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The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. A standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: Biddy, biddy, biddy, my name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is episode 678 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how does a series maintain its look and feel when directors change each week? We’ll talk about one solution, which is the on-set producer responsible for upholding a showrunner’s vision on set. We’ll also talk about TV development and answer listener questions on pitching, shipping an app, and writing by hand, plus the scourge of directors’ chairs. What can be done about these implements of torture?

In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s talk about officiating weddings, because me and Craig and our guests have all been officiants officially at weddings. We’ve married people. We’ll talk about the process of marrying people.

Craig: We marry people and we’ve married people.

John: We have, yes. Both as a transitive and as an intransitive verb.

Craig: No. They’re both transitive.

John: They’re both transitive, but different.

Craig: Just different verb meanings.

John: Yes. We’ll dig deep into the verb meanings behind–

Craig: Welcome to nerd corner. Do you know what I did when I introduced my– do you recognize that sound?

John: No. Tell me.

Craig: Biddy, biddy, biddy.

John: I don’t know what it is.

Craig: Do you have any idea? That is from the Buck Rogers television show way back [crosstalk]

John: Oh my God. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and I remember it. [crosstalk]

Craig: The little robot. Biddy, biddy, biddy.

John: So good.

Craig: Was it? [laughs]

John: Well, I enjoyed it, but I also kind of enjoyed Gil

Gerard. I think that may have been why I was watching the show.

Craig: Erin Moran.

John: Erin Moran.

Craig: There we go.

John: Everyone has a thing to–

Craig: Everyone’s got–

John: What’s the robot?

Craig: By the way, early network executives were like, “I don’t care what happens in space. I want a guy that everyone who likes guys would like. I want a girl that everyone who likes girls would like. Put them in the spacesuits. Go.”

John: Go.

Craig: They were right.

John: They were absolutely correct.

Craig: Nailed it.

John: Our guest this week is a guy that all guys will like and that all girls will like. Helping us figure all this out is Dan Etheridge.

Craig: That’s so much pressure.

Dan Etheridge: Wow.

John: He is a producer whose credits include Veronica Mars, iZombie, High Potential, The Carrie Diaries, and Cupid. He co-created Party Down and on the feature side, he produced seven movies, more than seven?

Dan: Yes, I think that sounds right.

Craig: For a moment there I thought you meant Seven the movie and I was like, “What?”

Dan: It’s pretty incredible.

Craig: What a weird outlier in that resume.

Dan: You’re welcome.

John: There’s a bunch of movies including my film, The Nines.

Dan: That’s right.

John: Dan Etheridge, welcome to the show.

Dan: Thank you. Thank you. Nice to be here.

John: Dan Etheridge, in addition to being an incredible producer, you are also one of my dearest friends on earth. It’s so great to finally have you on the podcast.

Dan: Back at you.

John: All right.

Dan: What’s it been, like 30 years as of this year?

John: That we’ve been friends?

Dan: Yes.

John: I guess our friendiversary is probably coming up pretty soon, because it would have been– What year did we meet? That would have been– I’m going to call it in ’95.

Dan: ’94. ’95.

John: ’95. Yes. Right in there. Great.

Dan: Right in there. That’s the time. Then what year was God?

John: God the short was 1998.

Dan: Okay.

John: Yes. Shortly after.

Dan: A few years later. Right on.

John: God, a short film with Melissa McCarthy.

Craig: Yes. The great Melissa McCarthy.

John: So good. So much fun. We have actual news. In addition to everything else, my company makes the app Highland for the Macintosh. Today we are coming out with the new version, Highland Pro, which is a new app from the ground up. It is made for the Mac, of course, but also iPhone and iPad. Today, as you’re listening to this episode, it is available in all of the app stores. On the podcast, we talk about Nima, the helpful elf. This is a work done by Nima and Dustin, if you’ve heard of the show. It’s mostly what they work on, but also Drew, Chris. Drew is just cutting a video for the launch of it.

Drew: I thought you were giving me credit for making this app, and that was not true.

John: No. Drew uses the app regularly.

Drew: All the time.

Craig: That’s almost the same thing as making it.

John: Yes. Drew and I have been using the app for the last two years. We’ve gotten to see all the beta development things. It’s so nice to actually have the rest of the world be able to use it.

My goal with this new version of Highland Pro is to get rid of all the stuff that can distract you in the world as you’re writing. A couple of examples is we have a new thing called the shelf. Sometimes when you are writing something, you need to cut a scene and then you will just cut it and paste it into an extra document, sort of a scratch file. Craig, I see you nodding. It’s a thing you do.

Craig: I do that.

John: You do that.

Craig: I do that.

John: Then it’s work and you’re breaking your flow from doing it. In Highland Pro, you just grab it, you drag it to the side, to the shelf, and it just stays there.

Craig: Yes, that’s a really smart idea.

John: It’s always there. Nice.

Craig: It stays within the file.

John: Yes. Craig, you probably leave notes for yourself in a script to go back and do some stuff. Do you boldface them?

Craig: Rarely, I do an all caps, boldface, fix this, or make this go better.

John: In Highland, you can just put double brackets around things to make a note or just put an equal sign in front of it as a note. It’ll always stand out. It’ll always show up in the navigator on the side for like, oh, these are the things, the work list you leave for yourself on stuff.

Craig: I wish I used a navigator on the side. It’s there. I never look at it. I just scroll like an idiot.

John: You don’t need to. You can just do this. The coolest new thing that we introduced in this version of Highland is what we call lookup. So often when I’m writing something, I’ll need to switch to Safari to find something. It could be a rhyme for something, it could be, what year was Madison president? It could be some small little thing. I’ll find myself just getting sucked into a hole because I switched over to the browser because I left my typing environment to do it. Now in Highland, you just type slash and then whatever you’re looking for. If it’s a rhyme for green, if it’s a distance from Denver to Houston, it gives you the answer right there in the documents.

Craig: Does it connect up with Google or something?

John: It does. For things like rhymes and for dictionary, for definitions, it’s using an outside service, an API that’s called WordNet something. Those answers are blazingly fast. If it’s something it doesn’t know how to do, it reaches out to one of the services, reaches out first to our server and then to one of those services, and gives you an answer as quickly as it can. It’s basically Googling it. I just want to give you the shortest possible answer.

Craig: You don’t have to leave.

John: You don’t have to leave.

Craig: You’re forcing me to write more. Stop it.

John: I’m hopefully making your writing process smoother and more enjoyable.

Craig: I don’t know about you, but I love the distractions.

John: You love the distractions sometimes.

Craig: Yes. I can’t wait for Final Draft to steal all of your ideas, John.

John: It’s going to happen here soon. What question– Drew has it open here. What question do you want Drew to ask? Let’s pretend you’re writing something. It’s something you need to know.

Craig: Got it. When was the first locomotive in operation in the United States?

John: He’s typing.

Craig: I hear him.

Drew: It says the first locomotive introduced in the United States was the Tom Thumb, which was built in 1829.

Craig: Oh [crosstalk]

John: Wow. Did you know that already? Was that–

Craig: New. Nor do I know if that’s true.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Seems made up.

Drew: Tom Thumb.

Craig: Tom Thumb. Sus.

John: What I tend to use it for is, I don’t need the absolute verifiable fact. What I need is, what is that? What am I thinking of? Sort of the reverse. There’s a word I’m thinking of that starts with an L that means this thing. It’s so good for that.

Craig: Confirmation.

John: Yes. The kind of stuff that could stop you for 2 minutes and just break that pattern. Just getting you out of there really quickly. Also, you don’t have to go open a menu. You don’t have to do anything. You just type slash and then what you want, it’s there, and it goes away.

Craig: Great.

John: Highland is out today. It’s on the Mac App Store, the iPhone App Store, the iPad App Store. You can try it there.

Dan: I think that my blurb, I believe it was from Bronson Watermarker or either Weekend Read, probably Weekend Read.

John: Probably Weekend Read, yes.

Dan: “Staggeringly useful,” and that applies very much here as well. Very nice.

Do you remember that you asked me to write something up? I happily did because I really did love the app and I’m not really a writer, but I wrote up like a three, four sentence paragraph that I really spent some real time on. It had the phrase staggeringly useful in it when the blurb appeared, “staggeringly useful”. I appreciated your editing, ever the great writer/producer.

John: You’ve got to be concise. You’ve got to be short.

Craig: It’s a blurb. [crosstalk] It’s a blurb.

John: Blurb. I overdid it. It was my fault.

Craig: You over-blurbed. Very common mistake.

John: Yes, I know. I do it all the time. Let’s do some follow-up. What do you got for us?

Drew: Yes. In the last episode, Craig, you said that there is no way around Google AI summaries.

Craig: Yes. Not at least other than what I’d read was forcing Google to only return answers prior to a year.

Drew: Right. Tom, listener Tom wrote in that you can get around Google’s AI results by including profanity in your search, and it works.

Craig: Yeah. Weird work around. So if I just want to search something, I just got to throw an F-bomb at the end of it?

Drew: Yes, or get creative. Put it in the middle.

Craig: When was the first fucking locomotive invented in the– oh, warning, language warning.

John: Yes. Sorry.

Craig: Okay. Interesting. Also, weird choice by Google to just be like, “Oh, yes. Oh, we can’t let the AI hear those dirty words.”

John: Absolutely.

Craig: That’s interesting.

John: I bet that will work for about the next two weeks and then–

Craig: I switched my search engine to a start page.

John: Oh, very nice. I’m using DuckDuckGo. Dan shaking his head.

Dan: Google.

John: He’s Google. I’ve heard of Google.

Craig: Start pages seem nice. Work great.

John: Good.

Craig: No stupid AI results.

John: We have some follow-up from episode 536.

Drew: Tony in LA writes, “In episode 536, you read my story that my best friend and writing partner had unexpectedly died. Thank you both for your sympathy and advice. It was very much appreciated. You asked me to provide an update after a year. I obviously missed that deadline by quite a bit, but in all honesty, I didn’t have much to update after a year. Writing solo continued to be a struggle. It didn’t matter if I was working on a short or a feature, editing something old or creating something new. I found myself constantly second-guessing my ideas. I felt rudderless. I missed my friend. I missed his voice, his opinions, his humor. I no longer felt joy when writing.

I was still able to keep busy creatively, however, editing a micro-budget feature that he and I had shot before he died. That film is now finished and out on the festival circuit. I’m sad that he’ll never get to see it, but I think he’ll be proud of the work that we did. Since his death, I also started playing D&D.

Craig: Nice.

Drew: We have a weekly Saturday night game. I knew none of these people before, but we’ve become an incredible group of friends. I’ve gotten very close with one in particular, and she and I have started writing together. I wasn’t looking for a new partner, but it just organically grew out of other creative work we were doing together, and writing with her is, dare I say, easy, and I feel joy again. The strangest thing, I can now hear my friend’s voice much clearer in my head.”

Craig: Well, Jeez Louise.

John: No, I’m so happy that it pulled out a happy ending there.

Craig: That has everything. That story’s got it all.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s got D&D.

John: It’s got loss. It’s got a love connection, but it’s a creative love connection.

Craig: A creative love connection, which is great. His email here reminded me a lot of the lyrics from I Miss the Music from the musical Curtains, in which someone has a songwriting partner who dies. He talks about, I miss the music. I miss my friend. I miss the wisdom and somebody to tell me I’m not doing it well enough, but then makes it better. It’s nice that he found– Some people should be working in a partnership.

John: Yes.

Craig: There are partner people and he’s a partner person. I’m glad he found a new one.

John: All right. Let’s get to our marquee topic today, which is the role of the on-set producer. All this actually stemmed out of a gripe I had about directors’ chairs that I vented to Dan and Craig both about, but then I realized like, “Oh, I’ve actually never talked about what Dan does on TV series productions,” which I think is incredible.

Can you describe the function you’ve fulfilled on the last couple of TV shows that you’ve been doing and what your job is, which is different from what Craig is doing as a showrunner. It’s different from what a line producer does. Tell us about what you’re doing on these shows.

Dan: I feel like you all already know this intuitively. I’m speaking to folks out there in the million foot view. There are two pillars of it. One, the creative. You’re there to help effect the showrunner’s vision for the show. Particularly, not just in the short-term, but the medium or long-term.

Then there’s the production pillar. In the on-set producer version of this, which is what I tend to do, you be on set every day. Ideally, you’re bringing a wealth of set experience to that job. What you are doing is every day accruing the experience of that set and the nuances and intricacies of that particular set.

Then I perhaps unglamorously, what I describe the job as, is a transaxle between those two pillars, because as we know, those are intricately linked, but it’s not always possible for the showrunner to be the person who links them or the writer/producer, if you have a strong one, or if you have a junior writer/producer on set that you are helping to educate on how to produce a show.

When I do it, and I think when a lot of folks do on-set producer, is that’s what they’re doing. They’re there every day so that the cast and crew and folks who are there every day know that there is one person that they can always come to who, if they don’t know the answer, knows how to get the answer.

Craig: Exactly.

Dan: Similarly, with the showrunner, ideally, you have a relationship with them and they know that you have their creative back. All of this, I should say, is, in television particularly, you are supporting the episodic director.

Obviously, there’s no infringing on the DGA prerogatives of the episodic director, but ideally, you’re supporting them in their mission and keeping an eye on the longer-term goals of the season of the series. Again, you all, I think, already know that, but the great thing is that every show operates as it wants to operate.

Many shows will not need an on-set producer. For instance, if the showrunner values being on-set every day and is able to construct the shows so that they can be, obviously, that would mutate or even negate the need for an on-set producer. Again, if you have a strong writer/producer there for their episode, as you should, but then there’s a lot of shows where the showrunner either doesn’t want to be on-set or can’t, or where there’s a junior writer/producer episode who needs to learn how to produce and needs a colleague and a partner in that. That’s when an on-set producer could be valuable.

Craig: Yes. There are times, I have a producing partner who’s usually on-set, but I’m also there, I’m an everyday showrunner. I call myself an activist showrunner. There are times where something happens where neither one of us know how to fix it. We do need a producee-producer. I call them producee-producers. Okay, so we’re supposed to be here. The problem is the people that are supposed to be not doing construction across the street are. Locations is on it, but when are we going to find out and who, talk to whom, and what are the actual– so you have to dial back to the mothership and a lot of texting goes on. Having somebody there to producee-produce, yes, I can see, especially if there’s not a showrunner there. I don’t know how you would not. I don’t know how a show would function without you.

John: Dan, so many of the shows I’m thinking about that you have been the person on-set because the writing was happening in Los Angeles and you were in Vancouver, you were in New York City, you were someplace different than where that was. You were functioning as the will of the showrunner, making sure that things were actually happening the way that Rob Thomas, in many cases, really wanted things to happen.

Dan: Yes, geography has certainly helped the career of the on-set producer by necessity. There have been a few shows in Los Angeles. For instance, and I don’t think Rob would mind me saying this, Rob finds great value in writing and being in the writer’s room and post. That is where he likes to spend his time. He and I know each other so well and have worked together for so long that he understands that I have a pretty good shot at knowing what he was looking for out of a scene or to answer a question. There’s value in that relationship.

You and I have been on set together throughout the years and I understand, I believe, the John August aesthetic and I believe in it and I’m excited to effect it. I did land this job once by just interviewing and it worked out great. Amy Harris, who’s a terrific showrunner and I love working for her, but you don’t usually do that. I think it’s someone that you’ve come to develop a trust with.

