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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/600-mcquarrie-returns).

**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.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 600 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Truffles, cloves, saffron in cooking. There are some ingredients that are so flavorful that they must be portioned carefully, deliberately, lest they overwhelm the senses. So too it is podcast visitors. A guest who appears too frequently loses their impact, their novelty. One cannot be shook if one is already shaking.

One such guest is writer/producer/director Christopher McQuarrie, who’s appeared just twice on Scriptnotes, and only on centennial episodes. After deliberation, Craig and I have decided to invite him back here today to mark our 600th episode. Joining us from London, I believe, Chris McQuarrie.

**Chris McQuarrie:** Yes, London, and congratulations on Episode 600.

**Craig:** I don’t know, is it congratulations or some sort of pity to be called for here?

**Chris:** Condolences. Condolences.

**Craig:** This is just… Good lord. Here we are. Nothing ever changes. We’re back with McQuarrie. With McQuarrie.

**Chris:** So sorry.

**John:** So sorry.

**Chris:** So sorry.

**John:** We recently put up a best of episode where we talked through, Chris, your two previous appearances. Just in case someone has no idea who you are, you are the writer and director of the Mission Impossible movies, Usual Suspects, Valkyrie, Jack Reacher. Your credits are long and wonderful. You’re also a good foil for Craig Mazin, which is why I’m so delighted to see you here on this podcast.

**Chris:** That’s what I’m here for. It’s to spar with Craig and stay sharp.

**Craig:** McQuarrie and I have been in the same fake fight for, I don’t know, 20 years. I don’t know how long it’s been. You will not find two men who love each other more and agree on less.

**Chris:** That’s an interesting take on our relationship.

**Craig:** Thank you. See, he’s about to disagree with me, and that’s fine.

**Chris:** Perspective is a funny thing.

**Craig:** All I can say is that it is an honor to know him. It is a pleasure and a joy. He is, I think you’ve nailed it, John, one of those flavors that you really need to be careful with. You said truffles, cloves, saffron. I would’ve gone with more of one of those fermented fish sauces.

**John:** Thai fish sauce, sure.

**Craig:** Something like a very dense-

**Chris:** Curry.

**Craig:** A durian, for instance, a fruit that many people think is delicious and others think smells like puke. That’s okay. Those are all okay analogies for the great Chris McQuarrie.

**Chris:** I can’t understand why anybody thinks we have a beef, Craig.

**Craig:** I love this man so much.

**Chris:** We hide it so well.

**John:** It’s going to be very hard to keep the conversation on the guardrails. I thought we might try to talk about teams and groups, because Chris, a lot of your movies have a central protagonist, but they also have a big group of people who are working together to do a thing. I’d love to talk about group dynamics within feature films and stories with multiple hero characters. I’d love to tackle this provocative quote about knockoffs and the way that Hollywood just makes cheap imitations of things that were good. Then in our bonus segment for Premium members, let’s talk movie theaters, because Chris, you care a lot about the movie theater experience.

**Chris:** Very much.

**John:** I’d love to know where in 2023 we’re at. If you had your dream of a way to see a big opening weekend movie, what kind of screen are you looking for, what kind of sound system are you looking for? There are so many things being thrown at me with this is better than that. What should we actually be looking for? I feel like you’re a person who can tell us.

**Chris:** Oh, good. That’s all good stuff to talk about.

**John:** Hooray. Let’s start with this provocative quote. I did this interview for Vox about AI and the WGA’s AI proposals. In the article that Alissa Wilkinson wrote up, she had a quote that I thought was actually really smart. She says, “I don’t expect the tools to ever turn out something as good as what a real human writer can achieve. I don’t think AI’s going to be able to write Everything Everywhere All at Once or Tar or Succession. At best, it will be an okay imitation of things that humans have already written. Here’s the thing. Cheap imitations of good things are what power the entertainment industry.” Craig, I see some nodding. How do you respond to that quote?

**Craig:** I think there’s every reason to think that’s true, because first of all, history proves that it’s true. People don’t mind it. I think sometimes we think that what we’re seeing here is that people are stupid and suckers. They’re not stupid and suckers. They just sometimes like comforting things, and they like things that are repeated. If you have to wait five years for the next installment of something that kicked something off and made it wonderful, and in between there are acceptable substitutes, people will go for that.

The other area that I think we need to keep an eye on is programming for children, because programming for children is literally intentionally built around repetition. It’s how children learn. There are plenty of shows. On YouTube there are these videos that mostly come out of China. They’re just these super crappy animations that seem as if they’re currently being done by AI, by early AI. I can’t imagine people did them. Those things can be churned out ad nauseam. Yes, I think the concern is less that AI is going to innovate something beautiful and more that AI will replace a little bit of the secondary industry of imitation.

**John:** Chris, we’ve talked to you on a program before. You talked about your career and how you came out of the gate hot. Then there was a time where you’d find yourself doing projects that you realize these were not the things I should be doing and deliberately pivoted to, what are the actual movies that make me excited to go into work and to dedicate my life to making these films. How do you feel about this idea that the industry relies on a lot of not amazing things to fill up the space, and writers are going to be doing those jobs, and yet you individually might make the decision not to participate in that system?

**Chris:** The first part of the question, just generating content. We live in an era in which everything is just about generating the largest amount of content. If streamers are all racing to build libraries and develop subscriber bases, you’re also seeing that very same industry realizing that they can’t rely on that the way that they wanted to. We’re right now at a moment where you feel all the studios are pivoting back to an idea, that they’re suddenly starting to realize they actually need movie stars and haven’t been cultivating them. On the one hand, it’s terrifying, because we’re looking at AI.

The industry can always be counted on to convince themselves that there is a new way to game the system, and that new way invariably implodes. The number of times we as a group have lived through somebody thinking they could do it faster, cheaper, better, they figured out the thing that’s going to change the industry, going all the way back to 3D and how everything was going to be 3D. When digital cameras became the thing, digital cameras were going to replace film. There was a moment where film was really on the verge of extinction, and everybody said that digital was going to make it cheaper, and it didn’t. It didn’t democratize anything. Now you just hire more people to operate digital cameras.

Ultimately, what I have faith in is that there will always be room for, for lack of a better word, handmade, quality storytelling, for the people that are motivated to do it and the people that demand to do it. That’s never going to be the studio. I do not mean to say this in a derogating way. Their whole thing is about risk mitigation, on time, on budget, trying to make things profitable, and so they’re always going to gravitate towards what appears on paper to be the saner, more fiscally responsible thing. We all know from our individual experience, that’s actually not how movies turn out. That’s not how they get made. It’s never how the process goes. It isn’t a predictable process. It’s not a quantifiable process.

You’ll see there’s going to be a push toward that, towards using AI to get rid of the one thing they’ve been trying to get rid of forever, other than the movie star, has been the writer. They would love it if they could do it without us. They would absolutely love it.

I’m always amazed when people who would rather not have me there can’t just do what I do. We as writers, for us it’s second nature to sit down and actually write something in script form. It’s astonishing to watch someone who does not do that for a living have a very clear idea of what they want and actually be paralyzed when they sit down to do it. They actually couldn’t write a single sentence. It’s like some sort of mental block. I think there are people looking at it now and saying AI is going to liberate them of that mental block.

The thing that AI is never going to deliver is empathy and taste. It can imitate it, but it’s not going to deliver empathy, and it’s not going to deliver taste. If you don’t have empathy through your audience, if you can’t be the audience, and some part of you can’t step outside of yourself and be the person in the theater or at home in front of the TV receiving what it is you’re communicating, you’re not going to tell a story that’s going to affect somebody emotionally, at least in the short term with what I understand about AI. I’ll probably be eating my words in six months when AI begins teaching itself.

**Craig:** By the end of this week.

**Chris:** If you look at all the years and years and years of all these different screenwriting seminars, all the humans that have been trying to teach this craft to other humans, you can teach people about rules and techniques, you can show them movies that have worked, you can express to someone how you create, you can’t teach them empathy. The one essential ingredient to being an effective storyteller, I’ve never seen anybody even bring it up as a critical element of telling story, let alone how do you teach somebody that in a series of afternoon lectures?

**Craig:** There are unteachables. I think we’ve always agreed on that, that there are things that you can instruct, but then there’s whatever, however talent is defined. I think one of the cornerstones of talent, you’re right, is empathy. It is possible that what we may be looking at at best, and it’s hard to say because we don’t know, but let’s just say at best, for the foreseeable future, AI can’t do any better than being a very mediocre screenwriter. There are a lot of very mediocre screenwriters working. In fact, there are very few that aren’t very mediocre.

**Chris:** There’s the rub.

**Craig:** There is the rub. In a legitimate way, what we’re talking about is saying, hey, if there’s a choice between hiring a mediocre human and a mediocre computer, I really think we should be hiring the human. That is what we’re trying to get at.

**Chris:** I’m going to be the business side. I’ll play the devil’s advocate. If I’m going to hire a mediocre human or if I’m going to hire a mediocre machine, I’m going to hire the machine, because it’s going to get it done faster.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course.

**Chris:** It’s going to deliver it. What we all know is that first and foremost they need a document. What I like to say all the time is a script is as good or bad as it needs to be on the day you hand it in. If they need that script, and they have a start date, and the start date is Monday, and you get it to them on Friday, you’re going to get the greatest review of a screenplay you’ve ever handed anybody. We love it. It’s fantastic. You’ve solved it. We have some notes, but we’ll figure them out as we go. If there’s no actor attached and no director attached and you wrote Casablanca, it would go into development hell, simply because-

**Craig:** There’s time.

**Chris:** There’s time. AI will feed very nicely into that. Then it will generate a 120-page document with dialog and formatting and locations and they can budget that.

**Craig:** Yeah, but I have to say I still… Yes, absolutely. There are times where they want scripts to budget, and then you say it’s not ready, and they say, “Literally our job is to hand somebody a budget tomorrow. Please give me a thing that I can budget,” which is fine.

It does strike me that even with the consolidation and the conglomeration of these companies that the media business and being a corporation that creates television shows and movies is not the best way to make a gazillion dollars. Jeff Bezos didn’t become a billionaire because of Amazon studios. Apple didn’t become larger than most nations because of Apple Plus. These companies are far bigger than that. If you want to make a lot of money as an individual, man, these hedge funds apparently do quite well.

I still feel like the management in Hollywood, even at the highest levels, on some basic level still also love good stuff. They’re proud of it. They like winning awards. They like being part of culture. They like changing things. They love that. I think on some level they know that involves the human touch, but-

**Chris:** They like one thing more.

**Craig:** Money I assume.

**Chris:** Control.

**Craig:** Here’s the thing about control.

**Chris:** It’s all about priorities.

**Craig:** I will disagree with you on this. There are places that… I work at a place where control is not a priority for them at all. It’s not. What’s a priority for them is that the work is good. That is a priority for them. I salute HBO for that. Obviously, there are lots of places that differ in that.

What I think this quote is getting to is that there is this large chunk of the business, we used to call them programmers, and I wrote on a lot of them, where it was like, the point of this isn’t to be good or special. The point of this is we need this kind of movie doing these following things, hitting this kind of tone for this audience. Go. The fact of the matter is, I believe I have written things that probably AI could have done, will be able to do decently.

**John:** Let’s make a case for the mediocre writer versus the mediocre AI, because in both cases they’ve been trained on a corpus of text, which is all the stuff that came before them. It’s the film student who watched all of the other movies and is just trying to replicate the thing it saw, because the AI’s literally fed all of that popular culture. The best it can do, the best it can reasonably be expected to do, is about middle grade. It can actually make the choice. It can make decisions about what is better and what’s worse.

That may be the saving grace of the mediocre writer is that the mediocre writer still has, to get back to Chris’s thing, still has empathy and taste, still actually understands what is good and what is not good, and may still be aiming for better, even if it doesn’t actually know how to achieve that. It actually has empathy. It knows what it’s like. Going back to a Big Fish or something, knows what it’s like to lose a parent. You actually can have that experience, which an AI can never have. It knows what it’s like to physically be in a body. The AI might be able to come up with a bunch of words that approximate that experience, but it has no real understanding.

