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Buckling Down (Encore)

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Scriptnotes, Transcribed

John and Craig are on opposite sides of the world this week, so they’re revisiting an episode from 2016 to look at the many psychological barriers facing writers tackling big projects, and offer practical strategies for actually getting the work done.

They also discuss the then-upcoming election (same as it ever was), and answer a listener question about how autism spectrum disorder might impact a screenwriting career.

In our bonus segment for premium members, John and Drew reflect on what’s changed in the eight years since this episode last aired, and then like all conversations in 2024, they just start talking about Moo Deng.

Links:

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

Big Money Movies with Marielle Heller

HWTBAM, Scriptnotes, Transcribed

John welcomes back Marielle Heller (Can You Ever Forgive Me?, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood) to look at three stories of real people with too much money and ask, How Would This Be a Movie? Stories include strategies for dating Leonardo DiCaprio, the rise-fall-rise of inventor Palmer Luckey, and a council built to give away a fortune.

We also go feral over Marielle’s new movie Nightbitch, as she shares the joys of adapting something that feels personal and her tricks to directing dogs and children. But first, we take a look at a new study on which movies studios are developing, and share exciting news for those joining us at the Austin Film Festival.

In our bonus segment for premium members, Marielle and John remember the terror, nerves and euphoria of premiering your movie at film festivals.

Links:

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

UPDATE 11-19-24: The transcript for this episode can be found here.

Scriptnotes, Episode 649: The Comedic Premise with Simon Rich, Transcript

Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/the-comedic-premise-with-simon-rich).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you are listening to Episode 649 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, which ideas are inherently funny? We’ll discuss what makes a comedic premise and how you develop and execute upon that idea. To do that, we have a very special guest. But first, Drew, we have some news and some follow-up.

**Drew Marquardt:** We do. We’ve talked about the quest to make a Harry Potter series, and the uncomfortably public search for a showrunner.

**John:** As a reminder, they said, “Oh, we’re gonna make a Harry Potter series and we’re gonna go through a series of rounds of different writers who might become the showrunner. It got kind of public in a way that made me feel eugh.

**Drew:** It was a bake-off, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Drew:** We have news that Warners has made their pick. It’s Francesca Gardiner of Succession along with director Mark Mylod, who also did Succession and Game of Thrones and The Last of Us and all sorts of stuff. They seem like a really good team to do that. I would say going into this, I was skeptical that anybody would want to step up to do this, especially in the bake-offy situation, but it looks like they ended up with some really talented people. I wish them luck. I think it’s gonna be a hard road ahead, but we’ll see what they’re able to make. That Harry Potter series will eventually probably come to your screens.

Second bit of news is very, very local here. For the last 20 years I’ve had this blog, johnaugust.com, that we reference every week. One of the things I’ve done on the blog over the years is have these little short snippets of scripts in there as examples, for like, here’s an example of dialogue, here’s what this looks like. They’re just these little boxes that show a little bit of screenplay format. To do that, we created this thing called Scrippets, which Nima Yousefi, who works for us, initially created. It’s super useful. It’s a plugin that you can install through WordPress. It’s been really great and useful.

The trouble is time moves on, and the plugin is no longer working well under the most recent versions of WordPress. Somebody out there listening probably does this for a living or as a hobby and has created WordPress plugins. If you are that person and you would like to step in and update this plugin for us, that would be fantastic. I’m sure there’s somebody out there who knows what they’re doing and could get this working. Scrippets, by the way, became the whole basis for plain text screenwriting. It has a long legacy, so you would be helping continue that legacy. If you’re that person and you want to help us out, just email Drew, ask@johnaugust.com, and he will be the person who can point you in the right direction.

With that done, it’s time for our main guest. Simon Rich is a writer and showrunner who created the series Miracle Workers and Man Seeking Woman and the film American Pickle. He’s also an author, who’s written novels and short story collections, such as Spoiled Brats, Hits and Misses, and New Teeth. His new book, Glory Days, is out July 23rd. Welcome to the program, Simon Rich.

**Simon Rich:** Thanks so much. Thanks for having me.

**John:** You have twice been my One Cool Thing, although Craig’s read your books and liked them too. Way back in Episode 179, which was the conflict episode, I talked about Spoiled Brats. In particular, one of my favorite short stories of all times is Gifted, a thing that I probably go back and read every year or two. I think it’s just such a brilliant short story.

**Simon:** Thank you so much. It really means a lot to me. Big fan of this show and a fan of your writing. It’s just thrilling to hear that the work resonates with you, truly.

**John:** For folks who have not read Gifted, the premise of it is that essentially this couple gives birth to what’s clearly the antichrist, clearly a demonic creature, and they’re so obsessed with getting it into the best private schools in New York City. I want to talk about the comedic premise and how we get into all that and why it’s a short story versus something else. But before we do that, I’d love some background on you, because I know you from your writing, but I don’t know basically anything about you. If you can tell us the backstory of Simon Rich.

**Simon:** The backstory, I grew up definitely obsessed with comedy, for sure. I would say particularly premise-driven, absurdist sketch comedy, Kids in the Hall, Mr. Show, The State, the chunk of SNL that was after Update where you were allowed to be a little bit more serial. I was also really obsessed with premise-driven genre fiction.

As much as I loved Kids in the Hall, I was equally obsessed with people like Richard Matheson or Stephen King or Bradbury or Philip Dick, Shirley Jackson, just anyone who would hook you at the end of the first page and make you keep reading. I was really always thinking of writing through the lens of what is a premise, what is a hook that I can generate that is strong enough to get people to keep turning the pages.

**John:** That’s great. What were the initial things you actually wrote? Were you in a stand-up group? What were the ways you were exploring this idea, like, “Here is the premise. Here is how we hook people in.”

**Simon:** My first book, which was called Ant Farm, it was a collection of short stories that were so short that they basically don’t even have narrative. Each piece is basically a premise, and then it ends before it’s developed in any way. That was pieces I’d written for The New Yorker and other magazines.

Basically, it wasn’t really until I got to Pixar – I was a staff writer at Pixar and I worked for Pete Docter writing on Inside Out. It wasn’t until I got there that I really started to think more in terms of narrative and storytelling. I kept being obsessed with premises, but that’s when my writing veered more into a traditional narrative space.

**John:** Great. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I definitely want to talk about magazine writing and your short stories in magazines, because I really have no idea how that whole world works. Clearly, that was a great entrée for you. But let’s get to Pixar. Was that your first time being a professional staff writer where you were going in to do a job and your job was to write funny stuff?

**Simon:** No, my first job was at Saturday Night Live.

**John:** I’ve heard of Saturday Night Live. It’s a show. For people who don’t know, it’s a very successful comedy program.

**Simon:** My first book had come out. Like I said, it was just a list of premises, and so SNL was a pretty good fit. I never had to really learn any narrative tools, because a lot of the sketches at the time just ended with everybody jumping out of a window. We literally got a warning once – or not a warning, but a very polite request from Seth Meyers, as one of the head writers, just asking us if we could, just for fun, have a week where no sketch ended with every character jumping through a plate glass window while a random ‘80s song played, because that was our go-to sketch out. It was just starting to get on everyone’s nerves.

It wasn’t really a story-centric show. That show was all about how do we get people to laugh by any means necessary. I learned so much about comedy and premise writing and dialogue there. I was there for four years. Then it wasn’t until I got to Pixar that I started to actually think about, what is this three-act thing.

**John:** Because this is a show that’s largely listened to by aspiring writers, they want to know how do you get hired into Saturday Night Live. Obviously, at this point you had Ant Farm. People could read that as a sample that, “Oh, this is a guy who understands what a joke is. He understands what a premise is.” But were you also submitting a packet? What was the process of getting hired at Saturday Night Live?

**Simon:** I had no packet. I had Harvard Lampoon. Colin Jost was two years ahead of me. I think he just handed my book to Seth and said basically, “I think you should read this and give this writer consideration.” I wasn’t really thinking about getting into TV and film at the time. I was a magazine writer at that point. I had another book that I was working on. I don’t think I had a television agent at the time. I had a book agent. I fell into it, but I’m really grateful that Colin thought of me for the show.

**John:** what I love about your description of your backstory in your biography is that you keep omitting things that were clearly important steppingstones along the way, like Harvard Lampoon. Harvard Lampoon is of course a great classic training ground for comedy writers. A lot of Saturday Night Live writers, a lot of Simpsons writers came out of Lampoon. Talk to us about – did you go into Harvard thinking, “Oh, this is a place I want to find myself.”

**Simon:** I went in desperate to write for the Harvard Lampoon, desperate to get better at writing. But I did really want to be a short story writer. It’s such a strange ambition.

**John:** Talk to me about that. Who are the short story writers that were inspiring you to say, “This is my calling.”

**Simon:** I would say when I was 18 years old, the writer that I was probably most obsessed with was TC Boyle, whose work has been adapted into a lot of films. Probably the people listening know Road to Wellville is one of them. But TC Boyle is this extremely funny, premise-driven writer. He’s written a lot of historical novels, but his short stories to me were just mind-boggling in terms of how original they were, how funny they were, and how had they incorporated various genres. He was never tethered to a specific genre. He was willing to write a Sherlock Holmes-inspired story and then go straight into a Western. He was a huge idol of mine. I remember going into one of his readings freshman year and just being too afraid to even meet him afterwards. That’s really what I wanted to be.

I would send my stories to every magazine on earth. There were a lot more magazines back then. The way that you would submit – it was before online submissions, actually, when I started. You would send a self-addressed stamped envelope along with your story, because the magazines were too cheap to mail you back. You would send your little short story. Under your name at the top, you had to put how many words it was to warn them what they were getting into. I was like, “This is 7,000 words.” I always felt pressured to keep them short, because I knew if that number was too big, they might not even read the first sentence.

I would send it off to places like Playboy and Esquire. These were magazines at the time that were publishing really good fiction. The New Yorker. Then I would always put the Lampoon as my return address, because the mail was more reliable coming to our office than to the dorm rooms. Every month, everybody would watch as I would get my stack of rejection letters.

Then I eventually started to get nicer rejection letters. I remember I did get a nice rejection letter from Playboy telling me to submit more. It was awesome. A couple others where they had actually written something back, as opposed to just sending you a form letter, which is the typical response, where it’s, “Thank you so much, but we… ” I still have some of those in a drawer somewhere. Some of them were really cool looking. I think the Paris Review had a really cool letterhead. Then I started selling some pieces. The first magazine that I sold to with any kind of consistency was Mad Magazine.

**John:** That’s great.

**Simon:** Then eventually, I started to place pieces in The New Yorker. Ant Farm is a collection of my most successful stories by that age. But again, they weren’t really stories. They were just kind of comedic premises without any elaboration whatsoever.

**John:** Let’s talk about the comedic premise, because one of the things I love about your short stories is I think if someone just handed me a book blind and said, “Read these short stories,” like, “Oh, this is Simon Rich.” I recognize a consistency of voice, despite the genres, despite whatever else. It’s all focusing on characters who are in violation of the social contract or that they have this opportunity to break the social contract, and the repercussions there, and there’s one thing that’s tweaked about the world.

It’s a very relatable premise of, it’s a dad who’s taken his family on the train and recognizes it was a big mistake because it’s taking too long. He goes to the bathroom, and he meets the troll there who tries to con him out of… The troll is the addition to the thing that makes it just not a grounded-in-reality story.

But let’s talk about, with that story or really any of your stories, what is the comedic premise? Is the comedic premise the thing that’s different or the thing you’re actually going to be able to explore by going into that? The example I gave you is a story about what it’s actually really like to be a parent and just give in and just let your kids do what they want to do. What is the comedic premise for you in those kinds of situations? Is it’s what’s different or what you can get out of it?

**Simon:** I would say that there are comedic premises that are really, really funny but are not necessarily emotionally – they don’t have what I would call narrative legs necessarily. For example, when I was at SNL, I wrote a lot of sketches with John Mulaney and Marika Sawyer. John Mulaney actually reads the audio book for Glory Days. I’m supposed to plug the hard cover, because it’s more expensive, but everyone should obviously listen to this one instead.

But we wrote a sketch called Rocket Dog. The premise is that Tracy Morgan is a film director and he has directed an Air Bud style film called Rocket Dog, the inspirational story of a boy and his dog and a rocket that they fly. It becomes clear, after watching the clip based on the in-memoriam sequence that runs at the end, that many dogs died, and also some people, during the making of Rocket Dog. That’s what I would call a comedic premise, but I don’t know if that necessarily is a premise that has narrative legs. It’s a premise that can support hopefully a three-minute-and-a-half sketch.

**John:** Let’s talk about that, because essentially what you’re describing, that is the punchline. The premise is the punchline where you’re getting to, and you have to establish the context around it. Talk about that specific sketch. What was the initial pitch on it? What was the process of going from, “What about this sort of space?” to, “There’s now something written down. There’s something that we’re going to get approved. There’s something that we’re actually going to rehearsal.” Can you walk us through what that’s like?

**Simon:** The pitch is the hook. The pitch is you reveal in an in memoriam that – you show a bunch of dogs. That’s the pitch. It’s like, okay, great, that’s a strong turn, a strong comedic reveal. How do we sustain it? The answer, of course, sketch comedy rules, as we had to figure out new ways to escalate it and show multiple in memoriam sequences and make sure that we’re escalating the carnage at every turn. Also, we have to write a lot of jokes and have reaction shots from Kristen. You just kind of go through the mechanics of sketch writing.