Craig: Yes. Wow. Because I’m not– I guess I’m a much more scared person. I don’t want to say paranoid or less trusting, but on the one hand, when you said, okay, there for the writing and then there in post, I went, “Oh, that sounds like a dream.” Then immediately, my adrenal glands fired.

John: That’s Damon Lindelof on Lost. Damon Lindelof was never in Hawaii.

Craig: Right. I think that’s most people. It’s just like, I immediately go, “Oh my God.”

John: That’s how people are built.

Craig: It’s how people are built, exactly.

John: Let’s walk through the process because as I understand it, you get involved, on a classic show, as the room is figuring stuff out, you get a sense of what the season is going to be like and helping the showrunner figure out what are the sets we’re going to need? Where are the issues? Then it transitions into production and you have a much stronger role there. Talk us through from pre-production into production and what your day might look like while you’re working in production.

Dan: Just to tee that up, to each showrunner his own or her own, in the case of Rob, who I’ve done many shows with, I will tend to be in the writer’s room. That is an exercise in listening, for the most part, and exercises in learning and listening, seeing how they’re developing the aesthetic of the show so that I can best help to affect it when we get there.

Obviously, one hopes that you have a great line producer-producer on the show. If you do, they’re also going to be absorbing that aesthetic. As pre-production starts, obviously they’re beginning to do the mechanical work. I will start to help out. If you have a producer-director, they might be doing this, but we often just go with an on-set producer and I’ll be doing it, so you’ll be starting again.

It’s that transaxle quality. You start to help to oversee sets, make sure they’re being developed in the right way, not just on the brutal level of construction, where you’re going to put the camera ports, but does it live up to what I’ve been hearing in the writer’s room?

John: And not just for the episode, the first episode [unintelligible 00:17:14] but where it’s going down the road.

Craig: Exactly.

Dan: Which is something that you can provide, not just to go back to sets again, but if you have a new set in the middle of the season, the episodic director obviously will have a lot invested in that set because it’s their episode, but you know what it needs to do five episodes down the line. That’s the value you can bring ultimately.

I do think, to answer your question, day by day, once we start shooting, I’m on set every day. I might step away for the tone meeting, which we can talk about what that is, or maybe you all touched on that before.

Craig: I think we’ve probably talked about tone meetings.

John: We’ve talked about it, but let’s recap the tone meeting. The tone meeting is the discussion where the director for that episode gets up to speed with what the showrunner and what the creative team wants to do for this episode, and gets the conversation that happens here. It feels like your function is to really know what that is and be able to remind the director of, this is what the goal is of this scene, of this episode.

Dan: You have done many tone meetings. Showrunners will do tone meetings in different ways. I always think of it as a conversation between the showrunner and the director that I get to eavesdrop on. Sometimes other folks will be invited to eavesdrop as well the first day, depending on how the showrunner wants to have that done. But I think it’s invaluable for me to be there for exactly that reason.

It’s really a support thing. The director is taking all this in, but they’re taking in a lot. When they’re on set, sometimes they turn to you for the support of, is this in keeping with the flow of the show? It’s good to be able to be there for them when they need that.

John: That’s great. You’re on set from basically call to wrap to make sure that everything is working okay. Who are your conversations with? Obviously the director is an important conversation. It’s making sure the director feels supported, but also understands what the goal is-

Dan: Exactly.

John: -of certain scenes. You also have ongoing relationships with the talent because you are the person who sees them every day, whereas directors will drop in and drop out.

Dan: That’s right.

John: Talk to us about that.

Dan: First of all, and again, I’m not just saying this as lip service. I have absolute respect to the prerogatives of the episodic director and speaking to the actors. I would never speak to the actors in terms of directing the actors. That is verboten and wouldn’t do it. It’s not good for the show, even if it wasn’t a policy. They need to hear from one creative voice.

But there are questions that they will have about things that are going on during the series. Look, different actors have different idiosyncrasies, different strengths and weaknesses, different fears and turn off. Over time, as you get to know them, you can help address them, assuage them to mitigate them so that then the director and the actor can do their best work on set.

John: Absolutely. Because you have all the intel on the actor and know what the actor needs and how things tend to work, you can have the private conversation with the director to get them up to speed. These are things to be thinking about with this. Here’s how you might want to organize your work.

Dan: That’s right.

John: Let’s talk about, you know what the season is supposed to be. You have some sense of where things are going, but a lot of the series you’ve been working on, they’re still writing episodes as things are going along. To what degree is there a feedback mechanism from you to this is what’s happening here in production and this is what you’re doing there? How helpful are you in terms of being able to communicate back to the writing room and the writing process and to the showrunner, these are the issues we’re running into and let’s be thinking about that as you’re putting together stuff?

Dan: Not to sound like a broken record, but it is showrunner dependent and the relationship you have with the showrunner. Obviously with someone like Rob, we talk all the time, and just by nature, it comes up, how are things working, how are things doing? I’ve worked with other showrunners who are terrific, but they don’t need that kind of support and also they can get that feedback a little bit from the line producer if it’s a little more mechanical. You are there to offer it and should be there ready to offer it, but it’s not always a part of the job description to be honest.

John: You’re tending to address the problems that are coming up in the day’s work, that is, to make sure that you get the best episode shot as was written.

Dan: Yes.

John: If it’s helpful to communicate back, great, but that’s not your main function.

Dan: Yes, and there are bigger picture just in terms of, like you said, in tone and certain things, you want the consistency that you want to help bring to it. Otherwise, you hope, and often the showrunner has got the vision for the season and you’re just trying to help execute it.

John: Now, the other people who are obviously stakeholders in this are the studio and the network who may have opinions too. Hopefully they’re communicating–

Dan: Oh, they do.

[laughter]

John: They’re obviously communicating opinions to the showrunner, but I can imagine they could also be showing up on your sets.

Dan: Yes, that is true.

John: That is true.

Dan: That is true.

John: Talk to us about how to manage that, because I think even as, hopefully our listeners are writers and they’re on set, but they’re also going to encounter suits who are going to show up and want to do things. What are some things you’ve found to be helpful? What are some things to really avoid when it comes to you have visitors on set who are decision makers?

Dan: I am not saying this to be politic, though I probably would be politic as one, but my more recent experiences, I’ve actually had some pretty capable and lovely executives come down the set. That doesn’t mean that everybody gives a great note every time somebody gives a note, but it does mean that there is a collegial respect for you. You do need to take in what they are saying, and you do need to try to see if that fits within what you’re doing, or in certain cases, to figure out a way to do it, because sometimes they’re just your bosses flat out. I know this is different for different showrunners and-

Craig: Different networks.

Dan: -different power hierarchies, but I would say, generally speaking, if you’re in my job, your job is not to put up any sort of fight or a wall, but to try to form a relationship with them where you can understand the heart of notes that they’re offering and giving, and if you do feel like there needs to be some pushback, you can either hopefully have that dialogue with them, or get the showrunner down there to do it, if it’s going to be something that you know to be invasive, again, where your relationship comes to bear, because you then have to sense, is this something where if we do this, it’s going to really hurt the show in a way they’re not going to like?

Craig: I could see a scenario where an executive who isn’t getting anywhere with the showrunner might try and backdoor something in with you.

Dan: I would like to think that I can balance those, but look, I’ll be honest, when certain folks are on set, the studio is the boss of the show, and if they have certain things they want to see done, I would never do anything without roping in the showrunner if I felt like it was pushing against it, because then you would never do that.

Craig: They are paying for it?

Dan: Yes, but you do need to consider what they are saying-

Craig: Always. Yes.

Dan: -and at the very least, bump it up if it needs to be.

John: A couple years ago, Craig and I did an episode where we sat down with a bunch of development executives and talked to them about, here’s how we are hearing the notes that you’re giving us. It was really a session for development executives to really learn about what it’s like to get notes as a writer.

I wonder if you could do a short version of this for if you are an executive who’s visiting a set, what are some best practices, what are some things to think about as you’re arriving on that set to help the process and not throw giant wrenches in there? Are there some best practices?

Dan: Here I want to– and I will stress this again, not to be politic, this is something that happened 15 years ago. This is not anybody I worked with recently, but with a junior executive on set, I think eager to make their voice known, offered some notes about blocking that were not sensical. They simply did not speak to–

Craig: They were bad.

Dan: Thank you.

Craig: They were dumb.

Dan: I over-blurbed. I over-blurbed.

John: They were bad.

Dan: It really was opaque how to grapple with that because it simply was, they didn’t understand how editing might accomplish what they– and were going to cost us an hour. In that moment, one does have to make a snap decision to not do a note, which is a very difficult decision to make.

I guess I would say long-windedly, is that for the folks who don’t yet understand set, there is not a need to give notes to pretend like you do understand set. Happily, over the last couple of shows I’ve worked on, we’ve had executives who are very experienced on set, so they’re not worried about that and they’re not trying to give notes on things that they know, “Oh, we can deal with that in a different way.”

John: Craig, what advice would you have for, not your HBO execs, but just things you’ve noticed as people come to set?

Craig: I want the HBO folks to come more to set. They’re so, in a wonderful way, hands-off, but then sometimes I’m like, “Don’t you want to come?”

John: Your first season in Calgary, nobody wanted to come to Calgary.

Craig: Calgary is awesome. I’m a big Calgary fan, but no, in the middle of COVID, nobody wanted to get on a plane, sorry, WestJet specifically, and go to Calgary.

My advice would be to at least have a basic understanding of the protocol of the set, and to ask questions rather than make statements. If you do think, “Hey, you know what, this scene might be better if that guy walked over to the ladder instead of not,” it’s probably better to pull someone aside and say, “I have a question. It’s probably dumb, I’m probably wrong. Would it be better if that person did this?”

Because as a question, you might get, “If we weren’t shooting this other angle in about an hour, you’d be absolutely right, but we are, because here’s a plan.” I will walk onto my set in the morning, someone else is directing, I will see the blocking, and I’ll be like, “I feel like we’re missing a thing.” Then I’ll check with the director, and they’re like, “Oh, no, no, totally. It’s just that we’re going to do this after because of–” blah, blah, blah. I’m like, “Great, I didn’t know.” Better to ask as a question.

Just enjoy it, and then leave because it’s boring if you don’t have something to do. When I say something, I mean really, minute to minute, if you are not occupied with a task on set, it turns into a very boring experience.

Dan: It’s such a great point in life generally, but don’t pretend that you know. Ask, and sometimes, in fact, they’ll say, “Yes, we’re planning on doing it,” or sometimes it can lay bare something that you’re missing.

Craig: Absolutely. You know what, that’s a great question. “Hey, Jane, come over here.” It’s a great question. “Why aren’t we doing it that way?” “Oh, yes, well, maybe we should. Absolutely.” There’s a humility to it, which is nice.

John: Yes, the most frustrating kinds of notes I’ve seen on sets from development executives are clearly, oh, this is a casting issue. We are now four days into shooting with this person, and you don’t like the person. It’s like, I don’t know what to tell you. We’ve almost shot out this actor. This is what we have, and so this is not an addressable concern in this moment. I don’t know what to tell you. What can be useful is, really, again, if the executive is asking a question, or stating the concern, like, “I’m worried we’re missing the point of the scene.” There’s probably a more gentle way to say that, but like, “I’m worried that I’m watching this, and I’m not actually getting out of this what I’m supposed to get out of it.”

That’s valid. We might take a moment to actually consider, “Okay, is there something here that we’re missing because we got so caught up in the choreography of the scene that we’re actually missing the point of something?” That’s where a set of fresh eyes could be really helpful.

Craig: Yes, there is something that happens early on in a television series, and we’re talking about the pilot, the first three episodes, where everybody has a panicked feeling that if they don’t get their point of view in the door now, then forever hold your peace, because everything is cemented into place, which then means, as the people who are making something, you start getting panicked by all these people telling you to do stuff that you’re not really sure you’re able to do. You can get a note that says, “Hey, could the lead character, she’s playing an elderly mom. We don’t think she’s funny enough.” You’re like, “Funny.” I’m like–

If you go, “What? It’s too late. We cast her, we’re making it, we wrote it, and we’re shooting.” Then people are going to feel shut out and shut down, particularly in that beginning part. You’ve got to go take deep breaths, take it all in, and then come back and say, “Here’s the thing. We’ve got to go work with what– we’ve got to go dance with the date we brought. We can nudge her, and we’re going to nudge. We’ll get her there. She’s finding her legs under her, but it’s going to be a little awkward, but we’re working on it.” That’s often enough for people to at least feel heard.

Dan: Having that dialogue, being able to have a nuanced dialogue, that’s when I think we know you’re working with a great executive, is when you can have a really nuanced dialogue like that, and they don’t immediately grab the most melodramatic version of, that’s going to be horrible, or that’s going to be great, but we’re working through this problem, and here’s how, and they can hear that.

John: Back in the day when we shot pilots, if something didn’t work, we could re-shoot them.

Craig: It was almost like we’re the dog that caught the car. Everybody hated, “I’m waiting on pins and needles to see if my pilot got picked up, and they’re going to shoot 20 pilots, and green light 6, and the rest of us are all–” Then they were like, “All right, what if we just green light stuff?” We’re like, “Great. Oh, no.”

[laughter]

Craig: Oh no. What do– It’s a horse of a different color.

Dan: Brave new world.

John: Brave new world. A thing that a visiting executive will get to sit in is a director’s chair on set, and so I want to have a little sidebar about directors’ chairs.

This came up because last week I shot two different EPK things, and shooting an electronic press kit, I was seated in a director’s chair, and for, I don’t know, about an hour for each of them, and my legs fell asleep, because directors’ chairs are terrible.

Let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. A director’s chair is a folding chair that has a canvas seat and a canvas back. It is taller than a camp chair. It’s like about 2 feet higher up, so that if you’re sitting in it, you’re at standing height to people, which I think is by design. Your legs fall asleep, they kill your back. Dan, you specifically had an issue with directors’ chairs.

Dan: First I do want to say, I held this in my pocket till now, but also on lookup: The history of the director’s chair.

John: Oh, what did it say?

Dan: Now, there’s a word I don’t know how to pronounce, but it is C-U-R-U-L-E. It is the Roman, it’s that Ottoman style chair.

Craig: C-U-R-U-L-E?

Dan: Yes. I believe that is the–

Craig: A curule.

John: A curule.

Dan: Let’s go with that.

Craig: Curule.

Dan: You can see why it was scary for me-

Craig: It’s a tough one.

Dan: -so I avoided it. I believe I got the spelling of that correct.

Drew: You got it correct.

Dan: That’s where the magistrate would sit. It was a seat of power.

Drew: Absolutely.

Dan: I think there was actually a company also on look up. It was like 1868, that date’s wrong, but it’s close. A company that started manufacturing the director’s chair and it still exists to this day. I think it parked it as sort of a hierarchical chair position hearkening back to the curule.

Craig: The curule. They also managed to make the noisiest possible chair ever for a position that needs to be absolutely silent. I have talked about this a number– We use the director chairs, and by the way, they’re director’s chair and everybody sits in one.

Dan: Oh, yes.

Craig: All the producers sit in them and the cinematographer and the key grip, everybody is sitting in those chairs.

John: Basically at Video Village, it’s a bunch of those chairs gathered together looking at the monitor.

Craig: There are multiple Video Villages because there’s your producer tent, your director tent, your cinematography tent. We use the aluminum frame ones that aren’t the classic wooden X style, but more of a– They’re quieter and they’re better.