Finally, that AI is a chat bot maybe, but you can’t really talk back to it. So much of our job as screenwriters is not just doing what they tell us, but intuiting the note behind the note, intuiting what actually you need to do to get it beyond this next step, how to get it through this development executive to their boss, how to get that director on board. That’s not a thing that an AI is going to understand how to do. It’s not going to be able to think that many levels ahead. I think there’s still a job for a human being there.

I think my concern is that, whereas it used to be us pushing words around, that made us a screenwriter, it might be the person who is writing those prompts and having to deal with all the people that is doing the job of screenwriter. That’s where I think we might get replaced is that it’s we’re the person pushing the buttons but we’re not the real writer, we’re not the person stringing the words together.

**Chris:** Writers have had to, I think, disillusion themselves of certain beliefs, which I think AI is going to push them to have to accept even sooner. There is a lot of dogma around being a screenwriter and what a screenwriter’s role is and also what screenwriters want to do. We talked about this the last time that we all spoke. Actually, you and I spoke. Craig wasn’t there, because he was busy doing other things.

I think the future belongs to the writer-producer. You need to be somebody who not only writes the material but then can be there to help to execute and supervise and deliver that material. You’ve got to get out of the mindset of, I write a screenplay and hand it to other people, and they make the movie the way I think that movies should be made. You have to get away from that. That future has never been a rich one. I really believe that that future is doomed. Now you’re having to compete with a machine.

Whether you write the script or the machinery writes it for the studio executive who cannot write and does not want to hire another writer or doesn’t have the time, it’ll all evolve from, yeah, I would like to hire a writer, but it’ll take me three weeks to make that person’s deal. Then that person will go off, and they have a contractual number of weeks before they have to deliver a draft, etc, etc, etc. I have to deliver this in such and such, in 48 hours, because we have this window and this person is available only for these times. There will be a series of honest compromises that lead to this becoming a necessity and a necessary evil. That’s how I see it.

The writer who’s standing on the other side of it, the person who’s going to be making a living, is the person who’s there’s to fix what the AI broke and then be able to actually carry and deliver it and execute it. You’re always going to need a human being to put the stuff together, the same way AI right now, whatever it’s doing, it needs people. It needs to manipulate, maneuver human beings in the real world to actually pull levers and push buttons.

I don’t know if you read this article about how this AI learned how to lie. In order to bypass a captcha code, it went to some website. I can’t remember the name of it.

**John:** Mechanical Turk or something like that, where it hired, or Fiver.

**Chris:** Yes, it hired a person to get past the captcha for them. That’s the world we’re headed towards.

**Craig:** I think you’re probably underestimating the probability that AI will begin to instruct other AI. You may also be underestimating the probability that we are AI. That’s a topic for-

**Chris:** We don’t know that this conversation is real. None of us are sitting in the same room.

**Craig:** Also define real. I think that in a weird way with all of the cloud around this and how much confusion and possibility there is, it seems to me that it is incumbent upon the labor movement in Hollywood to come to an incredibly simple term, which is only humans write stuff. Man, they’re going to scream about it, but I don’t know how else you get around this.

**Chris:** I know how to get around it. They’ll make up a human. There’ll be somebody out there. There’ll be a well-known writer who you’ll find out 10 years later-

**Craig:** Was fronting for AI?

**John:** [Crosstalk 00:20:41].

**Chris:** Yeah, a front. It’ll be a front. By the way, I promise you-

**Craig:** That’s okay.

**Chris:** … there are writers out there who would take 10% of the salary to be the front, to represent an AI and say, “Yeah, that’s who I am.”

**Craig:** How is that already not a show on the air? Let’s go. Let’s go, McQuarrie. The front.

**Chris:** The front.

**Craig:** The front.

**John:** Going all the way back to The Blacklist, where there’s someone up there who’s pretending to be the writer of records. I want to stipulate that the conversation we’re having right now is about the kinds of film and television that we’re making and seeing right now, and so the stuff that we’re writing, that we’re creating, we’re producing. It’s entirely possible that AI could come up with some other kind of entertainment that’s generating itself, that is unique and different and compelling, might replace or displace what it is that we’re doing. That’s a threat not just to us as writers but to the entire film and television industry as we know it right now. That’s not a thing I think we’re qualified to get in the way of. That feels like a bigger governmental action.

I want us to circle back to this notion of Hollywood is built on mediocre stuff. What I like about it is that it’s a recognition that many of us aspire to make the one-of-a-kind, great, unique things. The bulk of what’s on television, the bulk of what is in our theaters every week isn’t even trying to be this great piece of art. It is programmers. There’s nothing wrong with that.

**Craig:** We learn that way. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t written something like that. I know there are some people. By and large, folks like us who have been around for a long time and have worked across the media and have rewritten and written and done originals and all the rest of it, all of us have worked on some of those things for sure. There is no shame in it whatsoever.

Also, again, like I said, it’s how we learn. If the AI is learning, so are we. If you take away the opportunity for humans to be mediocre, they will never get to be great. Even though theoretically McQuarrie was great out the door, what’s been going on is he’s been Benjamin Buttoning talent-wise.

**Chris:** Craig Mazin, everybody. Craig Mazin, dear, dear, dear, sweet friend, Craig Mazin. There is an expression Tom and I talk about all the time, which is educated into stupidity. We learn a lot of very bad habits. We spend a lot of our formative years writing to get past certain people in that chain. You have to write things that feel like a movie to them, even though they don’t actually understand what a shootable document is versus a readable document. We develop a lot of bad habits out of a sheer need for survival.

That is a big part of what feeds into the mediocrity machine is a lot of writers are educated to be mediocre by servicing low-level executives, producers who have had one big credit and now suddenly have all of this authority. You have to get by them. They’re just gatekeepers. Politically they might know how to get a script made, but they don’t really understand the nuts and bolts of telling you what to write so that it’s actually a shootable movie.

When that’s the objective, when the objective is a go movie versus a good movie, you’re always going to get that. Quality is not a standard option. It’s a factory add-on. It’s like, do I want the Blaupunkt stereo or do I want the standard AM/FM radio that they have in the car. Someone in the chain has to demand that this thing be good.

When you’re talking about an assembly line that is about we need it now and we need it at this budget, it’s not that they don’t want quality. Quality is simply not the number one priority. It can’t be, because quality is a nuisance. It’s an absolute burden. It’s a pain in the ass. It’s exhausting. The number of times that you want to just get to what I remember Ed Zwick referred to as the great fuck it. When it’s good enough and you don’t want to do it anymore, you have to have the power and the will, the resources, the credibility, to confront the narrative over and over and over again until it’s good.

When you reach a certain level… When Craig sent me Chernobyl, and I read Chernobyl, and I read the first two episodes and I called him and I said, “This is the most shootable hundred-and-some pages I have ever read.” I can’t understand how Craig Mazin wrote it.

**Craig:** Neither can I.

**Chris:** I said, “What is it?” I asked you in all seriousness. I said, “Where did this come from?” You said, “I finally figured out what I was doing.” You’d been at it for 20 years. I’ve been at it for close to 30 years before I was working on Top Gun: Maverick and saying, “Oh, I actually know what the priorities are now. I actually understand how to structure these things in a way that is instinctive rather than mandated.” You can accelerate that process. You can get through that a lot faster. That involved unlearning 30 years of really shitty habits that have been imposed upon me.

That’s the disadvantage of the writers who are starting out now is they’re swimming upstream against a much stronger current, having to learn the nuts and bolts and the ins and outs of the craft and to get to a place where the complexity becomes simplicity. The headwind that they’re going into now is, “I don’t need you to write the garbage. I don’t need you to do your apprenticeship. I’ve got a machine that can do your apprenticeship.”

I really believe that there needs to be a deconstruction and an education for the writers who are coming, about understanding what’s the priority, what’s the priority of story, how do these things really work, and get people past what I perceive as the absurdity of everybody young starts out thinking they want to make Apocalypse Now in 2001. They want to make all of their heroes’ movies without ever stopping to realize that all of their heroes started out making elevated genre fare and actually knew how to make and had apprenticeships where they just made movies. That’s the key to survival I think is learning how to make nuts and bolts entertainment and arrive at the place where you can then decide, okay, now I’m going to do one for me, where it used to be-

**Craig:** What was Jim Cameron’s first movie? Piranha?

**Chris:** Piranha 2.

**John:** Piranha 2, wasn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah, Piranha 2.

**Chris:** Piranha 2.

**Craig:** Didn’t even get to write Piranha 1.

**Chris:** Look, it’s the three guys I’ll use all the time. One made a gangster movie, one made a monster movie, one made a space monster movie. Coppola made The Godfather, Spielberg made Jaws, and Ridley Scott made Alien. They all made elevated genre movies. No one can see my air quotes. They were all artists. They were all auteurs. These are absurd terms that I think create an air of conceit. They were all great filmmakers in their own right, who had to make genre movies if they wanted their shot. If you wanted to make Apocalypse Now, you had to make The Godfather. Some part of Coppola really believed he was slumming when he made-

**Craig:** The Godfather was a pulp novel. It was kind of a trashy novel. When the book came out, it wasn’t like people were like, “Oh my god, this is the equivalent of Lord Jim.”

**Chris:** Killers of the Flower Moon.

**Craig:** It was a sexy book where people were shooting each other.

**Chris:** Jaws is a summer beach novel. Alien was a script by Dan O’Bannon, as pulpy as pulpy science fiction gets. Yet when you look at those films, they’re some of their most powerful and enduring movies. They’re also great cinema by just about anybody’s estimation. They’re movies you can go to and watch again and again and again and again. Machines couldn’t make them.

What’s happened is that a wedge has been driven. It was countersunk and pounded through the industry in the ’70s, in the beginning of the ’70s new wave and the idea of the auteur filmmaker that separated art and entertainment. You either make art or you make entertainment. You are an auteur or you are a shooter or you are a journeyman. I’m still trying to understand what that word means. As opposed to looking at it to say the real art for me, the real craft, what is cinema to me, are the movies that strive to walk the center line between art and entertainment.

You’re trying to pull art closer to entertainment and entertainment closer to art. You’re trying to make a film that engages and enriches the audience. That’s the really fine line. That’s the zone that it’s going to take AI a long, long time to get to.

It’s the zone that writers nowadays are almost engineered to avoid, in pursuit of one of two things. You’re either making mass entertainment for an audience, not the audience, you’re making mass entertainment for the Marvels of the world, the DCs of world, the Disneys of the world, which is all great, or you’re making art for the Academy, for a couple of thousand people, most of whom vote without actually watching every single movie that they’re voting for.

Filmmakers are essentially asked early in their career to make a decision. Are you going to be an artist, are you going to make movies for the Academy, or are you going to be an entertainer? Are you going to be a sellout and go make mass entertainment for those guys? I look at it and say why can’t the objective be Jaws, Aliens, shit, Avatar.

Look at Cameron. He is in a class utterly by himself. He’s the only guy out there understanding if I want to make movies on this big canvas, I need to make movies that everybody’s going to come see. He makes mass entertainment. He’s not ashamed of it. Occasionally, his mass entertainment gets nominated for awards. You don’t see James Cameron courting awards. You see James Cameron like, “I’m out to make mass entertainment. I’m out to reach the widest audience possible.”

It just so happens that his big mass entertainment movies like Avatar have a huge environmental message to them. They’re actually not just junk content. They actually contain big environmental messages about awareness of the world around you. I don’t see what’s wrong with that. I don’t see what there is to be allergic about. That’s where I feel like the future of the industry needs to be leaning when we talk about cinema and movies for the big screen.

What Marvel’s doing and what Marvel is I think experiencing right now, they’ve reached a saturation. They’ve isolated their audience. They’ve created a massive, massive, massive audience, but it’s also self-contained. It’s a bubble. They’re not making movies for everybody. They’re making movies for fans of the ever more internal Marvel universe. That’s finite, whereas Cameron can call it like Babe Ruth and say, “My movie’s going to make two and a half billion dollars.” He doesn’t have a massive Marvel universe behind it to do it. There’s huge opportunity there. People have to get over themselves and actually strive for that.

