this page, but it’s just a different experience. We’ll get into that, but I also want to talk about– obviously you’ve done film, theater, television. I want to talk about origin stories, because you went from assistant to auteur, which is something that a lot of our listeners are trying to go for. I want to talk about time loops because I love a time loop. You’ve written a bunch of time loops in a Russian Doll, and we have listener questions about music cues and long scripts, which I hope you can help us tackle.

Leslye: Absolutely, yes.

John: Then after we’re done with the main show, in our bonus segment, I want to talk about the difference of seeing plays versus seeing movies, because as screenwriters, it’s easy to catch up on movies. We can just watch them anytime we want to watch them, but for plays, it’s such a specific deal. If you can’t actually go see a play– if I didn’t happen to be in New York to see your play, I wouldn’t be able to talk to you about how great it was. I want to talk about the differences between seeing plays versus seeing movies and how you keep up as an artist.

Leslye: Oh, I’d love to talk about that. I love working in all those mediums, but they’re all very, very, very different.

John: They are, and so having done a bunch of them, there’s gatekeepers, there’s shibboleths, there’s this a whole sets of systems you have to learn the ropes of, and so there’s things you come into it thinking like, “Oh, I know how to do this thing,” and you realize like, “Ah” that it works so differently. Can we wind it all the way back, though, because I’d love to some backstory on you and how you got started, where you came up from, and when you first decided that writing and making things was for you?

Leslye: Very, very young. I was one of those kids that just wrote, you just started writing. I would read books for– I’d get them from the library, like the Judy Blume, or I ordered a bunch of American Girl doll books, which I absolutely loved. Then I would fill composition books with rip-offs of those. Just doing exactly the same structure.

John: You learn by copying, you learn by imitating other things you see.

Leslye: Exactly.

John: There’s no shame in that.

Leslye: Just beat for beat imitations, but with my own characters, like with the themes and personalities that I found more interesting than the simplistic morality of those types of books.

John: Absolutely.

Leslye: One of the reasons Judy Blume is so great is that there’s this gray out area that she writes about, but very soon I found musical theater. I became completely obsessed with Stephen Sondheim. Nobody could tell me anything that wasn’t Stephen Sondheim. I was introduced to him from the D. A. Pennebaker documentary about the marathon recording of Company. My dad watched it with me. It was on PBS or something.

He was watching it late at night and he said, “Leslye, get in here.” I ran into my parents’ room and he said, “You need to watch this.” I started watching it. He didn’t know what it was, I think he just started seeing it and was like, “This is my girl.” I started watching it. Sondheim is in light all Black. There’s one part where he puts his head in his hands, he’s so depressed at what’s happening. I said, “Who is that?” He said, “That’s the writer.” Suddenly, I was like, that was my basis for what a writer was.

John: You had the opportunity to see this thing that you loved. Oh, you can actually see the face of the person behind the thing and see the hard work and process it took to make that thing?

Leslye: Absolutely.

John: Rather than scaring you away from it, you were like, “Oh, I want to go and do that thing.”

Leslye: Yes. Absolutely wanted to dive in. Jumped into being a drama kid, then I went to Tisch for college for directing and acting a little bit, but not writing. I would write screenplays on my own that were terrible. I would give them to my friends. They would say, “This is terrible,” but I learned so much from directing. Just figuring out how to tell a story visually rather than texturally was exactly what I needed for those four years.

John: Talk to us about the program at Tisch. Was this all directing for the stage? Was it directing for a camera? What was the classes and what things we were learning?

Leslye: It’s a good question. They’re all broken up into different studios, and I was in a studio called Playwrights Horizons. It’s actually not that connected to the off-Broadway theater, but this particular studio, rather than– and they have Strasberg, Adler, the musical theater program. Playwrights was a little jack of all trades. You could study design, you could study directing, you could study acting, you could study, not dance, but Alexander Technique and have all these voice classes and everything. It really was a hodgepodge of information, so you could pick and choose what it was you wanted to focus on.

My main one was directing, and each year you’d do something different. The first year you’re just going to everything. Everything. I did acting classes, I did design classes, I did directing classes. I was not great at any of them, to be quite honest. I did have a couple of spurts of directing that were good that I felt very proud of, but that was it. Then in second year, you stage-managed for the juniors and the seniors. When you became a junior, you did two short plays. You did one in the fall and then you did one in the spring. You did two one-acts. I did The Lesson by Ionesco, and I did Beirut.

Then when you’re a senior, if you’ve made it this far, which a lot of people did not, you do a full length. I did Waiting for Godot because I love that play. It is my heart. It is exactly who I am, and the story that I want to tell influenced me beyond– like Sondheim. I’d say it was like Sondheim and Godot were just the major thing. I got to do that for my senior thesis project. I would say that people at Tisch responded to it, essentially, the same way that people respond my work now, which is, they’re impressed, but they’re also confused by what’s happening. I do think that the style of what I do now absolutely was born out of that production.

John: Let’s talk about that style, because what was it about that? Was it your choices in terms of how characters are presenting themselves on stage? Was it how you’re handling dialogue? Because as we get into Cult of Love, I want to talk about your very specific choices in terms of when characters overlap and when they don’t. What were some things if someone said like, “Oh–“ if they could time travel back and see that production, it’s like, “Oh, well, that’s very Leslye Headland.” What was it about that?

Leslye: Well, it was definitely very choreographed. One of my teachers said that was the most energetic version of Godot I’ve ever seen, because I didn’t have them just standing there. My aha moment for it was Marx brothers. I was just like, “It’s Vaudeville, that’s what this is.” Therefore, it was very choreographed and it was almost a musical, essentially. That Sondheim influence was pushed into it.

We did so many visual gags that were– even Lucky’s speech was this massive, just all of them hanging onto that leash of his and yanking him around. My Lucky was an incredible dancer and a gymnast. He could fall on the ground in just a violent, violent way. My mentor for the project said– When you do a postmortem with all of the teachers and the head of the studio and you get the critique, and some of it was good, some of it was critical, which is normal for what that moment is, but my mentor for it said, “I think you’re one of the darkest people I’ve ever met, but also really stupid things make you laugh.” I do think that what I ended up doing was very messed up characters and situations that then became a big joke. [laughs]

John: Coming from that, you’re graduating from Tisch? This is early 2000s. When are you coming out of Tisch?