Dan: Do you do the lower ones? There’s medium ones and–

Craig: I’m just used to the up one.

Dan: You want the position of power.

Craig: I think it might be a medium one because I don’t feel like I’m a kid at a table. The wooden ones, the footrest is also foldy. After, I don’t know, 4 minutes of use of a new director’s chair, that footrest just starts–

John: Swingin’.

Craig: It just doesn’t catch the little peg anymore. I’ve talked about this with prop guys because the props department handles the chairs. No one knows why. No one.

Dan: No one.

Craig: No one knows.

Dan: They resent it.

Craig: Yes. They totally, they’re like, “So our job is to make all these creative objects for this show and keep track of continuity and make sure that the guns are safe. Also we lug in your chair.” This is, we’re shooting on the side of a mountain and they’re lugging chairs up. Of course, from their point of view, they’re like, whatever it is, it’s got to go be foldable and it’s got to go be light.

Dan: May I rope in another, this is a tangential issue, and it’s an issue of Video Village, but that’s sort of my workspace and it’s other people’s workspaces as well. Here’s a gripe that I have about set that will never be fixed, is that there’s this Venn diagram overlap of the people responsible for assembling Village, obviously the camera and the DP do this, props does the chairs, then you’ve got sound that’s got–

Craig: Location does the tent.

Dan: Exactly. If you do not have a show–

Craig: They’re all yelling at each other.

Dan: If you’re not a show where, let’s say that, fortunately, I work with DPs who very much value getting Village set up. If you don’t have a DP who values that, then suddenly trying to coordinate those departments when they actually have other things to do, very difficult, very angering.

Craig: One of the things that happens during the day when you’re shooting, usually when you’re shooting on location, is they have to move Video Village.

Dan: All the time.

Craig: Because you’re turning the camera around and pointing towards all that other stuff. Sometimes the AD is like, yes, we’re going to have to move actually all those trucks, that Condor, those two tents. They have to do this fast because on set, time is money. The chairs at that point, it’s good that they’re light, I guess. You can see the prop people are like, “We’re also trying to get the props ready for the scene. Then we have to move chairs. It’s insane.”

Dan: Then if you have visitors, let’s say you’re in the desert, you’ll have a tent, you’ll have the air conditioning unit, and you’ll have everything set up because they need to be– I can rough it. I can rough it.

Craig: You need a luxury tent for your executive.

Dan: Exactly.

Craig: It’s only fair.

Dan: I do have a solution to offer for directors’ chairs.

Craig: Please.

John: This is a podcast about not just whining about things, but actually fixing– Doing things about it.

Craig: Yes, we like to fix things. What’s the solution?

Dan: After I stupidly sat in those chairs in around 2014, had three years of miserable back pain and two surgeons said, you’re going to have to have surgery. Instead, because I did not want to do that, I just had the grips make me a board, a hardboard, the shape of the chair. Then I got a little cushion on Amazon and I put that board down and do the cushion and I have not had to have those surgeries and it has cured it.

Craig: It’s that curve in the seat that just collapses everything.

John: If you think about it, your buttocks, everything is being wedged into the wrong shape.

Craig: There’s no support. It’s like–

John: There’s no support. There’s no lumbar support either.

Dan: I would say it’s antagonistic to the notion of support.

Craig: It’s undermining you, literally.

Dan: Yes. That’s right.

Craig: It is undermining you by giving you–

John: It’s a terrible hammock for your [crosstalk]

Craig: It’s a hammock. It’s a butt hammock.

John: Yes.

Craig: No, it is– You know what? Yes, they’ve got to fix this because I spend a lot of time on that thing. I’m not getting younger. My back, I got problems.

John: Craig, I’m saying season three, you’re going to stop blocking pages. You’re going to stop doing colored revisions.

Craig: That’s out.

John: You’re going to end up like, find a better seat situation.

Dan: Make pals with construction, get that board. It’s done.

Craig: Are you kidding me? My construction team and I-

John: Are like that.

Craig: -me and Dino, we are tight.

Dan: Then you’re in.

John: In my head, it should be pretty simple because the canvas seat just slides in. There’s little dowels that slide into the edges. It feels like you should be able to make a hard thing that slides in that place

Craig: Yes. The props people will not want to be responsible for it.

Dan: Unless you have befriended them and then if you’ve got a good relationship, they’ll take that board.

Craig: Here’s what I worry about. This is a showrunner thing. It’s different. What I worry about is, if I say, “Hey guys, I’ve come up with this. The guy recommended this. It’s great. Now this is part of our routine is putting this wedge in the chair.” They’re going to go, “Got it.” Because I’m the showrunner. Then they’ll walk away like, “You dick.” Now we’ve got to lug this around for little Lord Fauntleroy’s butt. I worry about that all the time.

Dan: In a show I did called iZombie, fantastic crew up in Vancouver. It was a five year show. I was up there for quite a bit.

Craig: We probably have a lot of overlapping crew, I suspect.

Dan: Yes. Great folks up there to a person. Over time, when they knew that I was having back problems, the board for the chair, then there actually came a sturdier chair made out of wood and with the board. Then the gaffer started to rig an electric cord on the side-

Craig: Oh, nice.

Dan: -and then they gave me lamps. By the time it was done, it was like working the con in a Star Trek episode.

Craig: It’s so funny that you mentioned the– if there’s one spot on a set where more departments intersect, I think it’s the tent. You can’t have light without the electricians. You can’t have tent without locations. You can’t have the monitors without the video playback person. You can’t have the chairs without the prop folks. You can’t have the food without the caterers. Every single thing. Oh, and then the lighting, you’re like, okay, the electricians put a light in, it’s glaring.

Dan: Yes, it’s awful.

Craig: Here come the grips to put a little duvetyne or a little crinkle paper around it. Everyone works on the tent.

Dan: Yes, they sure do. It worried me considerably that this overdone chair on iZombie, was I– did I have a– I was assured that [crosstalk]

Craig: Well, that’s the thing, they always assure you, and then they walk away. [crosstalk] They walk away like, “Can you believe this? This guy.”

Dan: Son of a bitch.

John: Is there any bigger solution to this? Because when you just described, okay, the whole tent situation is crazy because of the split of departments.

Craig: Of course there is. The solution is money. Here’s the problem. I don’t know who owns those chairs. I don’t know if the props people actually own the chairs. That may-

John: Be a rental.

Craig: -then be part of it. Often they do. What happens is, and this is very similar to a key grip. Key grips obviously earn that job by experience and time, but also they’re renting stuff to you. They are a grip equipment company that comes with a guy that understands how to do the job of the grip.

If the props folks, part of their money is renting you the chairs, they don’t want to spend their own money to get new chairs and then turn around and go, “Hey, by the way, our chairs cost five times as much as everybody else. I can get my money back on these,” because no one’s going to pay that to them.

Dan: On lower budget shows, I’ve had the props people say, “These are the chairs I got.”

Craig: Exactly.

Dan: There’s been some higher budget shows where the props people said, “Well, I’ll just buy some new chairs and the show will buy some new chairs and there’ll be mine.”

Craig: I feel like we qualify. We do. We have the nice, the aluminum frame ones. They are definitely nicer. I can’t remember the name. The manufacturers right now are screaming, “Say our name.” I just can’t remember it. It still could be because it’s still a butt hammock. It could be better. Some sort of space age polymer, a nice titanium.

John: Carbon fiber.

Craig: It’s expensive.

John: I will say, you and I had kids 20 years ago, baby stuff now is so much lighter because of carbon fiber.

Craig: Oh my God.

John: The car seats weigh nothing.

Craig: The lugging.

John: The lugging.

Craig: The lugging. Also, we were in that horrible middle spot because now they got carbon fiber, which is great. When we were kids, they just had crap. The strollers that you and I were in was like two sticks and a diaper.

John: Yes. It’s a wheelbarrow for a child.

Craig: We were in that middle zone of like, here’s just an apartment full of plastic to ensconce your kid and roll down the street and press 20 levers to fold-

John: Absolutely. Super heavy, everything.

Craig: -to get your finger caught in it, and they were heavy. Woe is us.

John: Woe is us.

Dan: That’s why I didn’t have kids.

John: Well done.

Craig: Well done. Isn’t that horrible? Our kids, if our kids listen to this, so our youngest, well, you’re only my youngest, they’ve been wanting to do the daughter version of our show, together just an episode. If they hear this, you’re like, “That’s why I didn’t have kids” and the two of us instantly, “Well done. You’ve solved the answer to how to live a good life.”

Dan: Hey, look, when I die alone, just remember that.

Craig: I think you can pay for somebody.

John: That’s true.

Craig: What about all those people making you these chairs?

John: That’s right, definitely.

Craig: That’s when you get the props guy in.

John: That’s when we find out if the assurances were real. Yes. All right, let’s do some more questions. We have one here from Adam.

Drew: Adam writes, I work in post-production as a picture editor. I’ve been kicking around the idea of a post-production software tool for a few years and finally got a working demo or prototype developed this year. After the initial excitement of getting a demo in hand had passed, my first thought was, “Shit, I don’t have any idea what I’m doing next.” My second thought was, “John did something like this. That seems so great. Wonder what he did.”

When you were getting Highland off the ground, I’d imagined there’s plenty you did, didn’t do, or wish you had known that informed and shaped how you pitched, developed, and finally launched the product. I would love any insights, pitfalls, considerations, or tips you’d be willing to share.

John: We’ve talked about this on the podcast a bunch. We’ve had people who have come in with production software, or production scheduling software, or other things like that, and trying to knock off entrenched, bad systems that are there. It’s tough because they’re the entrenched systems for a reason.

Even people who recognize the way we’re doing stuff is dumb, but there’s inertia to it. Adam, it’s great that you’ve got this prototype. You need to get it in front of as many people who actually do the job as possible, and get their feedback, see what it is that would stop them from switching to this right now, and incorporate that as quickly as possible. For Highland, it was really easy because I was just using it every day. I was dogfooding it every day, so I could see what was there, what I wanted to be there. I’d get friends to use it, and we could iterate really quickly for that.

The most important thing for you right now is just to make sure that other people are trying it, using it, and getting their feedback, and incorporating it as quickly as possible. It’s probably not enough of a market that you could have a Discord or any sort of message board or forum for it, but just reaching out personally to get people to try it is how you’re going to make it the next best thing. You’re not going to find a big publisher for it. You don’t need a big publisher for it.

Craig: Don’t need one.

John: No.

Craig: This reminds me a little bit of Evercast which didn’t exist, and then now it’s essential. I feel like winning over post-production supervisors is the key because editors if they like it, will be like, “Great.” Then post-production supervisors who have to pay for it are like, “What if it breaks?”

John: Yes, and figuring out what your-

Craig: That’s my impression of them.

John: -figuring out what your business model is for it, because Highland was a consumer app that could be just a thing you buy on an app store. This would not be. This would be something you’d be really selling as a service. There’s a tool called Scripto, which is designed for multicam shows, for late-night writing shows. There, they’re charging the show versus charging the individual user. Maybe that makes sense for it. As much as you’re figuring out the technical aspects of figuring out your app, you really need to figure out what is the model for the app? What is the business model for the app?

Craig: I bet if he just called up the folks at Evercast, because they’ve specifically done this three, four years ago. Evercast is the remote editing platform and it didn’t exist. Then about five years ago, it suddenly did. Now it’s–

John: They got it.

Craig: Yes. Right on time. Right on time. We use it all the time anyway, because we have people all around. They would probably be able to, because it’s such a specific thing, this industry-specific post-production tool. Who do I get it in front of? How do I commit some– Those guys may be willing to sort of tell their tale?

John: Yes. The fact that he was already working in post-production as a pitch writer, he knows what some of the other systems are out there. Get a sense of what is it that you like about them? What they hate about them? What other companies are doing the right stuff?

It’s possible that if your tool is really solving a need, that one of the other companies might be able to recognize it and take in your product. You don’t have to be the entrepreneur behind everything, which is honestly what sucks about doing Highland. I’ve gone through 10 years where I wish I had a marketing person, so I finally hired a marketing person. It’s just all the drudgery of running a business you get when you start making software. Next up.

Drew: Mike writes, after hearing you talk about how you like to break the back of a script, writing scenes out in longhand before working on the computer, I got into writing first drafts of scenes longhand, and I love it. Alas, I don’t have an assistant to transcribe them, so retyping them is a long process. However, there’s tablets like the Remarkable 2 that allow you to transfer handwriting into text. Do you guys know any screenwriters who write longhand on tablets, and do tablets convert the text well into screenplays?

John: I don’t know anybody who’s using it for writing that kind of stuff. The only time I’ve seen a Remarkable tablet in person was I had a meeting over at Amazon, and the executive there, she was writing on a Remarkable tablet, and they are really cool looking. It’s like e-ink, and it just feels really thin and nice, but also you can write on an iPad, and you can try it. I’ve never liked writing on screens.

Craig: I don’t write with my hands at all. I just type. I guess that is with my hands, but I don’t. Yes, if I have to make letters with a pencil or a pen, it’s like, what am I doing?

John: I don’t handwrite scenes that much anymore, but I will say that when I was doing that for my assistant to type up, I would write a little bit more cleanly, a little bit more neatly, and so that when the faxes went through, it could work. I do suspect fax machines, so I go down to the hotel lobby and say, “Hey, could you fax these 16 pages through to Rawson?”

Craig: Can I get into your business center?

John: Yes, absolutely. I know it’s late. I still need to fax something through.

I’ve been to bed and breakfasts and had to use their fax machine to send stuff through, but I’m thinking back to the pretty nice handwriting I did on those things. I have to feel there’s probably really good OCR now for handwriting that could get you pretty close. Mike, it doesn’t have to be perfect. It’s going to spit it out. It’ll be a little bit jumbly, but at least it gets you partway there.

Craig: Yes, and I think GoodNotes has a thing where you can train it. You write a bunch of stuff, and then you type it, and it compares and starts to figure it out.

John: It just feels like as good as AI stuff has gotten for this is a good use of AI is to read your chicken scratch and enter it into.

Craig: This is good. This is acceptable AI.

John: Yes.

Craig: A-A-I.

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s A-A-I.

John: A-A-I. Acceptable AI. Last one here from Tim.

Drew: I have a pitch meeting scheduled with a major production company. Initially, they were drawn in by one of my scripts, praising the writing but finding the film’s tone too dark for their brand. However, they invited me to a pitch meeting to hear my other ideas, particularly for TV shows. I prepared six TV show concepts, each with strong premises that my manager has approved but I’ve never formally pitched before.

Beyond confidence and enthusiasm, any specific tips? Should I present each premise individually and gauge their reactions? Should I talk more generally about them while they peruse log lines to themselves? Or have a full-on show, Bible, and deck for each of them? I want them to be hooked but not bogged down by overdoing it either.

John: I’ve pitched some TV. You’ve obviously pitched some TV. Dan, you’ve developed a bunch of stuff with Rob. What kinds of things can you think about for Tim here in terms of going into pitch stuff? Let’s go back to Party Down, for example.

Dan: Sure.

John: Party Down is a show you co-created. What was the pitch for it? What was written before you went in to talk to stars about the show?

Dan: We’ve tended to have fully thought out and pitches down to the quip and that sort of thing. However, I do think all of that seemed to me, and you would know better than I, under the category of read the room when you’re in the pitch.

