Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 610 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what is it even about? We are discussing the premise, the very foundation of story, upon which we construct our takes. We also have a ton of follow-up on AI and language, listener questions, and more. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, it’s back to school season. We’ll reminisce about pencils and notebooks and what we do and don’t miss about being in school.

Craig: Oh my god, that’s like, we’ll reminisce about penny candy.

John: Ah, indeed. I love it.

Craig: Pencils and notebooks, what?

John: A preview for our listeners, I have such distinct olfactory memories, actually, of back to school season, like the smell of glue and paste and when you open up a new thing of Mead paper and the notebooks. I love it all.

Craig: Listen, it’s going to be a Gen X fest.

John: It is.

Craig: We’re gonna talk you through all the pink erasers and-

John: Oh my gosh.

Craig: … the little plasticky zip-loc pencil holders that would go on your three-ring binder. Oh, we got it all, my friends.

John: Yeah, plus the new jeans that are really too stiff when you’re first trying to break them in.

Craig: New jeans. Hey, guess what? Jeans used to be made out of the same stuff they use to cover old boats.

John: Now they use them to make the new WGA T-shirts.

Craig: That’s right, exactly. They use that now to punish us, in our hair shirts. Yes, all true, all true.

John: It’ll be fun. We’ll start with some actual news. In the headlines this week, there was a ruling saying that AI-created art is not copyrightable. This was a bid. Stephen Thaler is an artist, a person who made something or had his machine make something. He wanted to register it for copyright. The copyright office said, “Nope.” The judge in the case said, “Yeah, the copyright did the wrong thing. That is a no from me, dog. You cannot say that is a thing that you created that is going to be subject to copyright.”

It is interesting. There’s been a lot of little moments that have come along this way. I’ve testified on the WGA’s behalf in terms of our perspective on copyright and AI. It’s going to be an interesting area to follow over the next couple years about whether things that are made by AIs can be copyrighted and in what circumstances.

Craig: I think Stephen Thaler, I believe he owns some sort of AI business. I don’t think he’s an artist in and of himself. I could be wrong. Maybe he considers himself one. To me, this was a slam dunk. There is no reason to imagine that AI would have copyright production, any more than there’s a reason to think that AI would have freedom of speech protection. AI is not a person.

If there’s one thing we know, that I think we can all agree on when it comes to the Constitution – and copyright is enshrined in the United States Constitution – it is that the people who wrote it were writing it about people and did not imagine, predict that there would be artificial intelligence. There wasn’t even a cognate for it.

Sometimes people point out that the Second Amendment was written at a time when guns needed to be loaded slowly with a rod and powder and that the founding fathers did not foresee assault weapons. True, but there were guns. At least we know, okay, so there was a gun. Guns have gotten crazy. All right, we can discuss. There were no computers, no calculators. There wasn’t even an adding machine. There was nothing. Copyright is for people.

I did read the decision. Sometimes you read these things, and you can just tell that the judge is like, “Oh, come on. Really? No.” It was very much a no. I foresee that that will continue. I cannot imagine that this would survive in challenges. I don’t care who’s on the Supreme Court. I really don’t. Unless the Supreme Court is entirely made up of people that own AI businesses, I just don’t see how anybody could ever argue that AI-created stuff qualifies for copyright.

John: We’ll put a link in the show notes to the pdf of the decision, which is great. People should read through it. The article I’ll also link to talks about some of the other challenges to copyright that have come up over the years. Of course, you and I, Craig, we both work for corporations, and corporations are retaining the copyright on the things we do, because we are doing work for hire. I think that was part of Stephen Thaler’s argument here is that the machine was essentially work for hire and the same kind of principle should apply here.

Craig: No.

John: What I argued in front of the U.S. Copyright Office is that copyright was initially intended to protect… There was always a human author. It was always about the authorship. While the final copyright might transfer to somebody else or transfer to a corporation, it was originally intended to protect that author and that author’s expression and to foster more expression from authors. That is not a thing that a machine knows or wants to do.

Craig: No. Work for hire was about commissioning work. You could commission it from people. Again, there was no understanding or conception or ability to foresee that you could commission work from something that wasn’t alive.

For instance, nobody would’ve argued that if somebody had, I don’t know, a loom that could operate itself, that that would be creating works of art. Player pianos, interestingly, created all sorts of issues around copyright. That led to a whole understanding of mechanical copies and things like that and how mechanical copying was in and of itself a derivative of copyright.

We do not commission work. I think work for hire and the commissioning actually started in, I don’t know, prerevolutionary time with silversmiths, people like Paul Revere, I suppose.

John: It’s all Paul Revere’s fault.

Craig: They would come up with a design and say, “Listen, you work in my factory. I do all the silver stuff. Come up with a design of something. I’ll make a bunch of buckles. I’m going to own the buckle copyright if you want to work here.” That became the way that functioned.

You cannot commission something that is not alive, because you can’t pay it. It’s not a thing. So work for hire requires payment. It requires employment. You cannot employ something that isn’t alive. That’s not what employment is. Employment is paying a human for a thing.

John: The use of technology has also come up in copyright over the years. As photography came to be, they had to decide, a photograph taken by a camera, is that copyrightable, and is it to the person who took the photo, and if it’s to the person who took the photo, does it apply to the monkey who takes a photo. There famously was a monkey who took a selfie. Who owns the copyright to that selfie?

Craig: What courts have found is that humans causing something to be created is an essential part of copyright. If a camera falls off the back of a truck and the take a picture button gets hit, and it takes a picture, welcome to public domain. No one caused it to be created.

Animals cannot cause something to be created in an intentional sense, or at least in the sense that we say is necessary for copyright. No, selfies by animals, pictures by animals, paintings by elephants, none of it can be considered copyrightable, nor can a human say, “I am causing an animal to create something. Therefore, I should have the copyright on this.”

John: Where I think the decisions will ultimately come down, and it’s trying to draw that line of, when a human being uses AI programs to create a work of art, or to create anything that would normally be subject to copyright, where is that line, where it’s like, okay, that human gets the copyright claim. Caselaw will figure that out.

Craig: That’s a real thing. That’s happening now, and to the extent that there are elements in there that you can say are unique. This is the key. People need to look at some of the language underpinning all of this, but the most important word is “unique.” Unique work expressed in fixed form. Unique is key.

If people are using AI to make something, but the AI elements that they’re employing are not unique, it’s gonna be very hard for them to qualify for things, because other people can… It’s just basically, you’re remixing chunks of stuff that somebody else has created.

John: While all culture is remixing, how you’re doing it and the things you’re using to do it with does matter.

Craig: Yes, exactly. You can remix to the extent that, okay, I’m gonna write a song that’s gonna hint at a little phrase that was in this piece of music and maybe do a variation of something else, and it’s unique.

What you can’t do on your own, just because, is do Paul’s Boutique by the Beastie Boys, and then not have to deal with the fact that you’re using copyrighted works that you are remixing. That is gonna be a mess, because AI itself can’t really exist without the input of stuff that somebody made.

John: Craig, on this listening session, I gave my little testimony, but then I also got to listen in as other people gave theirs. This was an interesting thought experiment, which is gonna not even be a thought experiment soon. This will come up, and it’ll become an issue.

Let’s take a game like Red Dead Redemption. You would agree that the company that makes Red Dead Redemption can copyright the material that’s in Red Dead Redemption. Someone wrote all the stuff that’s in there. There’s an ability to protect that material, correct?

Craig: Yes. Rockstar commissioned a lot of people on a work-for-hire basis. Rockstar owns the copyright to Red Dead Redemption. Correct.

John: Imagine a future version of Red Dead Redemption where the dialogue and situations that occur within Red Dead Redemption are not the product of people writing things, but instead of AI generating, in real time, within the game itself, those scenarios, the dialogue, what’s happening, creating characterizations. Would that material be copyrightable by Rockstar Games?

Craig: It would, because Rockstar is creating a derivative work of their own copyrighted material.

John: Okay. Defensible, but also challenging to protect in certain ways. If it wasn’t IP that was clearly already owned, then you can imagine scenarios in which there is, inside a computer game, new material being created, and a real question, a live question, of whether that material created by AI is protectable.

Craig: They would have to be able to show that their AI… Let’s just call it a black box. You put stuff into the black box. Stuff comes out of the black box. They would have to show that they only exclusively fed the black box stuff that they had 100% intellectual property control over. At that point, I don’t see how you can argue that the black box somehow undoes that.

Now, if they say, we’re gonna put in all of our stuff, plus we’re also gonna feed the black box 30 Westerns, now you got a problem. Then I think they can’t. That’s where it gets interesting. I think it’s actually, weirdly, not that complicated, as long as you understand how copyright works and what you can and can’t do and what it means to own something. Either you do or you don’t. If you don’t, you can’t half-own it. You own it or you don’t.

John: Other news this last week, Disney is releasing on Blu-ray Disc… Blu-ray Discs still exist, apparently.

Craig: Yes, they do.

John: Mandalorian, Loki, WandaVision, and some other titles. Just notable because you don’t hear about Blu-ray or DVD releases that often. There’s always that concern of shows will disappear off their services, and then no one will ever be able to find it. This is a counterexample, where these things are so popular that Disney recognizes, people will pay us money for these things that have special features on them, and they believe they can make a buck on it. What’s your reaction to some stuff coming out on disc?

Craig: Just last week I received my 4K and Blu-ray copies of The Last of Us on DVD.

John: Fantastic. Talk to us about that and also what is the sales pitch for a consumer. Why would a person want that, versus watching it on HBO Max?

Craig: Quality. It just simply comes down to playback quality. It doesn’t matter how fast your internet connection is. Let’s say it’s maximum speed. It still doesn’t matter, because in order to put the signal out in an efficient way across the world, every streaming service has to compress the image, and the sound to some extent, much less. Really, the image has to be compressed in such a way that it’s deliverable.

When you are getting 4K in particular, but also Blu-rays, it’s just higher resolution than what you’re getting over a streaming service. 4K would be the maximum resolution. In fact, technically, we didn’t even shoot the season in 4K. We were going to shoot the next season in true 4K. Then we went through an HDR process, and it gets up-ressed, and magically, I don’t know, something happens.

John: Probably AI.

Craig: It’s probably AI.

John: It genuinely is probably AI. It’s pattern matching to figure out what the missing pixels would be.

Craig: I have no idea. It’s probably more algorithmic than AI. The bottom line is, there’s no reason to buy any of these things unless you really want to see it at its best, which of course, as a cinephile, I do, for certain things.

Also, as our screens get bigger at home, the flaws of streaming will become more and more evident. You would think that as time goes on, speeds would get faster and faster, and therefore the ability to send something through at full resolution would be closer and closer. But the problem is because everything is now going through the same pipe. They have to feed that pipe across the world to billions of people. It’s gonna be a while, I think, before we have that kind of infrastructure. Owning these things on DVD at full resolution is as close as you can get to permanency, as long as they keep manufacturing the equipment to play them back.

John: That’s gonna be the question. We do have a Blu-ray player, but we got it specifically because Stuart Friedel, formerly Scriptnotes podcast producer, has purchased, for my daughter, a Blu-ray copy of Freaks and Geeks, because she’d never seen Freaks and Geeks. He got her a Blu-ray copy, and we realized we don’t have a Blu-ray player. We got a Blu-ray player so she could watch Freaks and Geeks. I think she watched an episode.

Craig: Stuart got you a gift that ended up costing you a lot of money.

John: It did. It did. It cost us a lot. This news that these titles are coming out on disc, I’m excited for those creators and showrunners and everyone who worked on them, because they know there’s some permanent copy of this, which years from now you can look back at, which is fantastic. Reflecting on my own experience, it’s been two or three years since I’ve played anything off of a disc. It’s just the reality. I don’t know what your experience has been.

Craig: Similar. I think that where home video on DVD, VHS, used to be this enormous market, at this point, it’s more akin to the way laser discs used to be, something that people who really care about image quality purchase. It’s more of a niche marketplace. It is a little bit of a prestigious kind of, “Look, you can even own it for yourself at full la da da da.” That’s terrific, but as you note, this is not something that they do for everything.

Luckily, I’ve had it for Chernobyl and for The Last of Us, because when I was writing movies, there’s DVDs for all of those things, because there was DVDs for everything then. So far, I haven’t written anything that could theoretically be disappeared off the planet, or as the kids would say, yeeted, or you know what? I don’t even think they say that anymore. I bet yeeted is 10 years old now.

John: Yeah, it’s moved on. It’s a historical term.

Craig: Yeeted got yeeted.

John: If you’re listening to this podcast 10 years from now, and we say yeeted, and you don’t know what we’re talking about, or you do know it, and Craig was wrong, and it did come back, please write-

Craig: It’s going to come back.

John: … to future producer, Adam Middlemarch, and tell Adam what happened.

Craig: Now we have to comb the hospital records for an Adam Middlemarch being born.

John: Good stuff.

Craig: Find him and just be like, “You have been chosen. It is your fate.”

John: “You have been chosen.”

Craig: “You will fulfill your destiny.”

John: We have some follow-up. Drew, talk us through. This first one, I’ll tell, his name is Adam Lisagor, because it’s hard to guess how you would pronounce that name. He’s a very smart writer, actor, producer, director person and a friend of mine. He wrote back about our conversation on large language models in 607.

Drew Marquardt: Adam Lisagor writes, “To Craig’s question of why we don’t like hearing our names over and over again, prefer using pronoun variables for comfort, my best guess is it’s a mix of two things. First, it’s a conservation of energy. Naming something with specificity requires effort, and naming something with generality requires less effort. We’d prefer to just not have to think so hard.

“Second, conservation of cortisol and our limbic system’s threat detection, because usually, hearing your name is a signal that something needs your attention immediately, can induce panic, like a new email alert tone. When there’s context, your name can be a really nice sound. When there’s less context, it causes stress. That’s my best guess.

“But I’ve been thinking a lot about why we would choose to use so many permutations of words to convey an idea instead of always trying to stick to the same words as the path of least resistance and best communication. I guess the best answer is that’s what makes us human. We derive so much joy from infinitely combining and recombining the elements to new and surprising outcomes, even at the expense of efficiency, even when it causes miscommunication. I guess that’s why writers write. When you find exactly the right new permutation of words, the link you can create with the receiver is that much more powerful. I’m not high right now.”

John: Two basic points here. The first is his pronouns argument, is that we use pronouns not just for simplicity, but also because it’s just more comfortable, because you’re not calling the person out every time by name. You don’t ring the bell as hard when you use the pronoun. Is that striking you as all accurate?

Craig: Yeah. I don’t buy the conservation of energy theory. When we talk about where we live, we don’t say, “I live in town,” although I suppose I say, “I live in the city.” There’s things that we refer to specifically all the time.

I do think that there’s something to the notion that your name is an attention grabber. Attention, what we know, if you keep ringing a bell over and over and over, it just starts to disappear. Our brains can’t handle repetitive alerts like that. Yes, that makes sense. It takes a little bit of the edge off of that. I agree. I don’t think he’s high right now. He might be high right now.

John: As he wrote this email, he probably wasn’t high. His second point is about basically, our language could be simpler. We could choose to speak in simpler words. We’ve definitely seen examples of cases where you’re limited now to 115 words you have to communicate. You can get it done.

There’s a game we played in the office a few weeks ago called Poetry for Neanderthals, where you can only use single-syllable words. It’s difficult, but it’s very doable to get your point across. The ability to mix things up and really surprise yourself and everyone else around you by how you’re stringing words together is what makes language delightful.

Craig: Agreed. I like your observation there, not-high-at-the-time Adam Lisagor.

John: We have some more follow-up on Esperanto.

Craig: Oh, god.

John: I love Esperanto.

Craig: We can’t kill this topic any more than we can kill the fake language Esperanto. It just keeps coming back.

Drew: You’re going to get a couple knocks on this one, Craig.

Craig: Of course I will.

Drew: Mark F writes, “One point that pricked up my ears was Craig’s reference to Esperanto being an aspiration of recent vintage. I just happened to be reading about Esperanto in the wonderful book, Humanly Possible, a historical overview of humanism by Sarah Bakewell. She includes a chapter on Ludwik Zamenhof, who originated Esperanto in the 1870s, with the ambition of making a universal language that would break down barriers and help promote a more humanistic civilization across cultures.

“An incredible part of the story is that Zamenhof developed the language as a teenager, but before he was able to work on introducing it to society, his father locked away all his language notebooks, to force the young man to focus his energies on studying to become a doctor. He was sent to Russia to study medicine, but when he returned, he discovered his father had actually burned the notebooks, at which point he started over and rebuilt the language from memory. Amazing.”

Craig: I’m really on board with his dad. I think Ludwik Zamenhof’s dad was spot-on.

John: Craig, this is the first time I knew that Zamenhof had worked on this as a teenager. That teenager idealism does still ring through in the language, in Esperanto. I’ve of course picked it up a couple times. It’s on my Duolingo little things I can study. It is clever in many ways. It’s so ambitiously unambitious in a way. It’s almost an example of how few words do you need, because it has a limited vocabulary by default, but it’s logical in ways that are all really appealing. No one is ever going to speak it in a meaningful way, because it’s just-

Craig: Ever.

John: There’s not gonna be any native speakers of it, and so therefore, it’s never going to catch on. I still find it delightful.

Craig: Regardless of when Esperanto was originally conceived and then burnt and then reconceived, culturally it did seem like it had a moment in the ’50s and ’60s and then rapidly went away. I’m sure there were lots of moments along the way, between 1870 and when it finally… Although again, it will never end. Esperanto is the Ayn Rand of languages. It’s just one of these things where it’s like, guys, it doesn’t work. Let it go. They won’t go.

John: Like communism. There’s never been a true communist country.

Craig: Exactly, nor will there be. There’s a reason for that. Now all the Marxists are gonna write in. Guys, it’s not gonna happen. Let it go.

John: But maybe like Marxism, you can say, what is it that’s fascinating about this idea, and how can you apply it to actual, real places where real people are living? Here’s my generous take on it. Looking at Esperanto and while it did work, it probably got a lot of people curious about how languages actually really do work.