Leslye: I graduated in 2003. I immediately started working at Miramax. I actually was working at Miramax while I was in school. I would go to my classes in the morning, I would go to Miramax. I was working in the Archive Department, which means that I was archiving all of the props and costumes and any set pieces for films, so that they could be archived for posterity. Also, all these things were sent out for Oscar campaign so that they could be displayed in places, like the costumes for Chicago, or the props, and the costumes for Gangs of New York. It was that time period, 2002.

Then, 2003, I immediately started working as an assistant. The next thing is that I quit. I had no money. I lived on my friend’s couch in a studio apartment. That’s where I wrote my spec Bachelorette. I worked at Amoeba Records, I worked at Rocket Video. I got a job wherever I could. Then I started writing these plays. There were a bunch of friends from NYU who had started a theater company called IAMA Theatre Company, and they’re still going strong. We just started developing these plays.

I started the Seven Deadly Plays series because I just wanted to challenge myself to write seven plays. That was really the biggest thing, was, “Can I keep writing, and can I keep getting better, and stop thinking about one particular project as being the thing that’s going to make me?” I felt that was really helpful. It was really helpful to develop the plays with actors, to watch them read things, and understand like, “Oh, that’s a really bad scene that I wrote,” because people don’t talk– I just saw two people do it, and it’s absolutely uninteresting, and there’s nothing going on.

I think sometimes when we are in a fishbowl of writing drafts or writing first drafts, it’s almost like your brain is a dangerous neighborhood and you really shouldn’t be hanging out there alone. [laughter] That’s how I– People have got to start reading it. You’ve got to have a reading with some actors. That’s just my advice. I’m sure nobody else does that, but that’s what I do.

John: No, Mike Birbiglia, who’s been on the show a couple of times, always talks about how important those readings are to get people just– the pizza readings just with friends, just to get a sense of, “What does this actually sound like? What does it actually feel like with real people doing it?”

Leslye: Yes, that’s exactly right.

John: You created a great situation for yourself, where you set yourself a goal of writing these seven plays. You wrote these seven plays. In the process of writing them, you got to stage them, see what they actually felt like on their feet.

Leslye: Yes. They were all done in little black box theaters. I forgot to say that, when I was an assistant, I was still doing that. I was putting my own money into black box theaters so that I could mount other shows like Adam Rapp and Neil LaBute. When I started writing the plays, again, like the composition books, I just started ripping off other plays. Bachelorette is just a female Hurlyburly. I just was like, “Oh, I can’t believe nobody’s thought of that.”

Each play had its own genre reference, if that makes sense. Cult Of Love is a family drama, which is a staple of plays. There are so many family dramas, but I like to, within that composition book, do my own thing.

John: Let’s talk about Bachelorette. This is one of your Seven Deadly Plays. You were able to write it as a play mounted in a black box theater situation, and then you went in and made the screenplay version of it with the intention of you directing from the very start, or did you think, “This is something I’m going to sell?” What was your intention in going into Bachelorette?

Leslye: I thought I was going to sell. I did not in any shape or form assume that I was going to be directing it. I worked really hard on the screenplay. I got an agent based off of it. I started to do the Water Bottle Tour. That’s what I call it. I don’t know if other people do.

John: Oh, that’s the term of art. We all say that, yes.

Leslye: This, for people who don’t know, it’s where your agent send you out to the executives at different production companies or different studios, and they’ve read your spec and they just get to know you and you guys have a little chat. Over and over again, I got the feedback about the movie that, “This is absolutely the way women talk, but no one wants to watch that.” I thought it would be a good writing sample, and maybe I can get some jobs off of it.

Adam McKay and Will Ferrell, and Jessica Elbaum ended up optioning it just as the play was going up in New York. It was a confluence of this piece that had been– this little tiny play that I didn’t really think was going to do– It was just one of seven. It didn’t seem like the one that was going to go, but then it went up with Second Stage in 2010. Then they optioned it at the same time.

They sent it to a bunch of directors, which is very par for the course. I can’t even remember who we sent it to. We sent it to every human. Everybody passed. It was also the time of– It was actually written before Bridesmaids, but Bridesmaids got made first, so there was this rush of, “Can we beat Bridesmaids? We can’t.” The directors started passing on it because–

John: They were just too much alike.

Leslye: Yes, it was like, “We already saw that. We already did that.” I was at the Gary Sanchez Christmas party with Adam and a bunch of other people. I was just sitting there with Adam chatting, and he said, “We haven’t found a director for Bachelorette.” I said, “I think we’ll find somebody.” He said, “Why don’t you just direct it?” I said, “I think that’s a great idea. I think I should.” Again, just do everything before you’re ready. If you get that opportunity, do not think in your head, “I don’t know how to do that.” Just say yes. Just be like, “Absolutely.”

His reasoning, and we talked about this a little bit, was, “You know these characters more than anybody in the world, and you can work with actors, because that’s what you’ve been doing for the last seven, eight years.” He said, “To me, that’s the most important thing. We can set you up to success with all the other stuff.”

John: I’d love us to transition now. We talked about getting Bachelorette set up, but I want to go back to plays and really focus in on playwriting versus screenwriting, because they look so similar at a glance, but then actually get into how they work and what our expectations are as audiences, they’re really different. In a stage play, the audience is actively participating in the imagination with you.

Leslye: That’s correct.

John: They’re there, they’re game to go. If you show them a desk and say, “This is an office,” this is an office. You have their full attention in ways that you don’t know if you have it with a movie. With a movie, you don’t know if they’re half watching. Here, for those first 5, 10 minutes, they are there, they’re fully invested into what we’re doing, which is great, except that some things are just harder to do on a stage, like that sense of where we are. Creating a sense of place is more challenging. You don’t have close-ups, so you have to make sure that small emotions are going to be able to land if we can’t see a person’s face.

Leslye: That’s correct, yes.

John: I’d love to start with, in Cult of Love– Drew, if you could read us this opening scene description of the house where we’re starting. We’ll read this first, and then we’ll get a summary from Leslye about what actually happens here. Drew, help us out with what happens on the page. Page one of Cult Of Love.