Craig: Yes, and I think there are certain things that you can pre-read any room. I can’t imagine any pitch meeting where they would be like, “Well, we didn’t like your first five ideas but we can’t wait to hear the sixth.” If you come in, you’re like, “Listen, I have six ideas but I’m not going to kill you with that. There are two that I really love. See if you respond. If not, I can always shoot an email with the other ones and see if they grab you. These are the two that I really love. I’ll just give you real fast five minutes on each.”

A lot of writers forget, you need to make space for them to talk and they have to then ask their questions and turn it into a conversation rather than, I’m here to sell you on this new nonstick cookware.

Dan: Right. You have to improvise in there. You have to come in with a plan but improvise, which is not profound but that’s nice.

Craig: Plan, improvise.

John: Yes. Generally, if they’re setting up this pitch meeting, it’d be great if you knew going in, from your manager’s job is to do this, to get a sense of what thing they’re actually looking for. You don’t come in there with this rom-com but they’re not doing a romantic comedy series. If you get a sense of what space they’re interested in, then you’re going in there and pitching them, having a conversation about one or two ideas that fit this. In that initial conversation, as you’re feeling them out, you can ask, what things are you looking for? What’s appealing to you?

Get a sense of what their taste is and then decide, this is the first thing I’m going to, this is the second thing and be ready to telescope the pitch. You give them the very short idea of this is a thing set in this world, blah, blah, blah. Is there interest?

Craig: Yes. I’ll go deeper.

John: Great. Let me talk you through what happens in the pilot and where it’s going.

Craig: That’s exactly what happened in my first television pitch, which was Chernobyl where I was like, “I think I got five minutes to figure out how to not have this guy be like, ‘Get out of here with this.’” I’m leaning forward. I’m like, “Let me give you a little bit more on that. Just a touch.” Then it’s like, you’re a crack salesman.

Here’s a little, here’s a little, now you’re a Chernobyl addict. Isn’t that a weird torture analogy?

Dan: You said telescoping, and the converse is also true. If you feel the eyes starting to glaze, then you can get out and get to the next one, get out and get to the next one.

Craig: Pull the ripcord and go.

John: It’s helpful when you’re there in person because you can read the body language and read the room. Unfortunately, so many of these are on Zoom. I will say that the instinct on Zoom is to keep talking as you’re trying to keep the ball up in the air. What can be helpful is once you establish what it is you’re looking for, if you have a deck you can show that shows like the three images of the thing, that can be really useful. Some of the series that I’ve been able to find homes for, I was able to show images that let people feel like, this is what it feels like inside the show, which is just really helpful because it gives them something to look at.

Craig: Yes, without you walking in with like these big posters, which makes you look like a dork.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Another thing is to check in with them to make sure that, any questions?

Dan: Yes.

Craig: Just so I don’t monologue and steamroll you on a Zoom.

John: Absolutely. I think I’ll often say is that as I’m sharing a screen to show images, you are going to get really small in my screen. Speak up if you need anything, because I won’t be able to see you if you’re waving your hand on things. That tends to work. It tends to be helpful. Good luck, Tim.

All right, it’s time for our one cool things. Dan, what’s your one cool things to share with us?

Dan: I almost switched this morning when we got the news of Gene Hackman and wanted to proselytize about Night Moves, which is one of my favorite movies. There’s some B-side 70s Hackman films, like Crime Cut and Scarecrow, great. Yes, there’s that. I don’t know if I just cheated because I mentioned that, but really what I want to take a risk because I’m not a gamer at all, but every 10 years, some puzzle game comes out. I did Zork in the ‘80s.

Craig: Yes, classic Invocom.

Dan: Fool’s Errand, I think.

Craig: Oh yes, I remember about that. Cliff Johnson.

Dan: Yes. It’s been a while, but last year, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this. It’s basically a puzzle game. It’s got a little bit of Zork in it, but it’s an art house puzzle game. It’s got a vibe to it that is a little bit German expressionist cinema, maybe Lynchian fever dream. It’s an exquisite puzzle game and it’s geared for the cinephile. I just, as a non-gamer or one who touches base every decade, that is the real deal. I just heard your Puzzle Box podcast. I need to recommend this to you.

Craig: I love stuff like this.

John: Craig is obsessed with puzzle games.

Craig: This’ll go right on the Steam Deck, it looks like.

John: Fantastic. Craig, what do you got for us?

Craig: I also have a game. I was talking last week about a game that I have not played in, I think, possibly 40 years.

John: Jesus.

Craig: I still think about it and I want to try and see if I can get another round of it going because I loved it so much. That game is Diplomacy.

John: Yes, so I love Diplomacy too, but I value our friendship too much.

Craig: That’s the thing. It’s important to know who you can and cannot play Diplomacy with. For those of you who are not familiar with the game, it’s a little bit like Risk, except there’s no dice. There’s no chance involved at all. There’s nothing random about it. It’s a World War I style map of Europe and you control territories and your job is to try and take over Europe. The only way you can do that is by creating alliances with other players to gang up on other players. Then, of course, the question is, when will you or your ally turn on each other? Are they even your ally at all?

The beautiful part of this game is the movement phase takes about 10 minutes. Then in between, there’s an hour of sidebars, whispers, winks, lying, not lying, mind changing. It is so awesome. It takes eight hours. Yes, it’s totally worth it.

John: I have so much PTSD from my one time playing Diplomacy with friends and some strangers. I was in high school and I hated it. I could never trust anyone ever again.

Craig: It’s a little bit like Mafia, except Mafia is fun and it ends within an hour or so because people are dying. You can see what’s happening after once you die. This is getting hurt or hurting all day long. The movement round, everybody finally writes their moves on the little secret slips and you’re hoping to God that the person who told you they’re going to do what they’re going to do isn’t screwing you over. The slips are collected and then they open up together. That’s when you find out just how boned you are or how–

John: Yes, I feel like with the rise of Survivor and the reality competition shows and Traitors, we get some of that on our screens all the time, but I’ve never wanted to do it.

Dan: It seems like there’s a purity to this.

Craig: It’s so pure because it’s basically like you got an army and you’re trying to go there, but you need somebody to support you from an adjacent territory. Will they or won’t they? What do they want from you? Then the person you’re attacking is like, I know, this makes sense, but think about this two turns from now.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s always like promises, like I promise I won’t attack you for the next three turns or something.

Craig: Exactly, which you can’t, nobody can promise anything in the game, but it is so pure because there’s no chance. It is all strategy.

Drew: Are you doing it all around a table or can you be like, “Oh, I’m going to go get some dessert in the other room.”

Craig: Oh no, you got to split up. You got to go find corners in the house and then you come back and someone’s waiting and they’re like, “My turn, I need to talk to you.” Then you just sit there waiting, like please don’t fold. Please don’t fold. Come on.

Dan: I got to go get this right away.

Craig: It’s awesome. The rules are not complicated.

John: Oh no. They’re really not. They’re not, it’s just all the social aspect of it, the social psychological.

Craig: You need to be on firm ground with the people with whom you’re playing.

John: Or complete strangers who don’t care that you’ll never see again.

Craig: Even they might pull a knife on you. It is brutal.

John: While you’re decompressing from the stressful game of Diplomacy, let me recommend Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars by Daniel Wallace. Daniel Wallace is the guy who wrote Big Fish. He’s a phenomenal author. I really love this new book.

It’s flash fiction, so they’re very short stories, almost sketches, but refined and distilled like poems are distilled. Flipping through it, it’s like, you read the first three or four pages of a great novel and you’re like, “Oh, I want to read more,” and then it’s gone. It’s just like, no, enjoy the moment that you had in the little scene that you were in.

It comes out in May, but you should pre-order it wherever you pre-order your books. If you have the power to get galleys, which I think a lot of people listening to this show who work on the Hollywood connect with galleys of things, get the galleys for this, because it’s really good and you’ll enjoy it, and it’s quick, and you can read it in an hour or two and get the whole thing done. Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars by Daniel Wallace.

That is our show for this week. It is produced, as always, by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our episode this week is by Richard Barrett. I just love that after 672 episodes, we still have folks doing completely new things.

Craig: It’s incredible.

John: Yes, a sound that we’ve never had before on the show.

Craig: Who would have thought?

John: Yes. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at JohnAugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the 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 and drinkware. You’ll find there’s a cotton bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to everybody who clicked through the link and moved to annual subscription to save themselves money, because people were overpaying us, and they shouldn’t.

Craig: We hate that.

John: We hate that. We hate that. You can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on, officiating weddings. Reminder to download Highland. It’s free. Get that on the app stores.

Dan Etheridge, thank you for coming on the show. It’s so good to talk to you with a microphone.

Dan: Yes, it was great to be here. Thanks. Thanks so much, guys. Appreciate it.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, so as we set up in the intro, you can marry a person, which means that you’re bound together with them for life, or you can marry a person, which you are getting that person married to another person. They’re just different forms of the verb to marry.

Craig: God bless our weird language and the poor people who have to learn it.

Dan: How many weddings have you officiated?

John: I’ve only officiated one.

John: I think I’ve only done one. I’ve done one.

Dan: Boom.

Craig: Whoa, five.

John: Five. Including my wedding. Dan was our officiator.

Craig: Did you catch a gay wedding boom when it was legalized?

Dan: Most of them, I think you’re my only gay wedding.

Craig: You’re just getting–

Dan: Just got my credentials from the universalchurch.org.

Craig: Same. Oh my God, you’re also?

Dan: That’s right, yes.

Craig: We’re all practitioners at the universal precepts of that church, which are to pay $10 to officiate a wedding.

John: I go to services every Sunday, I don’t know about you guys.

Craig: There’s a place to go? Oh no.

Dan: Unlike California, I did a wedding in, I think it was Oregon. It was a different state. They actually did require you to file your credentials and to sign different things that they had to do. I think California is very, very loose.

Craig: I did one in Ohio and I had to file a certificate, yes.

John: We just had to send through our marriage certificate for some form or something that we had to do. I was able to pull the thing and see your little signature there on the day.

Dan: It was a great wedding. I’m not complimenting myself. It was a great wedding.

Craig: Crushed it.

Dan: By the way, I don’t think– You can cut this out if you want to. Sometimes folks, they want you to take everything off their plate and construct the wedding. Sometimes people want to know what’s going to be said. John, I really appreciated this. John handed me a word for word script for what was going to be said.

Craig: That is so John August.

Dan: I think I delivered it like it was mine.

John: Oh, 100%. You owned it.
Craig: That’s right.

John: Dan’s also an actor. We should have stressed that you’re an actor first and foremost.

Dan: Previous life.

Craig: Yes.

Dan: Previous life.

John: Let’s talk about best practices for being the officiant. Like you, I’ve seen situations where the officiant was clearly following a plan given by the couple being married. Other times where like, they were just doing their own thing and the couple had no stake in this. I tried to hit a middle ground with the one wedding I did, which was during the pandemic. I was there in person, but everybody else was on Zoom. I sat down with the couple and really talked about what things do you want in what I’m going to say?

Craig: What do you not want?

John: Exactly. How do we emphasize this?

Craig: What you’re getting at is, your job as the officiant of a wedding is to get the hell out of the way of the people that matter. No one is there to see you. The good news is the expectations are zero, which means you actually can kill. Meaning you can get laughs, people can really be impressed by what you do. They can be moved, they can cry because their expectation is nothing but get out of the way and make sure you don’t because a problem. Make sure that you do touch on the things that they want to be touched on. Keep it short and get the hell out of there.

John: Now, Drew, you are the most recently married. I thought your officiant did a really nice job.

Drew: She was great.

John: Talk to us about the conversation you had with her.

Drew: I remember she was a justice of the peace who knew what she was doing. I remember us giving her our initial outline for it. She was like, “You’re missing five minutes. This isn’t going to be enough for people,” which I was surprised by. I was expecting-

Craig: There’s no such thing as a too short wedding.

Drew: That’s how I felt.

John: I can’t be fast enough.

Drew: I agree.

Craig: 10 seconds, best wedding ever.

Drew: Her argument was that like, if people come there and show up and are dressed up, that they’re expecting a little bit more of a full ceremony as opposed to, and we just wanted to–

Craig: They just want the food. Just get to the food.
Drew: Agreed, yes. It’s the party.

Craig: Nobody wants to sit there.

Dan: We had a nascent stage party down idea that never made it to camera. One of the actors abused the officiant role to test out a monologue.

Craig: That’s awesome. With the note cards like, no. Anyway. Won’t be including that one on the road. For our premium members, I guess you could tell the story of the part of the episode that was inspired in part by our wedding. Do you remember this?

Dan: Oh, yes. The gay wedding episode, the season finale of season one. That’s right.

John: Absolutely, Adonis Catering?

Dan: Yes, Adonis. We did, a rival catering company came in to cater that particular wedding, and it was Adonis Catering filled with just the most beautiful men of all time. I did have a template for that.

Craig: That should be a thing.

John: Yes, it was a thing.

Craig: Oh, it was a thing.

John: We did not intentionally hire them because of their beauty, but we were always like, “Oh, these are all models.”

Craig: It just worked out.

John: They’re all incredibly attractive people who are our waiters.

Craig: That is a thing in LA. When you go to parties and behind the bar and the people passing hors d’oeuvres around, many of them are here in town to be actors or models, and they’re working these jobs at night because they get the auditions in the day, they do these jobs at night. You can feel like an absolute troll. I’m asking, “Can I have a drink?” Oh my God. This is weird. I’m sorry.

Dan: I think there was, I think, I might be misremembering, I think there was a character prototype at your wedding of the person in charge of it all. Kristen Bell came in and played that very officious–

Craig: That’s good casting. That’s always good casting. It’s Kristen Bell. Yes, you’re just the greatest.

John: Pretty much the one when you decide on Kristen Bell.

Craig: The greatest.

John: Some bad officiating I’ve seen at weddings includes anything about Webster’s Defines.

Craig: Oh, god.

John: Or quotes.

Craig: Mawage.

John: Mawage, yes.

Craig: That, oh, you.

John: Yes, one of the worst weddings I’ve ever been to was just a series of quotes about love being read by a person who had no idea who the couple was. It went on for 20 minutes.

Craig: No.

Dan: That’s the corollary to, because I agree with everything you said about brevity. You’re also there because you ideally know them. Make it personal in the brief time that you have.

Craig: It’s actually rife with potential disaster. You want to make sure that both sides of the family are acknowledged, even though they might not like each other. There may be exes in the crowd. You don’t want to talk about, oh, after a lifetime of struggle, they found each other. Then people sit and they’re like, “Wahh? We- Come on…” We thought we were still friends. There’s just so many ways to go wrong. Then jokes. If you’re not funny, don’t. Do not because the problem with being not funny isn’t that people won’t laugh because the joke isn’t great. The problem is you won’t know what will upset people. That’s the problem that unfunny people have. You will upset grandma because she’s going to be there.

Dan: You make a good point about vetting. I do try to give them a look at the script or what have you, because of all, you don’t know there might be some minefields in there.

Craig: No question.

Dan: Or you forgot to mention so-and-so because it’s politics.

Craig: No question.

John: I’m a strong believer in the couple themselves exchanging vows and saying things and not being silent witnesses to it. I think you both said things during your vows.

Drew: We did, but we went basic. Like, do you? I do.

Craig: Do you take this person to be your lawfully wedded–

Drew: I feel like they’ve just been, those have– we’ve iterated them enough that they’re perfect. They’re just simple. We don’t need to say, we don’t need to write our own vows to each other.