A big important execution thing for that is what music do we play for the in-memoriam sequence. Marika Sawyer, one of the funniest people ever, wisely pointed out that it had to be a pretty uplifting, jaunty song. Otherwise, it would just be too sad to watch all of these dead dogs float by. She selected Life Is A Highway, which is just perfect. Still to this day, it’s one of my daughter’s favorite songs, actually. To this day, when it comes on our Alexa, I just think of hundreds of murdered animals.

**John:** That’s great. But I want to get a little more granular in terms of, okay, you have this idea. How is it written up and how is it presented to the group? How does it get approved to be in the episode of the week?

**Simon:** Oh, like in the process at SNL. At SNL, the writers are really allowed to write whatever they want, for better or for worse. That’s probably an idea that we had on Monday. Then on Tuesday night is when we would’ve actually written it into script form. That’s just the three of us in a room pitching jokes. Typically, we would write a long outline first. That was every single joke option in order. We had a rough shape of a sketch, but there’s many, many alts. But they’re arranged loose, chronologically. All the entrance jokes are at the top. All the premise-establishing jokes are at the top.

**John:** When you say writing, is this just in Word or something? What are you doing this in?

**Simon:** I always like to write the first outline in Word. It would always be a long Word document. Then we wouldn’t switch into script form until we basically were sick of writing jokes for it. Then it’s about just picking your lanes and reading it out loud many, many times.

We were lucky that one of us could act. That was actually really important for Mulaney to basically read all the main parts, so we could actually hear whether or not it was good, because Marika and I are not performers. If we didn’t have somebody with comedic timing, we would have to just hear it in our heads, which is not as successful a way to vent comedy. It’s better to hear somebody who’s actually funny read it.

**John:** Over this course of – this is Tuesday night you’re writing or Wednesday night you’re writing?

**Simon:** This is Tuesday night into Wednesday morning, 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 a.m. Then you turned it in. Then Wednesday there’s this big table read where you hear cast doing it and the host doing it for the first time. Now it’s down to 40 sketches, I think, or even less. But when I was there, they would read sometimes up to 50 sketches.

**John:** Wow.

**Simon:** They would pick a dozen, and those would be fully produced, and then they would cut four during dress rehearsal on Saturday night.

**John:** In this Wednesday table read, so you already said Tracy Morgan will play the director. You’re already making those choices. Tracy doesn’t have time to prep it. He’s just reading it cold, right?

**Simon:** Right.

**John:** Great. Then hopefully, the sketch gets selected. You figure out how to produce it. Then you do it in the dress rehearsal. Then you see if you’re actually going to do it like for the big show. Rinse and repeat hundreds of times.

**Simon:** Yeah, exactly. You had everyone’s help for the rest of the week. Once the sketches are picked, you have a whole day on Thursday where you have essentially a room that is a very traditional LA style writers’ room. We had one day a week where it felt like working for a sitcom, where you come in at a normal hour, and everyone argues about what to order for lunch. You’re spending a day collectively looking at scripts, figuring out as a group how to improve it, how to pitch alts, how to make scenes more efficient. There was one day a week that felt like traditional sitcom writing feels like.

**John:** You have dozens of sketches you have to do, so you can’t spend the whole day working on Rocket Dog.

**Simon:** No, but they would split into two tables. There’d be five or six sketches maybe per room. Every eight-page script got at least an hour of attention. It always felt supported by the writers’ room.

**John:** Then at the end of the writers’ room day, the three of you would go back with the Rocket Dog sketch and get it into its final shooting shape? There’s obviously the rehearsal before there’s the dress, and then there’s the final show. How much would change between the rehearsal, between the dress and the final?

**Simon:** A lot is changing after the rewrite table, although not that much typically. I would say maybe it’s 10 or 20 percent different after a Thursday. It has to be pretty close to the goal line for them to pick it. It’s probably a new ending, definitely some improved jokes, but it’s essentially the same thing. The casting remains the same. The structure usually remains the same. Friday and Saturday you’re really mainly focused on production, like what are they wearing and approving props. At SNL, you’re approving everything, because the writers produce their own sketches at SNL.

**John:** Now, how many years were you working on Saturday Night Live?

**Simon:** Four seasons.

**John:** Four seasons. You went from there to go to Pixar?

**Simon:** Yeah, I went straight from SNL to Pixar. It was maybe a few days in between the end of the season and my first day. It was such a culture shock, because I’d literally been coming from an environment where we would spend six days making a 90-minute piece of entertainment. At Pixar, it would be 10 years to make the same number of minutes. I mainly worked on Inside Out. Just to put it into perspective, I think I was maybe the second or third writer on that. It had already been a year maybe of development before I showed up. After I was gone, it was I think five more years before it came out. It’s just absolutely glacial, especially compared to late-night television.

**John:** I’ve been to Pixar and on their campus. It’s such a strange place. Lovely, but super calm. They’re riding their bikes all around. I heard them say things like, “Let’s do a three-day offsite about this scene.” I’m like, “Oh my god.” That just terrifies me. They’re drilling down and being so granular on certain things. I don’t think I could survive it. But tell me about what you were doing on a daily basis. What words were you putting out?

**Simon:** That job, I guess I would describe it – it was a lot, I think, like being a staff writer for an animated sitcom is what I would compare it to. With the director, in this case Pete Docter, being the creator showrunner. It’s Pete’s movie. It’s Pete’s idea. It’s Pete’s vision. He’s the showrunner. Then as a staff writer, you’re working with him but also with storyboard artists and co-directors to help Pete break the story. Then I would be assigned scenes to write. It’s pretty similar to what I imagine it would be like to write for an animated sitcom.

**John:** At any given point, was there a fully completed script, or were you just doing pieces and little chunks? Could you ever print out a script and say this is the script for the movie at this state?

**Simon:** No, because it’s so iterative. Every single sequence is at a different stage. Some things are in animatics. Some things are just in boards. It’s a very complex process. Part of it is just because it’s really hard to animate a movie.

**John:** What you’re describing, people should know, is very traditional for how animated movies are done. Disney does it this way. Pixar does it this way. Most places are doing it this way. Then weirdly, I’ve had the opposite experience, where I write a script and turn it in, and they make that script. For the stop-motion animation I’ve done for Tim Burton, there’s a script. Yes, there are storyboard artists and other things, but they’re figuring out how to execute the script, rather than this being this back and forth.

It’s a very different experience for writers who are doing what you’re doing, which is having to constantly react to what other people around them are doing. It’s not theater, but it’s just like you’re almost documenting what the current state of the story is.

**Simon:** Totally.

**John:** I want to drill in a little bit more here, because you said this is the first one that you’ve learned about character in three acts and moving beyond that initial premise, because a sketch or your shorter short stories are literally just the premise, and it’s just the punchline. Here, you have to keep moving on beyond that. What stuff did you learn at Pixar?

**Simon:** I think the clearest explanation of what I learned is you get to see how much I ripped them off. I wrote a story when I was there called Unprotected, which is the story of a very conventional premise. It’s a teenage boy, and he is struggling to figure out a way to lose his virginity, so essentially the premise of a million summer movies for many decades. What made it unique is that it was told entirely from the point of view of the condom in the boy’s wallet, who is waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting to be used. It is just Toy Story. It is just a straight one-to-one version of Toy Story, an R-rated Toy Story, where it’s a coming-of-age story about a young person told from the perspective of this anthropomorphic object. It was so blatant.

I remember coming to campus when The New Yorker ran it. I remember walking past the lamp, the little lamp statue, and a storyboard artist pointed to me and was like, “Toy Story, right?” I was like, “Yep.” I didn’t get in trouble or anything. But that was just me really trying to see if I could take the story moves of literally a famous Pixar movie and just ape them for my own creative purposes. That’s something I’d keep doing. But I’m not shy about it, because Pixar would do the same thing.

We would constantly map out the story for hugely popular movies and just say, “Okay, how can we turn our project into this? What would happen if we copied it exactly?” Invariably, you’d find, we can copy these aspects exactly, but not these, because we have a slightly different agenda. That process of modeling and emulation is another really important thing that I learned from them, in addition to just literally copying them.

**John:** One of the things I think you can get away with so well in short stories – you can also do it in SNL sketches – is be able to take a piece of existing IP and completely just subvert it or ask the question you could never ask in the initial IP. The title story in Glory Days is Mario’s journey into middle age and what he’s wrestling with. Can you talk to us about that premise and what you were trying to explore and what was the initial instinct? Was it the wholly formed idea, or was it just like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be funny to do a story about what Mario’s life is actually like?”

**Simon:** The initial instinct was I read an article on my phone, I’m sure, that was like, “Super Mario debuted in 1984, 40 years ago,” or whatever. I said, “Oh, Mario’s turning 40. That’s hilarious. What is his midlife crisis like?” I was really excited to dive in, especially because I knew I’d be able to get to write the entire thing in Mario’s singular voice.

**John:** “It’sa me.”

**Simon:** Yeah, which is this incredibly offensive two-dimensional stereotype Italian accent. I was really excited to be able to take a voice like that, which is so dumb and so lazy, and just imbue it hopefully with some humanity and some pathos. You find out that he lost all his coins. He got so many. They had whole rooms of coins that he just pocketed. But he made a rookie mistake in the business, which is he trusted a friend to manage his money. Yoshi just took him for all he was worth. He’s estranged from the princess.

**John:** Who he still needs to rescue.

**Simon:** Who he needs to rescue for the millionth time. He says he’s starting to suspect that she’s getting kidnapped by Koopas on purpose, which of course is really offensive. But that is what he believes.

**John:** His relationship with Luigi is strained, and because of Luigi’s partner, and there’s lots of very specific things.

**Simon:** Luigi got sober, which is great, because he was gonna die. But he’s married to this extremely boring guy, Kalami, who is really nice and super loaded and has this fancy job, but is just constantly getting on Mario’s case, like, “You need to get a job.” He actually makes Mario fill out a resume, which is this very tragic scene, because Mario is like, “I have experienced saving princesses.” Kalami’s like, “You need to put down your plumbing experience, because that’s where the jobs are at in this market.” Mario is just kind of devastated.

It ends up being a story of different types of winning. Mario is a character who has a very specific idea of what it is to win. You get a lot of points. You climb that castle thing and you jump and grab that flag thing. Then you stand next to the princess while Japanese text scrolls slowly by your face. That’s what winning means. In midlife, through the story that he lives through, he kind of comes up with different priorities and a different understanding of what victory can look like.

**John:** You said that the premise was Mario’s turned 40, what’s Mario’s midlife crisis like. How much did you figure out about everything else you just described before you sat down to start writing, or was it just the process of writing that you explored all the other things?

**Simon:** Great question. Basically, what I do is – the first thing, still to this day, and this is what I’ve been doing since I started writing as a kid – until I have the premise, I basically don’t do any story or comedy work whatsoever. It’s just finding the premise.

Once I got the premise, then I do a lot of what I guess you would call exploratory writing or free writing, where I’m like, “Okay, I really like this hook. I think it has a motion and legs. It makes me laugh.” Then I just write a bunch of just random scenes. If it’s close third person, there’ll be third-person scenes. If it’s first person, there’ll be first-person paragraphs, just to test it, to make sure that it’s fun, that I’m gonna have a fun time doing it.

Then I take a big step back and I outline it. That process is, I would imagine, very similar to the one that most screenwriters go through. I take a big step back and I say, “Okay, what is the act one, act two, act three.” I don’t do that unless I’m really in love with the premise and in love with the point of view.

**John:** You say you don’t want to start until you really know the premise. By the premise, you mean the hook, and do you think what the engine is that will get you through the story?

**Simon:** No, I don’t necessarily have the engine. I think I just have the premise and the point of view. Is it going to be first person, is it going to be close third.

**John:** Let’s also define close third person, because it’s a term that people may not be familiar with. Third person is obviously we’re looking at the character doing stuff, so “he did,” “she did,” that kind of stuff. But close third person is like the camera’s almost right behind the person’s back and we’re only seeing the stuff and knowing the stuff that they would know.

**Simon:** Exactly. Screenplays, they are pretty much written in what fiction writers would call the omniscient third, where it’s like, this is what is happening. This is literally what you are looking at. There are exceptions, like if you’re Shane Black or whatever, where the stage directions have a personality maybe or they’re written in the first person by the screenwriter.

**John:** They’re also written in the first-person plural. That’s why the “we hears,” “we sees,” the feeling like we are here together watching this movie, but we don’t have insight into just one character. We can have a global view.

**Simon:** You never write a stage direction like, “As she crosses the crosswalk, she sees a bird out of the corner of her eye and recalls a childhood song.” That would be very hard for the viewer to notice in a wide shot.

**John:** If you establish the premise and the point of view before you go into it, then you’re free writing to find what are the things that are interesting there, find what do you think the little bits and moments might be.

**Simon:** It’s like test driving a car or something. I just want to know that it’s going to be fun, because writing a story is really hard. I want to make sure it’s going to be a good time. It’s like, is it gonna be fun to write in this voice for a few weeks?

**John:** How much time are you spending on that free writing period?

**Simon:** Not too long. I would say a couple of days and then I’ll say, “Yeah, this is gonna be fine.” Then I have to do the challenging thing, which is break the story.

**John:** Then breaking the story, this is your outline phase, which is basically what are the beats. For a story like Glory Days, how long is your outline? How detailed is that outline in terms of these are the actual scenes that are gonna happen?

**Simon:** I don’t go as spartan as cards on a board, like, I would in a TV room, but I’m pretty close. I would say a sentence or two sentences max per scene. I just try to figure out what is – I guess I can give away that story. It doesn’t really matter. The situation, the call to action is the princess gets kidnapped by a Koopa. But the issue is that he has horrific back problems. Mario has spent the entirety of his adult life just running and jumping at full speed, at full intensity.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Simon:** Smashing many bricks.