Drew Marquardt: Sure.

“Home, the first floor of a farmhouse in Connecticut, 8:30 PM, Christmas Eve. The kitchen, dining area, and living room are all immediately visible. A small door to a washroom, an entryway alcove/mudroom with a coat closet/rack. An upright piano stands near a staircase to the second floor. A red front door with a Christmas wreath leads to a quaint, covered porch area. Snow falls.

The house is decorated for Christmas. This cannot be overstated. The place is literally stuffed to the brim with goodies, evergreens, and cheer. It’s an oppressive display of festivities and middle-class wealth that pushes the limits of taste. There isn’t a surface, seat, or space that isn’t smothered with old books, LPs, plates of sweets, (no real food, though), glasses of wine, wrapped presents, stockings, and garlands of greenery and tinsel.

There are many musical instruments, a spinet piano, banjo, nylon, and steel string guitar, ukulele, steel drum, washboard, djembe, melodica, harmonicas, hand bells, spoons, maracas, and sleigh bells. They are not displayed or specially cared for in any way. They lay among the Christmas decorations and book collections like any other piece of ephemera. When a character picks an instrument up, regardless of size, the audience should always be surprised it was there hiding in plain sight. Notably absent, a television, a sound system. Actually, there’s no visible technology. No one’s holding iPhones, tablets, or computers. They will come out when scripted.”

John: All right, Leslye, five paragraphs here to set up this room that we’re in for the duration of the play. It’s so evocative and so clearly shows you what you’re going to do here, but you, as the screenwriter, Leslye Headland, would never put that in a script. It’s a different thing than what you would do on the page here. Talk us through how you approach the scene description at the start of a play.

Leslye: Well, I think with this play, it was important to be super prescriptive about what that world was going to look like. Like you said, when you came in and you were like, “That’s the most beautiful set I’ve ever seen,” that was the idea, to go through five paragraphs so that it was very clear that this is not open to interpretation.

John: Absolutely. It’s not a metaphor of a family living room. This is actually the space. Your point about, when I walked in the theater, the curtain’s up. We’re seeing this behind a scrim, but we’re seeing the whole set. As the audience, we’re spending more than five paragraphs just looking at the space before any actors come in, and I think, which is also serving us. It’s really establishing this is the place where this story is going to happen, which is great.

Leslye: I also think that there are cues, essentially, that you should follow. One thing that I felt very strongly about with the play was that it didn’t feel too now, that there would be an essence of this could perceivably take place at any time. Putting the technology in there would be disruptive to the fantasy, because that’s really what it is. It’s a fantasy play. It’s not Long Day’s Journey Into Night. It’s not August: Osage County. It’s in that genre, but it’s not meant to be.

John: It’s in that genre. The audience approaches it with some of the same expectations, and so you have to very quickly establish that it’s not those things, and you doing that through music and other things, but we should say, because most of our listeners won’t have seen this play, we’ve set up this gorgeous set, what’s going to happen here? What’s the short version of Cult Of Love? You don’t have to go through everything, but who is the family that we’re going to meet here?

Leslye: The logline or the synopsis, you mean?

John: Yes.

Leslye: This is about a family, upper middle class family in Connecticut, who all come home to celebrate Christmas. It’s parents, four grown children, and their partners. They all are essentially exploring and voicing and venting all of these pent-up frustrations in history that they have with each other, which is pretty normal for a family play.

What I would say is that the thing that makes it set apart is that there is no plot. No one is trying to do anything. There isn’t a thing that any one character is trying to achieve. The action of the play is the disillusionment of both the family, or the disintegration, sorry, also disillusionment, but the disintegration of the family as a unit, as a beautiful idea into the reality of how a family breaks apart eventually and gets completely decimated.

The idea behind the play is that you watch that, but instead of watching the story of that, because there is no plot, that you yourself insert the plot of your own family. Therefore, the catharsis comes, hopefully, at the end of the play because you have been watching your family, not my family, or the play’s family. That was the intention of the show. I don’t know if I answered your question.

John: Oh, absolutely. We’re going to see on stage this family go through these dynamics. As an audience member who went in literally knowing not what play I was going to see, that’s what I was pulling out of it.

It’s interesting to say that there’s just no plot, because you’re overstating that a bit. People do want things. There are goals. Characters have motivations. There’s things they’re trying to get to, but there’s not a protagonist who comes through to the end and things are really transformed. It’s not the last Christmas they’re ever going to be at this house. There’s no establishment of that, but it’s all the little small things, the little small tensions that are ripping at the seams of this very perfect situation that you have established.

Leslye: Absolutely. One of the big inspirations for the play, and one of my biggest influences, beyond who surpassed Sondheim, is John Cassavetes. Cassavetes once said about Shadows, his first movie, that he was very interested in characters who had problems that were overtaken by other problems. That’s what I wanted to achieve, a lot of my work, for sure, but specifically with Cult Of Love.

That’s really where the overlapping dialogue comes in. It’s meant to evoke a Cassavetes indie film, where you can’t quite latch on to one character as the good guy or the bad guy. You’re dropped into an ecosystem where you have to decide, “Am I going to align myself with this character or this character?” That’s where all of that came from.

John: Actually, before we even get to this description of the set, there’s a description in the script about how dialogue works. Drew, could you read this for us

Drew: “A note about overlapping dialogue. When dual dialogue is indicated, regardless of parenthetical or stage directions, the dialogue starts simultaneously. After indicated dual dialogue, the cue for the next line is the word scripted as the last spoken. Overlapping dialogue is denoted by slashes.”

John: Incredibly prescriptive here. Greta Gerwig was on the podcast a couple of years ago, and she was talking about Little Women. She does the same thing with slashes when she wants lines to stack up the right ways, but you’re making it really clear. If there’s two columns side by side, simultaneously, those are exactly happening at the same time, the other overlapping, which in features we’re more likely to just say as a parenthetical overlapping to indicate where things are. You’re saying, no, this is the word where things are supposed to start overlapping, which works really well in your play, but also feels like you got to rehearse to that place. It’s not a very natural thing for actors to get to.