Craig: That’s what we did because I don’t want anyone to hear what I have to say to my wife at all. That’s private.

Dan: I think this is the reason I’m not married yet because I don’t want to have to say anything overly private in front of a bunch of people.

Craig: You don’t have to.

Dan: I don’t want to.

Craig: You can just do the Nicene Creed or whatever the term is for that. Ridiculous, it’s not that.

John: The counterpoint I’ll make is Megan McDonnell, our previous script producer, her wedding, it came time for the bride and groom to speak. Megan did a great job. Her groom, her now husband, knocked it out of the park. It was definitely, the thing was, everyone for the rest of the night was like–

Craig: Low expectations. No one expects the guy to be good at that. Everyone expects the girl to be just naturally expressive and emotional and she’s going to tear up at the right moment, and you’re going to tear up because, they have access to their emotions and this guy’s just going to be dirt to dirt. When I met you were good and I thought we were good. Then he, yes. See, as the guy, you come in and dunk.

Drew: My favorite is when people go, “You look so beautiful today,” looking down at their paper.

Craig: You mean last week when you wrote that?

Drew: When you wrote that.

Craig: Or possibly last night when you wrote this in a fever sweat?

Dan: I made a rookie mistake I just thought of in my second one, which is, I do think I can land a joke, but this one I didn’t land and it was right out of the gate. Hot out of the gate. I did a look down to pick up the names of the bride and groom, whom obviously I’ve known for decades and I don’t need to look and get their names. Assuming that that would elicit a little bit of a warm chuckle as people understood that. I soon realized, no, most of the people in the wedding don’t know me. They think that I don’t know the bride.

Craig: They literally don’t get it.

Dan: The crickets there was like, this is going to be rough and I got to hold a climb out of home right away.

Craig: You know what? That’s where you do appreciate the studio executives showing up and being like, “I do have a note.” I know you’re going to say the audience isn’t this dumb, but.

John: Takeaways from this. Officiants should not overshadow the couple getting married. We like short, we think short is great.

Craig: Short’s great.

John: It’s an important part of the night. Obviously, you want it to go really well, but it’s actually a pretty small part of the night. People are there to celebrate you together.

Craig: If someone’s aunt comes up to you in the middle of the party and says, “I thought what you said was so funny and so sweet,” you’ve done a great job. Then that’s that. Two minutes, two minutes.

Dan: Yes.

Craig: Two. You go past two minutes, you’re in so much trouble.

Dan: Be sure to end it with the line by the authority vested in me by the great state of California and the universallifechurch.org.

Craig: Exactly. I pronounce you, .org.

Dan: Get the last joke right in there.

Craig: Then you have to say copyrightuniversalchurch.life.org.

Dan: Yes.

John: All right. Lessons for everybody. Thank you, Dan.

Craig: Thank you.

Dan: That was fun.

Links:

• Highland Pro | Download on the App Store
• Dan Etheridge on IMDb
• Buck Rodgers’ robot sidekick
• [The Tom Thumb locomotive](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Thumb_(locomotive)
• Statpage and DuckDuckGo
• I Miss the Music from Curtains
• Curule
• Evercast
• Scripto
• Night Moves, Prime Cut, and Scarecrow
• Lorelei and the Laser Eyes on Steam
• Diplomacy
• Beneath the Moon and Long Dead Stars by Daniel Wallace
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, and Instagram
• Outro by Richard Barrett (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: Today’s episode has no bad language, but it does have some mild spoilers for Severance. If you’re trying to go into that show clean, without any spoilers, about midway through the show when Craig starts spouting wild theories, just skip ahead 30 seconds or a minute, and you’ll miss all of Craig’s wild speculations. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: Oh. Oh. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 677 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, what the hell is going on? We’ll discuss mystery box shows where the premise and audience experience involve solving the puzzle of what’s really happening. Then, we’ll talk about revisiting old projects. I am just back from two weeks in New York, working on the Broadway version of Big Fish, which I’ve been working on for now 20 years. We’ll talk about how writers should approach their earlier work when they need to.

We’ll also follow up on home automation and locked pages, plus answers to some of our listeners’ questions, and Craig and our bonus for premium members. Let’s talk about taking some time off. You just took some time off. You took the weekend off. Your weekend off feels like time off.

Craig: [laughs] I had to negotiate it, too.

John: Yes, let’s talk about being more deliberate about working on certain days, not working on certain days, and refilling our supplies after a lot of work sessions. We’ll talk about ways to do that.

But Craig, first, we have a little housekeeping. We want to thank all of our premium subscribers. You want to keep the lights on here.

Craig: When you say you, you’re talking to me. I am a premium subscriber.

John: You are.

Craig: I pay the $5 a month.

John: See, that’s what we’re here to talk to you about, Craig. Because right now, you’re paying $5 a month. We’re going to be raising that price.

Craig: What?

John: Moving up to $7.99 per month.

Craig: 7–? [sighs]

John: Because people should really be on the annual plan. Here’s what’s happening. Our annual plan is staying put at $49 a year.

Craig: Oh, so that’s even less than $5 a month.

John: It is. We really want people to stay on the annual plan because it’s just less tedious for everybody involved to stay on the annual plan.

Craig: We’re really incentivizing this?

John: Apparently, because we initially rolled out with this price, and it was really parity between the two things, people stayed on the monthly plan. People should move to the annual plan.

Craig: How do you do that?

John: It’s so simple. You click on your account settings. There’s a link in the show notes to this. You got an email if you’re a premium subscriber, just please move over to the annual plan.

Craig: It’s good for you, and apparently, it’s good for us.

John: It would save a listener $48 per year.

Craig: We’re asking you to give us less money.

John: Please give us less money.

Craig: Please give us less money. We should make the monthly $14,000.

John: Yes. [laughs]

Craig: Then watch how quickly they go to that annual subscription. You know what I’m saying?

John: We debated. If we went up like $1, would that be enough of a factor? Would it be enough of a friction that people would actually do it?

Craig: No. Can I just say, is there a point in our humanity, in our civilization, where we will just move on past the 99-cent gimmick?

John: Some stuff, yes, it doesn’t make sense.

Craig: It’s just everybody does it in every way, shape, or form. We’re all on to the trick, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: We all know what’s going on.

Drew Marquardt: They’re supposed to be doing away with the penny soon.

John: The actual physical penny.

Craig: Typical.

John: The idea of 99 cents doesn’t go away.

Craig: I could argue that all prices at this point should be rounded to a dollar.

John: Yes, they should be.

Craig: Rounded up or down, but then taxes back–

John: Let’s say an issue with like, if something costs $99, it’s really $100, too.

Craig: This is my point, so what are we doing?

John: What we are doing is raising the price to $7.99 in the hopes that people will get to the annual plan, which is $49.

Craig: I think that’s a great idea. I think that’s lovely.

John: We should talk about, Craig, how much money do you make from Scriptnotes?

Craig: Oh, I have seen $0.

John: I see $0 as well. Craig and I don’t take any salary for this.

Craig: No.

John: The money pays for our incredible editor, our producer, Drew.

Craig: We’ve gotten cars out of it, obviously. We got the cars and the houses.

John: Absolutely. All that big podcast money. We’re not the Pod Save America people who actually like to buy houses with stuff.

Craig: The Pod Save America guy lives across the street from me.

John: They’re doing well.

Craig: That’s a really nice house. They’re lovely people. I was in Vegas for a couple of days.

John: Gambling the Scriptnotes money?

Craig: Gambling my Scriptnotes money away at the penny slot machine. They project ads for all their acts everywhere. On the side of a casino that was facing my room, they were advertising a true crime podcast. I don’t remember the name of it, but apparently, they’re on tour. They’re on tour in Vegas? A podcast?

John: Many questions are raised by this. First off, when are we going to do a live show in Vegas on the strip? That’s crucial.

Craig: Right. Can we have dancers?

John: Yes, we’re going to have dancers. The question is topless, not topless? Or maybe there’s two shows. The later show is topless. I don’t know.

Craig: I would be fine with a kid’s show, a family show.

John: A family show, yes, for sure.

Craig: Then, at night, an adult show. This would be amazing.

John: Yes.

Craig: Yes, of course. We could get the ladies, but we could also get the Thunder from Down Under guys.

John: Oh, 100%. I would definitely have to be on a mixed show.

Craig: We need a mixed show but not at the same time. I think they would confuse each other with their choreography.

John: Different acts, different segments.

Craig: You bring on one group, then we do the first half of the show. Second group comes on, gyrates. We come back. What a weird thing to come back after, for you and me. It would just like, we’re the worst people to follow any kind of hot strip show. Then it’s just like, “Back to these two podcasters.”

John: It really does make a hard transition into, let’s talk about transitions, or let’s talk about–

Craig: Back to slug lines.

John: Yes, or I was going to say the Scriptnotes slot machine. The Scriptnotes is like a video poker machine, like those branded things.

Craig: Ooh. That’s fun.

John: That’s good stuff.

Craig: You know what the jackpot is, right?

John: What is the jackpot?

Craig: Sexy Craig.

John: Oh, yes. I always think if you get the jackpot, you get to be on a three-page challenge. It’s like a live show.

Craig: No.

John: I guess now it’s better than that.

Craig: No. If you get five sexy Craigs in a row–

John: Oh, lining up. Oh, gosh. We don’t take a salary. This pays for everything else, but the money that’s left over at the end of the year, we donate it away. We donated this year to Hollywood Heart, which is a beneficiary of our great live show. We also support the Entertainment Community Fund, which helps writers and others in the Hollywood industry.

Craig: Isn’t that also targeting some funds for the fire relief?

John: Exactly. Yes. That’s what we do with the money. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it all possible. On the topic of games, though, we actually have a game shipping this week. Way back in Episode 655– actually, not that way back, 655 is 22 episodes ago.

Drew: That‘s like half a year.

John: Half a year ago, I put out the call that I was looking for an indie game developer to partner up with on a game that I wanted to make. Drew, we got 10 people writing about that.

Drew: That sounds right.

John: I zoomed with a bunch of them. They were all fantastic and great. I ended up picking this Canadian developer named Kory Martin, who has been toiling away. Now, just a few months later, we have a game for you to try out right now. It’s called Birdigo. Birdigo, like the thing that flies. It is a roguelike deck builder where you’re trying to make words. Craig, you just played it. Tell us about the game. Your experience so far.

Craig: Oh, I just played a little tiny bit, but as far as I can tell, what’s going on is you get some letters from a constrained letter bank, a little bit like a Scrabble tile distribution. You have to make some words from your letters. As you make words, you get some new tiles. You have some discards, and you’re trying to hit a point number to move on to the next thing. But when you do, you’re going to get some sort of power-up, some kind of Belatro-style card that makes the next rounds better, because I presume it just gets harder and harder and harder.

John: It gets harder and harder. It’s a roguelike in that it’s really difficult to complete a level, what we call a migration, but eventually, you’re able to do it, and then it unlocks more things down the road. If you would like to play it, you can play it right now. It is on Steam as part of the Next Fest event this week. You can follow the link in the show notes or just go to birdigogame.com, click through and see the game that’s there. The first 50 levels are up for everyone to go and play this week as part of this special event.

Craig: And John?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s called Birdigo. Like vertigo but with a bird?

John: Yes.

Craig: Birdigo.

John: Birdigo.

Craig: How much does it cost?

John: We don’t know yet, so it’s free. The demo is free. We don’t know what the final pricing is going to be.

Craig: Amazing.

John: We’ll ship it sometime this spring, probably.

Craig: Right, but right now, it’s free.

John: It’s free.

Craig: It costs nothing.

John: Yes, so you should try it. If you like it, put it in your wish list. Originally, we were going to call it AlphaBirds. It’s really a spin-off of the physical game we made called AlphaBirds, but Birdigo was a better name for what this game is.

Craig: Yes, I think so. Plus, also, people love the stuff on there. Are you going to bring it to iOS at some point?

John: We’ll do Steam first, and then we’ll see where we’re at for it. Because the nice thing about doing it on Steam first is we can then transition to Xbox or Switch or all the other stuff. Eventually, iOS would be great, too.

Craig: All right.

John: It’s fun.

Craig: Great.

John: All right. More follow-up. Drew, help us out on locked pages and unlocked pages.

Drew: Michael wrote in and says, “I’m a script coordinator on a large TV series where our security is super intense, and everything is distributed digitally. Since we’re forbidden from printing scripts, I thought our show would be a great case study to implement keeping the script pages unlocked throughout production and using the locked scene numbers as our linchpin for revisions.

My stipulation was that I would only do it if it didn’t mess with the workflow of any of our departments. However, in reaching out to the departments, I found that not having locked pages would cause issues with the work of our script supervisor and our post-production team, mainly the editors and assistant editors.

Our script supervisor told me that they use a software to do their job that relies on the pages being locked. One of our scripties uses MovieSlate and the other uses ScriptE, which seems almost final draftian in its arbitrary rigidity. The software organizes their notes by scene number, take, timing of take, notes, cameras, and other things, but each page of their notes corresponds with a facing page, and that refers to the page number of the locked script.

John: Let’s pause for a second here. What I think I’m hearing is that in a physically printed script, you have on the right, if you’re printing on one side of the page, on the right in your notebook, you would have the printed page of page 46, but there’d be a blank page on the left. I think that is the facing page where they’re typically taking notes or doing other things on that page?

Craig: Okay.

Drew: Since the notes are not connected to a specific facing page, if that page were to change with the new content during the shoot, the notes wouldn’t line up anymore. At the end of the shoot, all the notes and their facing pages are exported as a continuous document to send to the editors. The assistant editors use the daily reports from the scripties to assemble binders for their editors with all the notes and their corresponding facing pages. Those binders are organized based on the locked script and messing with the locked pages would mean it was difficult for the AEs to match the scripties notes with the facing pages.

It appears that until the software the script supervisors use can find a way to connect their notes with just the scene number and not the locked script pages, I think locking script has to remain. I will say, even though I can’t figure out how to make it work and not interfere with certain departments, everyone I pitched this concept to was down for a change. For my showrunner to the script supervisors and post-production, people would love to bring things into the digital era and leave some of these old methods behind. Also, no one cares about keeping color names for revisions.

Craig: In talking with my script supervisor, he did bring this issue up, but even he seemed quite flexible about it. I believe there’s a way in the output to just say, okay, just bring me to the notes for scene, whatever. The idea that the assistant editors and the editors are using this massive binder of notes is a pretty old school, I think. I have not seen the binder in a long time.

Also, the idea of editors routinely consulting the notes, while lovely is something I’ve seen every now and again, like a four-leaf clover. It’s actually quite frustrating how editors just don’t look through that stuff. In a way, I like that. The editors get their fresh take on things. They don’t necessarily want to be bound by whatever opinions were written down on the day.

But I do believe that document would still function unless you were literally using it like a printed bound thing, which I don’t think anybody does anymore, or most people don’t. I’m sure the ones who do will write it and insist everyone does. The companies that make the software really need to just make this very simple change. It should just be organized by scene number. I don’t care. I’m doing it on Season 3. I’m doing it. I’m just getting rid of the page breaks. I don’t care. [sings] I love it. I don’t care. That song was originally written about this very topic. Page breaks.

John: I’m happy that Michael, who is a script coordinator, the person who is responsible for this, was writing it and was really trying to make this change happen and was consulting with the people who he knew it could affect early on in the process. It really does sound like people have entrenched ways of doing things that don’t necessarily make sense, but it’s what they’re used to, and it would be an adjustment.