That probably could’ve started a whole generation of folks who were more curious to learn about the actual languages that people out there in the world are speaking, and the quest for what is the universal grammar that’s underneath all these languages, like what is it about our brains that is causing us to create the same patterns again and again and again, and why languages broadly work in very similar ways, when we can imagine that they could work, that they just don’t work.

Craig: That is remarkably generous.

John: Thank you.

Craig: I don’t think Esperanto did a goddamn thing.

John: People with the little green stars, Esperanto speakers.

Craig: Esperanto speakers, yes, they can all talk to each other at the world’s most boring conference.

John: We will have universal translators very soon. Arguably, we have them right now in that-

Craig: Yeah, it’s called English.

John: Also, what’s on our phones right now, those translate features are really good.

Craig: They’re really good. They are really good.

John: It’ll become less important. Our last bit of follow-up here is about lingua franca, and it really pertains to this.

Drew: Chris writes, “As a fellow language nerd, I enjoyed Episode 607, but I have to correct Craig’s assertion that the term lingua franca derives from the fact that French was once the common language for international communication. In fact, lingua franca was spoken throughout the Mediterranean, where Europeans came into contact with people from the Middle East and Africa, for whom Franks was a general term for Europeans. Lingua franca was the language of the Franks.

“Scholars argue quite a bit about whether lingua franca really qualified as its own language or was more of a pidgin dialect, but in any case, the languages to which it was the closest were Italian dialects, not French. Some version of lingua franca was still spoken in North Africa into the 19th century, but a Frenchman would not have understood it.”

Craig: That is fascinating. I did not know that. Lingua franca is a combination of Italian and French and other stuff, but yeah, I guess more akin to Italian than… It’s its own language. It was the Esperanto of its time, except that it emerged, I presume naturally, as, Chris says, a pidgin dialect as opposed to-

John: Yeah, which is when you have people who can’t speak the same language have to figure out how to get along, you get a pidgin. Then if their kids speak that as a creole, which is a more formalized version, a new language is formed.

I want to defend you here, Craig, because you were talking about lingua franca in the way that we typically use it, rather than the historical terms, because we now talk about lingua franca as being the actual default or the bridge language in a place. English is a lingua franca for a lot of places, where it’s just like, the British language is the common language that people speak. If we throw in that Wikipedia link there.

Craig: Again, you’re being very kind. I think I just screwed up, because I’m pretty sure that, it sounds like, I can’t remember exactly, but I probably said something like, “Lingua franca, which comes from French, because that was the language of diplomacy,” which it was. I’m sure I referenced the Olympics and the fact that they constantly would repeat everything in French in the Olympics for some reason. It made sense in my brain, but I was wrong.

This is the kind of thing that… I have to say, some people don’t like people like Chris at parties. “Well, actually… ” But I do. By the way, I also appreciate that Chris did not use the word “actually,” even though I’m sure Chris really wanted to. Thank you, Chris.

John: He said “in fact,” which is the gentleman’s “actually.”

Craig: Could be a she

John: Absolutely. 100% true. I don’t know why I jumped to that conclusion.

Craig: Because you are a-

John: I’m a monster.

Craig: You’re a monster. You’re a cancelable monster. Thank you, Chris. I appreciate the correction. You are completely correct. I was entirely wrong. Now I know something that I can bother other people about.

John: I love it. Hey, Craig, let’s talk about the premise. Our marquee topic here in the weekly Inneresting newsletter, which is sort of the print version of Scriptnotes, Chris Csont had picked an old blog post I did back in 2016, where I was responding to something that Michael Tabb had written for Script Magazine.

In that, Tabb was talking about how a premise is the core belief system of a script and the lifeblood of a story. I was arguing, “What you’re talking about seems great. I really wouldn’t call that the premise. Greek scholars might call that the premise, but I would really say that is the thesis, that is the dramatic question.”

I wanted to talk with you, Craig, about what we mean by the premise, what we mean by a thesis, and really what we mean when someone says, “What is your movie about? What is your story about?” Because that about is really two very different things. It can be about what is the TV Guide’s synopsis, it can be talking about that log line, or it could be like, what is it emotionally about for the characters within, what is it about for the writer, what is the purpose behind the work. Sometimes when we have challenges talking with people about their work, I think sometimes we’re really not understanding what we mean by “about” when we ask, “What is this about?”

Craig: This is a great question. I tend to answer as follows when people say, “What’s your show about? What’s your movie about?” I’ll say, “What it’s about is blah blah blah, but what it’s really about is blah blah blah.”

What it’s really about, that’s the theme, that’s the central dramatic question, whatever vocabulary you want for that. What is it about to me is the plot premise, what’s happening, literally what’s the basic, simple thing of what’s happening in your show. What it’s about, it’s about the nuclear disaster that happened. It’s about a guy that has to take a girl who might have the cure for worldwide plague from point A to point B. It is the hardware premise, because that is the very first thing that will hit people’s eyes and ears when you put a trailer out, for instance, or a teaser.

John: That sort of log line description, for The Martian, is an astronaut stranded on Mars has to find a way home. That is a good example of, it’s explaining what the problem is and what the quest of the movie is. It feels like, oh, how would you do that? That’s intriguing. It feels like there’s a question mark to that.

Sometimes we’re talking about the story area. What is your movie about? It’s about Hawaiian indigenous rights. Great. Or it’s about fatherhood, which is a broad, general theme, but fatherhood is not a central dramatic question. It’s not a thing you’re necessarily grappling with.

Craig: I try and avoid topics as a premise, because a topic just is a topic. Okay, it’s about indigenous rights in Polynesia. Okay, that’s a topic. That can be a term paper. It could be a nonfiction book. But what is the premise of the movie or show?

John: If it’s about a tribal leader leading a revolution against some other people for indigenous rights in this one Polynesian island, that is specific.

Craig: A premise has occurred. We need to know what some big, huge thing is happening. Typically, it’s the big, huge thing that happens very early on that is the thing. Most people, by the way, out there in the world, the vast majority of the audience, will never get past that “what’s it about” when they’re telling other people what it’s about.

When we’re talking about this with potential people, to buy it, act in it, direct it, write it, whatever it is that we’re trying to get somebody to do when we’re communicating this within our industry, it’s very important to know the both what it’s about, because if it’s super high-concept, people may get very excited, like, “Whoa, these three guys get together to fight an outbreak of ghosts in Manhattan? Very high concept. I can see how that movie… It’s a comedy. Okay, got it.”

Then what’s it about-about? Then maybe in a circumstance like this, there’s very, very little. It’s about somebody going from being cynical to a believer. That’s cool. But there are other situations where, what’s it about, it’s about one baseball game of no importance, that happened in 1976, between two teams that weren’t even in contention, for a pennant. But what it’s really about is da da da da. Then you’re like, “Oh, this is fascinating.” We need to know both. It’s very important.

John: Not only do you need to be able to communicate both, you need to really deeply understand both. I was on a phone call yesterday with a young writer, talking about her project. Her two abouts didn’t really match up, because she could tell me both abouts. I just didn’t think they were fundamentally compatible. That’s really the heart of our conversation.

She was doing a period musical about a young woman trying to get over a breakup and move on. Okay, I see that as a plot premise, I guess, and her inner emotion. But what it’s really about is this writer’s own feelings of exile after being forced to leave the country.

I said, “Okay, I get those two things separately. I don’t see how you’re drawing the connections there. Okay, that feeling of exile and loneliness, sure, but I don’t see how those two things are going to tie together with everything else you’re describing here. I think maybe you’re going to have to honestly change one of your abouts, to get something that’s actually going to be writeable. I think the reason why you’re struggling is you’re trying to write two different incompatible movies. I think that’s why you’re finding it so difficult to have scenes that actually resonate and have a story that feels that it gets you to a meaningful conclusion.”

Craig: Yeah, it’s so important. There’s only one reason for the plot premise to exist, and that is to ultimately convey, in some form or shape, the “what it’s really about” premise. But there’s only one reason for the “what it’s really about” premise to exist, and that is to live inside of the “what happens” premise. They are connected, inherently.

Typically, we will think of a plot premise first. But the very next job should be, “Okay, but what would that serve? What could I learn or note or be fascinated by, even if it’s incredibly simple? What sort of thing would make this interesting once I have absorbed the reality of what it is?”

The opposite is also true. If we’re like, “You know what? I really… ” A lot of people start things with their own experiences. “I had an experience where I’ve lost somebody, and I experienced grief, and I want to write a story about grief.” Okay. “But also, one of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was skeet shooting. I want to write about grief, set against the world of skeet shooting.”

Your common love of things is not enough. They are not purposefully reflecting each other. They are simply living side by side. One has to purposely reflect the other. They must serve each other. It must make sense. Otherwise, like you said, you’re just going to have one thing floating on top of another, and nobody wants that.

John: If you have that inner premise and no external premise, the inner premise could be a great poem. You can just have free-floating feelings and analysis of questions. It could be an essay. But it’s not going to have characters and a story that can actually get you to a place, because that’s the social contract you’re making with an audience is that, if you’ve given your attention, I will tell a story that will be meaningful, and it will take you on a journey.

There’s not gonna be a journey if it’s just, “This is what I think about a thing.” If you just have a central dramatic question or this feeling you want to explore, that’s not gonna be a movie. That’s not gonna be a story. That’s just a thing. Maybe it’s a song. But that’s all you got.

Craig: Yeah, precisely. We sometimes get a little reductive about this stuff. That’s why I don’t like the whole pitch contest thing, even though I’ve judged them. It boils things down to only thinking about these premises like polishing these premises to sharp edges and points when they don’t need to be. They don’t even need to be interesting. The premise can be utterly boring if the “what it’s really about” is fascinating, and vice versa.

God knows how many times I’ve said it. We talked about it at length in the How to Write a Movie episode of our podcast. The “what it’s really about” of Finding Nemo is so banal and so dumb fortune cookie, it’s almost giggleable. But it’s what’s perfect about it, is that you sometimes want to take something that’s so simple and obvious and then explain it through the most remarkable premise, plot premise, so that you finally get it.

It’s weird. Sometimes the simplest things just fly right over our heads, because they’re so cliché, they don’t even sink into our skin. We need to be reminded through fascinating plots and vice versa. Sometimes the simplest plot is what you need to absorb something that’s very complicated.

John: Absolutely. I can think of many films I love, including many great indie films, where you look at the description, you’re like, “That’s not enough for a movie.” You Can Count On Me, it’s a woman’s sort of shiftless brother moves home. It’s like, is that it? There’s not a lot of plot, story to it. It’s terrific, because it’s actually exploring the rarely asked questions about how adult siblings get along and what the nature of that relationship can and should be. Both are good things. I’m saying, don’t freak out if they’re not equal weight for you. But they have to serve each other, no matter what.

There’s a project I’m hoping, whenever the Strike is resolved, to take out. I am genuinely very, very excited about the movie poster premise of it all and what you’re gonna see in the trailer, but even more excited about the “what it’s actually really about” of it all. Those two things I think are gonna marry really well together. I’d say I’m excited by the flashy, what’s in the trailer of it all, but I’m really excited to write the deeply what it’s about, if I get a chance to do so.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: We’ll hope.

Craig: That’s true. We have to hope. I don’t want to just go presume that it’s gonna be fantastic. I agree with you. First of all, we have to… You said, “Whenever the Strike ends.” If the Strike. Let’s just say if.

John: Oh, come now.

Craig: Come on.

John: Craig, no.

Craig: Craig, no. Craig. Craig.

John: Craig.

Craig: Craig. No, I believe it’ll end.

John: It’ll end.

Craig: Everything ends, John.

John: Everything ends.

Craig: Everything ends.

John: The heat death of the universe.

Craig: That’s right, John. One day the Sun will devour us.

John: Memento mori. Remember that you will die.

Craig: Craig.

John: Craig.

Craig: Craig, no!

John: Memento mori!

Craig: Craig, no! We should do some listener questions. We’ve probably built up quite a few.

John: We have. Drew, start us off.

Drew: Our first one comes from Johan on Twitter. He writes, “Hey, John and Craig. Is the whole starting a script with FADE IN actually just a myth? I think I see it in like 5% of the American scripts I’ve read through the years. Seems like a huge waste of space. Cheers.”

Craig: “A huge waste of space.”

John: Craig, do you write FADE IN?

Craig: No, but does it really seem like “a huge waste of space?” It’s one line. Who cares?

John: It is one line, but also, it’s the first line. If your first line is a useless line, I’d say get rid of it.

Craig: Look, I don’t use it. I think it is superfluous. Also, not every film fades in.

John: No, it doesn’t.

Craig: Often, you just start with a boop, where you just pop in. You don’t need to start a script with anything there than INTERIOR, EXTERIOR, blah-dah-dee blah, or even not.

John: Or not that.

Craig: You could start with just we hear a bunch of sounds or whatever.

John: Or just an image, because it’s not even clear where you are.

Craig: Exactly. That said, it is not “a huge waste of space.” It is precisely line. You can absorb it.

John: Absolutely. Now we’re gonna get all the people who are so angry at us. It’s like the CUT TOs and the we hears and the we sees.

Craig: I like that. Do it.

John: Do it. Write in.

Craig: Let them fight.

John: Waste our time. Waste Drew’s time, because he won’t put it in the outline for us.

Craig: It seems like a huge waste of time. What’s next?

Drew: Patrick writes, “Apart from supplying the budget, what services do the studios actually provide during the production of a movie? If you got the money elsewhere, as per your billionaire episode, would you still need to work with the studios? Equipment, studio space, crews, cast, post facilities, marketing companies, etc, are all available elsewhere, right? Are studios just glorified banks? Is it all about the distribution?”

John: Aha.

Craig: Cutting right to it.

John: He’s challenging the fundamental premise of the studios.

Craig: I think he’s confirming the fundamental premise of the studios.

John: Craig, you can talk us through. Also, Drew just graduated from the Stark Program, so he’ll have a perspective on what studios do. Craig, start us off.

Craig: I think Patrick’s put his finger on exactly why we do use them. Studios are, in fact, a combination of a distribution facility, a bank, and an advertising agency. That is what they are. The rest is what we do. But what they do is they pay for it, they advertise it, and then they put it out. That’s it. That’s what they do.

John: It’s easy to confuse the fact that they have physical lots where you can shoot films, and they obviously have some equipment there, and they have facilities there for doing post. But of course, Craig and I will both tell you that so often, a show that is for CBS will actually shoot on, like, Universal stages, because that’s what was available. It’s not like they’re always shooting their own things on their own lots. They do that wherever they could do it.

There are, of course, lots of movies that were made completely outside of the system. There are independent films and other things that are sold after they are produced, to a company that distributes them. But it’s that distribution function and marketing function that’s really, I think, the heart of why there still is a modern American studio system.

Craig: Yeah. There are stages everywhere.

John: Everywhere.

Craig: There are post facilities everywhere. Sometimes when things are independently financed, you take away the bank aspect of the studio, but you’re still maintaining the marketing, the advertising aspect, and the distribution aspect, which is why independent films are constantly looking to get distribution from studios. That’s sort of how it goes.

John: We talked about Legendary Pictures. Legendary, it’s kind of a studio. They definitely have money. They do their own development of stuff. They can put stuff in production. They have money to put stuff in production, but they’re not a distribution company. I’m sure they have a lot of sway in the marketing, but they don’t have unilateral control over the marketing of things.

Craig: That’s right.

John: They partner up with other companies for distribution. Drew, any insights that you have from having just completed the Stark Program and knowing… You’ve had a studio management course recently.

Drew: You guys have nailed it. I think marketing and distribution is obviously so key. I think it seems so easy for indie producers or indie filmmakers or people outside the studio system, that we would be able to jump in, and the idea of, oh, you can get some money together and make a movie. But without that distribution… Marketing costs, I think it’s a million dollars per 100 screens, just to try and get you to the place where you’re gonna break even on that money.

Then I think for people, for writers and for artists, it becomes an institutional check too. You can try and make a career outside of it, but I’m not sure. I think you need to have that to have a certain longevity.

John: Maybe so. One point I want to make about distribution is you need an ongoing distribution program. Basically, you can’t just spin up in a distribution company once, to distribute one movie, and then wind it all back down.

Craig: Correct.

John: You need to have ongoing people who do that, not just so you have the expertise to do it, but also, to collect the money that you made in those theaters, you have to have another movie coming out, so you can say, “Hey, deadbeat exhibitor, before we give you this next movie, you gotta pay us what you owe us.” That historically has been an incredibly important part of why studios who have spun up and done one or two or three years of movies have failed, because they couldn’t get the money back in, because they didn’t have the ongoing pipeline of product.

Craig: Money goes out instantly, comes back slowly. You also need a library to keep you afloat. You need to have the ability to absorb that slow return. Also, when it comes to distribution, there is a leverage when you’re dealing with…

Let’s just deal with theaters, which are having a nice little bounce-back. Hooray. There’s a limited amount of theaters. Do you want Batman? Yeah, you do want Batman if you’re a theater owner. I need you to also take this thing. You get to where, as if you just have this thing, and they’re like, “We don’t want to show that.” I don’t have a Batman to make you show it.

You’re absolutely right. There is a reason why the only new studios that are appearing are from companies that are already enormous. Really, Netflix was kind of the only one to emerge without having been a legacy studio or a preexisting massive entity, like Apple or Amazon. But even then, Netflix has absorbed an insane amount of venture capital. It is a massive endeavor to start one of these things from scratch. The war field is littered with the bodies of companies that tried and failed.

John: We’re phrasing everything in terms of movies, but the same thing happens in TV. If a studio has a TV show that they’ve made, that they want to then sell around the world, they need to have a team that sells that show around the world and collects the money from around the world.

If they have Designing Women, and they want to sell it to Portugal, and some Portuguese company wants to air it, they have to make that contract, enforce that contract, collect the money. That’s just a lot of overhead. You can’t expect one individual to do that. It just takes a lot of people and bodies to do it.

Craig: It takes a lot of people, which is why you can’t really create one of these things as a single-use entity, because the amount of people required, lawyers, financiers, to keep the pipeline functioning, it just is not warranted by a single-use entity.