Leslye: No, it is absolutely not. It’s a magic trick, for sure. Initially, you’re like, “Oh, this is super messy.” Then it continues and you really get the sense of the musicality of it. That kind of goes back to Godot. It’s essentially the way I staged it was a musical. That’s what Cult Of Love’s overlapping dialogue is.

It is meant to suck you in as a “realistic way that people speak.” There are certain sections, especially large arguments, that do need to happen, boom, boom, boom, right at the right time. It was difficult to explain that to the actors, that you do need to rehearse it in a natural way. You do need to say to each other certain lines, and you have to find the real, genuine objective, or super objective, or however the actor works. The issue is that once you’ve learned it, it has to be done in the way that it is written perfectly.

For example, Zach Quinto, who’s playing the character of Mark, there is this argument that happens. He has, in the clear, a bunch of moms. It’s like, blah, blah, blah, mom. Dah, dah, dah, dah, mom. Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, mom. That was difficult to explain to him that it should be in the same cadence, each mom, but, of course, for actors, that’s a little unnatural. I’ve had to give that note to actors very often, that this is not real. Your intentions and your pathos has to be real, but the way you speak is not.

John: If you watch any sitcom, you recognize that there’s a reality within the world of that’s sitcom, but it’s not the way actual people would really do things. When you’re stacked up, when you’re clear how you’re doing stuff, how you’re selling the lines, it is specific and it’s different on a stage than it would be on film. You would try to literally just film this play as it is. It would probably feel weird. It wouldn’t feel quite natural to the format.

Leslye: That’s correct. I think that you’d have to move it into the Uncut Gems world if you were going to do this, where the sound design becomes a fill in for dialogue that is happening off screen so that it feels a little unusual and a wall of sound of dialogue, or like Little Women, you’d have to figure out some way of doing it, but in a way that was parsed out and easier to follow, I think.

John: I want to take a look at four pages here at the start of Act Two. We’ll put a link to these in the show notes. Thank you for providing these.

Leslye: Of course, yes.

John: We’re 60 pages into the script, and we’ve now gotten to scene two. Scene one is very long, and we’re getting into a shorter one, which is–

Leslye: The scene one is about 40 minutes and then you start this.

John: We’re now into this new space. Time has passed, but we’re on the same set and everything is progressing here. I think it’s just a good way of looking at what’s happening with our dual dialogue, simultaneous dialogue. Then I think on the second of these pages, we have–

Leslye: [chuckles] This is such a funny session.

John: For folks who are listening while they’re driving their car, talk us through what’s happening in the start of this scene here.

Leslye: Johnny, who is the third out of four of the children, has arrived very, very late.

John: Yes, it was Waiting for Godot for a while, but he actually does show up.

Leslye: Yes, Waiting for Godot. Exactly. Everyone’s waiting for this guy. He shows up in a very eventful way by playing this huge song, this countdown song with everybody and joins everybody together after this fractured first scene. He’s standing and holding court at the top of scene two. He’s telling a story or attempting to tell a story about when he was younger, that he went to a chess tournament, and that he placed 51st out of a thousand, and how impressive that was and what essentially beautiful memory it was for him.

At the same time, he’s just doing that sibling thing, where he wants to tell a story and no one’s listening and correcting him and jumping in, moving into different spaces. The kids start quoting things to each other. They start doing little inside jokes and he gets sidetracked by all of that. I don’t think it’s in these pages, but there is a point as this moves on where he goes, “I’m telling a story about me. Can I tell a story about me?” Evie, his sister goes, “I don’t know. Can you?” [chuckles]

It just reminded me so much of those conversations at Christmas where everyone’s not sitting there talking about big things. They’re sitting there talking about things that are basically stupid and– not stupid, but they’re essentially superficial and it’s the subtext. There’s just the idea that he’s trying to tell this story about how special he is, but everyone is pushing down how special he is.

John: It works so well on the stage, but I’m trying now to imagine, try to do this scene with a camera, try to do this scene on film, and you run into some real issues. You have a lot of characters to try to service. Basically, who’s in the frame? Who’s off the frame? Who are we actually looking at? How is the camera directing our attention versus the person who’s speaking at the moment.

As an audience watching it on a stage, we can see the whole thing at once and we can pick an actor to focus on and see what they’re doing. You get a sense of everything. Cameras, by their nature, are going to limit us down to looking at one thing. Somebody’s going to be on camera and somebody’s going to be off camera for their lines is just a very different thing. I don’t know if you’re ever planning on adapting Cult of Love into a movie.

Leslye: I am, yes.

John: It’ll be terrific, but obviously you’re facing these real challenges and looking at how there’s times where we have eight characters on stage. You have a lot of people in scenes.

Leslye: I think actually in this scene there are 10 people on stage.

John: Crazy. It’s just really different challenges. Our expectation of how long we can be in a scene is much longer on the stage than it is in a movie. These scenes would be– it’s possible you could find a way to play this all in real time, but our expectation as audiences is like, “Oh my God, we’ve got to cut to something else. We’ve got to get out of this space when we’re in these things.” These are all of those things you’re thinking through.

Leslye: Dinner table scenes are a nightmare. They do become so static and you have to jump the line 34 times or something like that. However, yes, I do think it’s possible. I think that the Bear episode did it rather well. I think that the first episode of the second season of Fleabag also did it really well.

I guess what I would say is that it really would be about your editor. It would really be about having a lot of options for him or her to whittle it down into something that was as exciting. I agree, I think this would either have to be massively choreographed, like one take things that everybody is doing now, like The Studio and Adolescence. You’d either have to do that.

John: We talked about that on the podcast recently, just that how thrilling they can be, but also how baked in all your choices are and how– it’s the opposite of what you’re describing with theater, having a bunch of choices. You’re just basically taking all the choices away. Maybe that’s the closest to the experience of being in a theater, is that theater is all one continuous take. It’s just you’re in one continuous moment the whole time. Maybe that’s the experience you want to get out of this.

Leslye: I would just argue, I don’t know how immersive one take things are. I don’t know. Certainly, there are many people who watch Adolescence, for example, which is an excellent show. There are many people who watch that and probably don’t notice that it’s all in one shot. I don’t know. I’ve said this before, but in theater, the audience is wondering what’s happening now, and in film or television, they’re wondering what’s going to happen next.