Craig: Movie productions, television productions are rife with this-is-how-I’ve-always-done-it-ness, and sometimes getting people into the new way, you got to drag them kicking and screaming a little bit. Once they’re there, they’re thrilled. It does take a moment or two where they’re like, uhhhh. I’m doing it.

John: It’s good news on colored pages as well because the concept of colored pages is good.

Craig: At this point now on revision levels, it’s just so that you know which– is it draft one, two, three? I might change them to numbers.

John: In the part we cut out here, it says they started using version plus number for our drafts.

Craig: I might do that. Drafts V1, V2, V3, Rev1, Rev2, Rev3.

John: Put a date on it.

Craig: The thing is I put a date on them anyway.

John: Colored revisions have dates.

Craig: Maybe I’ll just do date revision. That’s it. The revision is this date.

John: How do you like doing dates? Actually, I have a question about this and then about Oxford commas, but we’ll talk about both.

Craig: Sure.

John: My preferred way of doing dates is I love periods between dates.

Craig: Very European.

John: I love the year first and then the month and then the day works really well for me.

Craig: If you did year, then day, then month, you’d be fully European, I think.

John: Yes, exactly. Doing date then month, things increase the right way. When you do date before–

Craig: Oh, I completely agree. This is one area where I think we’re right. I go day, month, year, which is more standard, I think. Just because of my old, old, old computer days, my convention is to go underscores in between because periods were reserved for file extensions and dashes right out.

John: Absolutely no colons on the Macintosh.

Craig: Oh, good Lord, no. Something, underscore, something, underscore, something.

John: Related question. I have a similar related question in terms of what your preferences are. For the Scriptnotes book, we’re now starting copy edits. Oxford commas. My personal take is I believe that Oxford commas can be useful for disambiguating situations. Obviously, we can bring up situations where without the extra comma there, you’ve changed the meaning of it. I find oftentimes commas are wedged in there in a superfluous way that makes me annoyed. How do you feel?

Craig: Oxford commas, from an informational point of view, are objectively superior because they give you more information than less. That’s always a good thing. From an aesthetic point of view, they are inferior to the American style. American style is cleaner. In the 94% of cases where there is no ambiguity, the American style just simply reads better.

My thing is I don’t think you need to be consistent. I think if you feel like, “Oh, this requires an Oxford to disambiguate,” put it in.

John: Great. I think we are aligned and agreed. That will be the notes back to the copy editor. That was what I did on Arlo Finch. To me, part of the reason is that even though this is text that is not meant to be read aloud, I’m still reading aloud in my head. I perceive a comma as being a small pause, and it’s an unnecessary pause in a series of things. When it’s not needed, it’s weird.

Craig: It’s a funny thing that in our language, when we do list things, we group the last two things together, and I don’t know why. A, B, C, D, E and F. We just do that. It’s weird. I don’t know. It’s a strange mental thing.

John: We have one more bit of follow-up here.

Drew: In the bonus segment of 671, we talked about home automation. We had a lot of smart people write in. Apparently, Lutron HomeWorks is the top-of-the-line lighting system, including shades and curtains.

John: That’s actually what we use. I forgot the name of it, but that’s what we use. That’s the app I have on my phone that lets me turn on any light in the house.

Craig: I had Lutron in my old house. I hated it. So annoying.

John: I think if it’s not set up properly, it can be just an absolute monster.

Craig: It is set up properly. I’m just like, I got to go to my phone. The switch is right there on the wall.

John: You should be able to do either one. It wasn’t set up properly.

Craig: No. It was set up properly. It’s just a pain in the ass.

John: I can tell our system. I can just verbally say, set the lights to 20%, and it’s a blessing.

Craig: Everywhere. Oh, because it’s linked into your Alexa or whatever?

John: Yes. In the TV room, I can just say, set the lights to 20% as I’m watching a movie, and it’s just great.

Drew: There’s also, apparently, an open-source software called Home Assistant, and that can pretty much connect everything, but it’s very DIY. You have to set it up yourself. It’s not plug-and-play.

John: Mike also uses Home Assistant for other stuff, which also works with Lutron. We can do things that are clever, but it relies on Mike figuring out how to do stuff and then teaching me what the commands are.

Craig: I’m quite good with these things. I did also try to explain to Melissa how the Lutron worked, and that didn’t go well. That’s also my future. I have to explain it to Melissa, and I just know it’s not going to go well because here’s what I’m going to get. I’m going to get a text that says the lights aren’t working, or Lutron is broken. I’m going to say, no, it’s not broken. Is there smoke coming out of it? No, it’s not broken.

John: The Wi-Fi is down, which could mean anything.

Craig: Yes. I actually get the wife’s Wi-Fi is down quite a bit.

John: It happens. All right. Let’s get on to our marquee topic, which is Puzzle Boxes. This comes from a listener question. Drew, read us a question here.

Drew: Christian writes, “I love both Severance and From, but I’m worried that they’ll both be Lost all over again.

Craig: Oh, jeez.

Drew: I’m worried my own novella is in the same trap. I feel really cheated by the end of Lost, but love the middle of the journey. When mysteries don’t deepen the focus, but just get wider and wider, it can temporarily create momentum that feels like a recipe for a disaster ending. How can you keep the pleasures of a puzzle box without falling into the trap of an unsatisfying ending?

Craig: I love when people say, I’m just worried that it’s going to become like that thing that was one of the most beloved television shows of all time and a massive hit. [sighs] Can we just stop with that? Can we just stop with beating up on Lost like it was a failure or something?

John: It was a great success.

Craig: It was.

John: Let’s broaden our scope. There’s a lot of series that do things like this, obviously talk about Lost. Severance is a current series.

Craig: Severance, Watchmen, but Watchmen had a built-in ending, so it was different.

John: Westworld, Twin Peaks, Silo right now. The new show, Paradise. Yellowjackets are just still going on. Heroes, Leftovers, Alias, The Man in the High Castle.

Craig: Good Lord.

John: They’re a really common thing. What’s uniting about all these kinds of shows is there’s a question of what’s really going on that is central to the story engine. It’s who killed Laura Palmer? Where are we really? What is this place? What the hell is Lumon? In Man in the High Castle, why is there this footage of an alternate reality? What strikes me as different about some of these series, though, is what the characters inside the series’ relationship is to the central mystery, is whether the characters are actively trying to figure out what’s going on.

Like in Lost, where the hell are we? What is this island? What’s happening? You as the audience are on the same level as the protagonists, or situations where the heroes inside the story know exactly what’s happening, and you as the audience are just behind where they are. Yellowjackets is an example of that, where we’re getting these flashbacks and everyone in the present day knows what happens there, but we’re just getting exposed to it bit by bit.

Craig: Yes, there’s probably a good distinction to draw between mystery and puzzle box, because puzzle boxes are constantly putting forth things that are surreal. That’s key to the genre, is surrealism. The granddaddy of all of these is Prisoner. The Prisoner? With Patrick McGowan, so this is in the ‘60s. I just remember my dad showing it to me when it was being rerun on PBS, which when my dad would come say, “Hey, Craig, sit down, we’re going to watch something on PBS,” I knew I was in for boredom. As a small child, I was like, “Prisoner, just– what?”

John: I just remember there’s this giant, white, floating ball-

Craig: The bubble.

John: -the bubble that is after him, but it’s great. You have no sense of what’s really happening there. Æon Flux was an MTV series that also had it. It seems like I have no idea how this all connects.

Craig: The surrealism is crucial. The idea that things are emerging that are very specifically puzzling as opposed to– why somebody did something, to me, is a mystery. I remember in Watchmen, they opened a door, and there’s an elephant in a room with tubes coming out of it. What? Severance, particularly this season. Last season, because it was somewhat limited in its scope, it wasn’t quite a puzzle box. It was closer to a mystery. This season, so far, has been a puzzle box.

John: Yes, absolutely. This season is leaning much more into the mythology, and who are the Eagans, what is this town, and the gradual reveal that the outside world is not normal, either. In the first season, it felt like a little stylized normal world, and it’s clear that the outside world is not a normal world either in this. I think it’s really important that you’re distinguishing between most shows. Many shows have mysteries at the heart of them. It’s like, who did this thing? You were trying to solve this puzzle.

You have either detectives or somebody who is investigating, is trying to solve this thing. It is the building up of mythology and impossible connections that is so tantalizing about a puzzle box show, and also can be really frustrating at times. One of the things that our listener was pointing to, Christian, is that sometimes it feels like they’re just spinning new plates.

Craig: This is the gift and the curse of puzzle boxing. As a writer, you and I know that if you have a scene and you want something exciting to happen, throwing something in that makes everybody go, “Wait, what?” People are in a house, and they think there might be a ghost, but they’re not sure, and one of their friends has gone missing, and then they open a door, and there’s a dragon in it. Wait, what? Black. Credits. They’re coming back next week. Everyone’s talking about the dragon. What the hell’s going on?

This is cheat coding your way to grabbing people’s interest. Each time you do it, it’s a little bit like heroin. Drew, I’m going to talk to you because you obviously know quite a bit. Drew, you remember the first time, right? You’re chasing that dragon the rest of your life. That first hit of puzzle boxing, you’re like, wow. Once you hit the fourth or fifth, you start to go, okay, anything can happen at any point. The value per puzzle starts to go down a little bit, particularly as the puzzles accrue in an unsolved way.

What Christian’s concerned about, and I think rightly so, is all of the puzzles have to have an answer. At best, they are interrelated. At best, there are one or two ahas that make all of them make sense all at once. In the case of Watchmen, I thought that was about as good as it gets. Maybe because it was one season, I went aha for all of it. When you have an ongoing series, the challenge is to figure out how to make these connected ahas that resolve everything without ending your show. That’s the trickiest part of all.

John: That’s the thing, when Damon Lindelof came on the show, we were talking about that, and at a certain point, he had to come to ABC and say like, “How many seasons do we have left? Because I need to pace out what we’re doing here because otherwise, we are just spinning our wheels.” He got the answer of, at that point, two more seasons or three more seasons. Like, “Great. We can plan for this overall we’re getting to.”

That also ties into, how often are you introducing new clues or new mysteries? If it’s every episode, then you’re setting an expectation that this is this kind of show. If it’s once or twice per season where you’re doing that stuff or addressing the underlying mystery, then it’s not so foregrounded. It’s obviously always going to be there as an open, unresolved thread, but it’s not pressing. Those are fundamental decisions you make as a showrunner.

Craig: There is that give and take where, like you say, you get to dole these things out because how powerful they are. The things you have to watch out for, in addition to over-puzzling people to the point where they just go, “I guess it doesn’t matter anymore,” is making sure that the characters themselves maintain a reasonable level of curiosity and a realistic interest in trying to solve the problems themselves. Because there are times where the characters just seem to go along with puzzles sometimes, go along with weirdness and then say, what is this all about? The other one is like, I don’t know. Let’s see where it goes.

After a while, you get the feeling that no one’s trying hard enough to solve the puzzles, which can also be a little frustrating. They’re fun. Look, the worst part of solving a puzzle is the finish, unless it’s wonderful. It’s high-risk, high-reward. To refer back to Lost, I think a lot of people just presume that the ending of Lost was “bad”, that it’s legendarily been discussed to death. Damon himself seems to write an editorial about it every few months, God bless him. It was good, I think, and millions of people thought so. People are always going to disagree about these things, but when you look at a show like Lost, the degree of difficulty to do– how many episodes did they do?

John: 20 to 22 episodes per season.

Craig: It was like 100 episodes or something. To do that is astonishing. What we ask now is maybe to do 20 for a puzzle box. For instance, Severance is in Season 2. I think they’re doing 9 or 10 episodes a season. I don’t know how many seasons they go for, but I can only presume that if we’re on Severance Season 8, something’s gone terribly wrong.

John: I think you’re right.

Craig: Which is a weird thing to say because, theoretically, you want shows to go forever.

John: One of the points you made there is how the characters in the world are related to the central mystery. We’re talking about shows where the characters don’t have all the information. It’s not just that the audience is behind. The characters themselves are curious. It’s really a question of how do you make the mystery integral to the show but not overwhelming so that you can actually just do other stuff that a series needs to do in terms of how are the characters in relationships driving plot and story? It’s not all about the franchise mystery of it all.

Example, the far end would be The Leftovers, which is premised on this idea that 3% of the world’s population suddenly disappears. We see the effects of that, but no one is trying to answer the question, what really happened? At least the characters that we are seeing and following don’t have the capacity, the agency to try to solve that. It’s only in the final season that they actually really address what happened, resolve this great loss and make a change that addresses this fundamental mystery. Instead, it’s dealing with the repercussions of the premise, rather than trying to solve the premise.

Craig: More Lindelof. I guess Damon, he’s the king of the puzzle box. I think you’re right. I think that a good puzzle box story makes sure that part of the puzzle impacts the identity and central crisis of the characters, and the way their relationships function. So Severance is very good at this. In the end, do I want to know what is going on at Lumon? Do I want to know what Cold Harbor is and the data refinement process? Sure. Do I want to know why there are goats in that room? Yes, I do. Do I want to know more where Ms. Casey is/Mark S’s wife? Absolutely.

John: 100%.

Craig: Do I want to see how that is going to function within the matrix of Mark’s interest in Helly R? Now we’re just down to good old soap opera, and I love a good old soap opera. That’s where my heart is. Your brain is teased and entertained by the puzzles, but your brain will only get you so far. For what we do, the heart has to be there. And ideally, the stakes of the brain solving the problem are fed directly into the stakes of whether or not the heart gets what it wants.

John: The other thing I would point out to Christian is that as you’re trying to figure out your story and how it all fits together, when you have scenes with characters that know more about what’s going on, be really careful about those shifts in POV. That’s the thing that you’re seeing Season 2 of Severance grapple with, is that you have characters who work for Lumon who are just having conversations among themselves outside of the Severed Floor. They know so much more than we know. Those conversations are very carefully tailored, so that reveals stuff to us that they would know. That becomes a really difficult balancing act.

Craig: It is very hard to do this kind of show — Again, I tip my hat to Severance because they’re doing it — In a world where we have the internet and entire subreddits dedicated to parsing every single thing. My youngest daughter is currently now into Severance. She binged Season 1 with my wife, and now she’s watching Season 2 along with us. She was all over the theory because TikTok was all over the theory that Helly was actually real Helly and not– spoiler alert, if you’re now watching the show, you know it’s going to happen. She was ahead of that. I have a crazy Severance– it’s not a theory. I just had this idea. I’m sure it’s all over Reddit, too. I’m not original about this, I’m sure. Should I say it?

John: Say it.

Craig: I’ve been wondering lately if it’s all backwards, that the people on the outside are the ones that have been “severed,” that the outside is, in fact, the experiment, and the inside is very much what is real.

John: Sure. As we learn more in the second season, the outside world is not what we think it is. It’s not just that the cars are old. It’s that they’re in a non-existent state. The license plates don’t match. The two-letter state abbreviation is not a US state. It’s always winter. There’s something that’s really strange about the outside world.

Craig: One thing that’s really strange about the outside world, the fact that Ms. Cobel almost got to the edge of something and then turned back. It’s a lot easier to say, create a false reality where someone’s wife is dead than it is to kill someone’s wife in reality and then bring her back to life in a false reality. I don’t know. Anyway, there’s just stuff going on that makes me think it’s flipped around. Because I keep thinking, what are they doing in data refinement? Perhaps what they’re doing is refining somehow the way the outside world functions.