The HBO is an interesting case, because they have certain, unlike Netflix or Amazon or Apple, which is just one worldwide, or Disney Plus, for instance. Everybody just logs on to the one thing. HBO still has linear. They have Max. They have Max LatAm. They have Max Nordic. There’s some local versions of it around the world.

Then for most places internationally, they’re making good old-fashioned distribution deals. For instance, in the United Kingdom, HBO material, through a deal that the studio made with Sky, is shown on Sky in the UK. In Canada, it’s shown on an outlet called Crave. Every single one of those deals has to be negotiated and forced, managed, renewed, evaluated. John, the amount of PowerPoints, we can’t imagine. We can’t imagine.

John: Obviously, Craig doesn’t have to worry about each of those individual deals. Craig might be asked to go to travel to some place to hype up the show as it’s being released in Canada, but he’s not responsible for negotiating the Canadian deal.

Craig: I don’t have to do any of that.

John: He doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to.

Craig: Thank god, because I would be like, “I’d love for Canadians to see it, but guys, how about just free? It’s free.”

John: It’s free. It’s free. I remember Rachel Bloom came to Paris while I was living in Paris, because Crazy Ex-Girlfriend had just started airing on its new network, and they wanted her to go there and promote it. She’s like, “I’ll go there and promote it.” We hung out. We drank some wine. It was nice.

I don’t want to get off this topic though without saying that just because it’s hard to build up an entire studio distribution marketing arm doesn’t mean that it’s hard for any given billionaire to make the production part of it. The production part of it’s actually the easier part. You make a thing, and you sell it to a distributor who does all the rest of that. We would love more people to do that, to do what Legendary does, to do what other companies have done to create that, because that’s awesome.

Craig: There is a lot of money in the world. There are only a few studios that are capable of marketing and distributing a film. Yes, lots of money. Now, traditionally, investing in movies and television has been a great way to lose a billion dollars.

John: Absolutely. It’s like opening a vineyard. It’s like, oh, it’s a great way to make a little money off of a lot of money.

Craig: You know how to make a million dollars in the wine business? Start with a billion dollars. It’s definitely a thing. But it has always been, I think for a certain segment of independent financiers, a labor of love. Patron of the arts is a thing. Nobody who supports the production of Broadway shows, for instance, nobody goes into that thinking, “I’m gonna make a gazillion dollars.”

John: “I’m gonna be rich.”

Craig: No. You are doing it because you love it. Now, you may still be a hard-charging guy who’s probably corrupt, because Broadway accounting makes Hollywood accounting look absolutely spotless. Nonetheless, the point is, you can make a whole lot more money just handing it to a hedge fund and just sitting back.

There is still a value to the Medici-style patron of the arts. Those people exist. Those entities exist. Every now and then, a very wealthy scion will go into that business. The Ellisons, for instance, both Ellison siblings have done so.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: And have led to the creation of some fantastic stuff.

John: Absolutely. You look at the success of A24, and as horribly toxic as they were, The Weinstein Company at its peak recognized the ability to make and market a certain kind of movie and distribute a certain kind of movie that did really well for them and did well for the industry, at least in terms of the quality of material they were able to put out there and some of the artists they were able to introduce. I don’t want to say it’s impossible to do it, but it’s not possible to compete on the big studio level with just a billion dollars.

Craig: No, it is very difficult. It may be the case that the lesson of the Weinsteins is that it’s only possible to be successful in going to war against those big studios if you are an absolute shameless son of a bitch. But who knows?

John: Who knows?

Craig: Look. A24, there are companies that do quite well.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: I don’t mean to take things away. A24 really is the new Miramax. They really are. They seem to be doing it quite well.

John: Fantastic. Let’s try one more quick question here.

Craig: CR asks, “I want to ask if having log lines or summaries of some of my original unsold scripts posted to a personal website with a prompt saying, ‘If you’d like to read this, please contact me at whatever email for the full script,’ is remotely a good idea. I’m friends with several amateur artists trying to break into their respective industries. One does a web comic posted to her personal website. She was telling me to start finding ways to give myself an internet footprint, so if someone wants to find me, there’s something to find. She recommended a website.

“The only problem is, what do I put on this website if I have nothing sold? I can’t just put up random pieces of writing like an artist might post sketches. I thought about putting final versions of original scripts I have up, but I’m not sure if I’m comfortable just having my unsold scripts there for the taking.”

John: My first instinct is, I don’t think it’s a bad idea. I just don’t think that’s actually gonna be successful for you. I’m curious what our listeners think, because we obviously have 10 years of aspiring screenwriters who have listened to this podcast. I’m curious whether any of them have done anything like this and found it to be successful in terms of getting people to read it.

My other instinct is, let people read your writing, but maybe just put up the first 10 pages so they can see, and if they want to read more, they can read more. Craig, what’s your instinct?

Craig: I don’t understand why you can’t put up random pieces of writing, like an artist might post sketches. Throw a couple of scenes on. Throw one scene on. Throw one scene on with a storyboard. Maybe your friend who does a web comic can… Throw her a couple of bucks and have her do a little… Why not? I don’t understand why. Nobody wants to read a whole script anyway. Everyone hates reading scripts.

Also, you say, “I’m not sure if I’m comfortable just having my unsold scripts there for the taking.” What are you afraid of? You have the copyright on them. They’re there. You’ve published them on the web. Register them with the United States Copyright Office for whatever it is, 100 bucks, and then put them there. Why worry? Dude, no one’s stealing your script, man.

John: No one’s stealing your script.

Craig: No one’s stealing it.

John: If it’s on the web, an AI will scrape it. They’ve already scraped it. But you know what? They’re gonna scrape everything anyway. We can’t stop it.

Craig: You should be so lucky, because then you can point back and say, “This was copyrighted.” Now the people that scraped it and folded it into whatever have to pay you a lot. No, I think there is no problem whatsoever. Think about this. Photographers do it all the time.

John: True.

Craig: Photographers take a picture. It is their copyright. They put it on the internet. Anyone can take it, copy it, and stick it somewhere. People don’t stick it in anything that’s actually legit and moneymaking, because they’re gonna get sued, and it’s gonna cost them money. They’ll throw it all over a bunch of crap that isn’t gonna make money, but also, they’re not pretending that they took the picture. I just don’t think this is a problem.

I think, I have always said this, the paranoia that people are gonna steal your unsold script is not warranted. You should be far more concerned about the odds, the minuscule chance that somebody who can make a difference in your life is also gonna find it and also gonna read it and also gonna like it. That tiny, little lottery victory is worth the chance that some dingdong somewhere is gonna take your pages and put them into his unsold script. It’s not a problem.

John: It doesn’t happen.

Craig: It doesn’t happen. Even if it did, you would have recourse. I just wouldn’t worry about it.

John: Agreed. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a holdover from our live show. We were gonna do One Cool Things. We ran long, and it was messy and chaotic.

Craig: Just say Natasha Lyonne. My belovedly messy and chaotic Natasha Lyonne.

John: My One Cool Thing is an article by Danielle Campoamor in Marie Claire. Headline is, We Need to See More Parents Having Abortions in Film and Television. The point is that if you look at, in film and TV, whenever you do see a character having an abortion, it is a young, unmarried white girl. That’s not actually the majority of abortions in America. It’s actually people who already have children are the ones who are getting the most abortions in the US. So rarely do we see that portrayed on screen. Literally, in 2020, of characters who had abortions on film, 73% were white, and one third were teenagers, and not a single one of them was a parent.

It’s just arguing for, we need to have representation of what reality is, because people see themselves in that and see the choices they need to make reflected in those characters. That gets people thinking about abortion in a different way, because I think our image of what it is is just that unmarried teen mom, and that’s just not the reality. It’s actually people who already have multiple kids and are deciding whether to have another child.

Craig: I completely sympathize with this. I think it’s important to get that message out. I’m not sure drama is necessarily the best way to do it. The problem is a little bit like showing… I bet you if we cataloged the portrayals of leukemia on film, you would also see a predominance of children and teenagers, maybe kids, or rather, young adults in their 20s. What you wouldn’t see are a lot of people in their 70s or 80s or something like that, because nobody cares, because it’s not dramatic.

The problem is the reality of abortion is it’s not dramatic. This is just the stark reality. It’s not dramatic. People who are in committed relationships, with three kids, and a woman gets pregnant, and they decide rationally, oh yeah, no, actually, this was not a pregnancy we wanted. She goes to a clinic. She goes to a gynecologist. There is an abortion. It’s done. Move on. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not saying it’s fun. But it’s not dramatic.

That’s specifically the point I think that Danielle’s making is that what we tend to concentrate on is the overdramatic abortion scenario, a 13-year-old white girl, because white girls. Oh, god, white girl. That’s what we concentrate on. Therein lies the problem, is that we are dramatists.

We’ve talked about medical shows and legal shows. They’re soaking in this problem. They’re just not building medical shows around the mundane medical needs of people, nor are they building legal shows around the vast predominance of legal cases, which are boring and result in settlements between people in quiet rooms.

I understand. I think it’s a fair critique. I think the critique needs to be acknowledged. I think it is important. For instance, what I would argue is that at the end of an episode or a movie about or that contains such an abortion storyline, it would be important to actually put this information up on screen. That’s more, I think, actionable than just forcing non-dramatic situations into a product that is supposed to be entertaining and dramatic. It’s a tricky thing to do, but that’s where I would go with it myself. I’m sure no one will have any thoughts or comments about this.

But as somebody that actively and aggressively supports reproductive rights and access to reproductive rights in this country, I just want to make sure that we don’t end up getting stuck on too much of a hook as dramatists, to portray situations that are inherently not dramatic.

John: The article itself actually points out Crazy Ex-Girlfriend as an exception to the rule, because on that show, Rachel and Aline had a character who was a mom of two kids, who had an abortion. It wasn’t a big deal. I think it was such a smart choice to have the character who was facing this decision not be Rachel Bloom’s character, but her friend, who is a central character, but is not the unwed young mother. I think there are definitely ways to do it.

I guess, Craig, I would just challenge that it’s not necessarily that we need to wedge this into more things. I’ve not even seen a movie that it happens in, or it even be the central thing in a movie. I’ve never seen it come up as an issue in this stuff. It feels like it could. There’s gonna be interesting ways to do it, and unexpected ways. We have such a stereotype of who a character is who has an abortion. It’s great to always challenge those stereotypes.

Craig: I completely agree with that. Listen, I guess in a way, I’m almost being more aggressive about it, by saying that we should just put facts on screen, white letters on black, and just say, “What you’ve just seen is a dramatization, or is drama. Understand, however, this is the reality,” da da da da da da da da da, to aggressively deromanticize and dedramatize the truth of how abortions occur, not only in our country but around the world, and have always done.

But I agree with you. I’m not suggesting that it’s not possible to do. Of course it is. Nor is there a way to do it in a way where there is no burden of drama on it. Really, what I’m saying is I don’t want to unfairly judge works of art that do portray-

John: I get that.

Craig: … the most dramatic form of abortion, particularly because I suspect in most of those dramatizations, the characters do end up either having an abortion or relaying a positive perspective of that essential reproductive right. Could be wrong about that.

John: I think what we’re both saying is we don’t need fewer portrayals of abortion. We want more portrayals of abortion, and among those, maybe a broader range of experiences.

Craig: With an acknowledgement of the truth, because I think what Danielle’s writing about is incredibly important. People don’t understand how this actually functions. We are typically, in this country, always afraid of the wrong thing.

My One Cool Thing is just as much of a hot topic. It is not. We gotta take a break from some of the serious stuff and talk about things that are even more serious, like Dungeons and Dragons. Oh, boys.

John: It’s Dungeons and Dragons adjacent. You don’t actually have to play D and D to play this game.

Craig: You don’t. This is sort of exciting. Again, not for everybody, but for boys and girls who are dorks like us, and who do like role-playing games. There is a new board game out. This is not a typical role-playing game of the sort you might see on Critical Role or the kind that John and I play on a weekly basis, sometimes on a biweekly basis. This is a board game version of Dungeons and Dragons that is playable in one shot, I think they estimate over the course of two hours, which is not wildly nuts. It’s like a nice, long Monopoly game. It’s called Dungeons and Dragons: Trials of Tempus.

This is an officially licensed product, so it gets to use all of the characters, classes, spells, and so forths from Dungeons and Dragons. It was created by two friends of mine, along with a fellow I don’t know, Adam Carasso, and then my friends, Thor Knai and Kyle Newman. It’s excellent if you enjoy nerdery like we do.

What’s really interesting about it is you get to do something that we generally don’t get to do when we’re playing D and D, which is fight against each other. You get divided into two parties. The two parties are rivals in an heroic adventure. Normally, when I’m DMing, technically I suppose it’s like the DM versus the players, but I think that makes you a bad DM. I think it’s the DM with the players. The point is we’re all gonna get through this and have a great time and go through highs and lows and all the rest. This is more of a traditional “our team wins.”

It’s got all sorts of D and D-ish things about it. I know the overlap between D and D players and board game players is almost 100%, so I think you might like it. Check it out, Dungeons and Dragons: Trials of Tempus, freshly out, available online and all sorts of places, including Schmamazon.

John: I checked this out when I was at your house this last time. It is beautifully put together. It’s in a very heavy box. It’s full of figurines and cards and things and all the accoutrement that you love in a board game. I’m excited to play it with you.

Craig: (Speaks French.)

John: (Speaks French.) That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Wow.

John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You’ll 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 weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. Craig, we gotta talk merch.

Craig: Oh, god.

John: We have T-shirts, and they’re great. They’re at Cotton Bureau, including the new Scriptnotes University T-shirt and sweatshirt.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: Craig, have you even seen this?

Craig: No, but I want a Scriptnotes University… Is there a hoodie?

John: Of course there’s a hoodie, but also just a normal sweatshirt, a collared sweatshirt.

Craig: I never wear those.

John: I’m gonna paste a link in the Workflowy here so you can see it.

Craig: What I need is a hoodie.

John: There’s hoodies.

Craig: I’m getting one.

John: Our hoodies are good.

Craig: You know Cotton Bureau, by the way, used to make the blank T-shirt in the Stuart tri-blend?

John: They don’t do it anymore?

Craig: They don’t do it anymore. They stopped.

John: Oh, wow.

Craig: It’s such a shame. I’m checking out… I love the look of it. Oh, but this doesn’t show me… Oh, it doesn’t have a hoodie. Oh yeah, it does.

John: It does have a hoodie, yes.

Craig: But it’s not a zip hoodie.

John: Oh, you want a zip hoodie.

Craig: Yeah, I want a zip-

John: We’ll figure it out.

Craig: John.

John: We’ll figure it out.

Craig: John.

John: The problem is the zipper would go through the logo itself. That’s the problem with a zip hoodie.

Craig: That’s absolutely true. Ugh.

John: It has a pullover crew neck. The pullover crew neck is what you would think about for a sweatshirt.

Craig: What about doing a zip one where you take the Scriptnotes University and just make it a bit smaller and put it on one side? I don’t want to screw up our merchandise methods. I’m just saying. A tank top? Wow. Who’s walking around in the Scriptnotes University tank top? That’s cool. Aw, there’s a onesie. Aw.

John: There’s a onesie. See?

Craig: Aw, so cute.

John: Make them for everybody. This was inspired by a Scriptnotes listener who wrote in. She wants to remain anonymous. She said, “I really feel like I learned more from Scriptnotes University than I did from actual film school. I really want a Scriptnotes University T-shirt, sweatshirt.” We’re now making this for her and for everybody else. If you zoom in, you’ll see that the little logo at the center has a typewriter. It’s surrounded by brads. It says “scriptum notas” and “ira and ratio,” which is umbrage and reason.

Craig: I love it. I love it.

John: Established 2011.

Craig: Established 2011, Scriptnotes University is objectively superior to every film school in the world and costs far less. I’m just saying it. I don’t care. I’m saying it now constantly. It’s just a fact. I know you guys went to Stark and everything. I’m just saying it. It’s a fact. We’re just better.

John: Speaking of college, any listeners who are college students, reminder that you can get Highland 2 for free for the student license. You just write in. There’s a link in the show notes. Also, just go to highland2.app. If you have a student ID, if you have a student dot-edu address, you get it for free. Why would you not want to do that?

We also have the new XL version of Writer Emergency Pack in the store at writeremergency.com. 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 Craig and I are about to record about going back to school.

Craig: Back to school.

John: Craig and Drew, thank you so much.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Drew: Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Oh, Craig. Megana was back from her trip, and she texted you and me, saying, “Oh, I was at Target, and I saw that it’s now spooky season, because they have Halloween stuff out.”

Craig: Freaking August.

John: Megana, it’s not spooky season yet-

Craig: it’s not.

John: … because it’s still back to school season. Back-to-school season is the best time of year. I loved back-to-school season. I didn’t like necessarily going back to school, but I loved school supplies. I loved stocking up for the new year.

Craig: Always fun, yes. Fresh, new stuff. Crisp, new stuff. I was the sort of kid that would just ruin his notebook or binder over the course of the first two months. To have a fresh, new binder, a new notebook, with that weird marble cover that makes no sense, all of that stuff was wonderful, and getting my new pencils, and pens, which we weren’t really allowed to use, until we were in, what, 7th grade or something?

John: For a while, we were allowed to use the erasable pens, which-

Craig: Those stank.

John: I’m sure they still exist, but no one uses erasable pens anymore.

Craig: What was it called, Paper Mate?

John: Paper Mate.

Craig: Paper Mate. Those stank. Poor lefties were just erasing their little-

John: That smear.

Craig: It was just so sad. Those stank. Protractor.

John: Oh yeah, compass.

Craig: Compass, all that great stuff. That weird eraser, that big, chunky, pink, trapezoidal, or parallelogrammatic.

John: I want to know, how did that form come to be, because where it’s slanted, it’s-

Craig: It’s a parallelogram.

John: It’s a parallelogram. That’s what it is.

Craig: It’s a parallelogram.

John: On the side. It’s a parallelogram extended as a solid.