John: Oh, wow.

Leslye: Yes. I think your point is that it’s impossible to drop in that immediacy and the ecosystem and all of that stuff. I would agree that adapting Bachelorette meant that it had to have a plot, because Bachelorette is plotless. Again, you’re right, the characters care about things and they’re pushing towards something and they all have arcs and they all have actions that have consequences, but Bachelorette, the film, had to be about fixing her wedding dress, the bride’s wedding dress. That had to be the thing that kicked them out of the room and into New York City. Otherwise, the audience would, I think, pretty quickly tune out in a way.

John: Yes, they rebel. I think audiences in a film or a TV episode come in with an expectation that early on, you’re going to establish what the goal is, like, “What is the contractor signing with me that we will pay this thing off by the end?”

Leslye: That’s correct. Yes.

John: It’s just a different relationship you have with the audience. They really have clear expectations.

Leslye: Yes, absolutely.

John: One of the promises you made with the audience early on in Russian Doll was that you would pay off the answer to what was actually happening with these time loops because Russian Doll, the concept is she keeps repeating the same moments, and no matter what happens, disaster befalls her at the end. I was doing a little research and I found your explanation of the time loops at the end. I was wondering if you could synopsize down what it was you were trying to make sure the audience got out of the metaphor you’re using with the orange about what the time loops were and what was really going on.

Leslye: Wait, what did I say? [chuckles] What did you see? Who knows?

John: Near the end of Russian Doll, Natasha Lyonne’s character picks a rotten orange at the market and explains these time loops are evidence that there actually is a solution to this, because it’s rotten on the outside, but the reality is still on the inside. Do you remember that as–

Leslye: Yes. No, no, no. I remember, I just wasn’t sure what I said about it six years [laughs] It’s like, I’m sure I said something very smart then. Well, in Russian Doll, I just think it’s really helpful if anyone is looking to dissect that first season. I would just say the way we started was with the character. We did not start with, “Here’s how we’re going to circle the drain.” It had to be somebody who was struggling with her own mortality, but in a way where she’s not talking about it, if that makes sense.

I just wanted to write a show about a woman that was going through an existential problem rather than a tactile problem, like, “Who do I marry? What job do I take? Oh, I’m being chased by this guy. I’ve got to solve the case.” It just felt like what female protagonists are truly just based in, “I’m having an existential crisis about my own mortality and whether or not the choices that I have made up until this moment are adding up to anything worthwhile.”

I think what then happened, if I’m remembering correctly, it was how do you externalize that? That really for me came from the Seven Deadly Plays. How do you externalize and physicalize envy? That’s a thing that happens in your mind. How do you put it into an active space? The circling of the drain for Nadia, which, if you haven’t watched the show, it is Groundhog Day. In addition to being Groundhog Day, each loop gives you an evidence of things, like you said, disappearing.

It’s not just, I’m going through the same day, it’s, I’m dying continually, and each time I die, something is taken away from me, some aspect of it. We did plan out, if I’m remembering correctly, it was animals go at this time, fruits, vegetables, and flowers go at this time. Other people start disappearing here. It was the shell, really, of the real– It was like a medicine that you’re trying to get somebody to take. If you put it in a gel cap, it’s easier to take down. I think that the premise of that was essentially a gel cap for–

John: What you’re describing in terms of needing to physicalize the problem, the crisis is a thing we’re always wrestling with as screenwriters, stage writers, is that there’s this feeling you have about the world or how reality is functioning, and you need to find some concrete way to put a handle on it so you can actually move it around and talk about it in front of things.

In the case of the Russian Doll scene, she’s picking up an orange, and she’s describing what this actually really means.
Without that, then you’re just having a conversation about an abstract, philosophical thing, and there’s no doorknob to open the door. It’s just like you’re pushing against it and there’s no way to get it to open up, and there’s no way to have a conversation or to see anything change about the issue you’re grappling with.

Leslye: Listen, I don’t mean to devalue that container within the story, but the way we talked about it in the writer’s room, of course, there was the temptation, to be like, “Oh, the reason this is happening is X. The reason that this happens is, I don’t know. There’s some sort of–”

John: She ran over a magical cat or something.

Leslye: Yes. There’s some sort of thing. I think Severance and Lost are a really good example of this. Puzzle box shows, they ask the question, what’s really going on? Who is pulling the strings and et cetera, et cetera. I just didn’t find that super interesting. I thought that the time travel movies that I found really interesting were, of course, Groundhog Day, which is totally based on morality. It’s absolutely the universe just teaching him a lesson. And Back to the Future, which, of course it has Doc and the time machine and got to get back and all of that, but truthfully, the reason he’s there is to get his parents together and to learn the lessons that he learns. It really isn’t like, “Why is he disappearing? Let’s go find out.” We get it, he’s disappearing because he’s being erased from existence because his parents aren’t going to get together.

We don’t need to know why this happened then, and this thing, it’s like very quickly in Back to the Future II, the alternate 1985, they just explain it really quickly. I am obsessed with Back to the Future. It’s a perfect movie as far as I’m concerned. I think Robert Zemeckis was just, just cooking so hard in that movie. He explains time travel in 90 seconds. In this day and age, that would be three scenes of explaining time travel. It’s all one shot. It’s just Doc coming into this thing, or actually it’s overs for that, but there are other times where he– oh my God, sorry, I’m going to go on a tangent about Zemeckis and how he blocks actors and then how his camera moves work, but I’m not going to do that.

I just think that those types of time travel are just more interesting to me. I felt that the orange moment that you’re talking about really just, again, metaphorically meant that even as you don’t change, the world keeps going. You can either let go or be dragged, kind of thing. She was just going to keep dying until she acknowledged the more, again, moral psychological issues, which is the little girl at the end of episode seven represents an inner child and a love that needs to be given to herself that never was by the world around her.

As the world closes in and threatens her in this very intense way of– threatens her mortality, at the same time, she is confronted with the fact that the rest of the world or that timeline will continue to go without her. Did that answer your question?

John: It did, and beyond it.

Leslye: Oh, okay. Good.