**John:** With his head.

**Simon:** With his head or his fists. It’s unclear how he’s doing it. But either way, it’s very arduous and rugged. His doctor, Dr. Mario, no relation, tells him that he needs intense spinal surgery, or else he might lose the ability to walk. He says, “You’re gonna lose the ability to walk.” He also speaks in Mario voice, of course.

Mario can’t make it through eight worlds, plus mini worlds, all the way to Koopa’s castle, unless he fixes his back. If he has the surgery, he’s incapacitated for a year. He finds this back brace, this revolutionary back brace that he can wear, but it’s really expensive. He needs money to get the back brace so he can rescue the princess. That is the act one goal is he’s gotta do it.

The low point at the end of act two is, by this point he has robbed his brother, because Luigi and his husband refuse to – they basically say, “We’re not going to enable your toxic relationship with the princess anymore. We’re not gonna lend you any more money.” Mario, in a really emotional low point, he steals Luigi’s Amazon packages and sells them online so he can get enough money for this back brace. Then he sends it over to the guy, and the guy starts asking him for garlic over the phone. That’s when he realizes that it was actually Wario.

**John:** The whole time.

**Simon:** It was a scam. He was tricked. Now he has nothing. He has no back brace. He has no money. He’s robbed his brother. That’s the act two low point. The princess is sending him texts like, “Where the hell are you?” He’s got no way to save her and no way to save himself. Then act three is redemption. The way I actually outline the stories is no different than the way I would outline an episode of Man Seeking Woman or a film.

**John:** Talk me through that process. In this outline, you’re really establishing what are the story points, how much story do I need to tell this whole story, because what you’re describing is great for a short story. It’s not gonna be enough for a movie, but there’s plenty there for what this is supposed to be. I think one of the great things about a short story is that you don’t have to have anyone’s permission to make this parody of Mario, whereas a movie or anything else, you couldn’t do it.

**Simon:** There’s a lot of freedom that you have in fiction that you don’t have as a screenwriter. Fictional characters never show up late and hungover. You don’t have any budget conversations. You don’t have any studio notes. The amount of control and freedom that authors have over their books is amazing compared to the amount of control most screenwriters have. I’m not a hugely famous writer, author, but I wield as much power over my books as Vin Diesel does over the Fast and the Furious franchise.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Simon:** I could say to my editor, “I want to intentionally misspell this word.” My editor will be like, “I don’t think that’s a smart idea, but okay, Mr. Diesel.” It’s on that level. It’s such a different level of freedom than I have when I’m working in TV and film.

**John:** Absolutely. I’ve done three books. I did the Arlo Finch series. It was great and liberating to actually have final say over every last little detail. Every piece of world building that I wanted to do or not do was there because I wanted it specifically there. At the same time, you don’t have the benefits of everybody else there to make a big final thing.

As we wrap up the premise, I want to talk about your experience actually making things with other people and having to do longer-form things, your two series or American Pickle. These are situations where you had this comedic premise that was originally a short story and you had to build it out into – let’s take Man Seeking Woman into a series. What is that conversation, and what needs to change in order to make that a sustainable thing with other people involved?

**Simon:** I love collaborative writing for a number of reasons. The biggest reason is just that – and I’ve talked about this already – you learn so much, or at least I’ve learned so much, from working with other writers. I learned so much at SNL from writing with Mulaney, writing with Marika, writing with Seth Meyers and for Seth. Seth was my boss. He was an amazing teacher and mentor. I learned a lot from trying to emulate him but also just literally asking him questions, like, “How do I do this? Why did you make that choice?”

Same thing at Pixar. I feel like I learned a ton working for Pete on Inside Out. But I would also just ask him and everybody else, “Hey, when you were doing Toy Story 3, why did you make this decision? How did you come up with this story point? What was your process?” You learn, or at least I’ve learned a ton from the collaborative work that I’ve done. You have access to not just the brilliant minds of other writers, but like you said, all these other brilliant artists who are contributing in such meaningful ways.

I would say the thing that I miss the most when I’m writing fiction is the music, because it’s such an unbelievably powerful, visceral, emotional tool. My younger kid has this Cocomelon book where you press a button and it sings the ABCs, and you press another button and it sings, “The wheels on the bus go round and round.” I always fantasize that I could have a button in my short story collections when it gets to the emotional denouement of a story. Mario is in the hospital bed holding Luigi’s hand. If you could press a button and John Williams plays, that would be dope. I really miss that tool.

But the thing that it gets you is freedom but also control. I think that a show like Man Seeking Woman, I’m really proud of the show. I loved running that show. But I would have to be a megalomaniacal psychopath to say that that show is mine the way my books are mine. I didn’t write all the episodes. I certainly didn’t act in any of them. I did not make the monsters. I definitely didn’t compose or sing the song at the end, in the third act of Episode 307, which is the only reason why the emotional arc landed.

There’s so many aspects of it that I cannot take credit for, whereas the books, for better or for worse, they are completely mine. They’re more communicative. I don’t know if they’re necessarily better, but they’re more personal.

**John:** Yeah, for sure. We have two listener questions that I think might be especially appropriate for you. Drew, can you help us out with these listener questions?

**Drew:** James in Washington writes, “Given the current state of the industry, should struggling screenwriters think about writing novels if they have good stories that can’t find a pathway to the screen?”

**John:** What’s your take on that, Simon?

**Simon:** It’s a great question. I think everybody should try it, just like I think everybody should try stand-up comedy. Stand-up comedy, there’s nothing more pure than that. You can just stand on a stage. People don’t even need to know how to read. They can be illiterate. You can just tell them anything. The only reason not to do it really is because you are bad at it or don’t like it, which you can’t really learn until you try it.

I tried stand-up in high school and learned very quickly that I was bad at it and also that I hated it. But if you’re okay at it and you like it, then you might be willing to put in the thousands of hours it takes to become great at it.

I think it’s the same thing with fiction. Give it a shot. If you’ve never written fiction before, it would be unusual for you to start off being great at it. But you might enjoy it and you might feel like it’s worth pursuing. If you really like it, then you might be able to put in enough time to become great at it. Then you’ll have this whole other avenue through which to express yourself, where you don’t need to ask for permission. You don’t need to get funded. You don’t need to pitch. You can just write it, and then it’s in the world and it’s finished.

**John:** Absolutely. I think implicit in James’s question is, “It’s tough to make a living as a screenwriter now, so should I be writing novels because it’s easier to make a living as a novelist?” It’s not. It’s really tough to be a person who writes books. It’s tough to be a writer who is making a living in general. Your ability to have complete control over everything and to not have to get anyone’s permission to do a thing is great. You don’t need permission to write a screenplay either. But if fiction appeals to you, try it.

One thing I’d also recommend is listen to what Simon’s saying about the premise. Some premises work really well for fiction or they work really well for a short story, they work really well for a play, but they’re not gonna necessarily work well for a movie. If you have an idea that is really interesting to you but it doesn’t feel like a movie idea or a series idea, then give yourself permission to explore it as what it wants to be.

**Simon:** Totally.

**John:** Let’s try a second question here.

**Drew:** Macklin writes, “I’ve recently found a love for playwriting again. Is there an unknown downside to publishing work in other areas, like novels or plays, or establishing an online newsletter or something?”

**Simon:** A downside? Not that I can think of. It’s a blast. Writing fiction is so fun. There are a lot of screenwriters out there that I think would be really good at writing fiction and might enjoy it. Playwriting is not something I’ve done a lot of, so I can’t speak to that. But it’s really thrilling to be able to just wake up in the morning and go right into it and not have to ask for permission.

**John:** I would agree with you. I’m curious about how do you budget your time in terms of thinking, “Oh, I should do a short story now,” or is short story writing what you do when you don’t have other Hollywood stuff that you need to do? What’s the Simon Rich calculus for writing short stories?

**Simon:** As strange as it is to admit it, I am a short story writer. That is how I identify. That is what I’ve been doing since college. Everything else is, I don’t want to say intrusion, because that makes me sound ungrateful for the Hollywood work. But Glory Days is my 10th book. I have done other things. I did write a couple of novels. I’ve run television shows. But even the shows that I ran were based on my books. Most of the movies I’ve written or scripts I’ve written have been based on my short stories.

I know it’s a weird thing to have devoted one’s life to, and I’m not going to try to defend it. But I am like a short story writer who sometimes adapts his work into other mediums, basically.

**John:** What you’re doing though, it’s analogous to some people who’ve spent their entire life writing on SNL though, because you’re writing very short, focused things that are in a very specific form, and that’s what feels really natural for you to write. Focusing on that and finding a thing that you write that you love sounds great.

I do wonder if sometimes on the podcast, because we’re mostly talking about feature writing or TV writing, we steer people into belief that that’s a thing that people should be aiming to do. There’s lots of other great ways to write that are not those things. It was important for us to have you on just to talk about people who have that instinct, who are funny, who have that instinct like, “This is a funny idea.” Just because it’s a funny idea doesn’t necessarily mean that a feature or a TV series is the only way to express it.

**Simon:** Totally. Totally. I think the voice thing, that’s a big one. You might find that you really love to write in the first person and from an unusual point of view. That’s what I miss the most when I’m writing scripts.

I would say when I was running Man Seeking Woman, those three years were the one time in my writing career where I really was focused on television more than fiction. I really felt at that job like I had as much freedom as one could ask for. The reason why is because it was at the absolute peak of an insane bubble.

Also, our show is unbelievably cheap. A lot of forces had to conspire for us to be allowed to continue to make that show that nobody saw. The Canadian dollar was at a historic low. We were shooting in Toronto. If you look at a 150-year graph of the Canadian dollar, there’s this unaccountable three-year dip that perfectly coincides with the history of Man Seeking Woman. I don’t know what happened. There’s a maple syrup shortage or something.

But anyway, working on that show, I had a lot of freedom. I could write and approve my favorite premises. I have Bill Hader playing Hitler in a pilot, and nobody blinked. But I still missed writing in the first person. I missed being able to tell an entire story from the perspective of a horse or a baby or a talking condom. Even though I could have characters like that on a show and I could write dialogue from unusual points of view and-

**John:** But you didn’t have insight into the inner thinking of that character. The way that fiction writing is like whispering in somebody’s ear is just a very special connection.

**Simon:** It’s very specific. Even in the best of times, which I would say Man Seeking Woman was for me, I found myself missing my incredibly stupid narrator voice.

**John:** Great. It is time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend stuff to our audience. My One Cool Thing this week is Howtown. It’s a series on YouTube by Joss Fong and Adam Cole. They try to answer one question in every episode, so things like how do we know what dogs can see, how do we really know COVID’s real death toll. It’s just incredibly well produced, smartly researched. But also it just looks really good. It’s smartly written. Check out the series Howtown. There’s a bunch of episodes that are up now, and they’re gonna keep doing more of them. But check it out. YouTube, Joss Fong and Adam Cole. Simon, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Simon:** I do. I’m on vacation for a couple weeks in Wisconsin, seeing some family. I found a book on the shelf of the Airbnb that I’m at, which I am obsessed with. I’m also finished with it. Hopefully the last 50 or 100 pages aren’t terrible. But I’m gonna recommend it anyway. It’s called Dr. Eckener’s Dream Machine, the historic saga of the round-the-world zeppelin, by Douglas Botting. It is just a phenomenal, true, nonfiction account ofana actual 11-day round-the-world zeppelin voyage that took place in 1929.

**John:** Wow.

**Simon:** Basically, when you think of zeppelins, you think of the Hindenburg, which is the correct thing to think of, because that wasn’t a one-off accident. These things exploded all the time, catastrophically. The way that they worked is there was a big bag of hydrogen, and then basically a fire would run an engine that was right next to the bag. If any sparks cut from the fire to the bag, everyone would die every single time. But it worked one time. This is about that one time. The descriptions of them circumnavigating the globe are stunning, because they’re not very high off the ground. They’re only at times about 300 or 500 feet off the ground.

**John:** Oh, wow.

**Simon:** They go over continents that have never seen or heard of air travel. They describe in Siberia people essentially, for the 20 hours that they’re going over Siberia, everyone is terrified and thinks that they are an actual alien or a monster.

**John:** That’s amazing. As you bring up zeppelins, or this specific story, there are so many premises that can pop out of this. What you’re describing in terms of zeppelins just basically want to explode, telling it from the zeppelin’s point of view, telling it from the insurance company that has to insure zeppelins. There are endless possibilities there. Or the actual story of this journey could be something fascinating too. It’s a great One Cool Thing.

**Simon:** Thank you.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies and hats. You can find those at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record with Simon about about getting your short stories published in magazines. Simon Rich, an absolute pleasure talking with you finally after all these years.

**Simon:** Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. Big fan of the show and fan of yours as well.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Simon, you publish these stories, before they’re in your books, in many, many magazines around the world. New Yorker obviously is the one I think about the most, but McSweeney’s, GQ, Vanity Fair. I have other friends who have don’t his as well. Megan Amram does this. BJ Novak does this. Can you talk me through what the actual process is for you right now? Your short stories are gonna be great. Do you just say, “I got a new one,” and they just say, “Great. Here’s a couple pages.” What is the process for letting them know that you have a short story that you want published?

**Simon:** Good question. It’s a smoother process now than it was when I started 20 years ago. Should I walk through the genesis of it?