Craig: What was it? Was it a Pearl? Was that what it’s called, Pearl Eraser?

John: Yeah, Pearl Eraser. Yeah, Pearl Eraser. A very distinct smell.

Craig: So distinct.

John: You’re not rubbing through the paper, but you can smell that burning rubber to it.

Craig: You know what? It’s by the Paper Mate company, and it’s called the Pink Pearl Eraser. It is one of those products still available, of course, that seemingly will never change. The script on it that says Pink Pearl and all that, it just will never change.

John: Why would you change it? It’s already perfect.

Craig: It’s kind of perfect. It does have that weird smell. Occasionally, it would crack.

John: Yeah, because it would dry out over the course of the year too. It was much better when it’s fresh out of the package.

Craig: Everything is.

John: A few months in, it’s pretty bad.

Craig: Everything is better. Also, we did have new clothes, which in my case meant going to Sears and buying-

John: Sears or JC Penney’s.

Craig: Yeah. On Staten Island, you would go to Sears, and you would have to buy all of your winter clothes, because that’s when they were available, because for some reason, they would only have winter clothes in the summer and summer clothes in the winter, which made me crazy. We were all in the same lower middle class economic stratum. We would get to school, and everybody’s wearing the exact same coat, this weird polyester thing with fake fur and a bright orange inside. Did you have that one?

John: I didn’t have that one, but I know exactly what you’re talking about. I also had this maroon color coat that was my coat for a couple years.

Craig: There was that. There were your jeans, your new sneakers. Everything was fresh, fresh, fresh.

John: You did not have hand-me-downs, because you were the oldest.

Craig: I was the oldest, yes.

John: I got a lot of hand-me-downs.

Craig: My younger sibling was a girl, my sister. She wasn’t really getting my stuff. That’s probably why our stuff was so shitty, because you could only use it once. It was all really cheap. I had a lot of Wrangler shirts. You know those Western style button-downs?

John: Oh, yeah.

Craig: You’d get a haircut. Your hair’s all combed. You had to look super clean and neat on day one. This ended on day one. Day two, you could be an absolute rolling, lice-filled wreck. But day one, spotless.

John: Now, did you have school photos on day one, or was it in that first week? When were your school photos taken?

Craig: That’s a really interesting question. I can’t remember. Maybe it was in the first couple of weeks.

John: I think it was the first school week. I do remember, because there was another day where you had to actually look pretty good and bring a comb, or they’d give you one of the incredibly sharp, painful, disposable combs to run through your hair. Every year, I would have to get my photos retaken, because I just could not smile properly.

Craig: Was there some… Emotionally damaged or-

John: I would make the wrong choice in that last millisecond before the shutter went off.

Craig: Was it the kind of thing where you would smile and everybody would be terrified, like look evil?

John: No. I would just be looking away or something. I would get nervous by the eye contact.

Craig: I do remember, it was always like every year, you would just be in the same arrangement. I was generally taller, and so I would be in the back, next to my tall friend. Man, every now and then, somebody will send me something like, “Oh my god, look. Your former classmate, who’s on Facebook, put this thing up from 3rd grade.” They’ll copy and send me the photo, because I’m not on Facebook. I’m just like, “What am I wearing? What is this weird, horrible, nylon disco outfit that my parents have put me in?” It was just nightmarish.

John: I think it’s more fun to look at what the teachers were wearing, because the teachers were actually indicative of what adults were wearing at the time. Like, oh my god, how was that comfortable? That looks like polyester death.

Craig: Everyone was wearing some sort of plastic clothing.

John: Not a tri-blend. No. It was actually just all plastic.

Craig: A uni-blend of some sort of cancer fiber that we were all breathing in. You know what? It was also a lovely time, because I’m sure it was like this for you, for us in New York, the weather was getting cooler. Finally, summer was ending. Fall was sweeping in. Fall in New York is lovely. There’s also all the fun fall stuff. It’s not spooky season. I just want to be clear. It was just more like apple cider and whatever. I don’t know. Leaves.

John: I remember we would get the Ditto machined copy of like, this is what you need to bring for your school supplies. I just loved that, checking off the things. You had to bring a box of Kleenex, because somebody, mostly me, I would go through all the Kleenex is the classroom, because my nose was always runny.

Craig: You were the snot kid.

John: I was snot kid, because I had terrible allergies in a time before people understood what allergies were, apparently.

Craig: Interesting.

John: Now, I take medicines for them, but at that time I didn’t have them.

Craig: There was always a kid with snot. I guess it was you.

John: It was me.

Craig: Then we would also have to bring a shoebox, which all the girls or resourceful boys or non-resourceful boys’ mothers would cover in wallpaper or newspaper or something to make it look pretty. That was our school supply box. We would have our Elmer’s glue and our safety scissor and whatever else was on that Ditto sheet, which I’m sure, Drew, you are absolutely falling asleep here, but let me just wake you up for a second and explain.

We did not get emails listing what we required. No. A teacher hand-wrote a list of things on this toxic piece of disgusting purple paper, that was then stuck to a large roller, coated in even more disgusting purple fluid. Then they would roll it with their hands. As they would roll it, it would stick onto another piece of paper, send that piece of paper off, pull in another piece of paper, and thus, like a small Gutenberg printing press, made of purple death. Each one of those things stank, and yet we all loved the smell of it.

John: You did, because you’d get a fresh Ditto machine, you’d just stick it up to your-

Craig: Everyone.

John: Stick the paper up and inhale it, yeah.

Craig: Everyone was snorting whatever was in that. I don’t even want to know what was in it. We were absolutely huffing paint, in the classroom, by the way. The teacher would be like, “Go ahead, kids. Snort it up.” Then we would go to work. That’s what we would get. What a time. What a time to be alive.

John: My olfactory memories of that age are so distinct, because I also remember when you have heads down for Thumbs Up, Seven Up on a rainy day, I remember what the desk would smell like. It would smell like this weird cleaner, whatever they used to clean the desks. I have that memory firmly in my head.

Craig: Same. It’s funny, you went to school halfway across the country from me, and our desks smelled exactly the same.

John: Absolutely. It was not quite urine, but it’s almost that. It was an ammonia-ish kind of thing to it.

Craig: It was ammonia. It was this weird, rank ammonia smell. It’s a disgusting smell. The desktop was some horrible, again, plasticky, lacquery thing.

John: It looked like wood, but it was not wood.

Craig: It also had a little bit of a sour milk smell to it. It just was disgusting.

John: Craig, did you have a number line taped to the top of your desk?

Craig: Of course we did. Of course. We all had a number line when we were learning addition and subtraction. Also, lining up in size order. Drew, did you ever have to line up in size order?

Drew: Yeah. I was always at the front because I was tiny.

Craig: Aw.

John: Aw, little Drew.

Craig: Aw, little Drew. Oh my god, he was in the front.

John: We were almost always in alphabetical order, especially if we were going to lunch, because we had to go through the lunch line. If you were buying lunch, they would check your name off on the little logbook.

Craig: I see. That actually makes sense. Lining up in size order seems unnecessarily cruel to everyone on either extreme of the line. Even if you weren’t on the extreme of the line, if you put two boys, if they happen to be next to each other in the size-order line, there would almost certainly be a shoving fight over who was taller. Just pointless. Why? What is this size order thing? Who came up with that? What does it even matter what the order is? What does it matter?

John: They want to make sure Drew gets his milk first.

Craig: Because he needed it. They’re like, “There’s only one thing that’s gonna make this kid grow: warm, under-refrigerated milk.”

John: In a cardboard container.

Craig: That has the picture of a lost child on it.

John: Indeed. Drew, what are we forgetting about back-to-school?

Drew: Oh, my god.

Craig: He’s like, “You guys are from a different time.”

Drew: No, the smell is real, but I can never delineate where the smell is cleaning product and what is just the smell of children.

John: That’s true.

Drew: Maybe that sounds strange, but-

Craig: It really does sound strange.

Drew: It does.

Craig: That’s really upsetting.

Drew: Should probably walk that back, but yeah.

Craig: I just like the idea of a small Drew just walking around, just sniffing.

John: Sniffing.

Craig: Everyone’s like, “Oh my god, what is with that kid? Oh, leave him alone. He’s small.” They didn’t know what the Ditto fluid was. Ditto fluid.

Drew: I wonder when they retired the Ditto machines, because I definitely went to a school that did not have up-to-date equipment by any stretch of the imagination, and we didn’t have one, which makes me feel like they must’ve-

John: At your point, it was all photocopies, right?

Drew: Yeah.

Craig: Here’s a website that says mimeographs, that was the technical name, “The classroom chore that smelled so good.” I’m just looking to see if they actually identify what was in there. The duplicator fluid was methanol and isopropanol, so basically-

John: Alcohols.

Craig: … alcohol, but non-drinkable alcohol, the kind of alcohol that makes you blind. That’s what we were snorting. Hooray.

Drew: In my generation, we had the markers that ended up, I think had to be the same stuff that kids would just stick straight in their nostril.

John: Craig, you and I didn’t really have markers as much, because even Sharpies were late in my career. We had some marker things, but it wasn’t a default thing. I didn’t go to school with Crayola markers at the start. Did you?

Craig: They were much later on. We typically went to school with a box of Crayola crayons. The classic was the 64… I have one. I bought one of them just off of eBay for two bucks. I loved it. It was a proper 1970s era 64 Crayola crayons with the crayon sharpener in the back, which didn’t-

John: Good stuff.

Craig: … sharpen shit.

John: No, but you didn’t really need to. Of course, the pink color was labeled Flesh, because that was the default white.

Craig: Yes, Flesh was that, yes, was a slightly whitey peach-ish. I don’t even think Flesh was my color of flesh. It was really for John and Melissa.

John: Basically, yeah. It’s a difference between my very tanned legs and my very pale ankles. It’s the pale ankle color.

Craig: It’s the pale ankle color, yeah. Flesh, it was like, oh, you’re very light. That is back when things weren’t quite the way they are. There was also Indian Red. That was a color, Indian Red. They’re not red, and they’re also not Indians, but okay, Crayola. That’s how we grew up. We had the Crayola thing and, oh yeah, man, the tape. Magic Tape was a huge deal.

John: Oh, Magic Tape, a huge innovation.

Craig: Yes. Before Magic Tape, Drew, regular Scotch Tape was shiny as hell.

John: Yeah, it was shiny and gross.

Craig: You’d put it on something, and it would just reflect like a mirror. Then somebody over there came up with this matte finish, called it Magic Tape. It was invisible. Everybody lost their crap.

John: Those 3M scientists, we don’t talk enough about the innovations they had. Magic Tape. Then they had the Post-It notes.

Craig: Oh my god, absolutely. They’re geniuses over there, absolute wizards.

John: Oh, question for both of you. Were you required to… You got your textbooks, or your math book or your science book.

Craig: Cover it?

John: Did you have to put a cover on them?

Craig: Yep.

John: Was it like part of your task is, okay, now you have to put on this cover?

Craig: Book covers, yes.

John: Loved them.

Craig: Which I bet you made your own book covers.

John: Yeah, out of paper bags, for sure.

Craig: I knew you would. I knew it. Now, you’ve seen me attempt to do crafts, so you know that I could not. My mom would have to do it. Then eventually, I got my sister to start doing it. If it ripped in class, you would get in trouble. I don’t know why. I would ask one of the kids sitting next to me. I’m like, “Can you fix my da da?” Then they would, because everybody just understood I was helpless.

John: They would rip off a piece of their shiny tape and fix your book cover.

Craig: Yes, just so shiny. So shiny. Inside the textbook, sometimes it would be like “this book is the property of” and then there’d be one kid after another, and it’s stamped. What was that about? Who needs to know?

John: I loved that.

Craig: Yeah, like, “Oh my god.”

John: They had the history. “Did you know that some of these kids are dead by now, and they owned this book.”

Craig: Absolutely.

John: They got sent off to war.

Craig: Correct.

John: Some of these people who were reading this book had been sent off to Vietnam, and I’m reading this book.

Craig: I’m reading this book on vocabulary, and the last kid who had it died in Inchon. It’s all very grim. I gotta say, man, every generation has its ups and downs and things, but you know what? Generation X, we’re pretty great.

John: We’re pretty great.

Craig: Does anyone hate us? I don’t think anyone hates us.

John: No, because we’re a small generation too.

Craig: We’re small. We’re kind of like, “Whatever, man.” We were still there when computers came around. We reminisce, but not like, “And our way was better.” We’re usually reminiscing in a way of like, “God, that sucked.” We like everybody except the Boomers. Nobody likes the Boomers. Let’s face it.

John: We grew up mostly with a fear of nuclear war.

Craig: Yeah, we’re terrified. We’re all right.

John: We’re all right.

Craig: Last question for you, Drew, on back-to-school week. Are there people that don’t like Generation X, or is there a generation that you think is opposed-

Drew: To Gen X?

Craig: … naturally to Generation X?

Drew: I don’t think so. I think you guys are truly safe, because my generation looked up to you. I’m firmly Millennial. We looked up to you. You were creating all the content when we were growing up. I think Gen Z likes you much more than us, because we’re very cringey to Gen Z, because we’re very cringey in general.

Craig: Yeah, you guys are special. You know what? It’s not your fault. Your echo Boomers. You’re the children of Boomers. You are trying to outrun a legacy in your blood, and you’re doing all right.

Drew: We can’t escape it though.

Craig: It’s tough. It’s a tough one. That was amazing. I wish it were back-to-school week every week.

John: I love it. Drew and Craig, thank you so much.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Drew: Thanks.

John: Bye.

Links:

• AI-Created Art Isn’t Copyrightable, Judge Says in Ruling That Could Give Hollywood Studios Pause by Winston Cho for The Hollywood Reporter
• Thaler v. Perlmutter
• The Mandalorian, Loki, And WandaVision Are Getting Limited Edition 4K And Blu-Ray Releases by Ryan Scott for Slash Film
• Lingua franca
• Where Story Begins – Premise by Michael Tabb for Script Magazine
• The premise, or what’s the point? by John August
• We Need to See More Parents Having Abortions in Film and Television by Danielle Campoamor for Marie Claire
• Dungeons & Dragons: Trials of Tempus
• Highland 2
• Writer Emergency Pack XL
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Adam Pineless (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 609 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode is a clip show, but I wanted to spend a few minutes to talk about how we got to this clip show. So often, these clip shows come out of work we’re doing in the office on other things. This stemmed from a conversation we were having yesterday.

Chris Csont, who does our newsletter, is working on an issue about dialogue and character voice. It started a whole conversation about the difference between a writer’s character voice and what the actor brings to that voice. Drew, you had actually had some research before this, because you guys were working on chapters about this for the book.

Drew Marquardt: Yeah, our summer intern, Halley Lamberson, was putting together a chapter on writing dialogue, and this conversation started ringing some bells, so went back and looked through it and found some really wonderful gems to talk about character voice and writing for actors.

John: In any of these clip shows, we’re traveling through time. We have 10 years of Scriptnotes. Which episodes are you plucking from here?

Drew: We’re starting with Episode 37, which was ages ago. It’s very fun to hear you guys and how you’ve changed. We’re talking there about the four general rules of character voice. Then we’re going to go up to Episode 286, where we’re going to talk about the history of dialogue and expand on the idea of character voice. Then Episode 371, where Craig, who had started acting at that point, was talking about what makes dialogue easy to memorize. Then we move to how to make sure you’re doing right by all the characters in a scene and keeping everyone engaged.

John: Fantastic. For our Premium members, what kind of Bonus Segment will they get at the end?

Drew: We’re going to look at Episode 470 on dual dialogue, which is really fun.

John: That’s great. Drew, thank you so much for putting this clip show together. We look forward to coming back with hopefully a normal episode next week.

Drew: Definitely.

John: Thanks. Enjoy.

Episode 37 clip:

John: And their conversation about finding a character’s voice, finding an actor’s voice for an impression got me thinking about what a character’s voice is. And so I thought we might start talking about that.

Craig: Great.

John: Because to me, the mark of good writing is never really about structure, or where the beats are falling. I can tell if it’s a good writer or a bad writer mostly by whether they can handle a character’s voice. If they can convince me that the characters I’m reading on the page are distinct, and alive, and unique. I would happily read many scripts that are kind of a mess story wise, but you can tell someone’s a good writer because their characters have a voice.

Craig: Right. You can suggest ways to improve story structure. And you can always come up with ideas for interesting scenes. But what you can’t do is tell somebody to write characters convincingly. Either they can do it or they can’t.

John: Yeah. So this isn’t going to be a how-to-give-your-characters-a-voice thing, because I think it is one of those inherent skills; like you sort of have it or you don’t. You can work on it, and you can sort of notice when things are missing and apply yourself again. And, there are some times where… There is a project that has been sitting on a shelf for awhile that a friend and I are going to take another look at. And looking through it again, I realized that the biggest problem here is that our hero could sort of be anybody. We made him such an everyman that he kind of is every man. And because of that, you don’t really care about him.

And so I thought of four questions, sort of four tests, to see whether character’s voices are working. So here are my four tests and maybe you can think of some more.

Craig: Okay.

John: First test — could you take the dialogue from one character in the script and have another character say it?

Craig: Yeah. That’s a common complaint that you’ll hear from producers or executives that the character voice is not unique, that the characters all sound the same. And that’s a common error. I don’t even say a common rookie error. I think people misuse the term rookie error. It’s really a common stinky writer error, because rookies who are good writers I think automatically know to not do this. They write the characters as them, so they’re speaking through cardboard cutouts. They’re speaking through policeman. They’re speaking through Lady on Street.

John: Or worse, they’re just talking as “cop.” They’re talking like a cop. And they’re not talking like a specific human being; they’re talking like, “this is what a cop would say.”

Craig: Right.

John: Well, that’s actually not especially helpful for your movie because this is not supposed to be any cop; it’s supposed to be a specific cop with a back story, and a name, and a role in your specific movie. And so if you’re making someone the generic version of that, that’s going to be a problem. You already hit on my next thing, which is is a character speaking for himself or is he speaking for the writer.

Craig: Aha, I read your mind.