**John:** Chris, what I hear you saying is that in features we have certain filmmakers can prioritize quality over everything else. There’s that classic pick two. You can choose good, fast, or cheap. They’re able to choose good, because they actually have the track record that they can do that. They have started in having to balance those things better when they were making cheaper genre pictures. Now Cameron can spend a billion dollars making a movie, and he has that. On the TV side, we still have brands like HBO, for which quality is their delimiter. HBO has a brand value that is great. You know that a show on HBO is going to have a certain quality. You may like it, or you may not like it.

**Chris:** Quality is their brand.

**John:** Quality is their brand. Do we have on the feature side, quality is our brand? A24 to some degree. They’re always innovative movie. I don’t know they’re always the highest quality. They have a certain point of view. I don’t know. I wonder if we could have basically a film studio that quality is our brand.

**Chris:** Pixar understood. You look at first tier of movies that came out, and that’s what they were dedicated to. Is it sustainable? Is it all good things must end, and there was a very specific group of people shepherding it, it was the objective that everybody wanted? How long can you maintain that, and how finite that group of people is that come with all that education, and are they able to educate other people up into those ranks and to keep that stuff going?

Yes, A24, Working Title, there are certain brands when you look at it and go, “Oh, those, they make those good movies.” There’s a bigger thing at play. I’m looking at Craig right now sitting with the Hollywood Hills behind him. Somewhere behind Craig is the Cinerama dome, which is sitting empty and boarded up. What’s not happening with the A24s of the world and the Working Titles of the world is they’re not making movies that pack cinemas and feed into the health of my other definition of cinema, which is a place you go to watch movies with other people and have a shared experience, which is not only what I think is a really important human thing to do, also it enriches the experience of watching a movie. A horror movie is never as good at home as it is, or certain horror movies, never as good as watching with a crowd of people. Comedies are never as good as watching with a crowd of people and feeding into that.

There are movies that I consider deposits and withdrawals. If you’re making a movie with the intention of drawing the largest possible audience to the cinema, and not an audience, but the audience, you’re making a deposit. You’re actually feeding into that system, and you’re helping that system thrive. If you’re making a movie because how you want critics to feel about you or your film or the awards that you hope to get, and you can convince yourself all you want that the awards that I’m getting are actually good, they’re advertising the film, etc, etc, you’re just admitting that it’s all about money anyway. If you’re making movies for awards and things like that, you’re making a withdrawal.

If you’re not making it to drive the most number of people into the cinema, you’re benefiting from it more than the system is benefiting from it. That’s okay. That’s totally okay to do that. Know that that’s what you’re doing. When you’re making a movie for a streamer, and you’re releasing it in theaters for the requisite number of weeks so that it is eligible for an award, you’re not really paying back into the system. You’re not really here in the name of cinema. You’re there for how the cinema benefits you and not how you benefit the cinema. I don’t look at it that way. My partner doesn’t look at it that way. We look at it like that’s a whole hungry mechanism that desperately needs to be fed, and we make movies for that machine so that machine is there.

**John:** Top Gun: Maverick I think is indicative of that. Top Gun: Maverick was a film that critics loved, audiences loved, theaters loved, that the industry wanted that movie to succeed and was so happy it succeeded, because it was a good movie to see on a big screen with a big audience, and it did great too. The movie could’ve made the exact same amount of money and not had the impact if it hadn’t felt like it was the right moment.

**Chris:** Very early on we said this can’t be a cash grab and that no one will come if it is. When I came on board, the script that I was handed was a lot of fan service, a lot of rehashing of scenes from the original movie. We definitely hit those beats, but we hit those beats in a way that they were echoes of the past and not, oh, let’s just recreate that scene. Do you remember when they made the sequel to Airplane and they just regurgitated the scenes from the original so you got to see them again?

**John:** Yeah.

**Chris:** That worked in the day when you actually didn’t have home video and you had to wait three years to see that film.

**Craig:** Just to defend them, the sequel was not made my Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker.

**Chris:** Of course. Of course.

**Craig:** They get very upset if anyone thinks that they made that movie.

**Chris:** I’m not talking about whoever made it. I’m just talking about the end result. We knew very, very early on there was an expectation around it that it’s Tom and it’s Top Gun, they’re going to come. Tom was the first guy to say, “No, they’re not. They are not going to come. They are looking at this with suspicion. They’re looking at this as though this is a cash grab, and we have to do everything we can to convince them that this is actually an event that they have to come and see.”

The money that Top Gun made, a surprising amount of it was from repeat viewing, multiple viewings of people coming back to see it over and over and over again. That’s a metric that you don’t see charted a lot is how many of these movies that are making a billion dollars are making a billion dollars because people are going to see them the way we went to see ET and the way we went to see Star Wars over and over and over again in the cinema. What Top Gun is is proof that you can do that. It’s proof that if you make a movie that is that much of an emotional experience…

I read some critique of the movie that said, “Oh, it just feels like every moment in the movie is engineered for the maximum emotional effect.” Yeah. That’s the point. What are you talking about? Isn’t that what you do? Yes, I want you to be completely emotionally engaged in it the entire time. We would sit there and watch it and step back from it and look at it objectively and say, “Now I’m in the audience. How do I feel about this? Why is this not working for me? Why am I watching somebody have an experience rather than having an experience with that protagonist?” People are starved for it. Top Gun demonstrated that they were starved for it. They demonstrated that they don’t reject sincerity and earnestness and optimism. They actually came. They showed up for it, and they enjoyed it.

Top Gun changed the way I will approach every movie I make after Mission Impossible. I had started making Mission before Top Gun came out. Now looking at the experience of Top Gun, the first thing I would start with… With Mission you start with what are the big set pieces and what are the big stunts, what’s going to make this different from all the other Mission Impossibles.

Every movie I start with now is, what do I want the audience to feel when they’re walking out of the theater. What’s the feeling I want them to carry away from it. If the feeling is anything other than I feel great about myself and I want to see that again, why are you making it? You’re making it for yourself and not for-

**Craig:** Hold on. I agree with you completely that the… Certainly how I approach things is what is this… The question I ask is, why should this exist, which is a little different than your question, but it’s related. Why should this exist? The related question to that is, and if it ought to exist, clearly that involves the audience. They need to feel something.

**Chris:** Anything can exist. I want to be very, very clear.

**Craig:** No, why should this exist?

**Chris:** It’s who are you making it for? Ultimately, who is your audience?

**Craig:** I’m simply saying I don’t think feeling good about ourselves is the only feeling that is a valid one to chase with an audience. Sometimes you can get pretty far with people feel sad. I think feeling sad is a strong feeling. I think mourning, I think coming to grips with mortality. There are difficult things we can feel walking out that are very valid. I think where I agree with you is I want them to feel them.

**Chris:** You can feel rewarded and satisfied with those feelings, or you can feel punished and worn out and exhausted and demoralized, which is a lot.

**Craig:** Or provoked. Or provoked.

**Chris:** Or provoked, which a lot of filmmakers seem to embrace as something admirable, that the audience is an obstacle. The audience is a thing that is to be tolerated.

**Craig:** I don’t see it as an either or. I see it as simply, yes, getting an audience to feel something and putting their feelings first is… I completely agree with you. I generally speaking do enjoy movies that make me feel good at the end. Sometimes I like those, and sometimes I like movies that don’t.

**Chris:** I want to be very clear. If you’re going to make a movie that cost $30 million, those concerns are not as big. If you want to make a movie that costs $150, $170, $200 million, my advice to you is everybody should leave the theater feeling really great. It’s all proportionate to who the audience is for that film. If a movie’s got to make that formula of, say, three times what it costs to break even, James Cameron understood there was a certain point at which he realized I’m all in, and everybody on the planet has to love this movie.

**Craig:** Sure. Then there’s The Dark Knight. Then there’s where it’s a massive hit.

**Chris:** How much did The Dark Knight cost versus how much did The Dark Knight make? Chris Nolan is a very, very smart, frugal filmmaker. He understands marketing and how to target his movies. He understood who his audience was. He didn’t indulge in that movie. He didn’t go over budget. He didn’t make a movie [crosstalk 00:43:22].

**Craig:** I’m not suggesting that he did any of those things. I’m simply saying that there are very high-budget, popular hit films that carry through in pop culture and are beloved by people where you don’t walk out feeling warm and fuzzy. That’s all I’m saying.

**Chris:** Yes, I understand.

**Craig:** Usual Suspects was a fantastic film written by this kid from New Jersey, that made me feel terrible at the end but also satisfied.

**John:** Satisfied is a thing.

**Chris:** Satisfied is the word.

**John:** Terrible, great, satisfied is the word.

**Chris:** I’m not talking about warm and fuzzy. I’m not talking about warm and fuzzy. I am saying that if you’re going to make a movie past a certain budget, that’s the way.

**Craig:** I think people should always be satisfied.

**Chris:** Satisfied, absolutely.

**John:** There’s a different metric here. We’re talking about $30 million versus $300 million for a budget. Also, what are you asking of the audience to go and experience your movie? If it’s something that they were going to flip channels to… There’s movies that I’ll watch on a plane, but I’m not going to actually go to the theater to watch. If you’re trying to make a movie that you need to get people to go from their home to a theater, to buy a ticket, to sit in that seat, you’re making a big ask. I think it’s fair that they should have big expectations for what they’re going to get out of that and how they’re going to feel at the end of that. You want to make sure that they are feeling a big feeling from the end of that, which may not need to be the same situation on a made-for-streaming that they’re watching at home. I think there are different expectations there.

**Chris:** In that instance, a streaming movie, plain and simple, it doesn’t have to face an opening weekend. It doesn’t have to compete with anything. Actually, the metric by which a viewing is even measured is not the same. Somebody watches it for a few minutes, turns it off, or turns it on and turns off their TV and goes to bed, and it’s still running in the background and counts as a view. That’s very different than people coming out of their homes and paying money to go and sit and watch that movie. It doesn’t have to confront the same-

**Craig:** Agreed.

**Chris:** … obstacles to whatever a definition of success is, which is great. We talked about this the last time. I am hopeful that the streaming world becomes the test bed, becomes the place where filmmakers can cut their teeth, in an environment where their risk is lower. Their career risk is lower. Their tolerance for failure is much higher. Their budgets are a little more constrained.

It’s the farm system that gets people to the place where they can make bigger movies in cinemas, because that’s the thing that I don’t see. There’s not a mechanism that develops people to the level that most directors are working at now on those big, giant movies. It’s one thing to demand quality and to say I want it to be this thing in the middle. It’s the other thing to actually know how to do that and to prepare and to understand that part of what you have to build into that is, I’m not going to hit a bullet with a bullet straight out of the gate. I’m going to be re-shooting. I’m going to be. I have to build that into it. It’s a very complicated process by which you arrive.

Cameron, look how long it took him to make that movie, in order to make it the box office success that it was, to justify the budget that went into making that movie. Every day he was out there and the movie was getting bigger, the movie had to be that much better. It’s an absolutely terrifying way to work.

**John:** I promised that we would talk about group dynamics. Let’s put that aside for a moment because I actually want to circle back to something you said quite early on in the conversation, which is that Hollywood has decided not to have movie stars. We’ve let our movie star system fall apart. Is this a solvable problem? Why is it a problem? Chris McQuarrie, can you make your case for movie stars?

**Chris:** There are two things that having movie stars would require. One, the studios have to want movie stars. Two, stars have to want to be stars. There are a lot of actors who have the capacity to be giant stars. They are defined by their choices. They’re not leaning into the kind of material that, and the kind of filmmaking that would make them stars. Being a star is a level of commitment. It’s a level of awareness. You have to really control your destiny. You have to really understand filmmaking. You can’t just entrust that to other people. Stars have to want to be stars.