**John:** It’s different if you’re Stephen King. Talk us through the process.

**Simon:** In the early days, I had no agent, and I would just send envelopes with my stories – that’s dating myself – to various magazines, with a self-addressed stamped envelope, saying, “Would you please read it?” They would either not write back at all, or they would send back a form, rejection letter, a rejection slip, I should say. A lot of times they were just actually horizontal strips of paper.

**John:** They didn’t want to waste a full sheet of paper.

**Simon:** Exactly. There’s no need to. The next step was I started to get some positive feedback from some editors at magazines saying, “We like this,” or, “We read this,” or, “We think this is really funny, but it’s not for us. Please submit again.”

Then all of a sudden, you have a contact. You have an editor. Then you have their email address or even phone number. Then it becomes a little bit easier, because you can ask them, “What sort of things are you looking for?” Then they might write back, “We’re doing a travel issue in six months. You have any travel pieces?” or whatever. The bullseye appears more cleanly through the fog as you start to know editors. Then once you have an agent, then it becomes much, much easier, because they of course have a lot more contacts probably than you do typically as a writer.

**John:** Now, at this point, you tell your agent, “Here’s the short story that I have.” Then are you discussing where is the right place for it to go, are there preexisting contracts or negotiations? Would any of your stories be appropriate for any of these places? What are you thinking as you do that?

**Simon:** I learned from a really early age that when I feel pressure to sell things, it doesn’t necessarily make my writing worse, but it makes it less interesting. I only really felt that pressure once, which tells you how privileged my career has been. But it was during the writers strike in 2007, ’08. Was that-

**John:** 2008, yeah.

**Simon:** Yeah, around then, yeah. I had started writing for SNL, but I was four weeks in. I still hadn’t earned the minimum for health insurance. I was doing just fine. I had a book deal. But I did feel some pressure to make some money. I started pitching aggressively to every single magazine under the sun and wrote a lot of pieces that I think are just not in my voice. It was more just like, “Okay, this is what’s in the news,” or, “This Maxim Magazine knockoff seems to be doing a lot of this sort of piece.” I started to write a lot of things just chasing freelance money.

Now, because I have the luxury of thinking of things in a less mercenary way, I just write the entire book, basically. I don’t show anything to anybody really. Then I just send the entire manuscript to my agent, who sends it to The New Yorker, and they pick the ones that they want to run. That way, I’m not thinking about, “Oh, they probably want a Trump piece,” or whatever.

**John:** Totally. Thinking about it this way, so you’ve written all the short stories that are gonna be a part of a book. I notice in Glory Days, you have it broken into one, two, and three. There’s some sectioning to it, and yet each of the stories does stand on its own. I’m hard-pressed to find a connecting thread between them. But they all feel like this is one book that is together.

You’ve written this book. You’re sending it to your editor. It’s going to The New Yorker. What is the purpose of getting those published in The New Yorker? Is it from them paying you directly, or it’s exposure for the book that you’re trying to do?

**Simon:** My goal as a writer always is for people to read the stories or listen to them or experience them in some way. That is the absolute only goal that I have. I hope that people will give these stories a chance, read them, listen to them, relate to it, connect to it in some emotional way, and I’ll feel less alone in the universe. That’s why I make this stuff. One hopes that they have enough cash that they could spend their days living that artistic life.

**John:** With these short stories in this most recent collection, The New Yorker might say, “Oh, we want this short story.” Would they ever come back to you with a note on the short story, or is it gonna be published as it is, because you also have your book editor who’s going through and reading the stories too. Do you get stuff from both sides?

**Simon:** I don’t really get big edits anymore. But I do get a lot of suggestions and feedback about what you would call line edits, which are really useful and really helpful.

I also get fact checked, which you wouldn’t expect for a fiction writer. But it’s incredibly useful. The fact checkers at The New Yorker are the best in the world. They’re basically the equivalent of what we would call script supervisors. They’re finding inconsistencies. They’re saying, “Why are they eating lunch if it’s night out?” and, “I thought you said she was a cardiologist, but then when we see her patient, he’s complaining about a broken leg.” That’s a huge help to me.

They’ll say, “Stop using that adverb. You’ve used it three times in 4,000 words.” I get a lot of editorial guidance and help when it comes to the actual execution of the sentences that I’m super grateful for. But I don’t get the notes that I get all the time in TV and film of like, “Can you make the protagonist more likable?”

**John:** Totally. Where are you at in your process? This book is coming out July 23rd. Everyone should buy it. Is the next book already done? Are you short story by short story? Where are you at in your work?

**Simon:** I used to do that. I used to basically, when I would finish a book, I would literally turn in a book and then the next day would start the next one. Now, I try really hard not to do that, because I find that especially my early books, I started to repeat myself, because I hadn’t allowed myself to live life in between the books. I would just be writing the same book again, but slightly worse. I don’t want to single books out. But I think the first half of my career, there are definitely a few where I’m like, I should’ve maybe waited a year before diving back into it.

What I’m doing now is the same thing I’ve done after the last few books. I just try to generate premises from reading. I read a lot about subjects that I’m interested in. I let myself just jot down premises that I think might be worth exploring. I’m not gonna pursue any of them for probably another six months or so.

**John:** You’re not a person who beats yourself up if you’re not sitting down generating 1,000 words per day.

**Simon:** No. I work a set number of hours a day, I would say. But sometimes my work is just sitting down for six hours and reading a book about zeppelins, because it’s been proven to me that that’s useful.

There was a yearlong period where I was just obsessed with pirates. I would just read endlessly about pirates, and to no end, really. Then one day I just got the idea for a story about two pirates, Captain Blackbones the Wicked, and Rotten Pete the Scoundrel. They find a stowaway on their pirate ship, and they have to decide whether or not to throw the stowaway overboard to the sharks or to feed her and take care of her. I was like, “Oh, this is a parenting story.” I ended up writing the story Learning the Ropes in my last book, New Teeth. I wrote that story a full year into my pirate obsession. There are a number of topics like that, where I’m like, someday I’m sure I will figure out. I will crack it. But you can’t really force it.

**John:** Simon, an absolute pleasure.

**Simon:** Thanks. Thanks for having me.

**John:** Thanks.

Links:

* [Glory Days](https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/simon-rich/glory-days/9780316569002/?lens=little-brown) by [Simon Rich](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Rich)
* [“Gifted” by Simon Rich](https://nypost.com/2014/12/28/in-book-excerpt-ex-snl-writer-takes-aim-at-proud-nyc-parents/)
* [Rocket Dog](https://vimeo.com/3771062) sketch
* [Howtown with Joss Fong and Adam Cole](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JS2rCjvjYLU)
* [Dr. Eckener’s Dream Machine: The Great Zeppelin and the Dawn of Air Travel](https://www.amazon.com/Dr-Eckeners-Dream-Machine-Zeppelin/dp/0805064583) by Douglas Botting
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nico Mansy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Drew Marquardt](https://www.drewmarquardt.com/) with help from [Jonathan Wigdortz](https://www.wiggy.rocks/). It is edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/649standard.mp3).

Scriptnotes, Episode 648: Farewell Scenes, Transcript

Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Heads up that today’s episode has just a little bit of swearing in it.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 648 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you say goodbye? We’ll take a look at farewell scenes to explore what makes them work. We’ll also answer listener questions about managers, fairies, and moving to Los Angeles. To help us do all of this, let’s welcome back our OG guest host, Aline Brosh McKenna. Aline, welcome back.

Aline Brosh McKenna: I’m actually Craig Mazin.

John: You are Craig Mazin. Craig always affects different voices, and he’s been working-

Aline: Je suis Craig Mazin.

John: I really respect his dedication to the craft. He really finds what it is, that unique kind of thing. As busy as he’s been doing The Last of Us, he still found time to. Craig, thank you again for all of the hard work you’ve done.

Aline: He’s doing a great impression of Aline. I’m doing a really good impression of Aline.

John: We’ve lost the thread here. Aline, it’s so nice to see you.

Aline: Thank you. Thank you for being so gracious about me being late. Anyone who knows me know I am scrupulously on time. And I was on time for the time I thought I was, which was 11:00. But for 10:30, when it actually was, not on time.

John: Not on time. Aline, I haven’t seen you for a bit. Tell me in just a general sense – you don’t have to name projects, but what are you working on? What’s under your fingers right now?

Aline: I have two thrusts to my day. There’s the things that I personally am writing, and then I have a company called Lean Machine, which is run by the wonderful-

John: Can I stop you for a sec?

Aline: Yeah.

John: I just recognized that Lean is actually related to Aline.

Aline: It is.

John: I’ve known you 10 years. I just now got this.

Aline: It’s because when I met my husband – people really love to call me AY-leen, and my husband said, “You should tell people it’s Aline Mean Fighting Machine.” When I started my company, I had to choose between Lean Machine and Fighting Machine.

John: No Fighting Machine.

Aline: I chose Lean, because we’re on time and under budget. I have a company that I run with this woman named Heather Morris, who’s wonderful, fantastic, used to work for Mindy Kaling. We have about 15 to 20 projects. About maybe 30 percent of them are things I’m writing in TV and film, and then the rest we work with other writers. That has been just a pure delight.

I’m not shocking anyone when I tell you it’s a tough time in the business right now. And so what I’ve really focused on is trying to be the producer that I would have wanted to have, which is someone you can really call for story input, because sometimes you work with producers and they are really helpful for story, and sometimes you work with producers and you call them when you have a story problem and you’re like, “Never mind.” It’s like when you ask your parents for advice about your friends, and then they start and you’re like, “Never mind.”

We provide a lot of story support. We help break stories. We make decks for writers. We proofread their scripts. We get sandwiches from Sycamore Kitchen. We try and get things in as good situation for the writers, so that they’re very proud and excited about what they do. I was telling you we started this company in 2019, which was just really great time to start.

John: A great time, because the business was expanding, so there were many more opportunities. However, you could not have known all the roadblocks ahead.

Aline: We did run into a buzzsaw. In fact, Heather started February of 2020, and we moved her right into her office, and then she wasn’t there for months. But I’ve really enjoyed working with writers. There is something fun about breaking a story with a writer and then seeing what they come back with. We work with wonderful people. That’s been really fun.

In this time, still creating things in collaboration with people, which is my favorite thing, I still get to do that. Then I split time between TV and movies. Right now, I’m working on a rewrite, and then I have another movie that we’re making a deal for. Then we have a project that has popped out of a place that it used to be, and we’re trying to find a home for that.

One of the interesting things is, in addition to the market being very soft, I don’t know if you found this, but the making-a-deal process has become glacial beyond my understanding. We have a running joke, because it’ll be like, “Oh, the BA guy is water skiing. Oh, the BA guy sprained his Achilles.”

John: BA being business affairs.

Aline: Yeah.

John: A thing that’s important to understand is, when they say, “Oh, congratulations. We’re gonna have a deal. We’re gonna hire you to do this thing,” that is the start of a process. When you and I started in this business, it could take not usually days; it was weeks to get that deal settled. Your agents and your lawyers and everyone would go back and forth, but you’d come up with a deal, and then you’d start writing. Over the course of the last decade, but really I think in a crisis point since the pandemic, to make a deal has taken forever. There’s times where you’re waiting 11 months to actually make your deal and start writing. Just crazy.

Aline: The movie stuff that I’m doing has been okay, has moved apace really, because if you’re working on something that they have in their mind as like, “Oh, we need this,” or, “We’re making this.” But TV is the thing that used to be, we would be saying, “Oh, TV’s so great, because they need things every season.”

John: There’s a season. There’s a schedule.

Aline: But there’s no seasons anymore. One of the things we’re taking out soon, we’re adding a producer, and we had this writer, and I think that deal took 10 months to make or something like that. And then some of these deals were interrupted by the strike. So we would’ve started it, then there was the six months of the strike, then you come back and you’re still making the deal.

Those poor BA people opened a door and a bunch of snow fell on them, because all these deals that had not gotten done before the strike, they’re doing those. So there’s just been, especially in TV, where you often have numerous components… Sometimes when I come onto a movie, it’s just me; it’s not my company. But things where you have multiple companies coming together with the writers, with maybe a rights deal, a book deal, it’s so funny, because as you said, all this enthusiasm, we’re making this thing, and then 10 months later you’re like, “Oh, right, yeah, no. Yes, this guy.”

John: I’m in that same situation right now. There’s two feature projects, both of which I would love to do. I’m halfway allowing myself to commit to them, like, “Oh, these are things I’m going to write.” But I’m also recognizing it could take so long to make the deals, I’ll probably be writing something else before I’m writing those projects.

I just came off five weeks on a project, which was really interesting for me, because you and I have done weekly work on features, where we come in and we’re working on a thing that is in trouble. It’s about to go into production, it’s in production, or maybe it’s in post and they’re gonna do rewrites. I had this situation for a series that had already been shot and was going to go back and do rewrites.

It was very challenging, interesting work, because I had to write new material that could fit between things that were already established and were gonna stay in the series. But then I had to keep in mind that, “Oh, this new scene also has to pay off in Episode 2, 3, 4, and 5.” Then there were things that could change and couldn’t change. It was really difficult. Drew had to go through all this with me, because there were times where I had to ask. I’m like, “Wait, what happens in Episode 4?” because I want to make sure I’m not duplicating this thing or making the thing that happens in Episode 4 impossible.

Aline: That’s kind of cool. We like to do our puzzles. That’s a puzzle.

John: It was a jigsaw puzzle, the kind of thing that Craig would hate.

Aline: That’s correct.

John: But Craig’s not here to complain about it.

Aline: That’s correct.

John: We’ll talk about these things, but also, in our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I thought we might talk about journaling. I don’t know if you journal at all. It’s a thing I keep trying to do. I never actually do.