John: You did read my mind. And so that is the thing. Are you speaking really through your own voice? And some screenwriters are very, very funny, and so they have very funny voices themselves. But if every character in the movie has their same funny voice, that’s not going to be an especially successful outcome. It may be an amusing read, but I doubt that the final product is going to be the best it could be.

Craig: Some people will say that there are highly stylized writers who do a little bit of that, and I actually disagree. Like some people say, “Well in Mamet everybody sounds so hype literate and in Tarantino everybody sounds so deliberate, and quirky, and fascinated with pop culture, and thoughtful.” But the truth is, if you watch those movies, you realize that he actually is crafting… Yes, he has a style; yes, both of those brilliant writers have unique styles, but they do shade them for the different characters.

Sorkin is another one who… It’s interesting. There’s a group of writers who have a very distinct style that exists through the movie. And yet the characters are distinct. That’s pretty advanced stuff to me.

John: Yeah. Diablo Cody often gets that knock. And she gets that knock off of her first movie, but then if you see Young Adult, those characters aren’t talking the same way.

Craig: I agree.

John: Those characters are very specific and very unique.

Craig: That’s a good example.

John: Sort of a corollary to that, maybe I should break it out to its own point, is the character saying what he wants to say, or what the movie needs him to say? And that is, is the character expressing his or her own feeling in the moment, or is he expressing what needs to happen next so that we can get on to the next thing?

And that’s the subtle line that the screenwriter works is that screenwriting is always about what’s next. And you as a screenwriter have to be in control of the scene and make sure that this scene is existing so that we can get to the next story point.

At the same time, you can really feel it when a character is just giving exposition or setting up the ball so another character can spike it. And those are not good things to have happen.

Craig: No. You don’t want to set up straw dummies. And you don’t want to put things in their mouth because the screenwriter needed people to hear it. And frankly, I think of all those things as great opportunities. We all run into moments where we need the audience to learn information, or we need another character to learn information. So then it’s a great opportunity to sort of sit there and think, “Well how can I do this in a crafty way? How can I do this in a surprising way?”

Sometimes the answer is to be completely contradictory and to have people say the opposite of what they think and then be clear through the writing that you’re using subtext or you’re relying on performance.

I mean, the other thing is bad characters, and maybe I’m cheating ahead again, bad characters tend to speak like they’re on radio. And their dialogue ignores the fact that their faces will speak louder than any words coming out of their mouth. Was that number four?

John: No, no. That’s good. Not radio. So I’m going to add Not Radio Voices.

Craig: No radio plays.

John: In situations, I don’t want to get too off track talking about exposition, but in situations where you need to have the audience understand something, or you need to make it clear that a character has been caught up with another character, like the characters split up and now they’re back together, and you need to make sure the audience understands that they all have the same information. Characters in real life cut each other off a lot, and they are often ahead of each other. So there may be opportunities to literally have one character stop the other and tell what they already know, so that we don’t have to sort of walk through all of those conversations again.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, there’s all sorts of ways to kind of recap. Simple rule of thumb is if the audience hears it once, don’t make them hear it twice. So, if you need to catch somebody up on what that bank robbery was like, and it was a crazy bank robbery, then the scene begins with the person who has been listening staring at the other person. They’re both silent. And then the person who was listening says, “Wow. That was insane.” I know. You don’t have to tell me. The only important matter is that they they’re reacting to what they just heard, but certainly you don’t want to repeat anything ever.

John: Wherever possible, characters should speak in order to communicate their inner emotion and not to communicate just information.

Craig: Right.

John: This is one I would throw out. What would a joke sound like from that character? And this is actually from… Jane Espenson was on a recent edition of the Nerdist Writers Panel; Jane Espenson, who is a TV writer who has done a lot of stuff and had a blog.

Craig: And a lovely woman.

John: And a lovely woman. During the strike, our three blogs came together and we all picketed at Warner Bros. Lovely woman. And so smart about comedy, and especially TV. She was on the Nerdist Writers Panel talking about Once Upon A Time, which is what she’s writing on right now. And she’s talking about having the Snow White character tell a joke, and that it was tough because it’s not a very particularly funny character, but you needed to find specific moments that she could be funny. And in finding what kind of joke can she tell is where you really get a sense of like, “Okay, I know who this person is.”

And so even if you’re not writing a comedy, I think it’s worthwhile thinking about how can that character be funny, because almost everybody is funny in some way, or at least tries to be funny in some way. What is the nature of their humor? What is the nature of their comedy? And when you know that, then you will also have a sense of how they are going to respond in stressful situations, how they’re going to respond in sad situations. It gives you an insight into them.

Craig: Yeah. And I also like to think about power. I always think in terms of the power dynamic between any two or three characters or four, whatever you have in your scene. Who holds the gun? And how does that change the way they talk to the other person? Obviously the gun in this instance could be anything. It could be anything from information to an actual gun, to “you’re in love with me, and I’m not in love with you.”

And then is there a way to change who holds the gun in the middle of the scene? And allow the character’s voice to adapt to what we would normally adapt to. I mean, think of how many times in life we have had conversations where we thought we were unassailable at the beginning and by the end we were getting our lunches handed to us? No, our lunches eaten, and our hats handed to us. Use that. Scenes are all, to me, they are all about variation, and they’re all about growth. Allow the voices to respond to the dynamics of the moment.

John: Agreed. My last test, and we’ll think of some more after this, can you picture a given actor in the role, or at least preclude certain actors from the role, because it doesn’t feel like they would say those things? And so my example here is Angelina Jolie. So let’s say you’re writing a woman’s role and she’s funny. It’s not going to be Angelina Jolie.

Craig: Yeah, probably not.

John: Probably not. Angelina Jolie has done at least comedy I know, but you don’t think of Angelina Jolie as being funny.

Craig: Well, I mean, it depends. I guess, like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, I thought she was very funny, but it was appropriately-

John: But it’s not telling a joke funny.

Craig: No, it was sort of clipped and wry, which is…

John: Perfect.

Craig: She has a great arched brow. It’s funny, when you think about doing impressions. I guess in my head I’m always doing impressions of actors as I’m writing for them. And so I think, okay, what’s that thing where I would go, okay, I can see her sort of arching her brow. And I always think of Angelina Jolie as somebody that has power. She can be confident and cut you down with one or two words.

I mean, in writing ID Theft for Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, I kept thinking about how Melissa was sort of, you know, she’s somebody who would ramble, and Jason is somebody who would be very short. And it was an interesting thing, because it goes counter to the normal thing, which is the rambler is the weak one, and the short talking person, the terse person is the strong one.

But in this case it’s the opposite. You have the terse person who is weak, interestingly, and the rambler is strong. And that was actually fun; that was a fun dynamic to play around with, because it just made those scenes more interesting to me.

And if you’re not thinking in those terms of how language, the quantity, the quality, the size of the words, how many pauses, the speed… I mean, language is music, and you should be musical about it, I think.

John: The project I’m writing right now, one of the reasons I had struggled with it a bit is I was writing it with one very specific actor in mind, who is great and funny, but is a tough fit for what this story kind of needs. And so once I got past like, it has to be this, and I started thinking of the broader picture, I landed on the other actors, like, oh, that’s inherently funny; him in that premise is inherently funny.

Now, ultimately, will we cast either of these actors? Who knows? But it helped me figure out the voice, because I could hear what it would sound like if this actor were saying it, and I could shape the lines so that it would be very, very funny coming from that person.

It doesn’t mean that that’s the only actor who could ever play it. Famously, Will Smith was not the original choice for Men in Black. And it’s hard to imagine that it was supposed to be Matthew Perry, but it was supposed to be Matthew Perry. So don’t think you have to be locked into a specific cast. But if you can’t think of someone who should play the role, that’s also probably a problem.

Craig: Yeah. Those things are sort of proof of concept, you know. If it’s funny with two particular actors, then at least you know it can be funny. If you can’t think of any two actors that it could be funny in combination, then screw it. It ain’t gonna work, for sure.

Episode 286 clip:

John: I thought we’d start with sort of a history of what dialogue is, because obviously, human beings have been speaking for our entire existence. That’s one of the things that sort of makes us human. But dialogue is a very special case.

And so I was thinking back to what is the first example of dialogue. It would probably be reported speech. So, if I’m telling you a story, and I’m using the speech as the characters in the story, or I’m recapping something and saying like that he says, then she says, and it’s that situation where you’re modeling the behavior of what was said before. And so you can imagine sort of cavemen around the campfire doing that kind of reported speech would be the first kind of dialogue. Within a monologue, it’s the speech in that. Sort of like how an audio book works.

But then we have real plays. And so have the Greek dramas, the Greek comedies. If you think about the Greek dramas, a lot of Greek dramas are not people kind of talking back to each other. It sort of feels like I say something, then you say something, and there’s not a lot of interplay. But the Greek comedies, they do actually sort of talk to each other in ways that are meaningful. Of course, Shakespeare has plays in which characters are really communicating with each other. The thing I say influences the thing that you say back to me.

And then you have the Oscar Wilde comedies, which are all about sort of the craft of those words, and sort of like badminton, where they’re just keeping the ball up in the air. It’s not a ball, but I’d say it’s a birdie.

Craig: Yeah, exactly. I went through a period where I was reading some of the old Greek comedies, Aristophanes and so on, and I was stunned at how contemporary they felt in terms of the back and forth of dialogue. It was kind of remarkable. And they are plays, so you’re reading essentially a script. A thousand and thousand-year-old script. And they had figured a lot. It’s actually insane how little has changed.

John: Yeah. But I think it’s important to distinguish the comedies from the dramas, because when I look at the old Greek dramas, there is back and forth, but it’s not the same kind of back and forth. And it ends up being sort of a lot more like I’m going to tell you this whole long thing, and the next person is going to tell you this whole long thing.

Craig: Yes.

John: There’s less of that sort of back and forth.

Craig: I agree. It’s very declarative. The dramas are very much about speeches.

John: Yeah. But then you look at what happens next is, as we get into radio plays, then it’s all dialogue. So, when you have stage plays, you can see the action happening in front of you. You have people there. But we get to radio plays, it’s just people talking. And so the words have to do so much more in order to communicate not only what’s being said, but sort of the world around what’s being said. And so it’s more naturalistic in some ways, but it also has to be sort of pushed in a way, because it has to explain everything through just the dialogue.

Same time we were seeing radio come up, you have the silent movies. And so in silent movies, of course, you have characters in scenes together, but the dialogue, if there is dialogue, is just title cards that are put there. So, you have characters emoting a lot, and then we cut to a card that has a very shortened version of what they would say. That’s a strange form.

Craig: It’s very strange, because the cards, they don’t make conversation possible so even though people are talking together, they will choose a, I guess, some kind of representative line of dialogue for one person to sum up this entire exchange that these two people might be having. And, of course, that is probably why a lot of silent films also de-accentuate conversation. And it’s very much about one person making speeches, while another person listens.

John: Yep. Then, of course, we transition to the talkies, and then everything is changed, because once you actually have dialogue and characters that are in a scene together, it changes the frame of reality around things. So you can’t just have a person emoting wildly and then you cut to a title card. They actually have to have a conversation. You have to keep that ball up in the air.

And it’s a huge shift in sort of how the audience’s experience of a story and really the writer’s experience of how you’re going to communicate this information. You cannot expect the audience to just be watching and gleaning something. They are expecting to have a real conversation happening in front of them. And that changes everything.

Craig: It also famously changed the skill of acting. I mean, the school of acting prior to talkies was very much about being emotive and really more of a filmed version of what people would do on stage, which was very formalized.

And because their faces and movement had to stand in for so much, but once you shift to sound, we begin to see the birth of naturalistic acting which peaks with the method movement that leads to, famously, some of our greatest American films of the ‘70s.

John: Yeah. So there’s an expectation that the performances are naturalistic, and therefore the dialogue is supposed to be more naturalistic. It’s not always that way, but the dialogue gets twisted towards naturalism quite heavily once you have real characters speaking to each other.

Television in general was a huge shift in dialogue as well, because you think about how people watch television, you’re watching the screen, but sometimes you’re not really watching the screen. Sometimes TV is playing off in the background. So, there’s a midway quality between what our expectations are of film dialogue and radio dialogue.

There’s a little bit of over-explaining that tends to happen in TV. I think less so now than, you know, 20 years ago. But TV dialogue could be a little bit more artificial, because there was an expectation that you got to talk people through the process.

Even procedural shows right now, there’s an unnatural quality which is sort of inherent to the genre, where you are talking as if the other character doesn’t have that same information, so you can get it out to the audience.

Craig: And prior to a fairly recent revolution where so much of our television is streamed, commercial-free, for instance, if you’re watching it on Netflix or Hulu. Network television, which dominated all television, was highly bifurcated, trifurcated, quadfurcated because of commercials. And there was an understanding that some people were just coming in, they had missed it, or they went to the bathroom while stuff was going on. There was no TiVo. There was no pausing. People were constantly reiterating things so that folks wouldn’t get lost just because they went to go get a sandwich.

John: Yeah. As you were saying, in recapping what just happened.

Craig: Right.

John: So let’s talk about what characters are doing in scenes and sort of what ideally you would love to have your dialogue be able to perform in the scenes you’re writing. So, the first thing we’re looking for is dialogue, which means characters talking to each other, with each other, and not just intersecting monologues. And one of the great frustrations I have in some of our Three Page Challenges is I feel like characters are just having a monologue that’s just occasionally interrupted. Or like two parallel monologues that don’t actually have anything to do with each other.

When dialogue is working well, it should feel kind of like Velcro. Those two pieces of conversation, they’re designed for each other. And so they can only exist together and they’re strong when they are together. But you couldn’t take those people’s lines independently. They would be sort of meaningless. They’re all informed by what the person just said before that.

Craig: That’s a very good way of describing a common rookie limitation – intersecting monologues. And it’s understandable because the complexity that is required to create dialogue that answers and is responsible to the reflection back from another character, it is logarithmically more complicated than one person saying something and then another person saying something. They always say that silence is just as important in music as a note. And it’s the listening of dialogue and the reacting and the incorporation and the adjustment, that’s the swordsmanship.

I think when we look at stuff where we have the intersecting monologue problem, it’s like we’re watching two fencers who are putting on an exhibition for us, and they’re showing us their fencing moves towards us, but they’re not fencing each other, which is just a totally different thing.

John: It is. So let’s take a look at sort of how we indicate in the real world that we are listening to each other and how listening shapes the lines we’re going to say next.

I want to talk about discourse markers, which is the general term for those words that function as parts of speech that are not quite nouns or adjectives or anything else. They’re basically just little markers that say, “Yes, I heard what you said. I’m acknowledging what you said. And here is my response to it.” I’m talking about words like you know, actually, basically, like, I mean, okay, and so. Things like also, on the other hand, frankly, as a matter of fact. As I do very often, as you’re talking, I go, “Uh-huh.”

Craig: Right.

John: It’s those small acknowledgments that I hear what you’re saying and keep going, or I’m about to respond back to you. There’s an acronym which I found online for it called FANBOYS. So if you’re trying to remember those words, it’s For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet, or So. Basically it’s ways to take what has just been said and put your spin on the next thing that’s going to come out.

And so let’s take a look at why you would use those discourse markers, and as a screenwriter, how to be aware of those things. I think so often we try to optimize our dialogue to the point where we’re getting rid of all the natural parts of speech. But without some of these little things to help you hook into the previous line, it can be hard to make your speech flow naturally.

So, here’s one function. It’s when you want to soften a blow, especially if it conflicts with what the person just said. So, it’s an example of like, “Well.” “Well, that’s not entirely true.”

Craig: Right.

John: You could say, “That’s not entirely true,” but that’s a harder line. The well takes a little of the edge off that and sort of connects like, “Yes, I heard what you just said, but I’m going to say the opposite.”

Craig: Yeah. So, these words are wonderful to indicate that the person who is starting their sentence with them has changed. Somehow what you said to me changed my brain. I’m not saying it changed my mind in that I have a new opinion. But it has changed my state of brain, which is exactly what goes on in conversation.

So, as you’re talking to me, you’re changing my brain because I’m listening to you. Actors understand this. They’re taught very carefully and very rigorously how to listen. You can always tell a bad actor because they’re not listening. They’re just thinking about their next line.

John: Yep.

Craig: Similarly, bad writers write characters who are just thinking about their next line. And so you lose these little things. And when we talk about… Everyone is familiar with the phrase “an ear for dialogue.” A lot of what an ear for dialogue is is this. It’s really not so much an ear. It is a sense of human psychology and an understanding of how it feels to listen.

So, when you’re writing two people talking to each other, you have to schizophrenically, I use that in the wrong sense, split-mindedly say something and then immediately throw yourself into the other person and hear it. And that is what will naturally lead to some of these very useful words.

John: Yep. We talked about softening a blow. A lot of times you’re also comparing two ideas. An example would be, “So, it’s like Uber for golf carts.” And so you’re basically taking the idea that’s been given to you and synthesizing it and putting it back. You might want to add onto an idea. So, that’s, “What’s more, there’s no evidence he even read the book.” That “what’s more,” you could take that off, but without it, it doesn’t connect to the previous line of dialogue.

Craig: Right. It’s not an acknowledgement that you’ve heard that. You’re agreeing with it, tacitly. And now you’re adding. So much gets unsaid by a “what’s more.” But we hear it, and the audience hears it, and they know so much because of it. That’s amazing. I’ve never really thought about that. Interesting.

John: Yeah. It’s a way of like sort of underlining that previous point. Another example would be indicating that a point has already been conceded and that you’re kind of moving on. So, an example would be, “No, you’re right to be concerned.” And so essentially saying like, “You said to be concerned. I’m agreeing with you to be concerned. Let’s move on to the next point.”

Craig: Right.

John: What I also find so fascinating about that no is that’s an example of how no can mean yes in dialogue. And I hear myself doing it all the time, where I will say no when I mean yes. And it’s basically that no means I’m putting no argument up against you. I’m agreeing with you. I’m not denying you. It’s awkward that, of course, it’s an example of no really meaning a yes. But it’s just the way that it works in our language.