The system, again, the award-driven system that tells you you either win Oscars or wear a cape, there’s not a thing in the middle that’s leaning towards encouraging people to be more traditional movie stars. There’s not an incentive to be Clark Gable. There’s not an incentive to be Marilyn Monroe, and yet the business needs those. People want those icons.

You see people time and again arrive in a place where you’re thinking this person’s really going to pop, this person’s really going to take off, this person’s going to be a big star, and then you watch their subsequent choices. It’s not that there was something in the water in the ‘40s that isn’t there now. There was a different system that cultivated those people and that groomed them to be stars, and then the stars themselves understood this is what I need to do to protect my brand and to put myself forward. Humphrey Bogart was a very, very smart filmmaker. Clark Gable was a very smart filmmaker. Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas were giant movie stars. They were also very, very, very smart about how to make themselves stars and to keep themselves stars.

**John:** Craig, how do we get there? How do we get movie stars back, or do we get movie stars back?

**Craig:** Movie stars are enormously helpful to center our culture, because the culture that we create is about human beings. It’s about the human condition, whether it’s a comedy or a drama. We identify with certain humans because of a kind of magic they have.

Tom Hanks is a human being that hundreds of millions of human beings connect to, even though he doesn’t know them. There is something in his eyes. There is something about the way his mind works and connects to his face and his eyes and his voice.

The problem that we have is that we have cheapened fame. The fame is useless now. Everyone’s famous. Fame doesn’t mean a goddamn thing. Fifteen minutes? Everyone’s famous for the rest of their lives. That’s my turn on Warhol. Everyone is now famous forever, because everybody is everywhere, seeing each other. It’s harder and harder to find the signal amidst the noise. It really is. Hollywood tries really hard. There are examples where they try to make people stars. They work on it. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.

**Chris:** Choices.

**Craig:** There are people who still emerge from all of this mess. The person that comes to mind is Zendaya. Zendaya’s a star. Zendaya’s going to be a star for the rest of my life. She will be a star for the rest of my children’s lives. That’s how that’s going to be. You can just see it. She’s a star. It’s still possible. When we find people like that, it’s important. Timothee Chalamet is a star. That’s just the way it is. We used to grow a lot more of them. It’s just hard now. It’s hard to figure out who is a star and who just has a whole lot of followers.

**John:** For sure. Let’s go to our One Cool Things. Chris, I see you with an object in your hands. What is this One Cool Thing you want to share with us?

**Chris:** It’s called the Anker 3-in-1 Cube. This is my favorite new little gadget. It’s a great travel gadget. It’s a great desktop gadget. It charges an iPhone. It charges your earbuds. It’s got this little pop-out thing that charges your Apple Watch with the fast charging standard.

**John:** Nice.

**Chris:** It’s all three in one, all in this nice little cube that actually folds up with one little click, goes in your bag, or just sits nicely on your desk and takes up very little space. It’s my favorite gadget. I love it.

**Craig:** That’s A-N-K-E-R I’m presuming.

**Chris:** A-N-K-E-R, Anker [AYN-kr] or Anker [AHN-kr]. When you go on Amazon, they’re an electronics powerhouse.

**Craig:** They make a lot of USB hubs and things.

**Chris:** Yes, hubs and batteries and things like that. I have to say I’m always suspicious of those brands that exist only on the internet. I have to say I have a lot of their products. They’re actually very good. This is my very favorite one of them.

**Craig:** Look at this free ad for Anker. Unbelievable.

**Chris:** Free ad for Anker. You noticed I’m wearing the Anker T-shirt and baseball cap, and my car has an Anker skin on it.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Craig, what is your free ad for?

**Craig:** My free ad is for something that I honestly think is magic. I don’t understand how this works. Are you familiar with goodrx.com?

**Chris:** No.

**John:** I don’t understand it, but I think I know what it does.

**Craig:** Here’s this insanity. If you are getting a prescription medication and for some reason your insurance doesn’t cover it, either because the med isn’t covered by your insurance or let’s say in the case of where I ran into this, I had a prescription that I was getting locally at the Rite Aid, but then my doctor was like, “Okay, let’s actually go through Express Meds,” which is our long-term medication thing through the WGA.

While I’m waiting for them to ship it, there’s a week where I need to get it refilled, but Rite Aid was like, “Sorry, they’ve already done it that way. We can’t do it this way on your insurance. However, why don’t you just go to goodrx.com?” I was like, “I don’t want to buy it from another company.” They’re like, “No, just go to goodrx.com, type in the drug you want.” Then it says, okay, where would you like to get this medicine from? One of the things is Rite Aid. They have CVS. They have Walgreens. They have everybody. I click on Rite Aid, and this little coupon comes up. I show it to them. They type the number in. They’re like, “Okay, so instead of being $5,973, it’s $12, also without insurance.” Without insurance.

Now, how is this working? I do not know, and I also am on the verge of not caring, because it does. It’s startling. If you have a prescription and it’s not covered by your insurance, goodrx.com apparently figures it out anyway.

**John:** They’re giving you some sort of a coupon, rebate code thing. It’s putting it in some group plan. It’s doing behind-the-scenes shenanigans.

**Craig:** Shenanigans.

**John:** Great. Shenanigans. Our whole health system is shenanigans. Chris McQuarrie’s laughing there because he’s in the UK.

**Chris:** It’s the way you went, “Shenanigans.”

**Craig:** It is shenanigans.

**Chris:** The answer is shenanigans.

**Craig:** Shenanigans. You know what? I love it. Great. Whatever it is.

**Chris:** It’s a scientific explanation.

**Craig:** If I open the door of the goodrx.com company and the inside is filled with nothing but leprechauns, I’m just going to close the door, back away, and drive away. That’s fine. I don’t care how it’s working. All I know is, what the hell is that? Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** There’s my free ad.

**John:** My free ad is for Signal, which people are listening to this saying, “You’re just now discovering Signal?” Signal is the messaging app. It’s known as being encrypted, which is great. Love it. It’s actually much better for… We had these group email threads that were getting endless and long and terrible. It’s all people who need to talk about one thing. It was these emails that were going back and forth. It was a disaster. We wisely moved over to Signal. There’s just a channel on Signal, which we’re all in this group chat. It’s so much better of an experience. If you are stuck in a group email or a group text situation, try Signal for it, because it honestly has been so much better of an experience going through this. It’s simpler than setting up a new Slack instance. It’s free. It’s been just a great experience. Signal I would recommend if you are in a group conversation situation.

**Chris:** I got rid of WhatsApp and only use Signal. It’s actually great. Signal’s the best one, most secure too.

**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, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We’re coming up with this Episode 600 T-shirt, so stay tuned for that. You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all of the back-episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on the movie theater experience. Chris McQuarrie, thank you so much for coming back on our program.

**Craig:** Thank you, Chris.

**Chris:** My pleasure. We’ll do team dynamics in a hundred episodes.

**John:** Love it. Perfect.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Chris McQuarrie, let’s say you’re making some giant movie that’s coming out, perhaps in a summer at some point. If I have my choice of theaters and theater experiences to go to, what do you think is the best, current in the United States at least, that I could go see a film like the one you might want to make?

**Chris:** It’s a very tricky question. The great leveler for me is Dolby Atmos and Dolby Vision. Sound is a huge component for me. I consider sound and music to be a full third of the experience. I think your sound design and your score are actually more important than any dialog in the movie. Dolby Atmos is the way to do it. Dolby Vision is truly amazing.

**John:** What is Dolby Vision?

**Chris:** Dolby Vision is the Dolby projection system, these laser projectors that are super high-definition laser projectors, which are one of the things you’ll experience when you go to a lot of your movie theaters. There’s foot-lamberts, I believe it is, the brightness in the bulb. Most projectors that you’re seeing, the bulbs are either not replaced frequently enough, they’re not properly maintained. A lot of times, when you’re going to the movie theater, you’re watching what should be, I think it’s at 11 foot-lamberts, you’re watching it at 9 or 8 or even less than that. Dolby Vision, its standard is 14, I think. I should not be giving you all the technical on it, only that it is extremely bright, clear image. The blacks are very, very black and very defined.

A great demonstration I saw of it, you sit in this theater and you watch them project black onto the screen. The black is actually very, very, very dark gray, because how can you get black if you’re projecting onto the screen? Dolby Vision can project proper black onto the screen. When you see it, the difference is quite startling. You get an incredibly rich image, and you get incredibly immersive sound. It’s to me in an all around. Dolby Vision, it can be in different sized auditoriums. For me, if I was going to build a theater in my home and had all the money in the world, I’d build a Dolby Vision.

**Craig:** You got close. I don’t know what you’re waiting for. I agree completely.

**Chris:** You’d be tragically surprised.

**Craig:** Is someone spending money in your house or something? I don’t know.

**Chris:** When you spend five years making a movie instead of two and a half-

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, there is that. I agree with Chris McQuarrie. Take that to the bank, my friends.

**Chris:** What?

**Craig:** Take that to the bank.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Craig:** Yes, that is absolutely correct. The future of projection is lasers, without a doubt. This problem of dim bulbs, as I’ve been saying for a long time, is brutal. Even without Dolby Surround and all that stuff, sound when we were kids was still pretty impressive because of the number of speakers and the size of speakers in a large auditorium situation. Sound has obviously gotten really, really good. Even at home, we can get really, really good sound. The projection on a large screen is difficult for people to have at home. I’m putting aside the communal experience watching a movie. The visual aspect, if it is a Dolby visual, it is a dramatic improvement.

Also, let us take a moment. If you do watch things at home and you’re making your own theater, let us take a moment to talk about something that is near and dear to both my heart and Mr. McQuarrie’s heart and any rational human being’s heart, which is to turn off your fucking motion smoothing. Get your remote out and turn that shit off. Go into the settings. It’s in advanced settings. Anything that’s called smoothing, motion, anything with the word smooth or motion, turn off. Turn it off. It’s crap.

**Chris:** Turn it off.

**Craig:** Crap.

**Chris:** It’s video interpolation.

**Craig:** It’s awful. Awful.

**Chris:** It’s terrible. It’s terrible. Whole generations of audiences are being conditioned to watch-

**Craig:** Crap.

**Chris:** … what Rian Johnson described as liquid diarrhea.

**Craig:** I saw a trailer. I think I was showing somebody the trailer for Chernobyl before it had come out. I was in his house. I just Apple TV’ed it over to his television to watch it. I turned it off within three seconds. I’m like, “Nope. You’ve got motion smoothing on.”

**Chris:** Can’t watch it that way.

**Craig:** It made me feel horrible. It made me feel like I had screwed up so terribly by creating Days of Our Lives – Chernobyl. It just looked so awful. Turn that shit off. That aside, theater-wise, Dolby. Dolby visual.

**John:** Chris, I remember when THX came out. It was an accreditation system, basically making sure that the theater itself actually met certain standards. I remember a THX guy came to one of our classes at USC and said, “If you have a choice of where to sit in a theater, you should sit about two thirds of the way back and in the center, because that’s basically where the filmmaker probably was situated as they were mixing the film.” Is that still an accurate way of thinking about, given your druthers, where a person might want to choose to sit?

**Chris:** I can tell you that when I go to test movies, I end up in the back of the theater most often. It’s the only time I sit in the back of the theater. It’s truly horrible back there, no matter how good the auditorium is, because you’re in the surrounds. You’re not in the center five one. You’re not in that center channel. They’re fairly well balanced. If you’re in the center, anywhere between the front and the middle of the auditorium generally, I don’t sit that far back.

When I’m mixing the movie and our mixing stage, the thing we’re constantly reminding ourselves of is that you will never see the movie or hear the movie as good as the filmmakers do on their state-of-the-art mixing stage. We actually have settings whereby, because we know that there are going to be projectors with a shitty bulb, if you have a scene that’s dark, we’ll deliberately dim it, to look at it and say, is there going to be any detail when you’re watching this in a shitty theater that hasn’t been updated in 12 years, because they don’t make enough money? We’ll deaden the sound. We’ll do stuff like that.