Aline: Great.

John: But should we be keeping track of what we’re doing all day?

Aline: Oh, can’t wait to talk about that.

John: We’ll talk about that. In the news, Inside Out 2 opened huge. It opened in $155 million in the U.S. and Canada, $295 million worldwide, a huge, giant opening hit for the summer. I’m so happy for everybody at Pixar and the people who made it.

Aline: God, I’m rooting for anything that works. Rooting, rooting. Just need those things to work and for people to be excited.

John: Yeah, so it was great to see that. I was honestly surprised. I didn’t know that the world had a huge, pent-up demand for Inside Out. I liked the first movie. It wasn’t like, oh, that’s a surefire sequel. I was surprised.

Aline: I think that that has built up an increased following on Disney Plus, where kids have really dug into some of the older animated titles. I know Moana and-

John: Encanto.

Aline: Encanto. Those have I think become huge juggernauts on Disney Plus. I think that that’s Inside Out. If you’ve been watching it at home, it’s exciting to take your… It’s an all-audience… I think because that movie’s a little more sophisticated, in that it has these more, almost Charlie Kaufman-y themes to it. It’s like a Charlie Kaufman movie for kids. I think adults enjoy unpacking the math of that.

John: It wasn’t the only good news about the box office. Bad Boys 4 opened up really well, and opened up better than I think people expected as well. A $56 million opening weekend, made $214 cumulative as we’re recording this. That’s great for them. Good job, Sony.

Also, Sony and George Gallo settled their suit. Apparently, there was an ongoing lawsuit for many, many years. The original movie was based on a George Gallo short story, and it was a question of, do they have to pay him for that short story for the other things. Apparently, they finally settled that lawsuit that had been going on for years and years and years.

Aline: Do you know how that was settled?

John: Of course no one ever talks about what the actual settlement details were. But both sides are apparently happy that the thing is resolved. It’s really about derivative works, because obviously they buy the short story to make the first movie, and then it’s a question of are all other movies based on that short story or not.

Aline: Got it.

John: Sony’s also busy; they’re buying Alamo Drafthouse. I don’t know if you saw this.

Aline: I did see that.

John: Do you like the Alamo Drafthouse? Have you been down there?

Aline: I love it. I love it. Now, how branded is it gonna be? I saw a movie at The Egyptian, which is owned by Netflix.

John: It’s Netflix’s Egyptian, right?

Aline: Yes. It’s beautiful. I don’t know what it looked like before, but it’s sparkling new. Concessions are good. It’s a really nice place to see a movie. I just wonder, are we gonna be looking at Charlie’s Angels everywhere? How branded do you think it’ll be?

John: I doubt it’ll be very branded, but we’ll see what happens. For international listeners who aren’t familiar with the chain, Alamo Drafthouse came out of Alamo, Texas and was known for having a real love of movies and retrospectives of films, older things in addition to new releases. They also had food that came to your seat, which was delicious. Just a really good movie-going experience. We have one in Downtown Los Angeles. For me and Aline, it’s a bit of a hassle to get to, but it’s worth it when you want to see a movie down there. I’m hoping that the chain stays the same and they keep that same vibe.

But it’s important to bring up the fact that it feels like this was a thing that wasn’t supposed to be allowed to happen, because we don’t think about movie studios being able to own theaters, because of the consent decrees. We’ve talked about this on the show before, but back in 1948, the government said that you could not be both a movie studio and also own the theaters, because that was a vertical integration. That was bad. I’ll put a link in the show notes. Apparently, that only applied to Warner Bros, 20th Century Fox, and MGM. It didn’t apply to Columbia, because Columbia didn’t own movie theaters at the time. And so even if that had not been overturned relatively recently, nothing was stopping Sony from owning a theater.

Aline: Listen. I wish someone would buy the ArcLight. I miss the ArcLight every day. I know they’re gonna reopen the Cinerama Dome, but the actual ArcLight, that’s where my kids grew up going to the movies. It was the greatest. I wish someone would buy that and bring that back.

John: I feel like eventually ArcLight Complex will reopen. It’s been so tough to see it happening. What I’ve heard is that the ongoing issue is that ArcLight Theaters owed money to the studios and basically had to figure out some sort of settlement for unpaid film rental, and that may be what’s actually keeping them from being back in business. I hope it gets resolved. It was such a great place to see movies.

Aline: The best.

John: The best. More follow-up. Drew, talk to us about 3 wing 4. I did not understand this.

Drew Marquardt: In our last Three Page Challenge, there was a script called The Long Haul, where two of the characters were talking about 3 wing 4. You and Craig and me had no idea what that meant. Several listeners wrote in that this comes from the Enneagrams.

Aline: Oh, I’ve done this. I’ve done this.

Drew: Which is a personality profiling system kind of like Myers-Briggs.

John: Great. 3 wing 4 refers to what your personality type would be. In Myers-Briggs, I was an ENTJ or whatever that was.

Aline: So am I.

John: Not surprising that we’re successfully driven screenwriters and have the same kind of things. We’ll put a link in the show notes to what these descriptions are.

Aline: I did this, but I can’t remember what it was. There was a thing where this was going around. Someone sent this to me. Whatever I got, the person who sent it to me was like, “Oh yeah, you’re such a that.” But I don’t know. How useful do you think this is?

John: I don’t know if it’s especially useful for an individual or for a character. I guess there’s two threads I want to talk about. The fact that Craig and I didn’t understand what this was would mean that a lot of people are gonna have no idea what the hell you’re talking about on page 2 of a screenplay. So that’s an issue there.

I always look at these kind of things like astrology. It’s just like, okay, everyone says that this is what your energy is. It’s like, okay, fine, great, if it helps you as a writer make choices for the character that underline that. But I worry that it could be a shorthand for not actually doing the work on the page to create that character who has these characteristics.

Aline: I know this is not a thing that will endear me to folks, but I have an easier time believing in these things than astrology. I’m puzzled. Maybe I am under-informed. But there’s so much chance that goes into when you’re born, like when the doctor can get there or when you push or how you’re pushing or who’s there or whether your mom got there yet.

John: Yeah, or did they fill out the right thing on the form? Turns out you were actually born the next day. They just wrote the wrong thing down on this.

Aline: It’s really, really popular among younger people, especially women. And so often people want to talk to me about it. I usually say, “This won’t be a fun conversation for you, because I will not be yes anding you. I will be wondering why.”

John: I think I’m in your camp here, because it feels like things like Myers-Briggs or what this Enneagram is, which I don’t really know very well, it’s based on, okay, looking at the choices that you make in your life, what are characteristics that group together like that. That kind of tracks for me. But where you were born, when you were born, where the stars were, how Mercury was doing that day doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Aline: I think it goes to, you know in scripts, the idea of the chosen one, the Harry Potter? It’s most religious things. It’s like, oh, no, this guy matters more than all the other people. I think there’s a fantasy in your specialness that even the stars would pull you in certain directions.

Listen. I get it, because as I was saying to someone the other day, it doesn’t sound cute, but we are meat that will be dirt. Of course we will look for greater meaning. I get that. It’s just the exact moment of when you were born, as someone who gave birth twice, just don’t know what that would correlate to, because there is actually a bit of… You could nudge it if you wanted to.

John: My daughter, we had to induce. When she was born was kind of a choice that a group of people made.

Let’s talk about these kinds of scenes. This is a feature we do on Scriptnotes every once in a great while. The first time we did this segment, it was about your first day on the job, and we referenced Devil Wears Prada. We’ve also talked about breakups. Today I want to talk about farewells, which is that moment in a movie where two characters are saying goodbye presumably for the last time.

We’ll talk through some examples of these scenes in movies, but also, what are the characteristics of a farewell scene. This could be the end of a romance. It could be that one character is dying. And so Big Fish, of course, obviously has a farewell scene. We have the deathbed scene and the funeral there too. Or it could be some other situation that is pulling these two characters apart. Maybe buddies who’ve come to – they were rivals at the start, they became friends, and now they’re having to say farewell, and we see the journey there.

But I want to talk through the aspects of farewell scenes, how they work, why they work, and what things writers should be looking for if they’re crafting a farewell scene. Can you think of farewell scenes that you’ve written?

Aline: The one that I’ve spoken about the most probably is the end of Prada where they see each other on the street and Miranda does a little tip of the hat to Andy. I think you can interpret that in a number of ways. Is that a salute? Is that a farewell? She has a little bit of a lingering smile when she gets into the limo. And then Meryl says, “Go.” I say Meryl, because in the way it was scripted, actually, in the screen description, it said, “She looks at the driver. Go.” It was in the scene description, and they had actually shot it, were packing up, and Meryl wanted to go back and say, “Go,” to the driver. It snaps you back into her actual MO.

It’s funny, because I think about this also with respect to romantic comedies that end with people kissing, and that has a finality. But you need to make either your coming togethers or your coming aparts feel final, because you don’t want to feel like they said goodbye forever at the end of Casablanca and then they ran into each other at a bar two days later. The same thing with rom-coms. If it’s like, end of Pretty Woman, he rescued her, she rescued him right back, you don’t want to feel like, cut to four days later where it’s like, “This is insane. You leave your pants on the floor. What is this?” How do you make any ending feel like it stuck?

John: That’s why I think because movies are one-time journeys for characters, we mostly think about farewells in the course of movies. Of course, some series, especially with ongoing regular characters, they will say farewell to a character, and that can be incredibly meaningful at that same time.

But let’s think through the aspects of a farewell. Generally, the characters in that scene acknowledge that this is the end. They may not go into the scene knowing that it’s the end, but at some point in the course of the scene, they realize this is the end. The location they’re at generally is relevant to the scene. Either it’s a special place for them or creates a situation in which they have to say goodbye. Ideally, it needs to rhyme with an earlier moment in the story.

Aline: That’s a great point. That’s a great tip for writers. It should not be a random place. It should be something that goes, “Ah. The irony.”

John: It could be the location rhymes or we’re back in a place we were before, the dialogue is rhyming back to an earlier thing that was said before. Something about this moment needs to feel like it echoes a thing that happened before.

Looking through these examples, we’re gonna see that there’s a bunch of nonverbal story points. There’s a lot of silences in these. That’s honestly the characteristics of these. And it’s why sometimes we’re not gonna be playing the audio for this, because it’s a lot of people not talking.

Aline: I hope you’re gonna put these up on the website, because this is fantastic. Drew, did you make this? This is fantastic. This is really good.

I did send you that funny – there’s a funny piece about the end of Big and how many problems it brings up, where it’s like, are there missing posters for him as an adult? Are there missing posters for the boy? I had read that in the original end of Big, that he goes back to class and there’s a girl named Susan in his class and they wink, like, this is gonna be Elizabeth Perkins. But they dropped that, and so they’re never gonna see each other again. I had been trying to think of comedies, and that’s one. E.T. is probably one of the…

As we had discussed, I think Past Lives is – people were hysterically sobbing at that moment of, they’d been separated for so long, and this is another separation, and possibly permanent.

John: I think what’s important – and Past Lives is a good example of this – is that you’re closing hopefully two characters’ arcs. And so it’s not just your protagonist that you’re seeing through this, and this is the end of their journey. Hopefully, the other character, it’s the end of their journey too, at least in terms of what we’ve seen them go through. Past Lives is a great example of that.

If there’s a choice to be made, hopefully your characters are making the choice. Sometimes the situation may just require them to separate. But I think the farewells that land best, one of the characters is making a choice for this to be the end, and that feels great.

Aline: Can I ask you a question?

John: Please.

Aline: How do you feel about this Bill Murray whisper at the end of Lost in Translation? Is that tantalizing to you, or is that frustrating for you?

John: For me, it’s a little bit frustrating. And also, as I went back to look at the kiss, my recollection of the real movie is that it was a friendship and it was a relationship, but it wasn’t a romance at all. And then he kisses her on the lips, and I’m like, “Wait, he did?” That sounds weird. It felt like it was more of a-

Aline: Of a cheek moment.

John: Yeah, a cheek moment rather than an on-the-lips moment. I was like, “Oh.” I didn’t like the moment when I just watched the clip out of context.

Aline: Lip kissing is out. I used to have a couple friends who were lip kissers, which was always like when you saw them coming towards you and time slows down, because my lip kissing policy would be spouse or gave birth to. That’s about it, pretty much. Those people are coming at you and you’re like, slow motion turn the face. But I think it’s post COVID.

John: To me, lip kissing is a romantic gesture.

Aline: Can you imagine if I lip kissed John on the way out of here?

Drew: I don’t-

Aline: Drew would be so uncomfortable. Or if I lip kissed Drew on the way out of here. It would be so weird.

John: We’d all be so uncomfortable.

Aline: So weird. The French…

John: Yeah, but it’s the cheeks.

Aline: The cheek. The cheek. It felt like this wanted to be a two-cheeker, but we don’t do that in America. But I agree with you. I have a memory of this being a cheek kiss, and it’s not.

John: It’s not.

Aline: You’re saying it’s a full lip kissing. Interesting.

John: Full lip kiss. We can look at the video.

Aline: But what do you feel about not knowing what he said?

John: I’m a little bit frustrated, but I’m also kind of okay with it. How do you feel about it?

Aline: I think it suits this movie, which has a thread of enigma running towards it, and I think suits Sofia Coppola’s vibes, so I think that sense of intrigue and that sense that people are layered and mysterious. I think it works for this. If this was in a really super mainstream Hollywood movie, you’d be irritated.

John: We as an audience need to see that growth or change has happened. A farewell will not be meaningful to us unless we’ve seen the characters are in a different place now than they were at the start of the story, and not just because of circumstances, but because of things they chose to do.