Craig: We’ll call it the affirmative no. Sometimes when people use it, I feel like they’re actually responding to themselves. So you say something. I’m thinking a thing. You give me a different point of view. And I say, “No, yeah, I think that’s right,” as in, “No, stop thinking the thing you were thinking. This new thing is correct.”

John: Yeah.

Craig: It is fascinating how many words we elide as we go through. Yeah.

John: A lot of times you’re going to use one of these words to demonstrate a sense of logical sequence. So, “Okay, once we disable the cameras, then we can start working on the vault.” Basically, I am going to now set forth a chain of events that describes what’s going to happen next. Or, we’re going to offer an illustration, an example. So, “And we all remember how drunk he got at the Christmas party.” Again, you could take off that “and” and start and say, “We all remember how drunk he got at the Christmas party.”

Craig: Yeah, that’s not a–

John: But that “and” is really helpful, because it means I’m adding on to the thing you just said. I’m giving you an example of the situation that we’re talking about. That “and” is incredibly helpful, and without that “and” the sentence doesn’t mean the same thing.

Craig: I think sometimes when educational therapists… There’s a whole world of people who work with kids who have autism or Asperger’s and they struggle with social interaction. Some of these things are the things that they’re actually instructing them, because for some people, that “and” is absolutely superfluous. And from an informational point of view, it’s close to being superfluous.

But what they’re missing is that they’ve eliminated that social glue that says, “Just so you know, I listened to you, and I heard you.” When, of course, somebody who is very regimented and perhaps rigid in their thinking might think, “The fact that I am here staring at you is an indication that I heard what you said.” And some people need to be taught these things.

John: Talk us through sort of then the modes of dialogue. What are the tones of dialogue? What you’re trying to do in basic structures of dialogue.

Craig: Yeah, I was thinking about this question of the kinds of ways that we, meaning humans or characters, speak, and if they could be divided up into categories. And I don’t know if these are all of them, but these are certainly many of the ones that you’ll see and use as a writer all the time.

The first one is the easiest and most obvious, which I’ll just call neutral. And that’s sort of the way we talk throughout the day. It’s how we’re talking right now. It’s low stakes. It’s even-tempered. It’s not particularly loud or soft. It can be inquisitive or informative or social. It’s two people chatting at lunch. And in movies, sometimes that’s what’s going on, but it’s important to match the neutral mode to the actual circumstances. You don’t want to have people speaking neutrally when perhaps it might be more interesting or dramatic or appropriate for them to be speaking a different way.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Then there’s emotional. And that’s what we probably think of when we think about Oscar movies and so forth. But emotional dialogue is in every movie, of all kinds. And that is dialogue where the character is revealing some part of their inner emotional state. It is typically well controlled speech. It can often be uneven because we understand that it is an expression of the lizard brain, our flight or fight type of instinct. Very often this kind of dialogue is irrational. It can be contradictory. It can be very loud. It is rarely well-articulated.

This we’ve seen a lot in Three Page Challenges. People speak in this remarkably well articulated, I won’t say even-tempered, but very well-articulated way, when in fact in the moment they should have an emotional mode, which is clumsy and often truncated or weird.

John: There was a screener I was watching this last week, a movie that I genuinely loved, but there was a moment in there where a character has a huge emotional moment, and I was frustrated that the character was far too articulate in that moment. They actually dialed up the sophistication of the dialogue in that incredibly emotional moment. And the actor was talented enough to pull it off, basically. And, yet, it didn’t actually track. It didn’t actually make sense. The moment should have been less coherent and more emotionally clear. And it was sort of too precisely, too finely written for where that character was supposed to be at emotionally.

Craig: Well, it sounds like perhaps the writer fell into a fairly common trap, where when you should be emotional, you opt for something that I’ll call declarative. This is the mode of speaking when you are intentionally getting across some kind of meaningful insight or important news or dramatic revelation.

Declarative, the most obvious example would be a lawyer giving a final argument. There’s that moment in, what was that movie called, A Time to Kill, where Matthew McConaughey delivers this impassioned speech about what happens. And then he says, “Now, imagine she’s white,” which is a very declarative, insightful… There’s a wisdom to it. And actors and writers love these moments, because they are so remarkable. You know, Yoda is always declarative. But when you are emotional, you should not be declarative. That would make the emotion seem fake, and it would make you and the character and scene feel inauthentic.

John: Yep. It’s the reason why the lawyer can’t give that passionate closing argument after having just found out that his wife died.

Craig: Right.

John: There’s a mismatch of sort of what’s going on in his mental state to be able to do that. And it’s a very controlled thing for him to do that remarkable speech.

Craig: That’s right. And, by the way, that example that you just gave… Oh and interesting, I just used “by the way,” which is another great signifier to indicate that I heard you and then it’s triggered something else. Sometimes you’ll see these notes come up where somebody will say there’s a mismatch in the way this moment, with how they feel. Without putting their finger on it, what they’re saying is you’re using the wrong mode of dialogue for what would be the mental state of this person.

Interestingly, there’s this other mode that I’ll call manipulative, which makes it sound Machiavellian, but I’m using it more as an over-arching term. And manipulative dialogue is anything where you’re trying to either convince somebody or calm somebody down or inspire somebody or avoid their questions. You’re using dialogue purposefully to achieve an effect in this other person.

And if you think about our example of the lawyer, that’s the difference between a lawyer who is trying to get one over on a jury, and a lawyer who fervently believes what he’s telling them. One person will be manipulative, and the other one will be declarative.

John: Absolutely. So, what I find so fascinating about everything we talked about with dialogue in this segment was it’s all about the emotional state and the emotional content of dialogue. So, in no ways are we trying to talk about dialogue as a mechanism for conveying story, at least story in terms of plot. We’re really talking about like how do you convey characters’ emotional states and how are you going to let them try to change the emotional state of the other characters in the scene.

That’s really what dialogue is supposed to be doing as it functions now, not like how it functioned historically. But what we do now when we write dialogue is to be able to provide insight to the audience about what’s going on inside the character, but also let the characters try to change the emotional state of the characters around them.

It’s part of the reason why the example of neutral modes of dialogue, that’s why those scenes are generally not so exciting, because there’s not going to be a conflict there. There’s not a challenge for the character there. There’s nothing they’re trying to do to the other characters in the scene. There’s no inherent drama there.

Craig: Precisely. And this is one of the great challenges of writing a scene is that you have to be… We’ll limit it to two people talking. Forget three or four. You have to be three different people at once. You have to be the architect of the story, who understands in an intellectual way that something must be achieved in terms of plot and character to advance this narrative.

Then you have to be both people, who do not know that, and don’t have access to that, and are reacting and living in the moment, reacting to the world around them, reacting to the feelings inside of them, and most importantly, reacting to what the other person is saying. So, that is very difficult for a lot of people. When we talk about talent in writing, sometimes I think that’s what it is. Those are three different people at once, and the best writers are the ones that are talented at being all three of those people. The writer, and then the two people in the scene.

And one of the ways I think I immediately am aware of quality in these moments is when there’s a mismatch of mode between two characters. Maybe one character is being neutral, and the other one is being manipulative. Or the other one is being emotional, and the other one is being declarative.

You know, Luke is very upset and Yoda is very calm and wise. Or, somebody is very emotional, and the other person is calming them down. So, whenever possible, you do want that mismatch, because that is creating conflict or resolution. When two people are emotional, it’s just two people yelling and absorbed in their own minds. And when two people are being wise and informative, you’re wondering why they’re both telling each other these incredibly wonderful fortune cookie insights. Mismatching these modes is a huge help when you’re navigating your way through a scene.

John: Absolutely. You want to be able to give the characters someone to play against. And if they’re trying to play the same melody, it’s not going to be nearly as exciting as if there’s a conflict between what they’re trying to do and sort of where they’re at in the mode of the scene.

Episode 371 clip:

John: Craig, start us off.

Craig: Sure. So, a couple of weeks ago I had an opportunity to participate in something. It doesn’t really matter what the circumstances are. But it was the first time that I had to memorize dialogue in forever. And it was a particular kind of dialogue memorization. Most people at some point in school will have to memorize something like a passage from Shakespeare or if they’re in a school play or a musical there’s a script. And then there’s a lot of time given to memorize it. In the case of a musical, you rehearse over the course of a couple of months or so.

But traditionally the way we shoot movies and television an actor comes in and learns their lines for that day. Every day, new lines. Maybe you’re doing one scene that day. Maybe you’re doing two. So, the object is to learn, somewhere around three, four, five pages of dialogue. You rarely individually have three, four, five pages of dialogue, but it’s part of a conversation that goes on, and that’s roughly a day’s work. So actors learn their lines for the day.

And I had an opportunity to do that. And so I had the scene and I just read it and I had to memorize it somewhat, you know, relatively quickly. But, you know, 30, 40 minutes or something like that. I mean, I was familiar with it prior, but about that much time to memorize it. And then I had to do it. And it was very instructive. And I hadn’t written this dialogue. So it was a way of interacting with dialogue that I don’t normally do at all.

And in the doing of it I kind of learned some interesting lessons that I had never considered, that I think might be applicable to the writing of dialogue, because in the end, someone is going to have to memorize it and someone is going to have to say it. So, there were certain challenges that come across right away. I mean, the really easy ones. You have to remember what you’re saying. You have to obviously think about how you’re going to say it. That’s the performance part. And then there’s this third one that I think people underestimate, which is when do you say it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s easy enough to know when your dialogue ends, because it ends. And then someone else starts talking. But when do you come back in? So that’s the listening part. But in that part, you begin to see how memorization relies a lot on two things: the relationships between different words and what I call, what I don’t call, what neurologists call chunks. Have you ever encountered the chunking theory of memory?

John: I think I know what you’re talking about. Essentially, we don’t hold little atoms of information. Instead we group things together in bigger packages, and it’s those larger puzzle pieces that we’re putting together to form actual memories and to form a string that becomes a sentence.

Craig: That’s exactly right. I mean, the brain is pretty good at taking certain bits of information like a number and then chunking them together in a group that is memorable. And so what they find for instance is that roughly seven digits is about the largest chunk of information you can make for people where they can reliably remember it. Meaning to say if I come up to you and I say I’m going to read, I don’t know, seven random digits and I just ask you, and single digits, and I say you’ve got to remember that, I’m coming back five minutes from now. You didn’t write it down. You can’t write it down. You’ll be able to. More than that becomes really, really hard.

John: Yeah. And the same thing would be true with words. If I gave you seven random words that had no contextual meaning together it would be very hard to get those seven words, or more than seven words, together. But if they had semantic meaning, that would be very simple.

Craig: Correct. There’s a certain ability to chunk them together. They find that people that are really good at things or have a lot of experience, the amount of information they can put in an individual chunk expands.

So for instance, chess players they found, whereas I might look at a chess board, I’m a terrible chess player. So if I look at a chess board that’s sort of set up to be mid-game, and I’m told you have to memorize this and then walk away from it, come back one minute later and reconstruct it on the board, the amount of pieces that I will be able to keep in my mind and where their positions are is very small, whereas people that are very good at chess, it’s a breeze for them, because they’re essentially creating relationships between things. They understand these four pieces in relationship, it’s sort of a thing. It’s a chunk.

John: It’s a pattern.

Craig: It’s a pattern. And so I realized that’s kind of how you memorize dialogue when you’re reading it. There are certain things that kind of indicate this is the beginning and this is the end of a chunk. And the chunks of words are anchored, essentially.

So, there’s always a word or maybe a couple of words that are stuck together that is the emphasis, the point, the reveal, or maybe a strange word. In this little chunk, and the chunk could be five words long, those are the words that are kind of the glue that’s holding all the other stuff together. Little bits and bobs of words that maybe in and of themselves like The, And, But, Before, and OK, and Whenever, and Ever, and so on and so forth, all those are kind of connected to this anchor word. So one thing to consider as you’re writing your dialogue is what is the anchor of this thought or piece of dialogue?

John: Yeah. So if it’s not hanging on anything, it’s just going to sort of fall away. And probably was not a meaningful line anyway.

Craig: Is not a meaningful line anyway. And so what you end up with is, well, it could be a meaningful line, but you heard it by creating a kind of hypnotic rhythm or pattern to it.

So, for instance, here’s something that, the sort of thing that we might say in this sort of rhythm. “After we go but before we’re let in, if we can take a look at how we arrive at the … “ Every single one of those words was one syllable or maybe two. They were all roughly the same length. There were certain repetitions of words. A lot of minuscule words with hundreds of meanings, like look and act and can and in. You’re asking the brain to do a lot of work to remember the stuff, and there’s nothing anchoring it together.

The other thing that can sometimes anchor a chunk is not a word per se, but your reaction to something that you’re looking at or you’re smelling or you’re hearing, so that the words are chunked around a reaction to the world around you.

John: Yeah. So classically, dialogue, you’re going to be reacting to the thing the person just said beforehand, but there may also be something in the environment that’s actually causing the line to happen or causing you to pick those specific words. And so you can think about what that thing is that’ll help you remember that chunk, or it will help unify that thought.

Craig: Yeah. If someone says I want you to take a look at this document and review it, and that’s their line of dialogue, and my line of dialogue is to pick it up and say, “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at here,” okay, those are sort of bland words. There’s not much of an anchor to that. But if someone says, “Take a look at this,” and they whip a window open, “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at here,” that’s a reaction. It’s already so much easier to remember, because it’s not just words. It’s words in relation to something.

And similarly, as I was doing it I noticed that the way you realize that one chunk is over and another one is beginning is that inside of well-written dialogue, there are all these little mini/micro reversals, reconsiderations. There’s little built-in pauses or moments for emotion. And all those little things help you divide it up into chunks so that you’re not memorizing a list of words, but rather you’re memorizing movements of thought. I don’t know how else to put it.

John: Absolutely. It’s like musical phrases, but they are little sections of thought. And a lot of times they will follow English grammar. So, I suspect oftentimes you find the chunks do fit in where commas are or where connector words like “and” are. Or they end at periods. But they don’t always. And so it’s always worth looking at would it make more sense to continue this thought sort of beyond the period into its next line. You can also be thinking about sort of where is the natural place to breathe, and that may also give you a sense of where that thought really wants to break.

Craig: Yeah. And you’re right. Sometimes your desire actually is to blow through the stop sign, because you realize that everything is chunked together around one emotion of rising frustration. So you blow through that stop sign, and you chunk a larger bit together.

And I also noticed how little bits of odd word order could trip me up. It’s interesting. Odd words are great to help you remember things and they’re great to sort of signify what’s happening in a kind of attractive way when you’re performing dialogue, but here is the sentence I just… This is my example sentence. “Odd helps if it’s notably odd, but it hurts if it’s just odd in a mundane way.”

Now here’s that sentence again. I’m going to make one change. “Odd helps if it’s notably odd, but it hurts if it’s odd in just a mundane way.” All I did in that second one was move the word “just” to a slightly different spot. I moved it down two words. It’s not wrong, but it’s a much harder sentence to memorize at that point, because just is kind of the anchoring word, because it’s a change. It’s sort of signifying a new chunk. And so I just made the first chunk way longer. “But if it hurts it’s odd in,” all single-syllable words.

It seems like it’s not a big deal, but in a way it is. I’ve spent a lot of time on sets watching actors sometimes trip over these seemingly minor things, and you wonder why. And I’m starting to think it’s because of things like this. Or for instance, “This is the third time. This is the third time you’ve done this.” Okay, perfectly reasonable bit of dialogue except “this is the third time” is kind of… Your brain starts to–

John: It’s annoying. It’s not that hard. It’s just a little bit annoying. It’s because they’re different THs also. So the “this” and “third” are not the same TH.

Craig: Right.

John: And that also messes you up. I want to get back to your moving the “just.” I think part of the reason why it’s tougher that way is you’ve created a parallel structure where you’re saying odd twice, but the repetition isn’t meaningful in the second way, without the “just” there. And so that hurts you. But you’ve also broken the rhythm of the sentence. And it’s like there’s a bump in the carpet and you’re trying to walk naturally across it and you just can’t because that just is in the wrong place. And it’s a thing you don’t notice unless you read your dialogue aloud that it’s happening.

Craig: Ah, unless you read your dialogue aloud which therein is the ultimate lesson of this little mini discussion on craft. We advocate all the time that you read your dialogue out loud. Mostly because I think you start to hear maybe that some of the choices are wrong, or perhaps you’re going on a bit too long. But also I think these little things start to emerge. These are the things that will subconsciously begin to undermine the performers.

They’re really good at what they do. They can memorize anything. And they will. But the stuff that’s easier to memorize I suspect is therefore easier to perform, and therefore I suspect is easier to hear. And when I say easier, I don’t mean less challenging intellectually. I mean it’s just more mellifluous. And so when you and I fuss over where the word “just” should be placed in that sentence, it’s not merely writerly fussiness. It’s kind of the point. These things really, really matter.

So, the little lessons that I learned from my little bit of memorization, and perhaps they might help people as they go about creating things for other people to memorize.

John: So a few techniques which I want to suggest to anybody who has to memorize dialogue they did not write is obviously the cliché of this, just sort of how the writer cliché is sort of like typing on the typewriter, oh it’s terrible, you rip the paper off and crumble it up. The actor cliché is I’m auditioning for something and I’m just running lines with a friend. That running lines, it really does happen, but the way we usually see it in movies, weirdly, it just feels very false and fake. But literally just the practice of going through the lines and having somebody else work through the lines with you will help.

When I’ve had to do it for songs, I don’t know if you ever encountered this, is to memorize lyrics. Other singers have told me that you just write the lyrics out by hand. And the process of actually having to write it out sort of helps cement it in the brain a little bit more. Makes you think about what those words actually are and helps you chunk them down.

Make sure the words mean something to you, that you’re not just saying the words, but you actually understand the intention behind them. My daughter had to do Shakespeare. She had to do a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream. And you can just spout the words out, but if you don’t actually understand what they mean, the scene is not going to really work, and you’re going to have a harder time really holding onto those words, because they’re just syllables. They’re not words that actually mean anything to you.