That said, it may not be that at all. Also, I don’t care. Here’s the truth, I don’t care. What I really want is for people in the end to be happy or to be resolved, to fulfill their destinies by sacrificing or doing something for the greater good. We have villains. The villains have become much more sharp this season. Corporation has become much more of a villain now. Mr. Milchick, you can feel his– oh my God, this storyline, can I just side note for a second? I don’t want to turn this into the 400,000th Severance podcast, but I was so delighted with this little mini storyline of Mr. Milchick being presented with those paintings, those incredibly, what do we call them, corporate racist? There’s like a corporate racism is its own thing where it’s like, we recognize your contributions, and look, we made a picture.

John: We want you to be able to see yourself in a story.

Craig: We just made our leader Black for you but in a bad painting. That little tiny, tiny story between him and– I can’t remember her character’s name, the woman who speaks for the board. I guess the two Black characters that are working for the company. Oh, it was just handled in the most delicious way. Really, really well done.

John: It was an interesting moment because not knowing what the real world of the show really is, oh so, race is still a thing. Based on the evidence of the rest of the show we’ve seen so far, does it have the racial history of America? It clearly has some racial history there. The fact that their Black is actually specific and acknowledged within the world of the show.

Craig: Right, which a lot of times in shows like this, they do the old colorblind thing where nobody has any comment on race whatsoever. You’re right. It was like an interesting break in the reality bubble of everything.

Anyway, to, I guess, wrap up the question here for advice, if you are thinking about writing one of these things, obviously, plan everything out, be meticulous, study your great mysteries, read Agatha Christie, read Arthur Conan Doyle, read as many things as you can that function like this clockwork machinery, watch all of the great puzzle box shows, go through the whole Lindelof catalog, basically, the Lindelog, and learn, and then figure out how to both begin middle and end it all, and create the characters that fit into it and are informed by it that we will actually follow and care about because when all is said and done, if you’re the kind of person who is only interested in how the puzzle box resolves, you’ll probably be disappointed all the time, but most of us care about the characters and the relationships.

John: One last observation I just need to make is that the fact that we can have this conversation about Severance is because it is a weekly release schedule. Had they dumped all these at once, there’s no conversation because you don’t know where people are at in their watching.

Craig: How are we still talking about this like it’s not the most obvious thing in the world? I wouldn’t even make my show if it were dumped all at once. I just wouldn’t do it. The thought of it, the thought of working that hard for that long for everybody to watch something over one day or a three-day thing and then occasionally nibble on it, oh my, why? Why does Netflix do this?

John: There’s a project that I would love to be able to make, but if we end up at Netflix and we’re released all at once versus someplace else, we would fundamentally have to change how we’re doing some things because you just can’t count on the–

Craig: I literally don’t understand. I’m sure there are a lot of people at Netflix, or a number of algorithms who would be happy to explain it to me. It seems so patently obvious that the shows that people talk about, the shows that grip people and get them excited are indeed released once a week.

John: So, second topic. I was in New York City for two weeks working on a new version of Big Fish, the Broadway musical that I did 12 years ago. This process resulted in a 29-hour reading where we had actors in for one week. You get to rehearse and perform it once for investors and theater owners and other friends. It was great. It was so, so much fun. We had Patrick Wilson starring and Jerry Zaks directing, a great experience. Then also when I got back from New York, I went in and did an EPK interview for Corpse Bride, which is the 20th anniversary of Corpse Bride that I wrote with Caroline Thompson and Pamela Pettler.

Craig: Twenty.

John: Twenty years. The experience of those things back to back made me think about when do you go back and revisit old projects? In the case of Big Fish, this is a thing that I was working on, first, the movie and then the Broadway show. Andrew Lippa and I had this giant catalog of like, here’s all the songs we wrote for the show. And as we’re reshaping and moving stuff around, it’s like, oh, I remember this little bit from this little bit. The bag of scraps you have can be really, really useful. Remembering what was the intention behind some of those things.

But for Corpse Bride, it was a chance for me to go back and watch the movie again, which I had not seen in 20 years. I remember like, “Wait, what did I actually do on this?” I watched the movie, then I read the script before I came on board. There were so many lines. I was like, “Oh, I remember writing that line.” Nope, I didn’t write that line. That was Caroline Thompson or Pamela Pettler. It was already in the draft. But then there were things that I did change and did add. It’s like, oh, I had no idea. That moment, which worked really well, like, oh, that was so great. The chance to reconnect with those things.

It also made me really wish that I’d kept a journal, that I’d kept some record of what the experience was like. Because in the conversation with the co-director and the producer, I had some ability to just remember why things were the way that they are, but it’s mostly just like, yes, that thing exists. I’m not quite sure how we got to that moment.

Craig: I’ve talked about this before. I’m not a big reflector. I don’t spend a lot of time in my brain in the past. I spend almost no time in my brain in the past.

John: I’m not much of one either.

Craig: It’s a watercolor mush. I remember the strangest things and not things that would be relevant but also, in general, not too motivated to go back and watch things.

What does sometimes happen is I get a chance to see something that I did through someone else’s eyes. When my youngest daughter was home from college, she and Melissa also watched The Hangover trilogy. That was exciting and fun. I didn’t sit there and watch it with them, but every now and then, I’d wander by and hear something and be like, “Oh, I remember that day.” It is fun to see people who grew up with something come to talk to you about it.

It reminds you why you did it in the first place. If you write things particularly for kids or for the broadest segment of the audience, you’re probably not in line to get Portrait of a Lady on Fire-type reviews. Not to say that some things like that aren’t wonderfully reviewed, but in the end, all that fades away. Then you see like, is there something there that lasted for people? That is interesting to see. But the thought of keeping a journal, oh my God.

John: It’s made me think back all the way to how I got interested in screenwriting in the first place, was Steven Soderbergh for Sex, Lies, and Videotape. The first script I ever read was his script because it came in a bound book with his script and his production journal. I got to see how he made it and what the whole process was. It was so incredibly illuminating to me. It made me want to become a screenwriter. I don’t have that for much of my stuff. I do for the Arlo Finch books because I had that separate podcast series I did, called Launch, which people could still listen to.

That really charts the whole process from I have this idea to write this book to the book is now out in French. It charted the whole process. That’s such an exception, and there’s no time machine that I wish I could go back and do that. I really wish I had records of more of what the conversations were.

Because even on Corpse Bride, now we can go back and search emails, and emails are so helpful to find out that stuff, but that was back in the time of faxes and phone calls. Now the stuff would be Zooms or Slack messages that are not as searchable. I feel like there’s a lack of a record of some of what’s really happening in the projects I’m working on right now.

Craig: Other than the insane digital paper trail, to me, the product of the work is the most important. I know that people are fascinated by the process. We do give them this very curated look at– “Stay tuned after the episode to watch behind the scenes.”

John: We are filming those. You’re doing all those in one day, right?

Craig: Yes.

John: You’re having to reflect upon, this is this episode, this is–

Craig: They just go, let’s talk Episode 3, let’s talk Episode 4. Though it’s interesting, what I don’t do is say things like, “It looks like so-and-so is in real trouble.”

John: A lot of people do.

Craig: I don’t do that. If there’s a cliffhanger, I’ll let the show do the cliffhanger. I just try and provide as much thematic context as possible. I’ve never been the person to pick up a book like Stanley Kubrick discusses how he made 2001. Weirdly, I don’t care. I’ve never had interest in that. I’ve always had interest in just the result. It may be because of my deep-seated belief that process is personal. I don’t want to follow someone else’s process. I don’t want to feel like I’m emulating anybody. I just want to try and follow my own natural instinct, which, hopefully, will get me to the best thing.

If I did write a diary called The Making of The Last of Us, it would contain quite a lot of whoa stuff. Not all good, but just like, wow, you guys had to do that? You went there? It took how much to build that thing? Yes. But people at HBO will tell you– I just say I’m so allergic to behind-the-scenes because I don’t want to– I want them to believe. If we keep showing people backstage– and that thing is an interest, I just try and avoid that if I can.

John: A case where I have had to go back through a project and reconstruct a narrative of things is in an arbitration. There’ve been times where I wrote something five years ago, and I have to go back through my drafts and figure out which drafts do I submit? What actually changed? What am I actually saying happened here? I did a little bit of that for a Corpse Bride where I was trying to figure out what changed draft to draft. I wonder if I might be willing to put this in a small box of things I feel like could be a good use for AI in a sense of like, compare this draft, compare it to this draft, and tell me what changed. Because it’s such a tedious task for a human being to do but actually is so well suited for something that is just looking for patterns.

Craig: Although change is difficult to judge if it’s judged quantitatively.

John: I would never do it for something. I would never do it in an arbitration situation, but for me, talking on the EPK, what changed over the course of between when you started, and really, it’s like, what were the big shifts? That’s hard for me to reconstruct if an AI or some other system could point out this is the character who’s different. This is how Barkus was in this draft, and this is where Barkus got to. That would be useful for me.

Craig: I don’t know about you, but I’ve become one of those people. Anytime someone says AI, I go, boo.

John: I totally get it.

Craig: I was watching the Super Bowl, and some ad came on, and we were like, “What is this for?” Then finally, they got to AI and we all went, “Boo.” I guess it’s inevitable.

John: I want to totally validate that experience, that feeling. Also, by saying, “Boo,” make sure you’re not dismissing that it actually is real and that it’s there. Because sometimes people will just say, “Boo,” in a disbelieving way.

Craig: No. I say, “Boo,” like, “I don’t want it.” I just wish it weren’t there. I do. I love technology. Just this one, I wish it weren’t there. I so resent the fact that Google gives me that garbage AI result at the top of the page, and you can’t turn it off.

John: I’m sure there’s some workaround that.

Craig: There isn’t. The workaround is to query Google for results that only occur prior to the date the AI existed. It’s not useful.

John: I switched to DuckDuckGo for searches on mobile, which has been fine. What I want to underline is I wish it weren’t there is a valid expression, but that’s not going to help us get any policy or regulation or any controls over it. That’s my worry.

Craig: I can’t get any policy or controls over anything. I’m not a senator.

John: Let’s answer some listener questions.

Drew: Keanu writes, “I’m a high school student at Heritage Academy Maricopa, and my class had a question about screenwriting. If a person is in a cave, is it interior or exterior?”

Craig: I love this question.

Drew: What about Godzilla vs. Kong? Would the middle of the earth be interior or exterior and where do we draw the line?

Craig: Wherever you want.

John: Wherever you want. It’s just a philosophical question.

Craig: I know. I love it.

John: Am I inside or outside?

Craig: Right. It’s great. Interior and exterior are mostly useful for productions to figure out if they are actually going to be physically outside or inside so that they can decide if maybe they’re going to build a set or if they’re going to have to worry about the weather. When it comes to something like a cave, personally, I would say interior because you are getting out of the rain. It really comes down to rain in my mind. If it were raining outside, would my actors be getting wet?

John: Which is the cover side.

Craig: Exterior. Now, if you’re under a bus shelter or something, if you’re hiding from the rain, sure. The center of the earth, you mean in the molten core of the center?

John: No. In the Godzilla vs. Kong movies, there’s this giant underground, it’s really an outdoor space that happens to have a roof on it.

Craig: In that case, I probably would say exterior because there are probably sub-interiors within that. If there’s a cave inside of that world where there’s the dome sky, then– Truman Show, exterior street, interior house. All of it, spoiler alert, under a dome, interior.

John: 100% agree. It’s the other classic things like interior space, exterior space, exactly. If it feels like you’re outside, it’s great. It’s not going to affect anything. We get it.

Craig: It’s not going to affect anything, but I do like the philosophy. Here’s maybe a useful way of thinking about it: If where you are could be separated from another interior, it’s probably exterior, if you’re going to go inside from where you are.

John: I would just go to inside, outside. If you enter a place, then you’re interior. If you exit a place, you’re likely going into an exterior.

Craig: Feels about right.

Drew: Steve writes, “I’m working on a script that features actors who play in a cover band. I’d like to show them performing live on stage in small venues. I’ve read about some of the challenges David Simon faced while filming bands live in the show Treme, but can you go into specifics as to why? Is it the equivalent of shooting a dinner table scene? Also, am I mistaken in assuming that the songs that I choose will be cheaper since I won’t be using the actual recordings?

Craig: Here’s why shooting live songs is hard. It comes down to editing. When a band is playing live, it’s never going to be exactly the same each time. Their movements, the notes, the tempo, everything will always be a little bit different from show to show. Any tiny difference will make a jump happen if you’re going to edit from one camera to the other unless you’re filming eight cameras. Even then, most of the cameras will be seeing the cameras.

Now you’ve got some painting out to do and you don’t get that fluid feeling of going through. So typically, what we do is we ask the musicians to play to a fixed track. The fixed track will be in their ears, and they mime play along with it, essentially. They can live play along with it too, but they have to be locked in for editing purposes. It is a challenge.

John: Either a pre-record or a click track, basically something to keep them on exactly the same metronome for things. For Steve, if it’s looking to do maybe a smaller indie project, in some ways, that might argue towards doing some live recording because maybe it has a feel where it’s just you’re just going to record the entire thing, or it’s in a one-er, or there are reasons why you’re there and you’re experiencing it live. I think back to the movie Once, which is about the folk singer you fall in love, that feels like a thing that was probably recorded live and made sense to record live. It felt like the right vibe for it.

Craig: If you’re going to do, for instance, that wonderful song Falling and it’s two people, one playing guitar, one singing, three, four cameras going at once, that’ll get you what you want. No problem. We face these challenges from time to time, and we figure them out with the sound department. But fun, chaotic, proper live with a club, and everybody dancing and everything. The sound is the biggest issue, is figuring out what we’re going to hear and how we’re going to hear it.

The other thing about playing live is the music is coming out through big speakers. Now, you can record the individual tracks, but you still have to mic the drums. You’re getting bleed through those drum mics from everything else that’s playing. What are you going to play for people when they’re watching? Because recording live is its own thing, plus you have the crowd dancing. It may all look great, but now it sounds like mush, or it doesn’t connect to what we’re seeing. Challenges.

John: It’s challenges. Answering two more little things, Steve asked, “Is it the equivalent of shooting a dinner table scene?” Not really. The dinner table scene is its own unique problem just because of eye lines that are getting people to match around a dinner table scene. Here, you have a bunch of people who, yes, they might be looking at each other, and that’s just a thing. It’s going to be the same problem whether you’re recording it live or they’re lip-syncing to a thing. “Will it be cheaper than using the actual recordings?” No, because if you’re going to do your own recording of the thing, you’re making your own recording, period. Recording it live doesn’t change that.

Craig: It could be cheaper only in the sense that if you’re going to use the recorded version, you have to pay for both the licensing and the mechanical, the master.

John: I’m presuming that if we see a band performing on stage, you’re going to record a band, that band, or another band recording on stage.

Craig: That recording you’re making, it won’t cost you anything. You’re just paying the licensing at that point and, of course, the performance fees for the band, or if they’re actors, that’s the acting. Yes, it could be a little bit more, but then you have a lot of other challenges you’re going to have to deal with, and you have to weigh those two things side by side. It’s a tricky one.

The good news is, post-production people, production people, sound people, they’ve all been here. They will all give you advice on the various ways you can go, but it is a bit of an interesting puzzle. When you’re trying to figure out how to, for instance, then shoot a conversation between two people who are off to the side with the band playing in the background continuously from their live performance, how are you going to do that? It’s all very tricky.