Also, as an audience, we need to see what the characters believe, even if they’re not saying it out loud or speaking it, because oftentimes in these things, one character’s being stoic and holding back. There’s reasons why they’re not fully expressing themselves. But we as an audience have to have insight into what they’re actually really feeling inside there.

Aline: Something I think about a lot is that, because if you have a quieter moment movie, you can have a quieter ending. Past Lives is a very quiet movie with a beautifully quiet ending. E.T., interestingly, which is one of my favorite movies that I’ve seen a lot, for a sci-fi movie, the level of relief on that is pretty low. The enemy is Keys. It never really gets that heightened. I know that if you made that movie now, there would be an interstellar shootout, there would be so much action packed into that end.

I think about that a lot, because anything that we’re working on that has a genre element, it just feels like it needs to get into a third act where there’s giant caterpillars invading from space, that need to be shot. I do feel like that movie now, you’d get a lot of notes about making it huge.

I would put this up there with Casablanca for me, in terms of merely really meaningful goodbye. And I think it’s because the ’70s aesthetic was still at play there, where you could have these quieter movies then. I really mourn that, because now it feels like that’s reserved for the smaller movies. And the bigger movies, if you’re not exhausted, on the ground, with a pounding headache by the end of a sci-fi movie, they’ve not done their job.

John: Let’s take a listen to Casablanca. Of course, we’ve avoided Casablanca throughout almost the entire podcast, just because it’s so cliché. But of course, as farewell scenes go, this is the one that people think about. So let’s take a listen here.

[Casablanca clip]

Rick Blaine: If you don’t mind, you fill in the names. That’ll make it even more official.

Captain Louis Renault: You think of everything, don’t you?

Rick: And the names are Mr. and Mrs. Victor Laszlo.

Ilsa Lund: But why my name, Richard?

Rick: Because you’re getting on that place.

Ilsa: I don’t understand. What about you?

Rick: I’m staying here with him until the plane gets safely away.

Ilsa: No, Richard, no. What has happened to you? Last night we said-

Rick: Last night we said a great many things. You said I was to do the thinking for both of us. Well, I’ve done a lot of it since then and it all adds up to one thing. You’re getting on that plane with Victor where you belong.

Ilsa: But Richard, no, I-

Rick: You’ve got to listen to me. Do you have any idea what you’d like to look forward to if you stayed here? Nine chances out of 10 we’d both wind up in a concentration camp. Isn’t that true, Louis?

Louis: I’m afraid Major Strasser would insist.

Ilsa: You’re saying this only to make me go.

Rick: I’m saying it because it’s true. Inside of us we both know you belong with Victor. You’re part of his work, the thing that keeps him going. If that plane leaves the ground and you’re not with him, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

Ilsa: But what about us?

Rick: We’ll always have Paris. We didn’t have, we’d lost it, until you came to Casablanca. We got it back last night.

Ilsa: When I said I would never leave you.

Rick: And you never will. But I’ve got a job to do too. Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do you can’t be any part of. Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble. But it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you’ll understand that. Now, now. Here’s looking at you, kid.

[End of clip]

John: This is a situation where one character knows this is gonna be a farewell leading into it, and she doesn’t know this, and she’s processing this in real time.

Aline: I don’t love the use of the word “kid.” I’m not loving that. That’s giving infantilization to me. I’m just wondering if you could just say a normal goodbye without… I’m not calling you “daddy,” so I’d appreciate not being called a kid. That would be a slightly different ending.

John: Yeah, it would be.

Aline: But I think this idea that’s embedded into this goodbye is this idea that they’re sacrificing for the greater good of the world. Does that still resonate? Do you feel like if you made a movie where it’s like, I need to go do this more public servicey – not public service, but global redemption thing that they have to go do. They’re dedicating themself. Their problems, their love is less than what the world requires of them. Maybe a climate change movie?

John: Or perhaps a movie about a robot apocalypse. Let’s take a listen to Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

Aline: Just his best transitions.

John: Right now, they’re at the forge, and they’ve just thrown the chips into…

[Terminator 2: Judgment Day clip]

Sarah Connor: It’s over.

The Terminator: No. There is one more chip.

John August: He points to his forehead.

The Terminator: And it must be destroyed also. Here. I cannot self-terminate. You must lower me into the steel.

John Connor: No. No.

The Terminator: I’m sorry, John.

John Connor: No!

The Terminator: I’m sorry.

John Connor: No, it’ll be okay! Stay with us! It’ll be okay!

The Terminator: I have to go away.

John Connor: No, don’t do it, please! Don’t go!

The Terminator: I must go away, John.

John Connor: No! No, wait, wait! You don’t have to do this.

The Terminator: Sorry.

John Connor: No, don’t do it! Don’t go!

The Terminator: It has to end here.

John Connor: I order you not to go. I order you not to go! I order you not to go!

The Terminator: I know now why you cry, but it’s something I can never do.

[End of clip]

John: So again here, we have a character who knows that this is going to be a farewell and the other character does not know it and is resisting that moment at the same time, and it’s for the greater good. This is self-sacrifice for the greater good.

Aline: One thing I will say is that where movies really let me down is – not to bring this way, way down, but dying in movies is really glossed over, even in movies about illness. Everybody looks real pretty. They’re beautifully arranged in a bed, and they go cough, cough, and then they look to the side and close their eyes. I had not had a lot of experience with that. My dad passed away two years ago, and the process of that was kind of shocking to me.

I know that love is not what’s in movies, so I don’t know why… And birth is not what’s in movies. People in births are always screaming, and screaming at the husband. I know that those things are not… But we do a very bad job with what it actually looks to leave this world in movies. Maybe it’s too nitty gritty. Maybe all those things are too nitty gritty. Maybe movies don’t need to show people peeing or people performing basic body processes. But maybe these are stand-ins for that. There’s a goodbye we all know is happening, is going to happen, and that these are wonderful, satisfying goodbyes that you can cry at. None of these are death, right? No, Philadelphia is.

John: Philadelphia, I want to focus on a moment that’s not the actual death. It’s not the moment on screen where he dies, but it’s the farewell moment. Initially, it’s Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington talking, and then he’s saying goodbye to other people. But if you listen, he’s never actually saying goodbye. Everyone’s basically saying, “I’ll come back tomorrow. I’ll see you soon.” Let’s take a listen to Philadelphia here.

[Philadelphia clip]

Joe Miller: How you doing?

John August: He’s taking off the oxygen mask so he can speak.

Andrew Beckett: What do you call a thousand lawyers chained together at the bottom of the ocean?

Joe: I don’t know.

Andrew: A good start. Excellent work, Counselor. I thank you.

Joe: It was great working with you, Counselor.

John: Here, Denzel Washington is putting the oxygen mask back on Tom Hanks’s face, because he was having a hard time doing it himself. It’s a moment of tenderness that we’re seeing.

Joe: Well, I’d better go.

Andrew: Yeah, sure thing.

Joe: I’ll see you later?

Andrew: Thanks for stopping by.

Joe: I’ll see you again. Well, I’ll keep it on ice for you.

[End of clip]

John: He just brought a bottle of champagne to celebrate the winning of the case. He’s putting it there and he’s saying goodbye to the rest of the family. Over the course of the rest of this, we’re gonna see the rest of the family members say goodbye. Some of them happen more emotional; some of them don’t. Of course the conscious is they’re saying goodbye for the night, but it’s clear to an audience that this is the last goodbye. Really well done. Not surprisingly, really well done.

It’s a great example of how it’s the subtext that is carrying the scene. They’re not actually saying the things they’re supposed to say, but the writer, Ron Nyswaner, has created a space to let the actors play those things in eyes that they’re not actually saying.

Aline: Beautiful.

John: That’s a final goodbye. But I really want to play this clip from Weekend. Have you seen Weekend, Andrew Haigh’s film?

Aline: It’s the top of the list of things I should see.

John: It’s really terrific.

Aline: I know.

John: I pulled this because I just did the Sundance Labs, where we were talking with filmmakers about the next things they’re gonna shoot, and the theme for the clips we were supposed to bring in was finales or conclusions. What I loved about this moment at the end of Weekend is…

So the premise is it’s these two guys who hook up on a Friday night, not really knowing each other, and they spend the weekend together. But one of them is going off to America, and so they know there’s no future for this. The one guy, he’s at a kid’s birthday party for a friend. The guy’s like, “If you like this guy, why don’t you just into the train station and stop him?” He’s like, “Oh, no, that’s too movie of a thing to do.” I just love that these two characters realize that they’re in a movie kind of moment. Let’s take a listen to a scene from Weekend.

[Weekend clip]

Russell: Looks like it, eh?

Glen: So is this our Notting Hill moment?

Russell: You know, I’ve never seen it, ever.

Glen: Neither have I, but I imagine there’s a declaration of love and everybody applauds.

Russell: Yeah. Do you reckon that’s what would happen with us?

Glen: Might do. Could give it a go. They’d either clap or throw us under a train.

John August: What happens in this next little sequence is there’s a train going by, and so like Lost in Translation, we’re not able to quite understand what they’re saying. But clearly, one character is telling something more meaningful, and then we catch in at the end sort of what that conversation was.

Automated Voice: 24-hour CCTV recording is in operation at this station.

Russell: I want you to not know I’m not here to stop you from going.

Glen: Please be quiet. Shut up! No, no, no.

Russell: I just want to… I just want to… I just want you to know that…

Glen: Oh, fuck. You’re a bastard for coming down here. Fuck me. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing.

Russell: You’ll be great. You’ll have the most amazing time.

Glen: Fuck’s sake. Fuck.

[End of clip]

John: Like Past Lives, there’s a lot of sounds, there’s a lot of things left open, which makes the moment feel very real and very extended. The kind of thing you couldn’t probably do earlier on in the story, but because you’re invested in these characters, you’re willing to watch them struggle to figure out what the next thing is to say.

What I also liked about it is that these characters are recognizing this is a movie kind of thing to do, to race to the train station to stop him before he goes. But once they get there, like, am I actually stopping you? They don’t quite know themselves what the real goal is. They’re just recognizing that this is probably the last moment that they’re gonna have together.

Aline: Has anyone ever done, in a rom-com, a run to the airport where you can’t park, you can’t get through TSA? Actually trying to stop someone at the gate now… That’s ’70s only. Post 9/11, actually trying to say goodbye to someone at a gate is science fiction. You can’t do it.

John: I think probably two examples of it. First, in 30 Rock, there’s a moment where Liz is trying to get to Jason Sudeikis’s character before he moves off to Cleveland. She tries to do the whole thing. She has her special sandwich. They give her a sandwich to get through the TSA. But I also feel like David Wain’s movie They Came Together, with Paul Rudd and…

Aline: Amy Poehler.

John: Amy Poehler. I feel like that must’ve happened in that, because it’s playing all of those rom-com cliches. We’ll put a link in the show notes to a lot of these other clips.

Aline: This is beautiful. This is a great resource. This podcast is free.

John: Free.

Aline: You don’t have to fast forward through ads. This is great stuff right here. This is great. This is the kind of thing, if I was a baby writer, I would be so grateful for, just to focus yourself in on. As you’ve often said, pick the thing that has the best ending. Write something where you know the ending. If something occurs to you for a final scene, that’ll guide you through the whole writing of your movie. It’s really great to study these things. I think this is a wonderful resource.

John: Big Fish would not exist if it weren’t for that last scene. You’re leading up to that. I always describe Big Fish as it’s a long joke that ends in tears rather than a punchline. And it’s getting to that place. The other ones we’re gonna include on the show notes here. The end of The Wizard of Oz, of course she has to say goodbye to all of her friends, that she’s leaving. E.T., of course, saying goodbye to E.T. Toy Story 3, which is a sort of special case. Oh, god, Michael Arndt.

Aline: It’s a killer.

John: Killing us here.

Aline: Yeah, killer.

John: It’s Andy giving up his toys and sending them off to the girl who’s gonna take care of them. Dead Poets Society. All such great choices. Farewell scenes.

Aline: Well done.

John: Well done. Let’s continue with momentum and talk about some listener questions. We’ve got a manager question here from Annie.

Drew: Annie writes, “My manager and I recently broke up. We weren’t a good fit for one another, but he also wanted 10 percent of my day job salary, a gig unrelated to what they were representing me for. However, a script I wrote was doing well on the blacklist, and a studio reached out to my manager during the fallout. But my manager won’t give me the studio’s contact info. It’s been a month. So should I assume my project’s dead? I looked on IMDb Pro for an assistant or someone to reach out to at the company, but I was unsuccessful. If the studio really wanted the script, they would find me, I guess. I’m pretty sad about it, and I’m not sure how to find new management. Thanks.”

Aline: That’s not nice.

John: That’s horrible. That’s horrible on every level.

Aline: That’s really not nice.

John: First off, that manager should not be trying to take 10 percent of your day job salary. That is crazy. I’ve not heard of this.

Aline: Craig would be turning this desk over.

John: Absolutely. Craig has destroyed so much furniture on this podcast. It’s really tough.

Aline: This is shitty.

John: This is. Let’s talk about what happens next. First off, on your script, you have contact information on that. Hopefully, they’re not stripping that contact information off the title page, so they can get a hold of you directly. You, Annie, need to have some public presence out there in the world, Twitter, Instagram, some other place where people can find you, because they will be able to find you if that comes up. Put up a website, Annie, whatever your last name is, screenwriter. Make sure you have a way that people can find you. Obviously, if you’re a WGA member, you’re in the WGA directory, and so people can always look you up there.