That’s why those things are really important. That’s why when you see Dolby Atmos, you know you are getting a quality, standardized, and probably fairly recently updated system. If you do that, Dolby Atmos is pretty immersive, regardless of where you’re sitting in the theater. It’s different from theater to theater. It’s hard to say definitively.

**John:** My final question for you, Chris, is, Nicole Kidman in the AMC ad talks about sound you can feel. As you are mixing sound, are you only thinking about the actual sound that you’re able to project, or is there something about… Some of these theaters now actually have special extra vibrational things. Is that something you now consider with the kind of movies you’re making?

**Chris:** You will hear more and more a term, PLF, premium large format. Premium large format, there is IMAX, there’s Dolby Vision, there’s 4DX, which is what you’re talking about where it has the shaky seats, and there’s one called ScreenX, which is now they have screens on the side of the theater.

**John:** Our Koreatown theater has that, which is really cool.

**Chris:** When I first heard about it, I thought, what? Then I saw. Like 3D, it’s something where it can be done right, or the movie suits it or the movie doesn’t. Sometimes the transfer really works, and sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on how much time and work and effort they put into it. Yes, sound you could feel, absolutely. Even if I’m doing something that’s not 4DX or ScreenX, the mixes I like are mixes that you can feel. There are elements in Dead Reckoning, for instance, that you primarily feel. You’ll never experience them on home video the way that you will in a theater. You’ll hear it in home video, but in a theater you’ll actually physically feel it. It’s actually something we’ve done with a malevolent force. In our movie, we created a sound element that is as much physical as it is audible.

**John:** Awesome. Chris McQuarrie, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, Chris.

**Chris:** Thank you.

Links:

* Chris McQuarrie on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0003160/) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/christophermcquarrie)
* [The looming threat of AI to Hollywood, and why it should matter to you](https://www.vox.com/culture/23700519/writers-strike-ai-2023-wga) by Alissa Wilkinson for Vox
* [Anker 3-in-1 Cube with MagSafe](https://www.anker.com/products/y1811?variant=42206465327254)
* [Signal](https://signal.org/en/)
* [GoodRx](https://www.goodrx.com/)
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You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/600v2standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/group-dynamics).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Okay, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 599 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. We often talk about story in terms of the journey of a single protagonist, but some movies center on a group of characters that serve as the hero. Today on the show, we’ll look at these group dynamics and how to think about them both on the scene level and story-wide. We’ll also talk about pitch decks and translations of public domain works. We have some follow-up on binging episodes versus putting them out one week at a time. We got a real grab bag of stuff here today, Craig.

**Craig:** I love a grab bag. It keeps us spontaneous and fresh.

**John:** That’s the goal. In our bonus segment for Premium members, I’d love to talk about how you start playing an RPG video game, because I’m looking at two new ones, Diablo and the new Zelda. You may find the same experience. I want to start playing them, but I also don’t want to make dumb mistakes that have me burning like 10 hours. We’ll talk about strategies for how you start playing one of these games.

**Craig:** What a great topic. So much anxiety. So much early game anxiety. Oh my god, what skill tree will I pick? We will dig into that. You know what? If you don’t play video games but you are a Premium member, stick around for that bonus segment anyway, because there are life lessons, my friends. Life lessons.

**John:** I’m excited to hear them. Let’s start off with this new report that I saw, uh, today. So Deadline had a link to it. Well, Deadline actually did not have a link to it, which was so frustrating. They had a zillion links in their article, but none of them actually linked to the actual study. I had to Google a quote from there to find an actual better article about it. We’ll link to something from The Streamable.

It’s a study on which is more successful for streamers, to put all the episodes of a season out at once or do them week by week? This is a thing we’ve talked about often on the show, and our opinions on this, which I think you and I both are in the opinion that you build more momentum and more love for a show week by week than putting them all out to binge. Here are some numbers that study that.

This is from a company that monitors actual TV. They’re not getting their data from the streamers themselves. They’re getting it from viewers and who’s watching a show, who’s finishing a show. What they were able to see is that if you put out all the episodes at once, more people will finish the whole series, but the actual growth of the show is limited. It doesn’t sustain for as long. To me, I think what we’ve always talked about is that if you are a streamer, your goal is to keep people subscribed to your service, and therefore it makes sense to just keep people hooked as long as possible.

**Craig:** Obviously, I’m a big believer in the weekly method. This makes total sense to me, because it is true that if you have all the episodes available, you do fall into a kind of inertia, the inertia of motion. When an object is in motion, it wants to stay in motion. An object watching a show wants to keep watching a show. Watch the next episode. Watch the next episode. Watch the next episode. Sure, you’ll finish it. In finishing it, it’s eaten so quickly, digested so quickly, that it’s forgotten quickly.

There is no ability to share a communal discussion, whereas for both of the television shows I’ve made, the week-to-week model wasn’t part of its success, it was almost all of its success. It’s not like The Last of Us premiered to small numbers. It premiered to fantastic numbers. It just grew from there. It just grew, and it became a global discussion, because it was week to week.

The week-to-week model also creates this cottage industry of summary recaps, tons of podcasts. There was probably, I don’t know, 15 or 20 podcasts that would just do a, “Okay, we just watched this episode of The Last of Us. Here’s what we think.” I think everybody should be doing it. Now, that said, this article is making an argument that certain cases, binging may be better.

**John:** The two marquee shows they talk about from 2022 are Netflix’s Wednesday and HBO’s House of the Dragon. Wednesday was a binge all the episodes at once. House of the Dragon was the classic weekly model.

Wednesday did great. It was a giant hit. It did do big numbers for them. It had a lot of rewatching too, which is understandable that you’d get through the whole thing, then just go back and rewatch the whole thing. If you think about Wednesday, it had some breakout cultural moments. Wednesday’s dance got to be a big thing. It did burn really bright, but it didn’t continue out over the number of weeks. I don’t think it has the cultural conversation that House of the Dragon did, for its classic weekly structure.

Netflix can’t be upset with Wednesday, and HBO can’t be upset with House of the Dragon. They both were very successful for what they were trying to do.

**Craig:** Yes, and they will both come back, and they will both make more. Look, it’s a little bit of a question too of the tone of a show. Wednesday does feel like it goes down a little bit easier. House of the Dragon’s pretty heavy. It’s violent. It’s upsetting. It’s hard to watch that show one after another, after another. Wednesday’s much lighter fare. It’s more of a young adult show. It’s got comedy elements.

If I were Netflix, and I’m not, if I were, I’d run it week by week. I would, because I just look at how there is this world of discussion, analysis, debate, group watching. If everybody was watching that dance scene at the same time, it would’ve been even bigger.

**John:** Yeah, very possible.

**Craig:** It just feels like they’re missing out. This is part of the Netflix fire hose. There’s something that’s slightly cheapening about the fact that you can see everything all at once, all the time, no matter what it is.

**John:** Looking at Disney, with Disney Plus, so two of their Marvel shows, Loki 2 will be weekly, like the way it was always. That makes sense, because there’s going to be a lot of speculation in between episodes about what happens. Echo, which is the spin-off of Hawkeye, is going to be all at once. Maybe that makes sense. They can at least see how it does. Echo is a younger show. It is probably more on the order of a Wednesday, so maybe it’ll make more sense for that show to be all at once.

**Craig:** It might. I did see some commentary on the internet that framed it in terms of this is how Disney values these shows, with the understanding that putting it out there all at once was a devaluing move.

Now, I’m not sure what the benefit is of putting it all out at once versus week by week, unless the idea is we don’t think… I think this is what people were implying by the devaluing. If the company thinks, “We actually don’t think this thing is going to build. We got to get them real fast,” this one is going to be like, we got you, you watched it all, hooray, but no one’s going to be coming back week after week to watch this. That’s an interesting concept.

Netflix hasn’t had the ability to discriminate like that. It is interesting that Disney has started to discriminate like that, whereas HBO only does things week by week. We’ll see what happens. I’ve just always been puzzled by this whole, here it is all at once.

**John:** All at once. With Stranger Things, this most recent season is split up into two chunks. You could say it was for story reasons, but it was really I think to hold people across another month so that they would have to stay and subscribe to Netflix. I think that was good for the show, because it built up speculation about what happens in the second half of the season. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do more experiments where they are trying something more weekly down the road.

**Craig:** I’m curious. We should have the Duffer Brothers on the show for sure, not only because they’ve made this just culturally important televised institution, but I want to hear their opinion on this. Stranger Things seems to me like the poster child for a show that ought to be week to week, because it’s a mystery. It has cliffhangers at the end of every episode.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** It has these “holy crap” moments that you want to share with everybody communally.

**John:** It is intense. It’s intense, and the episodes are long. It feels like once per week would actually serve that show really well.

**Craig:** Yes. I wonder if they’ve ever asked. I know that Ted Sarandos is on record as saying the whole binge method is part of the DNA of Netflix, but maybe not.

**John:** Yeah, but other DNA has changed too. Netflix was shooting their first pilots as we went into the strike. They had never done pilots. Now they’re doing pilots. They didn’t have ads. Now they have ads. A lot is changing. I do wonder if the binge model will also change.

**Craig:** Honestly, I have never understood it. It always occupied that same space in my brain that MoviePass did, which is, wait, what am I missing? In the case of MoviePass, nothing. I missed nothing. I was correct. You were correct. Anybody with half a brain was correct. In this case, I just wonder. It feels like I’m missing something. I just don’t know what it is.

**John:** I think here’s maybe what you’re missing is what metric they’re going for, because this article would say that you look at Wednesday, and overall people finished the show more. They may have some metric that says people finishing a show is better in the long run for our retention. Maybe they have some reason why they believe that. I think they’re missing out.

The bigger point we’re making in terms of when you don’t release a show week by week, you lose out on the whole ecosystem that can build up around it. That feels like a giant loss. There’s just no way to get around that.

**Craig:** There is something that feels like a lack of vote of confidence. Queen’s Gambit that Scott Frank made, that ought to have been a week-to-week show. I haven’t asked Scott about it, but it just seems like that would’ve been way better than putting it all out there, because it was fantastic. My whole thing is, if it’s crack, don’t give them all the crack at once. The whole point of crack is-

**John:** Also, people want to say, oh, teenagers will want to watch it all at once. They can also watch it all at once when it’s all done, and so they can join in the conversation.

**Craig:** Also, isn’t part of life telling teenagers no? By the way, I have no idea how crack works. I don’t know why I was just saying, “Isn’t the point of crack,” and then I trailed off, because I don’t know the point. I actually don’t know.

**John:** You could put something on the table and say, “That’s crack.” I’m like, “Okay.” I can recognize the paraphernalia around it, but if you were to say, “This is a rock of crack. This is a portion of crack. This is the appropriate amount of crack for a person to use,” it’s probably zero, but I wouldn’t know what it is.

**Craig:** I think if you put a piece of crack, and I don’t even know if the term piece… A rock. A rock of crack.

**John:** I’m assuming rock, yeah.

**Craig:** You put a rock of crack down next to a rock of a little bit of drywall, I’m not sure I would be able to tell the difference or pick out the one that’s drywall versus the crack.

**John:** If it was something that I got out from the tread of my shoes, that kind of thing, I wouldn’t know the difference.

**Craig:** I’ve noticed that Drew’s been real quiet about this.

**Drew Marquardt:** I have secrets.

**Craig:** I’m guessing that he’s like, “Oh, guys. Guys. Guys.”

**Drew:** We need to have a meeting.

**John:** Back in Scotland. Back in Scotland.

**Craig:** We need to have another side podcast that’s just about crack.

**Drew:** Just me talking about the different sizes of crack rocks.

**Craig:** Just you talking really fast and wildly about crack. We solved that problem.

**John:** We solved that problem. Let’s do some more follow-up here. Drew, we have something about tone meetings.

**Drew:** David Michael Maurer, ACE, wrote in. He said, “Loved listening to Episode 598 with Vince Gilligan. Wanted to share that in my experience as an editor, being part of the tone meetings is incredibly helpful. It allows me to hear firsthand what the showrunner and writers intended and listen for any creative pivots that the director may discuss. I can also ask questions earlier in the process about things like VFX or complicated sequences that may impact post-production and set time to sidebar with the director if needed so that they’re supported.