John: I wanted to get back to something you said about the writer’s room, that it’s not that you weren’t curious about what was going on, but you didn’t want to establish that as being the central question because if it’s a show about what’s actually really happening, then that’s what the audience is going to be expecting an answer for. They may not be paying it as close attention to the things you actually want them to focus on, which is her growth and what she’s actually looking for, and what she’s actually needing to achieve. I think by not foregrounding that question, you also let the audience follow you to places where you actually really want to take them. That’s a good insight.

Leslye: I think a really good way of describing it and coming down into the central question of the first season was we don’t want the audience to be asking what’s going on. We want the audience asking, “How is she going to get out?”

John: Exactly.

Leslye: That’s the interesting question. I think that as much as I enjoy watching Lost and Severance, which I do by the way, the going into this space of there’s really a cult that’s pulling the strings or running this thing, and there’s really a– Alice and Janie had two kids. It just feels like answering the question or attempting to answer the question of what’s really going on was just not the intention of that story of Nadia.

John: We have two questions from listeners to answer, which I think you’re uniquely well-suited to answer. Drew, can you help us out with Liz’s question?

Drew: Sure. Liz writes, I’m a professional classical musician working on a pilot set in the classical music world.

Leslye: Ooh, fancy.

Drew: [laughs] I have several action sequences that I’ve choreographed specifically to a given piece of music. For instance, this punch has to land right on beat 3 of measure 14. Should I be including these details in the script itself, or would they be notes for a director and/or editor later down the line?

John: I think you’re a perfect person for this because not only do you care about Zachary Quinto saying mom the same way at the right cadence, but we haven’t really talked about Cult of Love is not a musical, but it’s the most music I’ve ever heard in a play. It is a very musical family that plays instruments and sings live the whole time. What’s your instinct for Liz here with her music cues?

Leslye: I think you have to put them in the script. You just have to. The director and the editor will make their own decisions. Not in a bad way, but once the script is turned over to the process of production, mentioning the song in the action line versus this is where it lands in the first movement or whatever, I think that you have to do it. Now, the caveat of that is do your best to streamline it.

If the action is happening on a particular sequence, like you’re referencing– I don’t know if you’re referencing a track, you can say, “It’s Beethoven’s whatever by such and such and this album,” and then your action lines should be really sick because I do think people will be intimidated by that. That’s the caveat is that I do think that executives or producers may read that and go, “Oh gosh, this is so prescriptive,” but there will be somebody that reads it and thinks, “God, I believe in this vision. This is cool.” I think you’d rather that than somebody taking it over.

John: I agree. I haven’t read Todd Field’s script for Tár, but I have to believe that he’s specifically mentioning exactly what piece that she’s conducted because it’s essential to that story.

Leslye: Oh, absolutely. I haven’t read it either, but he must have done that. I wonder if the Bernstein movie too did that.

John: I suspect it did. I think Liz could also try, and this is the thing I ended up doing for the Big Fish musical script, because we had to send it around to some people who wouldn’t know the actual tracks that were previously recorded is you can now in Highland and other apps probably too, include links that actually link out, so the PDF will link to something like a track you have on Dropbox or someplace else, or Spotify.

I wouldn’t do that for everything, but for something where you absolutely need people to hear the real music that goes with it, it’s an option there. Specifically, from a piece of classical music, you can put the full name of the thing in there, the odds that someone’s going to find that are very, very low. If you need to hear a specific thing, I’d put a link in there.

Leslye: Oh, a link is a great idea. A link would be really good to listen while that’s happening. The only other thing I would say is maybe think outside the box about how to write it. Meaning if you write music and can read music, the reader will not, but if you wrote it like a musical where instead of dialogue, the action lines are underneath each thing, at least, one, it would look pretty, and two, I think people might be really intrigued by that. It might also be a terrible suggestion, but I think if this is really important to you, try to think outside the box in terms of how to present it.

John: Absolutely. Just the way stage musicals, they have both the script and they have the score that has the stage directions and dialogue in it too. Providing a supplemental piece of material there, it could just be surprising for people in ways that’s interesting. A question here from Richard.

Drew: “What’s the longest draft you’d send to a friend for notes? Is there a sliding scale of pain or rather page count that you’d be willing to inflict on a best friend? What about a friend or a writer’s group? Of course, I know never to send a professional contact like a rapper producer, a bloated 140-page draft.”

John: Leslie, what’s your end stage? Do you send long stuff to people to read? When do you like to show people stuff and and how early in the process will you show it?

Leslye: You’re right, love. It’s like 90 to 100. I do think that for a first draft, anywhere between 100 and 150 is okay because you can say in a caveat, it’s too long, but there’s a lot of stuff in there that I think I’m curious about what you think I should cut. I know it’s too long, but I don’t know where to make these changes. 120, if you consider one page as a minute, that’s two hours. That’s a decent script. I write pretty short scripts, and I keep an eye on the page count for sure, but then you asked something else, John, was it about the first drafts?

John: Yes, how early in the process do you like to share what you’re writing with people, and who are the trusted people you love to read early stuff?

Leslye: I would say very close to the first draft, I will do a reading with actors, pretty close. I would make sure stuff that was really wonky, I’d be like, “Mm.” What’s fun about that is that because all of my friends are actors, I don’t want to have anything embarrassing there. Anything that I feel like that would be stupid, I’ll take that out, and it forces me to be a little bit better at my job. I try to get a reading as soon as humanly possible.

They also have good feedback. I have to say, the actors will have really good feedback. If they’re trusted people, they won’t be like, “I just don’t get it.” They’ll say, “I really loved this part. I didn’t really understand this scene. Is it supposed to be this or that?” Getting the direction from them. Then, yes, once I do that, of course, I will send it to either a trusted friend or I have a manager that I really love, Michael Sugar. I will send him stuff as soon as I can.

John: A question for you. Is it ever awkward that you’re having friends who are actors read through stuff, but they may not be the people you actually want to be in the project itself? Does that ever become an issue?

Leslye: No, that’s a good question.

John: Tell me about that.

Leslye: That’s a good question. When I was working with IAMA and we did readings, because it was an actor-based company, it was unspoken or explicit that the people reading those lines would be the actors that would eventually do the show, for sure. When I do more casual readings, especially if screenplays, just to be super blunt, we will try to get the most famous person that we can, [laughs] who’s right for the part, but the financing will be based on the profile of the number one and number two on the call sheet.