And the last thing I think really goes back to your idea of chunking. It’s really connecting the thoughts. And so obviously, you’re going to be responding to the person who just spoke, but you also have to connect back to the scene as a whole. You have to understand, remember, what was your intention two lines ago, three lines ago? What’s actually happening in the scene and what is the environment in which I’m saying this line, because the environment is constantly changing based on this conversation.

So it’s not just a ping-pong match where the ball in on one side of the net or the other side of the net. It really is a bigger environment in which this is happening and make sure that you’re learning the line in that environment and not just in a little vacuum by itself.

Craig: Yeah, I mean, in the end, when you learn your part of a conversation, you have to learn their part too. You have to. It’s essential. You need to kind of know at least. Part of acting is being surprised by something you know is coming, including what you’re supposed to say. But you do need to know their side, or else you’ll get lost real fast.

John: Yeah. Being surprised by what you said, that can be really useful. It can make a scene feel really alive. But do remember that in real conversations, it can be useful to sort of turn on that little recording light when you’re having a real conversation. You generally do have a sense of what you’re going to be saying kind of 15 seconds from now. Even while you’re listening to the other person, you do have a next line sort of queuing up. So would your characters in the scene, and so will you as an actor. So, it’s okay to let the mental wheels spin a little bit, to get that stuff started even as you’re actively listening in a scene.

Craig: Yeah. Look, neither one of us are accomplished thespians by any stretch of the imagination, but considering that we work with them, these things are always… I think they’re very helpful to consider.

And I handed poor Jared Harris massive reams of dialogue that he handled brilliantly, but it was a challenge. His character in Chernobyl, he’s wordy. He’s a scientist, and he’s a talker. And he’s an explainer. But he’s also very emotional. So when he gets going, it all has to come tumbling out in this incredibly natural way. And he’s a master at that, but it’s a lot. It’s hard.

John: My prediction is the things that were mostly challenging for him, and this has just been my observation on many, many sets, is when actors have lines that are similar, that are in different parts of the scene, that messes them up. If they were completely different lines, it would be great. But if they have things that are kind of the same idea and they’re repeating themselves, but they’re not repeating themselves in the same way, that’s where things get tripped up. It’s like, wait, did I already say this? Where am I at in this scene? And that’s probably a sign that something isn’t working quite right in the writing, or at least in the execution, because each of those lines should only kind of be possible in that one moment.

Craig: Well, I mean, if you have any sense that thoughts or lines are vaguely repeating, that’s a writing problem for sure. And you have to eliminate those. And you can hear them sometimes, too. Again, when you read things out loud or you listen and you go, okay, that seems like we’re kind of rolling over the same ground there. And, yeah, you’ve got to get rid of that.

John: Yep. The writing challenge I faced this week was I’m doing a scene that is at the end of the second act, and so all the characters are well established. I didn’t need to introduce any new characters in the scene, sort of scene/sequence. It’s a pretty big number. It’s about five pages in all. But almost all of the characters in the story are in this sequence.

Now, the scene is clearly driven by one person. One person has almost all the dialogue in the sequence, and yet there’s a lot of other characters to service in it. And the challenge in these kind of scenes, and these kind of scenes happen in almost every script I guess, is how do you keep everybody else alive and active and engaged in that scene and sort of make them count in that scene, when they don’t have a lot to actually do.

And so it’s a frequent challenge. So, I wanted to sort of go through why this happens and some strategies for dealing with it when it happens. Because, Craig, I’m sure you face this on a weekly basis.

Craig: It’s inevitable. I mean, there are scenes where people need to listen. It’s really important that they’re there, because they have to listen to something happen. And they’re going to have one or two important moments within that, but mostly they have to listen. And yeah you need to really think carefully about how you’re portraying. You first need to ask do they really need to be there. And once you decide they do, well, then you’ve got to handle them. You have to service your characters.

John: And so one of the big complications in this sequence, but it’s also true I think for a lot of other movies, is the biggest name actors in the movie are going to be in the scene, but they’re not going to have the most to do. And that’s kind of inevitable based on the story. And that, again, does happen a lot.

So, I want to make sure that as I’m writing this, that these characters and these actors who don’t have a ton to do still feel very, very important in this scene, because you and I both know that otherwise they might show up on set and be sort of frustrated that they don’t have anything to do.

So, I’m trying to be mindful from the start of giving them interesting business and making them feel important in the scene, even though they don’t have a lot to do. And so that was one of the other things I was working through with this sequence.

Craig: Yeah. And, look, I don’t get too concerned with the egos of actors, because I’ve given up trying to predict what will or will not spin an insecure person off their axis. But what I do know is if they’re the most important characters in the movie, and it sounds like they have to be, because they’re the big stars, that means that the scene is about them. The bottom line is it’s about them. They may not be talking in it. They may be listening. They may be experiencing something. But it is about what they’re feeling. It’s about what they’re thinking. It’s about who they’re looking at and why they’re looking at them.

So, that’s kind of the thing. When you look at A Few Good Men, it may be that we’re concentrating on Tom Cruise and Jack Nicolson. They’re going back and forth. But when you go over to Demi Moore or to Kevin Pollack, their looks mean something. There’s something happening there that’s valuable.

John: I think it’s good you brought up A Few Good Men, because I was trying to list the types of movies where you see this challenging sequence happen. Courtroom dramas are one of the main places. But sporting championships are another important place for this, where the action is taking place on the field but, you know, we need to also track the coach and the people in the stands and all of the other characters are there for that final sports championship.

Craig: I can’t get over sporting championships.

John: Sporting championships. Well, because I’m saying, I don’t want to be just football, or just soccer, or just basketball.

Craig: I know. But it’s literally like you landed here yesterday from Planet Questron.

John: I like sporting games. I like to watch the sporting games and sporting matches.

Craig: You’re like, “When writing sporting championships.” Oh, you’re the best, man. I love you.

John: But even like major battle sequences, so when you see Star Wars, when you see big fights like that, you have a ton of things happening in the sequence, and to be able to track all those people. And every time you cut away to show somebody else, their reaction, you risk breaking the flow of the main action. So it’s finding that natural way to do it is tough.

Some movies with big musical numbers, you’ll just have everybody in there. And so how do you service everybody in that big musical number? And then speeches and rallies where you have one character. This is sort of like a speech or rally kind of moment in the movie I’m doing right now. You have one character making a big speech, so therefore will have almost all of the dialogue, so making sure you find interesting things for the other important characters to be doing in that, even though they’re not naturally going to have lines because they’re not going to be talking at the same time as the other person talking. So, those are circumstances where you find yourself in this writing challenge.

So, for me, what I did is I went back to sort of real basics. That’s making sure to do an audit of all the characters there and really look at what they want in that moment. Like what are they trying to do right then at that moment? What are the micro interactions between characters? And so it’s a way of acknowledging multiple characters there. If two characters can look at each other, exchange a meaningful look, that takes care of those two characters and keeps them alive in the scene, rather than having them do individual things.

I looked for like what physical actions could they do, so to give them something concrete, something we could see. And I really looked at sort of how can this scene geography suggest where people can be, so that in cutting to them around the space, we’re actually exploring more of the environment, exploring more of what’s really going on there. How can things change within that scene geography?

Those are just some of the techniques I sort of found for this sequence, but in doing it, I found that’s probably true for most of the sequences I’ve had to write that had five or more characters in them.

Craig: Yeah. I try and think of these things in terms of sort of multi-track narratives, because you have your main narrative which is the narrative of the big scene. You know, we are watching the Super Bowl, and the big narrative is what is happening with the football, where is it going, who is running where, and how far are they getting. And in trials, it is between whoever the fireworks is coming from in any particular moment. Same with battles. And same with musical numbers. And same with speeches.

But, that’s one track of the narrative. Then the question is, okay, for the people that are watching, what is their narrative? Because if it’s “I’m watching,” then they don’t need to be there. And it can’t just be “I’m watching,” because at that point they become boring. They have to be actively watching, actively listening.

John: Yeah. What I needed to make sure is that the characters who were there, who had to watch or witness part of it, still had important choices to make, and that the choices they’re going to be making are directly impacted by their reaction to what they just saw. And so that gives them a reason for why they needed to be there and why they’re making this interesting choice at the end of the sequence.

Craig: Right. So to go back to A Few Good Men and the trial scene there, there is a moment where Cruise’s character is considering basically putting his entire career, even his freedom, on the line to pursue a line of inquiry with Jack Nicholson’s character. And he looks over, and Kevin Pollack simply gives him the slightest don’t do it head shake. That’s it. And these moments are crucial because it means he’s a participant. He is impacting and affecting what is going on around him as an observer.

So when I write those scenes, I really try and give every character a narrative and also a moment where they can make a choice to stand up and say something or to not. They can stand up and go, “I have to stop this,” or they just let it go, but I understand that they are participating. And even if their choice is to not do a thing, they have changed the path of the scene.

This is frankly, no offense to our director brothers and sisters, but this is so important for us to do as writers, because if we don’t do it and we don’t do it clearly on the page, they don’t do it. They don’t do it. They miss those little mini stories. They’ll just write it off as, okay, let’s just grab reaction shots now. But what is the actor doing in the reaction shot? Listening? Coming up with their own theories and things? That’s fine. But that’s not as good as a clear narrative story that that actor understands they are pursuing before they ever get there on the day. And that the director then can think about how they stage that scene, understanding that they are not covering one narrative here, but multiple narratives.

It’s really important that we do this on the page, because if we don’t, we are going to be deeply disappointed nine times out of ten when we see the film.

John: Yeah. So, the Kevin Pollack that you mentioned, I don’t know what it looks like on the script page. I suspect it is clearly called out there. It’s the kind of moment where as I read back through the script, if I am worried that people are going to miss it, because people sometimes do get to be a little skimmy, and they might not be reading every line of the scene description, I might save one of my underlines for that. Just to make sure that it really lands. Like, oh no, no, this is a real moment. This moment has to happen. This is going to change and pivot what’s happening after it.

And, yes, great directors will look at a scene and look at it from every character’s angle and really have a chance to study and explore it and would probably figure out, like you know what, I need to really make that moment so I’m not just going to worry about coverage to get that reaction. I’m going to make sure I specifically plan for what is the look between those actors, what’s happening in that moment.

Craig: Right.

John: When you don’t have that kind of prep time, when you’re shooting a one-hour drama on a tight schedule, those are the moments that can be lost. And that’s the reason why in TV they want the writer on set. And it’s also the reason why in the tone meeting, where they’re going through with the director while the director is doing prep, they’re really trying to single out those moments that are so crucial, that they anticipate needing as they get into the editing room.

Craig: Right. 100%. And I do think, look, every show has a different kind of constraint on it. But if you’re doing one of these scenes and you feel like, given the nature of the time you have and the writing you have, that you can’t afford to multi-track your narrative, rewrite the scene. Because otherwise it literally will just be boring or stupid.

John: Yeah. So obviously going into one of these things I should have said at the very start is one of your first choices may be like do I need to have all these characters? Am I making my life too difficult by trying to service all these characters in the scene? And sometimes you are making it too difficult. In the case of the scene I was writing, it felt like all the threads needed to come together under one roof, and so yes, I definitely needed all those characters there.

Craig: There you go.

John: That concludes our clip show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, and featured segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, Megan McDonald, and Megana Rao, the whole murderers row of former Scriptnotes producers.

It was edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is also by Matthew Chilelli, a classic of his. 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’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

Hey, let’s talk merch. We have Scriptnotes T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau, including the brand new Scriptnotes University T-shirt and sweatshirt.

Speaking of universities, are you a college student with a dot-edu email address? Do you want a free copy of Highland 2, the screenwriting software that our company makes? Just go to highland2.app and you can get it for free. We also have the new XL version of Writer Emergency Pack in the store. You can find links to that in the show notes.

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 you’re about to hear on dual dialog. Thanks to everybody, and have a great week.

[Bonus Segment]

Episode 470 clip:

John: All right, let’s get to a craft topic. I want to talk about dual dialogue, because this week I’ve been writing scenes that have a lot of dual dialogue in it, which is not something I often do. We’ve discussed on Episode 370, we talked about simultaneity, basically when two events have to happen in the same time, but dual dialogue is a specific kind of that where people are just overlapping. And we may want the overlap for effect. We may need to hear information from two different sides. There’s a reason why we’re doing. It’s always a choice to do dual dialogue. And let’s talk about when you make that choice and how you might portray that on the page.

Craig: It is a little bit of a trap, because if you watch movies, particularly certain kinds of movies where it’s very conversational, very dialogue heavy, almost all of it at times will seem like it’s overlapping somewhat. And so there’s a temptation to think this is going to make it realer. If I do dual dialogue, it will make things look realer.

The problem with dual dialogue is that it is such a heavy-handed instruction to everybody. Everybody is now going, “Oh my god, I have to actually, we are talking at the same time over each other very specifically.” This isn’t a natural overlapping but a forced overlapping. So you have to be very deliberate, I think, about when you use it. It really comes into play rarely. I must say maybe three or four times in a script it’ll pop up. And even then I feel like I could probably get away with two of them, you know, get rid of two of them or something.

John: Yeah. So I think we often confuse and conflate it with people speaking quickly.

Craig: Right.

John: And so I think in a lot of movies that we see and we love, we think they’re overlapping, but really they’re actually just speaking quickly. And they’re anticipating their next lines. There’s just not pauses between things. But they literally are not stacked on top of each other. So, we see a tool in Highland or in Final Draft that gives us the ability to dual dialogue, and we think like, oh, that must be the way you do it. And I’ll tell you that on the page, often that’s not how you do it.

Craig: Right.

John: So some of the choices you might make is as a parenthetical “overlapping,” basically saying like there may be scene description that says all of this is overlapping. Basically don’t wait to clear the other person’s lines before you start talking. That it’s meant to be sort of on top of each other.

Craig: Yeah.

John: For example, Call Me by Your Name, there’s a sequence in which he’s sitting at the table, and the parents and these other visitors are just all talking over each other. And it’s not important what they’re actually saying. It’s the experience of being there, listening to that. And so that’s probably just an overlapping because it just doesn’t actually matter what the individual people are saying.

Other cases, you are very specifically trying to get information out there. So, we had Noah Baumbach on for Marriage Story. We had Greta Gerwig on for Little Women. And in those scripts, you can go back to those episodes and look at the PDFs, they’re very specific about where those overlaps are, and you are supposed to be hearing what everyone is saying. And the fact that they are overlapping becomes very important. Be thinking about what the actual effect is you’re trying to achieve.

Craig: Yeah. But there are those moments where it really is the perfect tool. Like you say, it’s not frequent. I mean, for standard overlapping, for casual overlapping you don’t want to do this. It is a heavy-handed instruction to everybody.

But, then there are times where somebody is going to try and talk over another person. Arguments, for instance, where someone is going to be talking and the other person starts talking as if to say, “No, you stop talking,” but the first person will not stop talking. Or, situations in comedies sometimes where two people are trying to explain the same thing at once. It is a moment where it is absolutely required that two people are speaking intentionally over each other, with knowledge that they’re speaking over each other, and neither one of them is going to stop. That’s pretty much the best case use for dual dialogue.

John: Yeah. Basically neither one of them is yielding the floor to the other person to speak.

Craig: Right.

John: So even the conversation that you and I are having right now, we are anticipating when I’m going to stop talking and you’re going to start talking. But along the way, I might try to shout over you a little bit. I may do an acknowledgment, which I think is a special case we should talk about here, which is the uh-huhs, the yeahs. If you’re doing The Daily, the New York Times podcast, it’s Michael Barbaro’s “Huh.” It’s that signal that you’re still part of it.

Craig: Huh.

John: So those are all meaningful things. And sometimes you’re going to choose as a writer to actually break up someone’s dialogue with that “huh,” that acknowledgment. But that’s rare. It would also be rare to put that “uh-huh” in a dual dialogue. So you’re going to make choices. Basically I’m saying you may not put every utterance of a person in the dialogue of your script.

Craig: And when you are there, you are going to find some sort of naturalistic language that comes out. One of the stark differences between play text from a playwright and screenplay text from a screenwriter is that the play text is designed to be performed by as many different actors as possible, whereas the screenwriting text will be performed by one. And unless there’s some remake of the movie 30 years later, it’s one person. So there is going to be a certain tailoring and idiosyncratic adjustment to that single performer, as opposed to a play.

So actually I do see dual dialogue frequently when I look at plays, when I read plays. It seems like that gets called out quite a bit because it’s formalized, whereas in movies not so much. It is a decent tool. It’s very useful for songs, when you’re writing songs in movies, and two people are singing at once. It’s perfectly useful. But I think it’s probably good to ask yourself do I need it. It is not fun to read …

John: It’s brutal to read.

Craig: … I’ll say, on the page. Yeah. If you see a page where it’s just strips of dual dialogue, your eyelids will get heavy.

John: Yeah, because you have to make the choice of, okay, am I going to read the left hand column and then go back and read the right hand column? It’s a lot of work.

Craig: It’s also hard to imagine. And you know we can play one voice in our head at once. We can’t play two. We just can’t.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So, you know, you’re asking something there. When you use it, know that it is very intentional, very purposeful. It is a heavy spice, so sprinkle it with restraint.

Links:

• Scriptnotes Episode 37 – Let’s talk about dialogue
• Scriptnotes Episode 286 – Script Doctors, Dialogue and Hacks
• Scriptnotes Episode 371 – Writing Memorable Dialogue
• Highland 2
• Writer Emergency Pack XL
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, featuring segments originally produced by Stuart Friedel, Godwin Jabangwe, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Emcee: All right, now without further ado, the hosts with the most, John August and Craig Mazin.

Craig Mazin: Wow. Wow.

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You are here for Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are…

Audience: Interesting to screenwriters.

John: Wow. Incredible here.

Craig: Incredible.

John: First off, we need to thank the LA Philharmonic Orchestra. It is remarkable to be here at the Hollywood Bowl, a dream come true.

Craig: It’s gorgeous. Probably the mics that we’re talking into are pretty close to the stage, so we’re probably only picking up maybe the first couple of rows-

John: Absolutely.