“Usually, this helps my editor’s cut get closer to what everyone intended tonally earlier. This also makes the director’s cut easier and stronger, and the showrunner’s first editorial pass becomes a much more enjoyable experience.”

**Craig:** Oh, yes. Oh, David Michael Maurer, I would like to kiss you for that. We certainly have our editors sitting in on our tone meetings. It’s essential. Look, editors do need a sense of freedom to approach the footage without feeling like they’re shackled.

On the other hand, you know, in talking about this very topic with Tim Goode, who’s one of our editors on The Last of Us, he does look back at the script a lot, and understanding what the lines are between the lines or why things were said or why things were put where they were, which does come out in a tone meeting, helps flesh that out.

We call it the clue book, because sometimes editors are like… I watch a scene and I’m like, “Huh.” They’re like, “I just didn’t quite know what to do here given the footage.” I’m like, “Let’s look at the clue book.” Then they’re like, “Oh. Oh. Oh, okay. Oh, okay, okay.” Getting a jump start on the clue book is a fantastic thing. If you are a showrunner, please, for the love of god, include your editors on tone meetings, for sure.

**John:** Craig, just a little sidebar here. Thinking back to The Last of Us, or Chernobyl as well, the editor may have been involved in these initial tone meetings. They have a sense of what that is. When they look at the footage from a scene, I assume they’re looking at what is the closest to a master shot that there would be.

In a lot of these shows, can you even fairly say that there’s a master shot for the scene? Are you ever just filming something wide enough that you can get the whole sense of what the scene’s supposed to be?

**Craig:** We certainly do. We’re not television. We’re HBO. Look, Chernobyl and The Last of Us certainly had the budgets and the creative ambition to be as cinematic as we could. We definitely shoot lots wide wides, wide wide wide wides and weird wides. It is a little different than some smaller shows. Obviously, every show is different.

The other challenge for our editors is we shoot a lot. For instance, our shooting schedule on average for an episode is 20 days. Now I say that around most people that make television and they just are weeping, because they get five days, maybe 12.

**John:** It’s crazy. So many one-hour procedurals, maybe they had eight days, now they’ve been cut down to seven and a half or they have to cross-board two shows to get 15 days.

**Craig:** At that point, your ability to shoot anything other than the bare necessities is really reduced. We do have that. They have a lot more footage to work with, which creates a lot more possibility, which is certainly part of what we do. If you look at Chernobyl or The Last of Us and count the big wides, you’ll count a lot of them. We’re big on those.

**John:** How often, as you were setting every day, did you do wides first versus a more specific shot? Are you almost always wides first?

**Craig:** Almost always. If we’re exterior, I always want to start wide, because it helps me start to choreograph the motion of the scene. It’s kind of free blocking. We’ve obviously blocked. Because it’s big and wide, you get a little bit of a sense of where positions are. It helps you. You can move things around a little bit. It starts to give you a little bit also of a sense of tone. It afford you an opportunity to create a visual transition, if you need, from what was prior, or you plan ahead to make your visual transition something super duper close. You just know when you’re getting close, you gotta grab that. Generally speaking, I follow the traditional wide and then march in.

**John:** It also gives you a chance to really look at the performances and see what it is that you may want to, little moments you may want to pick up as you get closer in or change or give yourself some options, because-

**Craig:** The actors are also using those big wides as rehearsals, because they know the moments that are crucial aren’t going to be playing in this huge wide, but it gets everybody’s juices flowing.

**John:** Some more follow-up.

**Drew:** Patrick writes, “That Disney TV movie from Episode 597 was in mono because there wasn’t stereo television in most places. That wasn’t until later in the ’80s with shows proudly displaying ‘in stereo’ at the beginning. For The Ewok Adventure in 1984, George Lucas being George Lucas, he wanted people to have the chance to watch it in stereo. They got radio stations in major markets to simulcast the audio in stereo. There were even ads explaining how to set up your home stereo.”

**John:** I do not remember The Ewok Adventure. I do remember the first time I would see the little bugs in the corner of the screen, like, “in stereo,” because it was a big deal when stuff was in stereo.

**Craig:** I gotta say, there’s gotta be some word for this, a memory that was simply not there and now is there. Just by Patrick saying, “Proudly displaying ‘in stereo,'” suddenly I’m like, oh yes, of course. I remember seeing “in stereo” for sure, but it was just gone out of my brain. It didn’t exist until Patrick reminded me. What is that about?

**John:** Let’s go on to our marquee topic. This is full disclosure. Our guest on next week’s episode, we already recorded that episode, and we were going to talk about this topic, and we ran out of town. I’m pulling it backwards or forwards in time to talk about it here on this episode.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I want to talk about groups. So often on the podcast we’re talking about classic dramatic theory, where you have a protagonist who begins a story. They have one set of beliefs and conditions. They undertake this journey that transforms them, finds them arriving at a different set of beliefs and circumstances. We talk about our protagonist. We talk about an antagonist, who’s the person who’s forcing them to change. There’s other characters, of course, who are very important. The central protagonist storyline is key to many movies, probably most movies. Craig, would you agree?

**Craig:** Yes, I think so. I think so, for sure.

**John:** There are movies that don’t have that one single, central protagonist. They’ve grouped the characters who share that spotlight. I thought we might spend some time talking about those kinds of movies and what a writer needs to be thinking about when you’re tackling a story that doesn’t have the one constant protagonist, but rather has a group that is doing that hero’s work.

Some examples of the classic thing would be like an Erin Brockovich, a Michael Clayton, an Elvis, Amadeus, Tár. They often have the character’s name as the title of the movie. That is one kind. Then there’s Charlie’s Angels or Reservoir Dogs, ensemble comedies like Best in Show or The Hangover, A Fish Called Wanda. There’s a lot of movies that do have groups of characters. Ocean’s Eleven has groups of characters that do things. Let’s spend some time thinking about the difference and how you make sure that there still is a narrative story drive even with disparate characters carrying the football through it.

**Craig:** One of the things that teamwork, and I like to think of them as teamwork movies and stories, do is they reinforce a natural pro-social desire we have to see functioning relationships where individuals get to shine because of their diverse abilities.

Pretty much the entire Marvel universe is like this. Yes, they definitely did Captain America. That’s Captain America. Iron Man is Iron Man. It wasn’t until they hit the Avengers where things went kaboom, because we love watching The Dirty Dozen, we love watching Seven Samurai, we love watching Ocean’s Eleven, where a team is assembled. Being on a winning team feels good. It takes away the burden of being the only one.

A lot of single-protagonist stories talk about the one somebody has chosen to win. In this case we’re all working together. Each one of us is different and has a moment to shine. The story is about the relationships. Now, typically, the relationships are narrowed down to one central relationship inside of the group, because we can’t really handle more than that.

Everybody gets a chance to win, and everybody gets a chance to lose. Watching the team struggle, fall apart, and then come back together actualized and all doing their individual parts is so satisfying. It’s just satisfying on a deep, deep level.

**John:** We hadn’t planned for which movies you wanted to tackle. Even thinking about the first Star Wars, A New Hope, it is Luke Skywalker’s story. He does protagonate in a very classic way, and yet the ensemble around him is very, very important. We see the team dynamics form and splinter and the tensions within relationships that are not even specifically about Luke.

You have smaller groups within that larger group. Of course you have C-3PO and R2-D2 and then their relationship. You have Luke and Leia and their relationship, but also Leia and Han Solo, their relationship. Within that bigger dynamic, you have smaller individual pairings or triads there, and you want to see how those are developing within the bigger context of things.

In those relationships, you have to be able to track those independently of the plot. It’s not plot stuff. It’s really about the growth of characters as we’re following them through the story.

**Craig:** If you note, each one of those characters will have some sort of failure and then some sort of success. The failure and success is within the context of the team. R2-D2 and C-3PO are basically failures. C-3PO is a failure all the time, but then R2-D2 is the one that ultimately saves them all from dying in the trash compactor. Eventually, C-3PO has his moments where he gets to win. That is exciting to watch. It’s exciting to see Han Solo be both swashbuckling and cool and then also selfish and then cool again. Everybody doing their part is just, again, it’s like watching all these pieces click together that feel so good.

In The Hangover, Alan, Zach Galifianakis’s character, is an absolute disaster of a human being and so much fun to write, because he’s just chaos. He’s completely unhinged. He has the strangest worldview and an enormous amount of confidence and certainty, even though he deserves no confidence and certainty. When the chips are down, literally, he just engages this bizarre gear he has and wins all this money at blackjack, because he’s special. We love watching that. We love watching the underdog who’s good at nothing suddenly shine and crush it.

**John:** Now, thinking about The Hangover movies, we talk about this on the macro scale, but let’s think about it on a scene level. You have several of the characters together in a scene. Classically, you would want to have your protagonist be driving that scene, and yet you don’t have one clear central protagonist. How do you approach a scene and who should be in charge of the scene, or are mostly people vying for control of the scene?

**Craig:** The Hangover, that trio of characters follows a pretty classic dramatic method of imagining one person that is split into three parts. You have the id, the ego, and the superego.

Ed Helms, his character is very much the superego. He is responsible. He is anxious. He’s concerned about logic and rules. Then Bradley Cooper’s character is very much about, understood, but force of action, getting things done. This is essential. If we have to break the rules, so be it, but it’s all in service of doing the right thing.

Then you have Zach’s character, who is chaos. Chaos, appetite, urges. Watching those three guys negotiate with each other is a little bit like watching a single person struggling to figure out what to do. Just like in real life, sometimes it’s our id that we need to release to win the day, and sometimes not.

**John:** Thinking back to the Charlie’s Angels movies, those were some of the most difficult things I ever had to write, because you had three central characters who fundamentally had no conflict with each other. They had some sisterly conflict, but their primary source of friction was not with each other. They each needed their own backstory, each needed their own love interest and thing that they were going out that was separate from the main A plot. It was really challenging.

Yet I could think of them as being, like you said, a single force. It generally wasn’t hard to figure out how to drive a scene, because one or several of them could drive the action in that scene. You felt anchored as long as one of those people was there.

**Craig:** There has to be a clear distinction between them. You don’t want repetition. That’s really important. You want to feel like everybody is specifically required. Ocean’s Eleven is a really good example. It has a very classic group dynamic model of we’re going to bring a team together.

Interestingly, there’s not a ton of difference between Rusty and Danny, Brad Pitt’s character and George Clooney’s. They’re both super cool, super calm masterminds who trust each other completely. They function actually more as their own little mini team. It’s like they’re partners, parents. They actually work like parents. Mother-father, father-father, it doesn’t matter. Then everybody else under them has a very specific role to do a very specific thing. Watching how those pieces come together is fascinating.

**John:** Can you imagine an Ocean’s Eleven where that central couple had real tensions or real fights? It would be a very different movie. I don’t know if you’d feel comfortable within the movie. You don’t want mom and dad fighting.

**Craig:** You don’t. One of the things that Ted Griffin did so beautifully in Ocean’s Eleven is place the central relationship tension between Danny Ocean and Tess, Julia Roberts’s character. They were exes. He’s trying to win her back. That’s what the movie’s really about. The whole thing is, how do I steal your heart back? That makes sense. If there’s any tension between Danny and Rusty, it’s, is this about the money or is this about her? You get the sense that Rusty always knows that it’ll work out. He’s just that cool.

That’s a good way of thinking about things. The tension inside of a group is important, but the central tension inside of a group really does need to be limited ultimately to two people.

There’s what I call fake tension. Again, let’s go back to Ocean’s Eleven, since it’s such a good example. You have Casey Affleck and you have Scott Caan. The two of them are basically, I think they’re the vehicle guys. They fight each other constantly.