John: There are reasons why you want that band to be looking like they’re performing and not actually performing.

Drew: We’ve got one last question. Todd in Maryland writes, “I love when you guys talk about D&D. I’ve played tabletop role-playing games since I was a kid and think they’re great for storytelling and socializing. The strange thing, however, is that very few campaigns stick in my head as being memorable stories. Usually, there are one or two standout moments, a funny interaction, a clever situation to a puzzle, critical success or failure, but the personal goals and growth of the characters and the overarching plots are lost in the wash of time. Have you ever used a role-playing campaign as the basis of a screenplay, or are these two fundamentally different mediums?”

John: I think they’re really different mediums.

Craig: Yes, for sure. Two issues there. One is the campaigns that he’s in aren’t memorable. That may be chalked up to the DM. Partly, that’s the job of the DM is to tell a great story, to make more than one or two memorable moments, to provide a lot of great NPCs that you can remember, and to make it all make sense in the end like it was all meant to be purposeful. That’s an entirely different question than from– also, let’s say you got that, should you base this? No, you should not.

John: We’re about to resolve a campaign that I’ve been DMing for the last year or so. Listen, I went in with some story points, but I really let the players dictate what was going to be happening. They are the storytellers of a lot of this. Those characters making those choices, their bad roles a lot of times are the iconic moments from it.

Craig: Like any good DM, you edit as you go. As long as you don’t make a change that undoes something that we all saw happen or somehow invalidate things, you’re fine. It’s a little bit like the puzzle box thing. You just want to make sure that when you get to the end, people are like, “Oh, this is, so nothing mattered. You just randomly did this, even though all these other things happened.” Yes, the puzzle has to make sense in the end.

John: What is I think consistent with good cinematic storytelling is the players, the protagonists should be the most memorable characters and the one who are driving things. While I set up a villain and sub-villains who I thought were useful and good and interesting, your heroes should be driving the story, and they have.

Craig: You hope that you have a group of players that create relationships with each other or key relationships with an NPC, but the point is relationships and how they interact with each other, that’s the fun. When I’m a player, I’m so much more interested in how I deal with the other party members than I am with how I deal with the rest of the world.

John: Absolutely. One thing that I did in this campaign, which we tried out, mixed success, but I said, in our session zero, as we were getting stuff ready, every character had to have relationships with two other characters around the table. It didn’t have to be like brother and sister, but they had to have some other connection with them so that they came into this small community with a sense of some shared history and purpose and relationship. It’s an idea I would continue through to the future, even as we’re looking at our next campaign, is I would love to come in with my player being connected at least to one other player.

Craig: I think it’s a good icebreaker moment. What happens is the players, as they play-

John: They make choices.

Craig: -they begin to figure out who they are and then they just create new relationships. Some of them are good running jokes. I had a good one with Phil Hay’s character based on the session zero, but then a lot of them just emerge because somebody’s character may irk your character by what they do. Then that’s the thing now by the choice they made. As long as you give people room to find their own bonds and flaws, as D&D says, you’re doing great.

John: Let’s do our one cool things. My one cool thing is a show/experience I had while I was in New York City called Life And Trust. Now, Craig, when you were in New York ever, did you go to Sleep No More?

Craig: I sure did.

John: Did you like Sleep No More?

Craig: I definitely went to Sleep No More.

John: Craig did not enjoy Sleep No More.

Craig: I attended it.

John: Let me talk about Sleep No More, and I’ll tell you about the differences between this and Life And Trust. Sleep No More, you go to this space and you drop off your coat and put on a mask, and then you’re wandering through this space, and you start to realize were there actors? Basically, anyone who’s not wearing a mask is an actor, is a performer in this world. You start to realize like, “Oh, Macbeth is happening around me.” As you’re wandering through the space, there’s really very little structure to it. You’re seeing scenes and moments, but it’s cool and also has a feeling of a little bit of an escape room in the sense of you could just spend all the time looking at the very cool set direction and such.

While I was in New York this last time, I went to see Life And Trust, which is by the same folks who did that. It is done in a bank in the financial district, an incredible space, and just gorgeous and much more ambitious than Sleep No More was. As you’re entering it, there’s a little bit of dialogue at the start as you’re sent off. Then like Sleep No More, you’re wearing a mask. You’re exploring the space, and you could just look at all the incredible set decorations throughout the whole thing. You realize that what’s actually happening is probably Faust or a version of Faust.

I thought the structural elements on it worked really nicely. We’ve just had a really good time. If you’re going with a group, you end up getting separated by default, and you’re having your own experience. Then really part of the fun of it is when it’s all done, which is about three hours, getting back together and like, “Did you make it to that space? I had no idea that thing was there.” I saw this scene happen, and you’re trying to piece together what all happened. I really dug it.

Craig: I remember that I was uncomfortable wearing a mask and watching people. Whatever a voyeur is, I’m the opposite of that. I felt very uncomfortable. No reflection on what they did, their performance, the quality, it was all clearly working at a very high level, and people do love it. I just thought like, “Oh, if somebody were to be looking at me, I’m the bad guy.” I’m just scrolling around, Eyes Wide Shut style, just basking in the performance.

I kept thinking to myself, a lot of these people are the classic starving artists in New York, working this gig for probably not a lot of money, and then waitering during the day. Then I show up at night, and I just casually watch them. I’m not going to watch them. I’m going to turn away and watch something else. I’d rather walk down that hallway than look at you and appreciate what you’re doing. I just felt so icky. I don’t know if anybody else had that.

John: I think that is a valid experience. I will say that this show was much more dance-driven than the other one was. The other one was like–

Craig: You know me. I love dance.

John: You love some dance. At times you realize like, “Oh, there’s choreography happening. Oh my God, I need to move really quickly because they’re about to slam into me.” You have to be so ready to do things on the fly, which is fun and impressive that they could do. Here’s the moment we had at the end, though, that made me– this is true for all Broadway actors, but I really felt it for this is, so we’re down in the financial district, and I have to take the train to get back uptown. We get on the train, and two of the performers are in there too, along with all these young Chinese girls who were there who had just seen the show and were fawning over them. It’s like, man, you just did this thing and you want to be done. Suddenly, there are people there who saw you do it.

Craig: Some actors really enjoy it.

John: Some actors love it.

Craig: Some fans, are you kidding? Who doesn’t like a few fans?

John: All right. Life And Trust is my one cool thing.

Craig: My one cool thing– let’s see. Yes, we’re getting close. This is a sad one cool thing, but it’s a wonderful one cool thing. So in about a week, my intrepid assistant, Ali Chang, will be graduating out of assistant university, and we’ll talk about what she’s doing next. It’s quite exciting. For another time, that’s really up to her. I just wanted to make her my one cool thing because for two years, she has just been the best.

I’d never really had assistants, but if you’re going to be a showrunner, you need not just an assistant. You need a super assistant. You need somebody who is operating like your auxiliary brain and, most importantly, is filtering everything that goes in and out to make sure that the showrunner doesn’t drown in information, so organization and anticipation but then also all the good nurturing stuff.

Then like, “Hey, I want to try something fun for dinner. What’s the best blank?” She knows everything about everything everywhere. I must have spent probably 1,000 driving hours with her because we just drive places because you got to go scout. You got to go to your sets. You got to here and there. It’s just like an incredible wingman and such a super person. I won’t have to miss her because she’s still going to be around, but she just did a fantastic job. She is my absolute one coolest thing this week. The great Ali Chang.

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

Craig: Don’t know him.

John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Never heard of him.

John: Outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkwear. You’ll find those all at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all those premium subscribers who really need to switch over to the annual plan and not the weekly plan. Save money.

Craig: It’s going to $7.99, but soon, it’ll be $799.

John: That’d be crazy.

Craig: Ugh.

John: Oy. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record about taking time off. Craig and Drew, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, one of the real challenges of being a writer is that because we’re not on the clock, we’re never off the clock. One of the things I really missed about a 9-to-5 job is when I was not on the job, I was just off, and I had no responsibility to that place of work. That just doesn’t happen as a writer.
Craig: No, and there’s this whole new world of people that don’t go to the office. They Zoom commute, which means, a lot of their time during the day, they’re probably also off.

John: It’s unstructured.

Craig: Yes, but if you Zoom commute as a writer, you’re just being a writer. We’ve always just been somebody that occasionally would go to a meeting. It doesn’t matter. You wake up. Theoretically, you could be writing. You should be writing. That’s what your brain tells you at least until you are fully unconscious. You can always possibly be writing. It is difficult to draw the line, and then if you are in the middle of a production–

John: My daughter is in her second semester of her sophomore year. I was FaceTiming with her, and she’s like, “I’m so overwhelmed. I have this paper to do and this stuff, and it feels like all I do is I wake up. I go to class. I go to work. I do homework, and then I go to bed.” It’s like, “Yes, we validate that. Yes, that’s what the experience is. Are you taking time off?” She’s like, “I’m sleeping okay.” It’s like, “No, I don’t mean sleep. I think you actually need to have some time that is just not that time. You have to replenish and refill.” It’s a hard thing to hear or to try to do because you’re just like, “If I’m doing that, then I’m falling further behind on other stuff.” It’s hard to internalize that idea.

Craig: It is, and it’s probably a sign that you either are trying to do too much, or you need to learn how to do the things you do more efficiently. That’s our greatest hope. The first thing we want if we’re an ambitious person is to say, “I’ve been asked to do 100 things. I feel like I could do 10.” Either I need to tell them I can’t do those other 90, or I need to learn how to do 100 things. Now, it turns out that we can do more than we think.

The dangerous thing is if you keep doing that and succeeding, where does it end? Where it ends probably is a nervous breakdown. College is an excellent time to find out just how much you can do. Sometimes the feeling of being overwhelmed is really just the fear that you are going to have to expand your appetite and your output because it’s hard, but you can, until you hit a point where it definitely feels wrong. I’ve had a few of those.

John: I’ve definitely had a few, too. The nervous breakdown I had at the end of D.C., it was my first TV show, was that just trying to do too much and not recognizing or not being honest with myself that I was overtaxed. It just was impossible to do it. I remember very distinctly feeling like I was just a vessel for making the show. If I was listening to the radio in the car, it’s like, “Is that a song that could be in the show?”
I was basically just a sorting mechanism for things that could be in the show and things that were not going to be in the show. Healthier now, I don’t do that.

One of the things I’m trying to be more deliberate about doing is, today is a day off. I’m just not actually doing any work. I’m not thinking about work. I’m going to do whatever feels good and not out of a sense of obligation, but I’m just going to chill and not stress out about stuff. It’s hard for me to do that because I recognize that there are always 10 more things I could be doing with that time.

Craig: I don’t have a guilt about those times. What I struggle with is finding out ways to actively do nothing. When I say do nothing, actively not work. Today I’m not working. Instead, I’m going to clean out this. I’m going to go do here. I’m going to meet up with these people. I’m going to walk around a museum. Mostly what I want to do, I find when I’m not working is dissociate. That’s what I want to do. I want to dissociate. I want to sit down with a video game or a puzzle and go bye-bye.

I think that’s fine. It’s probably not on the top of the list of psychological recommendations for people, and maybe people might think that’s a sign actually you’re doing too much because you need to dissociate, but I actually find it wonderful. I like going bye-bye because my brain is working all the time. I need to sometime just send it to bye-bye town.

John: That will give you Birdigo, and you’re playing some Birdigo.

Craig: Dissociate.

John: Dissociate. The other thing I’m trying to do more of is just allowing myself to be bored. It’s because I find that I’m trying to fill every moment. I would find myself pulling out my phone as I walked upstairs. That’s 20 seconds. I didn’t need to pull out my phone during those times. Literally just putting the phone down and just being in a place and just letting myself be bored. Just stare at my dog for five minutes. It is good for just bringing everything down a little bit for me.

Craig: I think that in time, our ever-increasing age will force us to do these things more and more. I do think sometimes I better get all this stuff in that I want to do now. What I want to do is we call it work. I don’t think of it as work. This is what I want to do. I’m lucky enough that what I want to do is the thing people pay me to do. Fantastic. I will do it now as much as I can until my– I smell burnt toast, and that’s the end of that.

John: We met up with friends of ours from Los Angeles but now have a place in New York. We went to the Met, and it was great, and they had a great exhibit there, and loved it. He’s kind ofd retired. He’s a writer, and he’s just like, “I’m just done. I’m just done working for other people. I stopped enjoying it. I have the ability to be done and I’m just done.” That’s a hard thing to admit. I can’t imagine myself getting there, but I’m really happy that he’s happy doing that.

Craig: That was the goal, I think, for most people for the longest time. I’m thinking of a friend that we have in common who keeps telling me, “Once this is done, I’m ready to finish.”

John: I know who you’re talking about. It’s been 20 years he’s been saying that.

Craig: Right, and I’m like, “Okay, but you’re not. It’s not going to happen.”
John: He’ll describe the plan, “Oh, we’re going to move to Upstate New York. We’re got this place and all this stuff.” It’s like, “Yes, you’re going upstate, but you’re going back.”

Craig: You’re not going to.

John: Your kids are in college. They’re out of college now.

Craig: Because you like the life, man. You like the life.

John: Growing up, did you have any concept of a Sabbath or a day off? Did your family do any of that?

Craig: No. Weekends were for homework and essays and stuff. I was always nervous when I got to the weekend, mostly because I had to spend all day with my parents instead of just a little bit. That was when, I guess, they imposed this running around on your weekend is bad. I did get to play. Don’t get me wrong. I got to go outside, but I had to do all my work first and had to do it great. Homework is the worst. Have we ever talked about how dumb homework is?

John: Homework is generally terrible.

Craig: It’s just the stupidest concept.

John: Study after study shows that it’s not productive.

Craig: It doesn’t do a goddamn thing. What is the point? If you can add two numbers together, why do you have to add more two numbers together all weekend long? It’s stupid. It’s not learning.

John: It also contributes to the Sunday scareies, that sense of this is all the work I have to do to get done, so I’d be ready for my new week. It’s bad.

Craig: It just gives teachers something to grade. It just gives them something to grade. It’s stupid.

John: I think our advice is let yourself rest. Don’t do your homework.

Craig: Don’t do your homework, kids.

John: Don’t do your homework.

[laughter]

John: Don’t do homework that other people have assigned you. If there’s homework that you feel like you want to do to make yourself ready, great.

Craig: If you work at a job and someone’s giving you homework, listen, you got to figure out your boundaries there and make choices.

John: As we record this on President’s Day. It’s on the calendar, is a day that should not have been a workday for Drew, certainly.

Craig: You know what? Drew made a choice. I think he made what I would call a coerced choice.

Drew: I could have not come in.

Craig: It’s a little bit like when a magician tells you to pick a card, any card, you’re picking the one they want you to pick.

Drew: It’s the one that’s popping up.

Craig: Yes, but thank you for picking this day. It was so nice of you. That’s it.

Links:

• Birdigo on Steam
• Lutron HomeWorks and Home Assistant
• The Prisoner (1967)
• Scriptnotes, Ep 296: Television with Damon Lindelof
• Patrick Wilson, Jordan Donica Leading Industry Reading of Revised, Broadway-Aimed Big Fish on Playbill.com
• Falling Slowly scene in Once
• Life and Trust
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• Craig Mazin on Threads and 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.

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You can download the episode here.