I think a lot of actors that I know who are brilliant theater actors understand that that’s how the world works. It becomes more difficult when actors have done the production of the play, and then the play gets moved to a different medium. That’s different.

John: All right, it’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing this week is Arthur Aron’s 36 Questions. I think I’ve heard about these before, but I saw an article in the New York Times about it, and then I went through and actually found the original study. Aron was a psychotherapist, I think, who was really focused on how people connect and what are the ways to get people to draw closer connections, and so would put together strangers and have them talk through this list of 36 questions that escalate as they go along.

You do reveal a lot about yourself in the course of them. Some of the sample questions are, number seven, do you have a secret hunch about how you will die? Number eight, name three things you and your partner appear to have in common. The partner being the person you’re talking with. Number 30 is, when did you last cry in front of another person or by yourself? Number 33, if you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone, and why haven’t you told them yet?

There’s 36 of these, and actually in the study that we’ll link to, there’s also a whole bunch more questions there. They’re good icebreakers for human beings, but they’re also really great questions for characters to be chewing over. I think if you have characters who you’re trying to get inside this character and you are just doing some free writing, having your characters answer some of these questions would be a great way to get some insight into what’s happening inside their head, these people who don’t fully exist in your brains yet. Arthur Aron’s 36 Questions.

Leslye: My God. Should we answer them right now?

John: You did Russian Doll, so do you have a secret hunch about how you will die, Leslye Headland?

Leslye: I’ve always thought cancer. It’s how most of us go. My dad had Alzheimer’s. He died, and he was very young, he was 64, so it’s something that I would never want to have happen to me. I hope not that. The last time I cried in front of somebody was last night. [laughs] That’s an easy answer.

John: The last time I cried in front of somebody was, it wasn’t full-on crying, but it was misty, a couple of weeks ago on Survivor. There was a heartbreaking moment, and so that made me misty. Drew’s smiling. He knows what it was, I think. Exactly what it was.

Leslye: Oh my God.

John: A young woman with autism who had a meltdown, and then a guy on another tribe knew what was going on and got permission to intervene and talk her down. Then she told everybody what her situation was, and it was really well done. It was very heartwarming.

Leslye: Oh, my God.

John: Leslye, do you have something to share for us as a one cool thing?

Leslye: In classic fashion, I’d love to do two things. [chuckles]

John: That’s absolutely fine and good.

Leslye: Just breaking the rules already. I just read Making Movies by Sidney Lumet. I just had never read it.

John: I’ve never read it.

Leslye: Oh, it’s wonderful. It’s short, you can finish it in a day probably, or a couple of days if you’re busy. It’s a real handbook. It really tells you, “This is the script stage, this is pre-production. Here are all my experiences with The Verdict and Orient Express. Here’s how I behave on set, this is how I do takes. This is who this person is, and this is who this person is.” I wish I’d read it before I made my first movie. I think that it’s a real– it’s not, I guess, instructions, but handbook, I think, is better.

Then, again, I’m just now reading Alexander Mackendrick’s On Film-making, which is much more of a textbook. It’s harder to get through, but it’s really, really cool and asks many, many questions about specifically how to create a narrative that is in the medium of film. Like I was saying, plays, you’re wondering what’s happening now, films, you’re wondering what’s happening next. He defines drama as anticipation mixed with uncertainty. He’s always pushing. He has a great way to do outlines in there, but it is more like reading a textbook. You have to get through a chapter and then put it down.

John: My very first film class ever was at Stanford. We had filmmaking textbooks, and I just remember being so technical in a very sort of like, “Here’s how the film moves through the gate, and also, here’s how we tell a story at the same time.” There’s a very specific era of those things, which is you were learning a whole new craft, and it was all new. I think we’re now in a place where we treat those as separate disciplines, and we don’t really think about the technical requirements of movie making at the same time we’re thinking of the storytelling goals of filmmaking.

Leslye: I agree.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Alicia Jo Rabins. 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 a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email that you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you to 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, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on keeping up on plays versus keeping up on movies. Leslye Headland, such a delight talking with you. This was absolutely a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on Scriptnotes.

Leslye: I’m so happy to be here. Thank you for asking me, John. I’m really honored, which is a goofy old word, but it really was lovely to be here, and I feel like I’m in really awesome company. Thank you.

John: Thank you. Come back anytime.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, for our bonus segment, I would love to talk about how you keep up with what’s going on for plays the way we do on movies. For movies, like when I was going through Stark program at USC, the expectation was that you would see basically all the new releases that came out each week. We would have the variety top 60 movies, and every week, I could just check through and see, “Okay, I’ve seen 40 out of 60 of those movies.” I would just see stuff every weekend to keep up on stuff.

As a screenwriter, you can do that. You can always go back and watch things on video for stuff that you missed. For plays, it’s harder because plays, if it’s not being staged someplace, you can’t see a play. If someone wants to be a playwright and they want to see what’s going on, it feels like it’s more challenging. Leslye, can you talk us through your ability to see plays coming up and how you’re balancing that now?

Leslye: That’s a great question. First of all, the community that I’m in it’s medium-sized. It’s very close-knit. What happens is, everybody goes to see plays. Everybody sees different plays. You get together and you do a kiki. You go, “Glengarry is absolute a mess. You don’t need to go, you don’t need to see it. Then, Deep Blue Sound, you got to go. Oh my gosh, it was incredible.” You get a sense of where you’re supposed to point your boat, I guess. If you’re looking for an old play that you can’t– definitely reading it, it’s tougher, but meaning, if you’re used to reading screenplays, you have to move your head into a different space to read them. They are super enjoyable.

John: Reading old plays, I obviously read a lot of screenplays, but the screenplay form is designed to evoke the experience of watching a movie, and it’s like all the action scene description is there to give you that space. In plays, reading plays, I have a hard time just staying in the moment, and sometimes, if they’re great, then I can click in, but I do find it hard to get the experience of what it would feel like to watch that play by reading the text.