**John:** They bicker.

**Craig:** They’re constantly bickering, hitting each other. It’s fake conflict. It’s hysterical. You don’t worry. You’re not emotionally invested in that conflict. That conflict doesn’t matter. It’s there for fun.

**John:** We also recognize that dynamic of conflict. They’re doing the thing that they would do. It’s not fake in the sense that it was artificial on the part of Ted Griffin. It was the kind of shit that two buddies do.

**Craig:** Then there was this interesting, I’ll call it a sub-protagonist, with Matt Damon, because Matt Damon’s character was the one guy who was really trying to prove himself. He was the new guy who was getting hazed and who felt like he didn’t belong and was constantly undermined and screwed with, because he’s the rookie. Then he achieves, and he feels like he earns his place in the group. It’s not quite at the level of, okay, Danny Ocean wins Tess back. It was still a satisfying journey for him, because his relationship was actually with the entire group, like, how do I fit into this whole group?

**John:** What we’re describing here is that each of these characters in these group dynamics has to have a clearly identifiable want and need that the audience can pick up on. As a writer, you need to find enough time to service that and service that progress and progression, which is really challenging given all the other story you’re trying to do. It’s one of the reasons why writing movies with a bunch of characters can be so challenging, because you’re just trying to service so many different things at once.

A scene in Charlie’s Angels had to service three different storylines at all times. That’s really tough. It also meant that if one of the scenes didn’t work or got cut out, you’re screwed, because a bunch of stuff was falling away with that scene getting cut out. Everything has to click and work in ways that are less flexible than in the classic protagonist story, where you might say, oh, we can skip over that beat, because we get it. If a bunch of other things are hinging on that moment, that’s a challenge. Ideally, one character’s growth or change is coming in relation to another character’s growth or change. You’re seeing those dynamics shift because they’re both progressing. They’re both moving to a new space.

**Craig:** Always important. To view everything through the lens of a relationship is important. The group is this large relationship. Inside of that group there are little mini relationships. Perhaps there is a relationship between one person and the entire group.

As you go through these things, you need to look out for characters that you start to look at as homework, like, “That’s right, this person hasn’t said anything in nine scenes.” Those characters you do need to think about, do we need them, what are they doing.

That said, there is also value to characters that are very quiet, disappear until the moment they are needed. When they are called upon to do one single thing, you go, “Wow.” Grease man in Ocean’s Eleven. He’s the acrobat who doesn’t speak English. I think that’s what the term is, grease man. It’s the guy that can wriggle into places. He has one thing to do, and he does it, and it’s awesome. That’s totally legal.

In The Hangover, there were a lot of scenes where Zach barely said anything, but he would say one little thing at the end, and it would make it awesome. That’s okay too. You just make sure that you don’t have a character that feels like they should be talking a lot, but they have nothing to say. That’s problematic.

**John:** Then you run into the Patton Oswalt problem, where he’s standing in the scene and-

**Craig:** Oh my god. I wish we had talked about that when Patton was on the-

**John:** We did. We talked about it.

**Craig:** We did. Okay, good.

**John:** We did, yeah.

**Craig:** I’m glad, because that is one of the… If people haven’t seen it, I guess we must’ve referenced it then with a link, so that’s good. That’s a great example of, there’s just no reason for that person to be there.

**John:** Even in stories where you do have more of a classic protagonist arc, something too like Top Gun: Maverick, it is Tom Cruise’s story fundamentally, and yet the group plays an incredibly important role. Do we get to spend a lot of time individually with some of those pilots? No, not really. There’s the one guy who’s quiet and has glasses, but we still love him, because we get what his role is within that group, and we’re rooting for him.

Those were all very crucial choices made early on in the process and during shooting to figure out how do we understand all these characters and what their deal is, even though we’re not going to have a tremendous amount of screen time to support those. They make really smart choices. It was so rewarding to see them succeed down the road or really felt it when they would have a setback. That’s crucial. Even though the central relationship is really Tom Cruise and Miles Teller, the other people, we understood their dynamics. They weren’t just glorified background players.

**Craig:** Exactly. If you are thinking about writing a movie or a television show that is based around a group dynamic, I urge you to watch some of the better sports films, because movies about actual teams are the purest example, I think. Heist movies come pretty close, because it’s also a team. Watching movies about teams teaches you so much about how to make that work. Have you ever seen Slap Shot, John?

**John:** I’ve never seen Slap Shot. I assume it’s a hockey movie.

**Craig:** Nailed it. Fantastic film. A great movie. Just wonderful. Paul Newman holds down the center of it. Anyone who’s seen Slap Shot is familiar with the Hanson Brothers. The Hanson Brothers are a fantastic example of just employing the characters with a specific skill that makes you go, “Oh, awesome.” Go ahead and we’ll throw a link on to the Hanson Brothers.

**John:** Fantastic. Let’s move on to some listener questions. Drew, what do you have for us?

**Drew:** Leanne from Burbank writes, “I’m currently writing a script completely free of any WGA signatories, where two characters rehearse a scene from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. I would like to use a 1961 translation from an Oxford University Press compendium of Ibsen plays. Of course, A Doll’s House itself is in the public domain, but the Project Gutenberg translation isn’t quite as sharp as the Oxford one. Do I need permission to use a published translation of a public domain play in my script? If so, do I reach out to the publisher, and are they likely to give me the green light without a price tag?”

**John:** Great. The answer is yes, you would have to have permission to use that in your produced thing. Could you include that stuff in your script without that? Yes, but that could be a problem down the road.

Leanne, I worry that you’re creating problems for yourself that you don’t need to create. I think you’re using a public domain play. There’s existing translations. How much of this play are you actually including in your film? I think you could write your own version of those scenes, and we’re not going to know the difference. I think you’d make a better choice than to open yourself to any problems of using something that is not free and clear. Craig, what’s your thinking?

**Craig:** Certainly, translations are copyrightable. You do need permission for those. I think since it’s just a scene, you could reach out to the translator. It’s not the publisher. It’s the translator that has the copyright. You could reach out to the translator and say, “Hey, would you be willing to just license this to me for five bucks, just because I really, really like it? We would give you credit in the credits.” They may say, “Yeah. It’s just a scene. Sure.” They may be flattered, because they probably agree that their translation is better than the Project Gutenberg one.

If they say no, good news, you’ve got a public domain translation that you can lean on, and then you can tweak it as you wish, because you can adapt public domain works as much and as significantly as you like. I would reach out to the translator, not the publisher.

**John:** I agree. The translator is the way to go there. I think it’s a smart choice. I do ultimately though wonder, Leanne, is that… You’re using that scene for a specific reason. It’s going to have some resonance to what the other characters are doing in the moment. Your version of that scene may be more appropriate than the official Oxfordy kind of translation.

**Craig:** All true.

**John:** What else you got for us?

**Drew:** Jess in the North of England writes, “I’m finding the process of jazzing up pitch documents or accompanying slides for pitch presentations is becoming increasingly elaborate. Is it just me, or is the job of a writer now also to be a skilled graphic designer? I’m genuinely considering taking a design course so I don’t have to rely on a graphic designer every time I pitch. Even if there’s someone in house at the production company who is a competent designer, it’s still such a specific skill to collaborate and get the aesthetic right. Even just the image sourcing is a huge undertaking.

“My question is, how much of this is the job of a writer? On one hand, I think I might be going to too much trouble. Shouldn’t it just be all about the words? On the other hand, maybe this is the work. Maybe I just learn Adobe InDesign and stop being a baby.”

**John:** This is a thing that’s changed in the time that we’ve done this podcast is that pitch documents, pitch decks, art boards going into things were not nearly as crucial or as fundamental of a thing you did for writers 10 years ago when we started this podcast. Now they’re really common. If I’m pitching on Zoom, I’ll definitely have a deck, and I’ll have negotiations with the rights-holders about what can be in that deck sometimes.

For this series I’m doing, there’s been just a whole long process, which we’ve brought an outside designer to do this essentially glorified pdf that is presenting this piece of IP. It’s a big thing. I hear you, Jess. We’re all encountering this as a new thing.

**Craig:** This is one of those questions where I’m hesitant to give a hard opinion, because like John, I came up in a time where this simply just didn’t occur. The pitching was entirely a verbal exercise, and nobody expected anything but.

May very well be that taking a design course is helpful to you. If you’re paying money to people, I get nervous, because we shouldn’t be paying money to pitch things on spec. A design course may not be necessary, but it’s possible that perhaps there’s a good ole design for dummies book that you can pick up, because the elaboration of the graphics themselves isn’t really I think what ultimately adds value as much as the thought and concepts that you put into things.

I’m hesitant to tell people, “You don’t need to do that,” because maybe you do now. Maybe the people who hear pitches are like, “Wait. What? Where’s your-”

**John:** “Where’s this?” Yeah.

**Craig:** “You’re just talking to me? Get out.” I don’t know.

**John:** The last couple projects I’ve had to go out and pitch on, I put together a deck. Actually, in putting together the deck, I really did figure out the story much better, because I had to think what would I actually show here, what is the thing I’m trying to communicate here, what is the tone of this, what things can I pull from other interesting films and movies that are useful here, that can really show this.

It’s been a useful process for me, and yet I am still conflicted, because after going through this whole campaign of No Writing Left Behind, here I’m doing all this stuff that’s not quite writing, but it’s like writing. I’m telling the story with visuals here. It’s just a lot more work going into these things.

It’s setting an arms race for what is expected going into one of these sessions, and yet I just know for a fact that it is easier to have a conversation with a creative person, an executive, when you have something to show them.

Going in to pitch Aladdin at Disney, I just brought in these art boards that showed this is how I see a live-action Aladdin looking, and this is how I see Jasmine. This is how I see a very different version of the genie. I could talk through my story, but I could also point to boards, and the executives can flip back to that board and really dig in on a thing. It was incredibly helpful. I probably will never pitch without visuals again. That’s just the reality of the world we’re in right now.

**Craig:** So interesting, because in reflecting on this, it seems to me that I really ought to have done this to pitch Chernobyl or to pitch The Last of Us. The Last of Us in particular, I had an entire video game that I could’ve just taken stuff from, and I just talked. I talked for both of those. It worked.

**John:** It worked.

**Craig:** Look, I think part of it may also come down to two factors. One, Jess, is how comfortable are you talking? I love talking. I’m a big talker. I like to talk. I like to engage people with my talking. That’s probably why I default to that. The other factor is who are you pitching to, because if they’re younger, they may indeed expect these things, where if they’re older, they may have quite a few years of just hearing verbal pitches and may not need it.

The biggest factor, I think, and my guess is you like having those things, because you’ve been using them, and you must be finding them useful. You’re just trying to figure out how to mitigate the cost and the effort.

I would say the only advice I could give you is don’t spend too much money on a course. Maybe buy a book. Don’t worry too much about the beauty. The content I think is more important, the intention.

**John:** It’s crucial. I’m sure this has been a previous One Cool Thing, but I’ll put another plug in for ShotDeck, which is shotdeck.com. It’s a really good website that takes pretty much any movie you’ve ever loved and pulls stills from them that you can actually search for the terms that are in there.

As I’ve been putting together decks for things, it’s so, so helpful to say, “I need medieval castle,” and here are 30 really good stills from other movies of medieval castle, because you can find other images on the web that’ll sort of get you kind of there, but they won’t look like a really high quality movie or TV show. ShotDeck can be a really good choice for you for there.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** Love it.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** I think that is it for our questions. Let’s do some One Cool Things. Craig, what do you got?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing today, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, but very specifically the Center for Trans Youth Health and Development. Los Angeles Children’s Hospital, or I guess, sorry, they do go by Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. I wish it were the other way around, because then you could call it LACH as opposed to CHLA.

Regardless, they I believe are maybe the second most advanced and respected center for gender-affirming care for young people in the world. I believe the preeminent facility is in Amsterdam. If you are here in the United States, or if you’re lucky enough to be here in Los Angeles, you’ve got this incredible place here. Now, they are both pediatric, but also I believe they also take in young adults all the way to 26.