Aline: If they were desperate, if they really wanted it. And it may have been an idle inquiry. But this actually just sounds like someone being sadistic and just trying to punish you.

John: Annie, when you say it’s doing well on the blacklist, I assume it’s the blacklist-

Aline: Ratings.

John: The ratings site and not the-

Aline: List.

John: Not the actual list, the end of the year stuff-

Aline: That sounds like it to me too.

John: … because that’s a thing when people would’ve tracked you down more specifically. Pick yourself up. Dust yourself off. As you’re looking for new managers, new reps, try not to be too burned by this experience. Remember that you’re always advocating for yourself first, and keep doing the next thing. It’s good that you had a script that people liked. It’s proof that you can write a thing that people will like. You need to keep writing those things. I’m sorry. All I can do is commiserate with you here.

Aline: Same, same.

John: Question from TJ here.

Drew: TJ writes, “Like many feature writers, I cheered the huge and very real win of guaranteed second steps in the new MBA, but I’m wondering what, if any, recourse we have if a second step remains unstepped. Chalk it up to strike disruption or executive turnover, but I have two feature projects at major studios, with multiple contractually guaranteed rewrite and polished steps, that have been sitting on ice for over a year. I’ve been doing this long enough to understand the writing is likely on the wall for these projects – or not. Who knows? And that’s fine. I’m an expert at moving on. But negotiating guaranteed money and turning in a draft, only to get ghosted on further steps, feels extra mega shitty, especially while trying to string together qualifying years for health coverage. Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated.”

John: I’ve had this happen too. Let’s remember what a guaranteed second step is. It’s that if you’re hired to write a feature project, you are hired for the initial draft, and if you’re under a certain cap, they have to also guarantee you a second step, a chance to do that rewrite on that project. This is good. This is a big win. Sometimes what happens is you’ve turned in a first draft and there’s a guaranteed reading period, and after that point they should be coming up to you for the rewrite. Sometimes this stretches out for a very long time, because things are just not-

Aline: But they’re supposed to pay you at the end of that reading period.

John: They are supposed to pay you at the end of the reading period. It’s your reps who are there to remind them, “You need to pay them.”

Aline: I’ve done that, for sure.

John: I’ve done that too, fairly recently.

Aline: Some people don’t know that they have a limited amount of time to get back to you and that they have to get back to you.

John: Someone made this deal. If it wasn’t your agent or manager, there was probably a lawyer involved. It’s time to call them and say, “Hey, we need to nudge this.” What can happen sometimes is there’s a little bit of a negotiation, like, “We don’t really don’t want to do this some more. Can we figure a thing out here?” You might be able to settle for less than that if they really don’t have you doing that next thing. There may be a way out of here. But you should be getting paid and-

Aline: On a schedule.

John: On a schedule. TJ, your concern about getting paid money so that your health insurance and everything else continues is correct. And so get that money coming in.

Aline: God, two of the most depressing things when you’re a young writer is trying to get paid, especially when it’s not a ton of money to other people but it is very meaningful for you, and then the other thing is – have you ever been on a money where they don’t want to give you your per diem? Then you’re calling your agent about something so minor. I have friends who were just telling me that this happened to them. It’s literally the most embarrassing, because you’re just trying to get money for a sandwich. There’s this embedded idea that you get paid enough, you should be fine. But if you’ve relocated, then you want that.

John: Totally.

Aline: But there’s nothing in it for your reps really. Early on in my career, I remember having to do that, and it was just so embarrassing, which is like, “No, I really would like money for that latte, so if you don’t mind.” Then the people they’re calling, they’re production people, not the creatives, creative executives. I don’t know. Anything where you have to ask for money, it’s such a bad day. It’s just such a bad feeling.

John: I recently re-watched Tropic Thunder, which largely holds up. Some stuff didn’t hold up so especially well. But one of the ongoing jokes in it is that in the actor’s contract he’s supposed to have a TiVo, and his TiVo didn’t show up. And so he’s like, “Where’s my TiVo?” The agent, Matthew McConaughey, is always trying to track down this guy’s TiVo. It’s silly. My daughter ended up not wanting to watch it, so I wanted to ask her, what is a TiVo. Does she even know? There’s a sense of-

Aline: That’s how my son taught himself to read was to use the TiVo, because he would run down in the morning to turn on the TV and figure out where Sesame Street was. That’s how he taught himself to read and work the TiVo at like four.

John: Of course.

Aline: It’s just funny, the tiny humiliations that we sustain as a writer, that are like, you’re just asking for the basic thing that you’re guaranteed, and then everybody acts like you’re a weenie for asking. It’s one of those things that can really grind you down.

John: This is a bit in the weeds here, but on this project I mentioned that was a five-week rewrite, it came at a time in which I did not have an agent or a manager, because I switched representation. It was just negotiated with my lawyer, who did a fantastic job. But also, it meant we actually had to bill for stuff ourselves. We invoiced for ourselves. It was weird dealing with it.

When you and I are starting a project, it goes from some special magic development account, and it’s this thing. But when you’re actually on a thing that’s running, it’s being paid out of the actual payroll for the actual production. I was talking to the accountant for this thing. It was clear that I’m filling out these forms that, as a writer, I should not be filling out this form. It was weird.

Aline: Wild.

John: Ultimately, the checks still cashed. Money is fungible. But it was weird to be paid out of just different pot of money.

Aline: Please, sir. Please, sir. Please, sir, may I have my paycheck. I’m sorry, TJ. You just have to find the right person to ask. But they do owe you something. Guaranteed means guaranteed.

John: Early on in my career, I did a project for Fox 2000. I did my draft and my set, and I had no more guaranteed steps. But my agent got a call saying, “Oh yeah, we decided to let the option on this book lapse, and so we’re closing out the books on this project. And there’s one polish step on his deal that we’re not gonna use, and so we’re just gonna settle that out and pay it.” I’m like, “But why are you doing that?” They wrote me this check.

Aline: Nice. Take that out. Take that out. Take that out. That never happened.

John: The statute of limitations on that has passed a long time ago.

Aline: That’s right. That’s long ago been spent on some fabulous vacations we’re gonna hear about.

John: We have a question from John about NDAs.

Drew: “I’m new and started shopping my first script around that I’ve written. I’m unrepresented at this point by an agent or manager, though I have a new lawyer. I’ve submitted the script to the US Copyright Office and the WGA. I’ve labeled the cover page with copyright at 2024, my name. I sent a log line to an executive. He responded favorably and asked to read it. I sent it. My lawyer told me that I should get an NDA signed by anyone who wants to read the script before. Is that necessary or common? My instinct is that it adds friction to the process, and if it’s copyrighted, what’s the risk? Is it common practice to have people sign NDAs?”

John: Uh-uh, absolutely not. This is not a thing that happens. We’ve had many fabulous guests on the podcast. We had Christopher Nolan on the podcast. I bet you probably have to sign an NDA when you read a Christopher Nolan script, because he sends a person over with a script that you have to read in person.

Aline: I will say this. If someone sends you, John August, a script to read, and they are not represented, then they would have to sign a form. But just watermark it.

John: You’ve written the script. You own the copyright on it. Worry less, John. It’s just not a thing. It’s a thing that happens with super high secret projects where there can be NDAs on things. This is not that situation.

Aline: You’ve seen the scripts printed on red paper?

John: Yeah.

Aline: I once worked on a project where they insisted on printing it on that silver, iridescent paper. Do you know what I’m talking about?

John: I’ve done another different thing.

Aline: It’s silver, iridescent craft paper. 99 percent of the things that I’ve written are just – people are not digging through files to find romantic comedies or whatever. But this particular company, we had to send it out. And that paper weighs like 100 pounds. We submitted it to a director who’s a friend of mine, and he was like, “I’m not reading that. That’s insulting to me that it would be sent in 20 pounds of iridescent paper. I promise I’m not doing anything with it.” But in a world where things can leak… That’s not this though. Just watermark it. Really, watermarking it takes two seconds, and then you’ll feel like you did something.

John: I would disagree on the watermarking. Anything that gets in the way of a person’s picking up the script and reading it is a barrier, and I feel like that watermark could hurt you.

Aline: Maybe it makes it feel-

John: Special.

Aline: Special. I don’t know. But definitely, you don’t need an NDA. If it’s submitted through a lawyer especially.

John: I feel like if I got something that was watermarked from some person who didn’t have stuff, I’m like, “Wait, you don’t trust me to read your script? You think I am going to steal this thing? That I am going to do something?” I get when a studio sends me a thing that’s a little more secret to me. But also, I would say in this day, in that situation, you’re probably not getting the pdf anyway. They’re sending you some special link to some dumb thing.

Aline: Have you had that, where they can tell how much you’ve read and where you are on it?

John: Yes. That’s spooky.

Aline: That’s a weird feeling, because you want to feel like I’m spending enough time on each page. You don’t know how much data they’re getting. But you don’t want them to know if you were whipping through it. That hasn’t happened to me in a long time. I haven’t gotten one of those in a long… Maybe just because I haven’t done as many of those rewrites. But I haven’t had as many like, give us a vial of your blood, and then disappearing ink on your computer. Also, by the way, half the time I don’t know how to do it.

John: I don’t know how to do it. I was talking with a showrunner who was describing a situation where they were meeting with two different actors for something, and so they sent them that script through that process, in a situation where they had to read it in an app in order to read the thing. They said, “Oh, no, we’re gonna go with this one actor,” and so they pulled the script from the other actor in the moment.

Aline: Off the computer.

John: Off the computer. He tried to flip a page, and then it was all gone. That’s how he found he didn’t get the… Brutal. Let’s talk about some fairies. What does Chris in Ireland have to say?

Drew: Chris in Ireland writes, “I’m writing a spec animated feature set in Ireland where a group of fairies are the antagonists. In Irish folklore, fairies are seen as unpredictable, mischievous, and often malevolent, the complete opposite of Tinkerbell, who I feel has become the dominant representation of fairies in popular culture. I want this movie to celebrate Irish folklore and culture with people around the world. But as the primary audience is children, I’m wondering how to navigate the Tinkerbell issue with, A, potential investors, and B, with audiences. So do I stick to calling them fairies, or should I refer to them as something else?”

John: I say you just redefine what fairies mean in your world. I think it’s great.

Aline: Yeah. I don’t know. It depends on the tone. I was just thinking about that. You may not want to go too meta. If it’s a comedy, you can talk about the fact that people have a preconception about what fairies are, but they’re actually not. Tinkerbell is one of my favorite Disney characters, because she is kind of a pain in the ass. She’s jealous and she’s capricious, and that’s one of the reasons I like her. She’s giving a word I can’t say on this podcast. But I love that about Tinkerbell. I think mischief is part of it. But I know, he’s talking about van art fairies. And so I agree with you. If you can redefine fairies, that’s fun.

John: Absolutely. Obviously, what you’re trying to do with any movie you do is let the audience know what genre you’re in but also how you’re changing the rules of that genre and what you’re bending in that world, and that feels like that’s what you’re bending. So go for it. Let’s wrap up with Dave.

Drew: Dave writes, “I’m an Australian-based DP and I’ve been listening to the podcast for many years now. I’ve been shooting a Netflix show since it started in Australia, and this year I’ve been fortunate to come on board as DP of the latest season of the U.S. version. I moved to my Santa Monica apartment yesterday and I’m looking forward to my next five months in LA. A big part of why I felt comfortable saying yes to the job was because Scriptnotes has made the idea of being in LA a whole lot less intimidating, so thank you. I’d love to know if there’s any resources you’d recommend for looking up screenings or industry events that might be handy for someone like me with a bit of time on their hands.”

John: Dave, you chose to move in Santa Monica. I’m sure you had a reason for doing that. It probably feels most like Australia. You’re kind of a ways away from the center of town of stuff, but that’s fine. Hopefully, you can get on the freeway quickly. What things should he be doing in LA?

Aline: This is a good segue into talking about something I love, which is Revival Hub. Do you follow Revival Hub on Instagram?

John: No. Tell me all about it.

Aline: Revival Hub consolidates all the revival screenings in LA, so all the rooftop screenings, the cemetery screenings, the Alamo special screenings. There’s the Academy Museum, which is open to the public. Every day. Maybe we could put the link to that. It’s every one that’s happening. Back to the Future was playing last week, and E.T. If you go to those, it’ll be packed with industry people generally are the ones.

I’ll tell you a hilarious thing. On Memorial Day, when most would be barbecuing, me and my son and his girlfriend went to the Academy Museum to see Shiva Baby. There were a fair number of people there, but not a ton. That’s not the traditional way of celebrating Memorial Day. And in comes Phil Hay and Karyn Kusama and their son, who we know. Phil and Karyn and I have been laughing for weeks about – I saw them walk in, and I was like, “That tracks.” And they were like, “Yeah, that tracks,” that that’s what we’re doing on that holiday.

You’ll find like-minded people who want to go in a nice air-conditioned screening of Shiva Baby, which I loved – we all loved. You’ll find your people there if you’re comfortable chatting with people. And if you’re working on a project, maybe you’ll know some people there.

John: Absolutely.

Aline: Or you can put up on your Facebook page, “Hey, I want to go see this revival screening of Urban Cowboy or whatever. Does anybody want to come with me?” That’s what I would recommend, because if I had more time, I would be doing those all the time. Obviously, there’s New Beverly. There’s lots of them.

John: I was gonna recommend the Academy screenings, which you can just find online. We’ll put a link in the show notes. But Revival Hub sounds great, because there’s always a ton of them around town. There’s an upcoming July 5th Charlie’s Angels at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery with fireworks afterwards, so I’ll be going to that. There’s gonna be retrospective screenings of Go coming up. There’s always gonna be those things that happen.