Leslye: This is really annoying, but Shakespeare is a really good read. He didn’t have a big production because they were just doing shit at the Globe, whatever, all the time. His dialogue– actually, he does it through dialogue. He’s like, as this person is entering, and then there’s the exposition, and then there’s also what somebody should be doing, they’re saying something like, bad version is, “Lord, I pray to you,” or something, and it’s like, “Get on your knees, you’re praying.” It’s just your brain, or not, but your brain starts to go, “Well, this person’s saying something, and therefore, I can imagine it.” Where, like you said, the stage directions and then just dialogue, is tough. It’s tough to read.

John: Yes, it is tough. You and your friends get together, you kiki, you talk about the things that you’ve seen. There’s also a very limited window to see those things, because they’re going to be up for a couple weeks, and then they’re gone, and I was lucky to see your play while it was still there. Now, I want to send people to see it, but they can’t-

Leslye: They can’t.

John: -because it’s not there to see anymore. There’s also the pressure to see the shows of friends, people are in things, so you’re going to see those things, even if they’re not your taste to see.

Leslye: Oh, yes, absolutely, yes.

John: Talk to us about previews versus the final thing. If you go to something in previews, do you hold back some judgment because you know that it’s an early draft? How do you feel about previews?

Leslye: In previews, you’re pretty much there with the script, or at least for me. I’m pretty much there with the script. I don’t feel like once we’re in previews, there’s certainly– some people totally rewrite the ending of the play. That’s definitely something that does happen in previews, but my experience has always been, “Oh, this is– oh, I got to tweak this, I still don’t understand it.”

With Cult, it was like, “Oh, these overlaps aren’t working. Let me uncouple them, let me do this,” but I consider previews to be rehearsal with an audience. I know the actors don’t feel that way, I know that once the show– and then you freeze the show. You have a couple performances, and then you freeze it, and that’s when press comes. I don’t know, I see that time period that way, and I don’t think the actors do. I think they go like, “Oh my God, I’m up here, and I’ve got to give this performance,” but that’s not my experience. That’s not how I think about it. [chuckles]

John: The other thing that’s different about plays versus movies is that the movie is the same movie every night, and the play is a different experience.

Leslye: Oh, it’s wonderful.

John: Small things change, which is great, and which I loved with the Big Fish musical. You’d see, oh, this is how it’s working this time, or that joke killed last night, and why did it not work tonight? It’s just something about the atmosphere, it makes it so different. It also means that my experience of going to the show on Thursday might not be the same show that somebody saw on Friday, and you can’t know why. That’s also one of the challenging things. It’s just, you literally have to be there.

Leslye: Absolutely. One of the things I had to say to most of the cast of Cult of Love was ignore the laughs, the best you can. Not ignore them, but don’t rely on them as a temperature taker, because in my work, people laugh at bizarre things. I don’t set up jokes the way that Seinfeld does. Obviously, it’s not a sitcom, but my characters just say things, and then an audience can just take it in and decide whether it’s funny or not.

It’s very important that they understand that. In previews and then in performances, people– when you saw the show, I can guarantee you that wherever people laughed was not the same where they laughed in a different performance. Some are hard jokes, definitely for sure, like when Evie yells at the preacher, everyone’s like, “Ha, ha, ha. She’s screaming at him,” but there was a night Mark and Johnny, these brothers are talking, and Mark says, “Basically, I don’t want to live anymore.” Johnny says, “Well, you’re not going to kill yourself.” Mark says, “How do you know?” Johnny says, “Because I tried.” I’m not kidding, one night, that got a laugh.

John: Yikes.

Leslye: In my work, I don’t see that as a bad thing. When Evie says, “Death is expensive,” which, by the way, I stole from Streetcar, and he was there, but people started laughing. They were just like– that is a very serious moment when she’s talking to them, and they start laughing. I just don’t– there are a couple times where I feel like that’s bad, and things have to adjust in order because it is very much supposed to be a serious moment.

I went on a little bit, but that was the barometer in terms of when you’re saying previews are different. Each night, there were laughs where it was like, “Oh, my God, you guys are sick people,” in the audience. Why would you laugh at that?

I also love when people walk out. Oh.

John: Tell me.

Leslye: I love when people walk out. Whoever I’m sitting with, when people leave, I turn to them, and I’m like, “They got to go, they got to get out of here. They can’t take it. They can’t take the realness.” I am obsessed because if somebody stands up and leaves in the middle of a scene, they are making a statement, and I think that’s gorgeous. If somebody walks out of a movie, it’s like, “Everybody walks out of a movie,” and also you’re not seeing it.

I also love when things go wrong. Oh, I love when somebody drops– and I think the audience loves it, too. When somebody drops a prop, because it just reminds you this is happening in real life. These people are not these characters. They’re people who have voluntarily gotten up here to do this.

John: This last year, we went and saw the ABBA show in London, which is phenomenal.

Leslye: Phenomenal.

John: It creates the illusion that you’re watching real people, but, of course, it is all on rails. Yes, there’s a live band off to the side, but they’re not going to drop a prop. They’re not going to knock over a microphone stand.

Leslye: Yes, that’s true, yes.

John: I don’t want theater to just be a bunch of perfectly moving robots. It’s the sense that a real thing is happening in front of you that makes it so thrilling.

Leslye: Oh, I love it. I have to say, in wrapping this up, I really love theater, probably, and I’ve worked in those three mediums, and I hope to start moving into YouTube. I’m kidding.

Although that’s where we’re headed. We’re headed to an OnlyFans distribution. I always say that on mic. If you want to know what distribution is going to look like in 10 years, just see what porn is doing right now.

John: Absolutely. Leslye, you’ll be a hell of a content creator, or whatever.

Leslye: Yes.

John: Leslye, an absolute pleasure talking with you.

Leslye: Thank you guys so much. Thanks for having me. Thanks.

John: Awesome.

Links:

• Leslye Headland
• Cult of Love – selected pages
• Bachelorette the play and the movie
• Fanny and Alexander
• John by Annie Baker
• Original Cast Album: Company
• Stephen Sondheim
• Waiting for Godot
• John Cassavetes
• Tár screenplay by Todd Field
• Arthur Aron’s 36 Questions
• Eva discloses her autism on Survivor
• Making Movies by Sidney Lumet
• On Filmmaking by Alexander McKendick
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Alicia Jo Rabins (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.