Right now, in our country, there is an effort, an ongoing effort in the states you would think it would be happening in to literally criminalize gender-affirming care for children, adolescents, young adults. The existence of a program like this is so important and profound. It also just makes me proud of my adopted city here in Los Angeles that we’re so out in the forefront.

If you are somebody who is looking for this kind of care, if you have a family member who is looking for this kind of care, just know that they not only take care of the patients, but they also talk with the families. They have every kind of care there is, emotional, mental, physical. Definitely take a look at the Center for Trans Youth Health and Development, if for no other reason than to be defiant on behalf of those who deserve it.

**John:** It’s such a frustrating moment we’re living in as we’re recording this in 2023 because things that should be just so fundamentally obvious, like that trans kids exist and that you need to protect them, are being questioned. I’m hoping that this will pass and we’ll just move on to the next thing that certain people will be outraged about. It is such a dangerous time to be messing with these kids who need help and support.

I also get so frustrated that if you talk to a person who is upset about trans kids, that they will say, “Oh, all these structures should be put in place.” Then you’ll tell them those are exactly the structures that are in place to make sure that everyone’s making smart choices.

**Craig:** The Center for Trans Youth Health and Development is not a place where you walk in and go, “Hi, I’m 10. Can you please remove my penis?” No. This is not how it functions at all. I think people have all sorts of crazy notions about how gender-affirming care functions.

I do think that this will pass. I agree with you, but it’s going to take time. I don’t know what the next panic will be. I remind myself that when you and I were young, John, people were literally suing heavy metal bands because they were Satanists who were causing suicide. There was a Satanic panic going on, not to mention just the general normal, I don’t know, criminalization and rejection of just good old-fashioned homosexuality.

We will get through this, and we will all be better for it, but until that day, it is good to know that while… People listen to us from all over the world. They may think that America is defined by its worst, which is in deranged and unfettered gun culture and hatred of people who are not straight or cisgender. America is kind of two Americas. That’s what’s happened. Used to be one, sort of, kind of. We did have Civil War.

**John:** There was that.

**Craig:** We might’ve just been whistling past the graveyard for a long time. Really, there’s two Americas, and they’re wildly different. I am very proud to live in an America that has something like Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. You can donate to them, which is important. Obviously, they are a nonprofit organization. When you donate, you might want to make one of the conditions be that they just reverse that name so that it is Los Angeles Children’s Hospital.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is so trivial by comparison that I… Maybe I should just celebrate that.

**Craig:** Did I shame you?

**John:** You did shame me. Mine is a silly game that is a Breakout-y game that’s on all the platforms. I’ve played it on iOS, on my iPhone, called Holedown, which you can giggle. It’s a silly name. It’s like Breakout, where you’re trying to smash a bunch of blocks, except that you’re moving from the top down to the bottom. It’s just a very well done, very sticky kind of dynamic there. It’s just very satisfying to smash things in it. I just really loved it. During some of the long, boring waits during the negotiations, I can pull this out and just spend a happy five minutes smashing some blocks in Holedown.

**Craig:** Wait a sec. Is that why we’re on strike, because you’ve been playing Holedown?

**John:** That’s what it’s been. It’s really pretty much all my fault. If I just focused a little bit more, I’m sure I could’ve come up with the one persuasive argument that would’ve changed the entire course of negotiations, but no, I was playing this.

**Craig:** But no, Holedown. What a brilliant idea to just go, “Let’s reverse the flow of Breakout.” I’ll check it out. That sounds like a fun game.

**John:** It’s a good game. Holedown.com so you can see all the different versions that are out there for the game. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** If you say.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Duke. 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. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We will have a 600-episode T-shirt before too long. Check those out. 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 on how to get started in a role-playing video game, how not to mess it all up.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, thanks for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, so my Instagram stories have been dominated by people who are playing the new Zelda on the Switch. Have you started Zelda?

**Craig:** No. I must admit that even though I’m a big gamer and have sunk god knows how much time to games like GTA or Elder Scrolls or Fallout, Breath of the Wild, I just… I, by the way, loved old Zelda. Ocarina of Time, great, and Twilight Princess. I just didn’t love Breath of the Wild. I didn’t connect with it.

**John:** I have a Switch too. I played it a little bit. It never bowled me over. People love it. That’s fantastic. I do remember Ocarina of Time. It wasn’t pre-internet, but I just lost my way in it and didn’t really finish it or follow it that closely.

**Craig:** The Zelda games are very comforting in one sense, that there are certain things that are always there no matter what, and if you enjoy them, you enjoy them. I do. I enjoy going into a temple and figuring out the puzzles. I enjoy opening up the chests. I enjoy the (singing). I love fighting the bosses. I also like going to the different groups of people. There are the fish people. There are the rock people. I love that.

Breath of the Wild was so big. It’s a little thing. It’s a little, tiny thing. I understand it is continued in this new one. That is that your weapons would break. I just couldn’t handle it. It just was making me nuts. It was making me nuts. In Fallout, your weapons do wear down, and you can patch them up. It’s just a much better crafting system. I was like, “Oh my god, I got a sword, and the sword broke? I can’t. I can’t.”

**Drew:** That feels like it defeats the point of Zelda, which is going around and cutting grass for hours at a time.

**Craig:** I know, exactly, or just like, I’m going to wander through this field of easy guys and just chop chop chop. It’s just so satisfying. Then like, oh, no, or like, I’m going to climb up this cliff, and then there’s a guy up there that immediately, bop, and my sword breaks instantly, and I’m screwed. What am I going to do, punch him, spit at him? I don’t know.

Look, people love Zelda. My oldest kid played all the way through Breath of the Wild, loved it. I don’t mean to take anything away from people. People love that game. It’s just really I did not connect with it, so I probably will not take on this new one.

**John:** I’ve played Dragon Age and finished Dragon Age. I’ve done Elder Scrolls, and I love that very much. I’m looking at the new Diablo 4 coming out. In all those games, you create a character, and then you have to make some decisions pretty early on that determine your class or your tree, which skill tree you’re on. I just don’t want to screw up, Craig. I ended up having to look online and see what people are loving or not loving. These games should be pretty well balanced so that you could do things multiple ways, but if you try to follow two trees, death, doom.

**Craig:** Here’s what I would say. This is where the life lessons come into play.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** There is an anxiety about making the wrong choices that are going to set your character on a path that is less than optimal. In Dungeons and Dragons, which we both play, there is a concept called min-maxing, where you try and throw all of your ability points into the thing you know you’re going to be using, and you don’t put any points into the thing you think you won’t be using at all. You don’t have to worry about being really smart if you’re going to be a barbarian. You just have to put everything in strength, all of it, strength.

Min-maxed characters, while efficient and successful in combat, are not always the most interesting characters. There is something interesting about a flawed character who is sort of good at a couple of things but not great at anything.

One of the things that I found with these games is that all of my anxiety early on ultimately didn’t matter, because I would start to play in a way that made me happy. That was the thing. I was like, “Oh, you know what? I actually way prefer shooting arrows than swinging a sword. It’s okay. You know what? I wasted a bunch of time. I wasted 10 levels of throwing stuff into swordplay. I don’t care. Fine. Whatever.”

Life is not efficient. We waste time in our lives trying all sorts of stuff. People go to school, and then they give up on it. People pick up a guitar, and they never learn how to play. That’s our lives. It’s okay. It’s okay. You will find what you really love, and then you start investing in that. By the time you level all the way up into the big boy zones-

**John:** You’ll be fine.

**Craig:** … doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t matter that you wasted a few points early. You’ll max out your archery thing anyway. The game that really blew my mind on that one was Elden Ring.

**John:** Yeah, Elden Ring. We talked about Elden Ring and how maddening that was. The other thing, lesson you could take from this is that, in real life you don’t get to set the difficulty level, or the difficulty level is set for you, based on circumstances in which you’re born. In these games, you could choose that difficulty level. I would say just maybe don’t be so ambitious if you just want to have a good time and have some fun. Maybe leave it at normal rather than going to hard or extreme difficulty. You don’t have to prove it to other people.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Maybe when you go back and play it again, then you can choose the hard setting.

**Craig:** Absolutely. What do you get out of these games? Where is your enjoyment? Is your enjoyment is mastering combat, then yeah, boost it up. If your enjoyment is in discovering the world and working your way through the narratives, you can go all the way down to story mode, where it’s really hard to die, and you’re really there to just enjoy time. Now, the aforementioned Elden Ring does not give you a choice whatsoever. There is one difficulty, and it is, oh my god, hard.

**John:** Insane.

**Craig:** They provide you with a choice of archetypes in the beginning that you don’t know what they do. They don’t tell you anything, which is horrifying but also exciting.

When I start one of these games, I really try and avoid looking for optimizations. I don’t mind getting some clarity on things like, how the hell does my inventory work, which in Elden Ring was so confusing, or what does this letter mean, like, “Oh, I’ve got a sword, and it’s an S. What does that mean? It’s a B.” I don’t know what these things mean, so I can look that stuff up. In terms of like, here’s how you make the best Elden Ring character, meh.

**John:** Meh.

**Craig:** Meh.

**John:** I will look up online just to get a sense of what the basic play styles are, because I know what I tend to enjoy and what I don’t tend to enjoy. I’ve been going back through and playing some Diablo 3, I guess. There was a witch doctor character class that I’d never really understood before. I was like, “I’ll give it a shot.” Now I actually understand how you do that and how you survive in that. It’s more fun.

**Craig:** One of the things that’s nice about Elder Scrolls is there are multiple storylines that require different skills. You can become a battle champion. You can also become a master thief. You can also become a master magician. You can also become a master assassin, or if you’re like me, all of them. Becoming all of them requires you to balance yourself out in fun ways, where you start to shift how you play and where you put your resources and your points.

I’m talking with my kids about this. When you start these games, you’re so scared. You don’t know what you’re doing. You stink. You have very little health. The world’s incredibly scary and foreign. You don’t know where you are or how to get back to anything. Eventually, you are the master of that world. You are the most powerful, knowledgeable person in that entire world. You just have to remember that you gotta go through some scary, confusing, bewildering, and disorienting times to get to a place where you are the boss.

**John:** Agreed. If I could also make one more plea to the people who are designing these video games, is I know you have crafted these very clever ways of getting people up to speed and how to do things and how combat works and how to build up inventory and stuff like that. You have these introductory things that take your hand and lead you through that. Once we’ve done that once or twice, I don’t want to do that again.

Elder Scrolls, if you want to start a new character, Jesus, you’re looking at just a very long slog of like, okay, now the dragon’s going to attack, and now I have to run through this whole falling down castle. Give me a thing that just lets me pop out and be at the end of that.

**Craig:** One of the things about FromSoftware that makes Elden Ring is they don’t give a sweet damn what you want. In fact, if you want something, they’re not giving it to you. It is a sadism factory. I salute them. The game is beautiful. Such a beautiful game and so frustrating.

**John:** You’re talking Elden Ring. I’m talking Elder Scrolls.

**Craig:** Oh, Elder Scrolls. In Elder Scrolls, yes, there are some very-

**John:** You’re the prisoner and then you’re there. It’s just a long slog. It’s great the first time you’re going through it. It makes you very reluctant to start a new character.

**Craig:** If you could possibly hold down the triangle button to skip all that, that would be great.

**John:** Love it. That’s our advice. More triangle buttons in life and in video games.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* [Study: Both Binge, Episodic Release Models Have Their Benefits, but Have to Be Deployed Strategically](https://thestreamable.com/news/study-both-binge-episodic-release-models-have-their-benefits-but-have-to-be-deployed-strategically) by Matt Tamanini
* [Patton Oswalt stands still for an entire scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA90rOwmkJ4)
* [The Hanson Brothers in Slap Shot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUbn5ss8j9c)
* [The Center for Transyouth Health and Development](https://www.chla.org/the-center-transyouth-health-and-development)
* [Holedown](https://holedown.com/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* [Craig Mazin](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/) on Instagram
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Duke ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and 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/599standard.mp3).