Aline: It’s really fun. It’s great. It’ll make you feel like you’re in the biz, because LA is really dispersed.

John: Fewer things out in Santa Monica, but even out there, there’ll be some stuff.

Aline: Oh yeah, there’s places that are close to there. There’s the New Art, some of the places in Revival Hub. But also, summer is a great time for special screenings. In Malibu they do them on the cliff. It’s fun.

John: I love it. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Malta. I just got back from Malta. Have you been to Malta?

Aline: I have not, no.

John: Malta is really cool. It is an island nation, of course, south of Sicily. It feels kind of impossible, because it is a foreign country that speaks English. You definitely know you’re in a foreign country, but everyone speaks English, because it’s the second language of the island is English.

It’s incredibly urban and dense, except for the parts that are totally rural. It’s really cool. All the names seem like they’re Arabic, because it’s Semitic language, and yet it’s not. It’s really a very cool place. I really dug it. A lot of stuff has filmed there over the years, like Gladiator stuff, a Popeye film there. They kept all the sets from the Robin Williams Popeye.

Aline: How do you get there?

John: We flew. I was in Italy for a conference, and we flew. We were so close. I could literally almost see it. But we had fly back to Rome, and Rome to Malta. Air Malta was good. I just dug it. I’m thumbs up on Malta. They have a nice big tax credit. I’m looking for a thing to shoot in Malta, because it’d be a cool place to do a thing. Everything is white limestone, and it feels like you’re in North Africa.

Aline: Cool.

John: That was great.

Aline: Love that. I did enjoy it on your Instagram.

John: Thank you. Game of Thrones shot some stuff there. Things like a lot of exteriors got shot for various seasons in Malta. So check out Malta.

Aline: Check out Malta.

John: I’m head of the tourism board.

Aline: Have we discussed that I am the other person who loves this drink?

John: She is pointing at caffeine-free Coke Zero, or Coke Zero Zero, as we call it in the house.

Aline: That’s the best stuff. I would drink 10 of those if I could.

John: What’s stopping you?

Aline: Because it disrupts my biome. It’s really not good for you. But that is the best one.

John: Craig Mazin does not believe me on this. I will bring it over to his house.

Aline: Incorrect.

John: He’s like, “Oh, I’ll have regular.”

Aline: No, it’s this.

John: He’ll have caffeine-free Diet Coke, which is not nearly as good.

Aline: No, no, this is the thing.

John: This is the thing.

Aline: It’s not my One Cool Thing, but it’s our one cool thing.

John: But Aline, it’s hard to find.

Aline: Oh, believe me. I have it always stocked in my office and at my house, so come over.

John: When people are shopping for you, they may have trouble finding it, but the one hint-

Aline: It’s red.

John: It’s red. You need to find it at the Ralph’s on Wilshire. Will always have about eight of them, and so I will always take seven, so I can leave one so they remember it.

Aline: I have two One Cool Things. They’re short. But I like to do something girly always on this most male of podcasts. I chose a color that was too dark today. I have two, and I picked the wrong one. There’s a thing called peel-off lip stain.

John: What’s this?

Aline: You put what looks like a very, very dark lipstick on. You’d actually like this, because it’s pretty cool. You put a lot of lipstick on, and then over the next 10 minutes it dries into a film, that you then peel off.

John: I like peeling off stuff. That feels great.

Aline: It’s a delight.

John: Like glue on your hands as a kid. Love it.

Aline: It’s like that. It leaves this color on your lips. There’s a few things you gotta master to get it right. You can just go to Amazon and write peel-off lip stain. It’s fun. The one I used this morning, as I said, is too dark, but look. It’s not moved since I’ve been here.

John: It matches your shirt.

Aline: It’s not moved since I’ve been here. It’s just a fun, silly thing that I got from TikTok, which leads me into my last thing that you would love. Are you a TikTok guy? You’re not.

John: I’m not. I’m a Reels guy, so I watch like TikTok two weeks late.

Aline: No, not two weeks late, my friend. Six months later. I love when someone puts up a funny song clip or something. There’s two that are really big right now. What happens is somebody will put up a funny song clip and then people will duet it. They’ll play along to it. They’ll sing along to it. They’ll rearrange it. They’ll do dances to it. There’s two right now that are big on TikTok. One is “I’m looking for a man in finance.”

John: Of course. Love it. So good.

Aline: You know that?

John: Yeah.

Aline: There’s a million remixes of “I’m looking for a man in finance” that are great. The newest one is a hilarious guy who does comedy songs. This one is (sings) “put a little dirt under the pillow for the dirt man in case he comes to town.” People have sung along to it, played along to it, danced to it. If you go to TikTok and you find the original – you’ll just put “a little dirt under the pillow for the dirt man” or just put “dirt man,” and then you’ll find the original one. Then what you do is you click on that sound. Watch the ones that have the most views. The ones that have like two views are not gonna be great. But “looking for a man in finance” has just taken off like a rocket. And Dirt Man, which is a real ear worm, has also taken off. I just recommend, especially if you’re new to TikTok and you’re trying to figure out what’s fun about it.

What I love about TikTok is that people are so creative. They are so creative. And so many people can sing. I really love the ones where people sing in harmony. But dancing, adding saxophone, they’re really fun. And maybe we can link to some of the better ones for those two sounds. But “looking for a man in finance” has now become iconic. Ariana DeBose did a parody of it for the Emmys.

I know that in a world where we are constantly afraid of what social media is doing to us, I see TikTok and other forms of social media too can be an area for great expression. YouTube is how I found Rachel Bloom. There’s good stuff on the internet.

John: My newest obsession in TikTok/Reels is I love seeing incredibly talented music producers take a thing and redo it. What I found this morning was a guy who could take a Dua Lipa, like, “What if Phil Collins had written this Dua Lipa song?”

Aline: Yes, I saw that. It’s fantastic.

John: It’s genius. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that too.

Aline: It’s great.

John: It sounds great. It’s like, I really love this. I want Phil Collins to have done this song.

Aline: There’s that Celine Dion remix that started on TikTok. Then sometimes things get popular on TikTok and it takes them a while to clear it legally so that they can stream it. But the Celine Dion one, which they turned it into a dance song, you can now get on Spotify. Humans are awful, but also wonderful and so creative. And there are so many talented people out there. And TikTok is a good venue for that and for some horribly useless things. But it’s also a venue for some wonderful stuff.

John: That is our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, with help from Jonathan Wigdortz. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Matthew Jordan.

If you have an outro, you can send your link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You will find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and glasses and hats now. You can find all those at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. Thank you to all our Scriptnotes Premium Members. We’re gonna be talking about journaling. But it’s always lovely to have you here on the show, Aline Brosh McKenna.

Aline: I’m actually Craig.

John: Yes, really, your commitment to the bit, Craig, I really respect that.

Aline: He did good.

John: He did good.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Bonus Segment. I want to talk about journals and journaling and this idea that we should be writing down what we did all day, because it feels right and feels useful and I’ve done it at times, but I don’t do it consistently. I’d like to do it more often. Aline, are you doing it?

Aline: I shockingly don’t. Not only do I not journal, I also don’t copiously write down ideas or bits of things. Very rarely do I do that. My husband is shocked at how little I record. I think I have this core belief that – I don’t know what the term for this is, but I don’t have a specific episode memory. I have a synthetic memory. That’s the term I would use, which is when I walk around the world, I’m noticing patterns more than I am trying to record actual instances of things. I find that if I concretize things too much too early, it prevents me from doing that process of synthesis.

Who doesn’t write in their diary when they’re a teen? “Nobody here understands me.” I certainly did that, but I have not found it useful. I know we’re gonna talk about journaling. I know I’m supposed to do it. I know it’s good for you. I know both those things are good for you. But I think it depends on what sort of person you are. I find that I do my ruminative stuff in a different way. We can talk about this on another episode, but do you narrate your life to yourself, or do you not?

John: I guess I narrate to the degree to which I am aware of the thing I’m doing. I have a very active internal voice, if that makes sense.

Aline: You do. I don’t. Some people are like, “Oh, here I am. I’m at the podcast. Look at Drew,” and they’re talking to themselves. I don’t, in a flow state. And I also can visualize things. I think that part of like – I’m gonna make up a word – synthetic memory, I assimilate things and sort them. I don’t dwell on specifics. Look. So many people do it. It’s probably better, and I should do it, but I don’t.

John: This is not in any way meant to be like, “This is a thing you should do.” I just want to talk about when it’s been useful and when I’ve done it and why I mostly don’t do it often.

A couple years back, I went through a really rough time. And one of the things that people recommended was this Five Minute Journal, which is this little white book. At the end of every day, you write down, like, here are some good things that happened today. It has these specific prompts. It sounds really stupid, but it’s just incredibly helpful, just by putting some context around stuff, like, “Oh, today wasn’t entirely shit. There actually were some good things, some things I noticed. Okay. Take a deep breath. It actually wasn’t awful.” Sometimes even over the course of the day, it got me thinking, “Oh, this is an actually okay moment.”

Aline: “Good latte.”

John: Take the small wins for what you got. I’m not using that book at all anymore, but it was useful for that. On the iPhone now, they have this app called Journal, which is a built-in app from Apple, which is surprisingly poor. It doesn’t actually do very much for you. But I thought, oh, that’ll be a good way to remind me to actually write down some stuff, because what I find I will do is I will happily email a person about the stuff I was working on or text somebody, but I won’t spend the time to actually text myself about, like, this is the thing that happened, and so there’s no record. I don’t have a good way of looking back, like, “When did that happen?”

Aline: My husband has an amazing book. We went out to dinner last night. He gets the card for the restaurant. He puts it in his journal. It says dinner with so-and-so at this restaurant. He has these little notebooks, and he’ll just paste them in. He has a record of the things we’ve done and the places we’ve been.

I think it depends on what sort of brain you have. But I had read a thing which is – and this is good for writers. You know when you’re working on a long-form thing and you feel like, “What did I do today?” Making a list of what you actually accomplished in a day, “Did a workout. Wrote four pages. Called my mother,” things that you to-done list. I did that for like three days.

John: Now, your husband is an attorney.

Aline: No, he works at a mutual fund.

John: For some reason, I was convinced your husband was an attorney. I was thinking there’s people who have billable hours who need to actually show the work they’ve done. That feels like a natural instinct.

Aline: He doesn’t have that. He doesn’t do that. People’s brains are a lot more organized that mine. I guess we’re at the age where you decide your faults or your strengths. I think I have more of a birds eye view than a day-to-day view, in a certain sense.

John: One of the things I recognized is that my photo roll becomes essentially my diary, because it’s like, “What was I doing in April?” Then I scroll back to April, like, “Oh, that’s what I was doing.”

Aline: Yes! John and I are sort of the same person. Have you noticed? ENTJs who like the exact same kind of Diet Coke. That’s exactly what I do. I love looking back and saying, “What was I doing a year ago?” Then you send it to a friend and they go, “Okay.”

John: “Okay.” But one of my frustrations I’m recognizing is that – I’ll get to what I’m actually doing and trying to do more now – but on my trip to Italy and my trip to Malta, I will think through, like, what am I gonna post on my Instagram stories, but I won’t do that for myself. I’m fine publicly presenting a history thing, but I won’t keep that for myself.

Aline: That’s what those social media things are. They’re like we’re writing our own lovely tribute to ourselves. I wonder if she would be okay with us name checking her, but Katie Dippold once said to me and Craig – we were talking about something, and she said there should be a button before you post something online that says, “Wait, but why?” It’s so true.

Listen. I started an Instagram for my dog, Sir Jimmy Jim. Why? I don’t know. I put one-second work into the caption. They’re terrible. But there’s a need to concretize. Now that you can publicly concretize, it’s very tempting. But you’re right, why not privately concretize?

John: What I’m using right now is called Day One. It’s an app that’s for iOS and also on your Mac. You can write some stuff in there about what happened. You can also link it to things. I use Strava for running, and so all my runs show up in there, and so it keeps track of that. You can add photos to it and make stuff work.

What I’ve found has been helpful for me to do is, on my iPhone I will start a new entry and then I’ll just hit the voice transcription thing, where you click the button and you just talk at it, because I don’t care that it’s perfect or that it’s exactly right. I just want to dump it out there and make a record, because I’m probably the only person who’s ever gonna read this again. That’s been useful. It’s one less barrier of a thing to do.

Aline: There’s a thing called the external brain that my husband talks about where getting things out of your brain into Evernote or into something-

John: I use Notion for that.

Aline: Because otherwise you wake up in the middle of the night going, “Oh.”

John: I’ve talked about it on the podcast, but I keep a stack of index cards by the bed, in the bathroom, and various places. I’ll write the thing down and then it’s done. I’ll put it by the bedroom door. It’s out of my brain. I can stop thinking about it.

Aline: You should do that. Again, these are all things that I should do and don’t.

John: Listeners, if you have suggestions for journaling things you want to be doing… Oh, but I do also want to ask you – several writers who we know do things called Morning Pages, where they write all the stuff… I see you shaking your head. That does not feel like an Aline thing. The idea behind these is that you unlock the artist within and fight the war of art and get all that stuff out of you. I’ve just never found it super helpful. I’ve tried it. It’s like, sure, I can vomit out a bunch of stuff, but my day isn’t better for me having done it.

Aline: The time that I’m writing, I want to consolidate into purposeful writing. I think it would make me feel despair.

John: Yeah, it could. Aline, always a pleasure having you here.

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