Craig: … in the Garden Boxes.

John: I can the energy out here in this-

Craig: Wow.

John: … iconic location.

Craig: What a dream.

John: 15,000 people?

Craig: Thousand.

John: I’d never envision this in our-

Craig: And the weather.

John: Great. A few sprinkles, but just the best thing.

Craig: Lovely.

John: Needed a little rain here.

Craig: You know what? That felt so good, because everything’s been going so great lately, so it’s nice that we have this going on for ourselves.

John: It’s nice that we have a little bit of a moment here. Today I was out on the picket lines, and we were talking about-

(Audience cheers)

John: Oh, hey. Phew! I worried we were going to have some anti-writer people here in the crowd. I was out on the picket lines. I talked about, oh, we have a live show tonight. It’s like, oh, did you plan for it to be on the 100th day of the Strike? Today is the 100th day of the Strike. Did we plan this?

Craig: We did.

John: A hundred percent. Craig said, “John, whatever you do, make sure the Strike goes on for at least-“

Craig: Slow walk this thing.

John: Yeah, 100 days. Now, it’s smooth sailing from here on forward.

Craig: John, to be clear, you do have a little bit of a weird and creepy, and what I honestly think is somewhat a bit of an anti-union secret. I think it’s probably important for you to come clean about it.

John: I thought that was green room rules. I thought we didn’t-

Craig: No. Fuck that.

John: All right. I think people could agree that I’m generally a pro-union, pro-WGA person.

Craig: That’s what I thought.

John: I would never disparage anything about the WGA. But 100 days in, there’s something I want to get off my chest, is that I believe the iconic blue official WGA Strike T-shirts… I love them as an image. I love wearing it there. I love seeing a field of blue. Fantastic. They are not comfortable shirts.

Craig: No.

John: They are really uncomfortable shirts.

Craig: In fact, they may have been manufactured by the AMPTP.

John: The official blue shirts are union-made, and the union is not the probably here. They are 100 percent cotton. We learned from our own Scriptnotes producer, Stuart Friedel, his sense of softness, what do we need for a T-shirt to be comfortable?

Craig: You need a tri-blend, John.

John: You need a tri-blend.

Craig: You need a tri-blend.

John: You need a tri-blend.

Craig: Tri-blend.

John: They are not tri-blend shirts.

Craig: No.

John: They’re not comfortable to wear.

Craig: No. They are hair shirts. I don’t like them at all. They chafe your nipples. Do not wear.

John: Here’s what I think about it. I have shirts that I wear because I choose to wear them, and there are shirts where like, you’ve now joined the army, here’s your uniform. They don’t ask soldiers is your camouflage comfortable. That’s not their concern.

Craig: They actually might. I got to tell you, I think that we have the worst of it.

John: We have a show that’s chockablock full with amazing guests. Quinta Brunson is here.

Craig: Someone named Natasha Lyonne is here.

John: These are guests who are not only incredibly talented writers, they are also actors. As members of SAG-AFTRA, there are certain specific restrictions on what they should be talking about. They are not going to be talking about their specific shows and programs that you know them for, but instead, we can talk about the craft, the art.

Craig: Which we do anyway. We’re not really press junkety question people. As we go through the show, if you’re wondering, hey, why don’t they mention muh or meep, it’s because we just don’t want to get them in trouble with their union. Also, I’m in that union too.

John: You are, yeah.

Craig: I’m in SAG.

John: You’re in SAG.

Craig: I’m in SAG. I’m an actor.

John: You’re an actor.

Craig: I’m a real actor.

John: I almost said the word. I said half the word of a show that you were in.

Craig: You can say it. That didn’t break the rule. You’re not in SAG.

John: Duncan Crabtree-Ireland is sitting right out there. He’s got a sniper rifle, so if we say the wrong thing-

Craig: Great.

John: We are going to talk about how they got started, how they got to this place they are today, but we are also going to have some fun. We’re going to play some games. We’ll do some audience Q and A.

Craig: With slightly stricter rules, because you guys really can’t talk about those shows either. That’s fine. That’s no big deal. I wanted to introduce somebody really quickly who’s going to be with us today. You’re going to be seeing him floating around over there. That’s Elliot Aronson. Elliot is going to be our ASL interpreter tonight. Elliot also was the ASL interpreter… I can say a show that was on the air, right?

John: [Crosstalk 00:05:31].

Craig: I’m going to do it. He worked for The Last of Us. He was Kevionn Woodard’s ASL interpreter.

John: I think he’s a former One Cool Thing.

Craig: He is a One Cool Thing. He will always be One Cool Thing. I’m sort of annoyed that he’s not signing right now, because I would force him to have to sign about himself and talk about himself as an incredibly handsome person and a wonderful guy whose name is Elliot. This is me. I am Elliot, and I’m amazing. He’s never going to get a chance to do that again.

John: Let’s get started, Craig. Our very first guest is a writer, a producer, an actress, a comedian. Last year, she was listed as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year. We’ve wanted her on the show forever, Craig, and now we can finally have her. Welcome, Quinta Brunson.

Quinta Brunson: Hi, everybody. Hi. How’s it going?

John: Quinta.

Quinta: Yes?

John: Backstage you talked about that you are not a huge podcast listener.

Quinta: No.

Craig: Me either.

Quinta: Or doer.

John: Or doer. Thank you for making an exception for us here.

Quinta: Of course.

John: You actually have some history with Hollywood Heart.

Quinta: Yes. I used to do improv at Hollywood Heart. This was probably the summer of, what’s this called, 2023. Then that was probably maybe six, seven years ago. I did improv shows with my troupe, Summercon [ph]. It was four of us. We would just do improv and then have the kids come up and join us at the camp, which is on a really scary… You guys, it’s on this hill.

John: Oh, no.

Craig: We’re trying to raise money to get them off the hill.

Quinta: It is terrifying.

Craig: Describe the hill.

Quinta: The hill is something of your nightmares. You know when you go in those canyons around here, and you’re like, “Whoa, this is crazy,” but then you get used to them because you’ve been in LA for a while? This shit, it’s like going to Bowser’s castle. It is insane. It’s windy. You feel like you’re going to… Kids, because we just talked about mortality back there, they don’t know that they can die, so they’re not afraid.

Craig: You’ve told them.

Quinta: Yeah. I think that’s why Hollywood Heart didn’t invite me back, because I put it in my improv. I just was motivated to tell the truth.

Craig: I like that most of your bits were just about how shitty that camp was. That’s pretty awesome.

Quinta: The camp is beautiful. It’s just the road on the way up there.

Craig: I see. It’s getting there.

Quinta: It’s in heaven. It’s so high up. This is why I don’t love to talk. I’m not talking correctly, you guys, because I’m not-

Craig: You’re out of practice.

Quinta: I should be a writers’ room. I’m not doing well with sentences.

Craig: We’ll work you through it. It’s going to be all right.

John: Quinta, before you were traumatizing children in this improv group, what is your comedy background? How did you get started? What was the spark? How did you actually go from like, “I like comedy,” to, “I’m doing it.”

Quinta: It was the connection between my siblings and I. My siblings are all significantly older than me. My closest sibling is eight years older than me. He hated me, because he was the baby for so long, and then I came along. He really didn’t like me. I was like, “I gotta win this guy over,” truly. That was a big motivator for me. He really liked Ace Ventura. He hated me. We had a Jack and Jill door. Do you guys know what that is? Between our bedrooms.

Craig: I had one of those.

John: Like The Brady Brunch.

Quinta: Yeah. He just couldn’t stand that he was sharing his space with this freaking baby. Then I would see him watching Ace Ventura and laughing really loud with his friends. I was like, “I can make my butt talk too. I can do that.” I started mimicking what was happening in the movies, and he would laugh, and he would like me.

I just started liking comedy, because that was a connecting factor between all of my siblings and I. My oldest brother, he loved the Kings of Comedy, so I would do impressions of Steve Harvey on that. Then my sisters, they were great, because they had different tastes. My one sister loved In Living Color, but the other sister loved SNL. One sister loved Martin. The other loved Conan. She was into late-night shows. It just became a way for me to connect with everyone. Same thing with my parents, who are also really old. I watched The Brady Bunch with them. I just like this.

Then high school, when it became taste to me, because I loved it so much, and I knew so much more about comedy than everyone else that I would bring DVDs to school and be like, “This is what you need to be watching. This is the new shit in the streets.” They’re like, “What the fuck is Napoleon Dynamite?” I’m like, “You’ll learn. You’ll learn.” Remember that? Remember when you gave someone a DVD, and it meant something?

Craig: I don’t know how young they are. DVDs were these round things.

Quinta: You gave it to them. You were like, “Return it.” You trusted them to return your only copy.

Craig: Not scratched.

Quinta: Not scratched.

Craig: Not scratched.

Quinta: That meant something to me to bring that. Then college, I was really good. I was a good student all my life, but then I just started fucking around. I was like, I don’t care about what I’m doing. I was an advertising major. Then I was just watching SNL one night and was like, where did these people all go to do this? That’s when I learned about Second City. Then that’s when I actually learned that I could do it for a living, because that was the change, and like, okay, this can be my career.

Craig: You mentioned growing up in Philly.

Audience member: Woo!

Craig: All right.

Quinta: Yay!

Craig: Philly’s got its own… It’s got an interesting comedy tradition. One of the things I’ve noticed about people that come out of Philly, especially people in comedy, like Kevin Hart or Rob McElhenney, is that it’s not a chip on the shoulder as much as, “You underestimate me at your own peril,” which is a very Philadelphia kind of vibe.

Quinta: Yes, absolutely. Love it.

Craig: I just want to ask you how you bring a little bit of the place you came from to your voice and how you apply that to writing and what you do.

Quinta: That is an excellent question.

Craig: Thank you!

Quinta: I love this.

Craig: Show over.

Quinta: I feel like I live my whole life like an underdog. I think my comedic voice, the projects that I have done all deal with underdog, underestimated characters and stories. Philadelphia as a city is the little cousin to New York. No one thinks of us until we…

Craig: Until you get stuck there.

Quinta: Get stuck there, or when you make it to a Super Bowl, everyone’s like, “Oh.” It’s like, yeah, we have a good fucking team. What are you watching? I was so mad during the Super Bowl last year when people were like, “Oh, the Eagles.” Bitch, the whole fucking season-

Craig: They won just a few years earlier.

Quinta: … was incredible. What are you talking about?

Craig: That’s Philly.

Quinta: It’s really frustrating. It’s also a really foolish city. We have that statue of Rocky. That is so foolish. We believe in ourselves so hard that even when you come… Allen Iverson is an honorary Philadelphian. I don’t think of where he’s from. To me, he’s from Philly, because he became a part of the underdog story. I say all that to say it’s just a city that makes you believe in the underdog more than any other city I think in America, but I still want to be the underdog, so maybe not as much as any other city.

Craig: You have to be an underdog in the race to be the underdog.

Quinta: Yeah. I had a hard time during the last two years of my life, where I was losing my underdog status.

John: Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People, yeah.

Craig: It’s a little rough.

Quinta: My friends started clowning me a little bit. They’re like, “Bitch,” because I’d be saying stuff like, “Oh, man, I don’t know if I can get in this club, but we going to try.”

Craig: They’re like, “Bitch.”

Quinta: Like, “Yeah, you’re going to get in the club.” Stuff like that. I’m dealing with that.

Craig: 100 Most Influential People of the Year.

John: This underdog thing of yours, the first thing that broke for you was Girl Who Had Never Been on a Good Date.

Quinta: On a Nice Date, yeah.

John: On a Nice Date, which Instagram video, not even reels, an early Instagram thing. Talk to us about decision to do those and what happened when those caught.

Quinta: Instagram wasn’t Instagram yet. It was 2013. The platform had just gotten video. I was just fucking around. I just wanted to make my friends who followed me… I might’ve had, I don’t know, maybe 1,000 followers, just friends from college and friends from high school and stuff. I just wanted to put up videos to make them laugh. I really was just testing out the platform, I guess. We didn’t even speak like this back then.

John: I know.

Quinta: We weren’t saying platform. We were just like, “Yeah, my Instagram account.” The first video that I posted had just gone viral, which that wasn’t even a thing besides describing YouTube, virality in that way. I saw an opportunity to capitalize off of it. I was like, “I’ll keep making them. People like it. This is the same as garnering an audience where people come to see you at shows. It’s word of mouth.”

I was a person who was really, really against the internet. I despised YouTubers. I despised just the internet. At the time, I was doing improv at ImprovOlympic, which no longer exists. I was like, “I’m a stage performer. I can’t be doing this.” But I came to accept it. It really helped kick off my career, so I’m very grateful for it.

Craig: We have spent a long time, over a decade now, teaching about writing and our business, to people, through this podcast. Your mother was a public schoolteacher?

Quinta: Yeah.

Craig: Both of my parents were public schoolteachers.

Quinta: Oh.

Craig: We have that shared experience. I’m curious if coming from a teacher the way you did, what you think about the way writing is taught, because we have an issue with the way writing is taught and the general education of writers, and I guess also the education of how to work in the entertainment business. I’m curious, as somebody who comes from that tradition, what you think about how we are doing things and who we’re bringing in and how we’re helping them or teaching them.

Quinta: I think there should be a little bit more focus for writers on, you said it, how to also do business and how to communicate with partners, whether it be other people in a room, a writers’ room or a studio or a network, because you can be really talented and not know how to communicate your idea, not know how to communicate it even on paper. You could have just such an incredible story in your head and write it down. Sure, amazing to you and your two friends. Do you know how to communicate it to other people who don’t come from the same background as you, who don’t speak the same language as you? When I’m writing-

Craig: A show. Let’s just stipulate.

Quinta: When I’m writing a show-

Craig: A show.

Quinta: … and I decide that I would like it to be for a broad audience, I think, will a person in Korea understand this? Yes, it’s in a different language, but will they understand it if it’s translated into their language?

I think that’s a huge thing that people miss out on. Even if you’re writing it in English and you’re writing it for Americans, why don’t you test and see if someone in France can understand this story, because I think that’s such a huge part of writing is just clearcut storytelling. It can be done on a wide, complicated scale. We’ve seen huge movies do it very, very well. It can be done on a small scale, like with a TV show. Does the story make sense to other people who aren’t you and aren’t your friends from school? Is that a good answer? I wish that was taught more.

Craig: I think it’s a great answer.

John: It’s a great answer. Before you started working on official Hollywood things, you were working at Buzzfeed for a time. It seemed like you had a chance to do a lot of stuff. Were you writing, performing, editing, all that, the whole cycle?

Quinta: Writing, performing, producing, editing. Producing was the biggest thing I got out of Buzzfeed, because we had a $300 budget to make videos. Man, that made me scrappy. My brain is just forever scrappy in that way. Even if I receive a big budget, it’s just still working on that $300 in a way. I have to be told, “Expand your mind. You have more money.” Those are the things I…

Editing too. I’m so grateful for learning how to edit there. That is another thing that I feel like anyone who is making something, if you can, spend time with an editor. Make sure you take yourself to an editor suite. Just get on the equipment yourself and start fucking around, just to see. It’s another part of it. Is your story communicating to the editor? It’s such a huge-

Craig: It’s how you finish. It’s the end of the writing. We think writing ends when we stop typing. If the point is to make, so there’s your production, and then the editing really is, it’s your final draft.

Quinta: Yeah, but if people never sit with an editor or-

Craig: They don’t know.

Quinta: … get on the programs themselves, they don’t know.

Craig: I remember the first time I saw the things that I was writing being edited, I wanted to barf, because I realized how far off I was, or also just how impotent my plan was. In my mind, I was like, “I have thought of it, and therefore it will be.”

Quinta: I think that I got a real appreciation for editors from Steven Spielberg. I was obsessed with Jurassic Park when I was little. I found everything he ever talked about, wrote, did, any video I could find. When YouTube came around, I just got on… Who’s that guy?

Craig: He is our ASL interpreter.

Quinta: Oh, hey.

Craig: You weren’t here for that part.

Quinta: I wasn’t.

Craig: Did you think he was-

Quinta: I was like, “Everybody’s cool with this?”

Craig: You think that we were about to get jumped?

Quinta: I did. I carry my purse because my shank’s in here. I was like, do we need to-

Craig: Like I said, Philadelphia.

Quinta: Seriously.

Craig: That’s how it used to be at the old Veterans Stadium.

Quinta: Oh my god.

Craig: Someone runs out there.

Quinta: Hello. Thank you. Where has he been the whole time?

Craig: He was down there, but I think the person that he’s interpreting for has arrived is my guess.

Quinta: Wow. That’s amazing.

Craig: He sprung into action. His name is Elliot. He’s wonderful.

Quinta: Hi, Elliot. That’s amazing that you have that. That’s great.

Craig: I’m glad that he’s up there, because now I once again-

Quinta: It’s really cool.

Craig: … have to say that Elliot is a wonderful, handsome person, and once again, he needs to sign it, which is spectacular.

Quinta: You should tell people that. I think Natasha’s going to lose her shit.

Craig: No, I’m going to going to. I want to see that.

Quinta: Wait. I watched Steven Spielberg talk about editing when I was younger. I was like, “Man, the editor’s the final part. He said he couldn’t do this without the editors.” There was a video of him sitting with the editors, working on Jurassic Park. The editor that really blew my mind when I was little, I was like, “Oh my god, he worked on Star Wars too. This is fucking crazy.” It just really painted the picture to me that they were a vital part of the process.

One of my favorite editors, Richie, he and I share a brain. I did one show that I sold to… It doesn’t exist anymore. It was Verizon’s platform. I had an editor who was Argentinian.

Audience member: Woo!

Quinta: Okay. Yeah. What a diverse audience.

Craig: One person from Philly, one person from Argentina.

Quinta: Super diverse.

Craig: Everyone else from Silver Lake, I presume.

Quinta: Some from Echo Park.

Craig: Yes, of course. It’s West Echo.

Quinta: I made this show. It was poorly written. I’ll say that. I think it’s great to get an opportunity to poorly write something for a digital platform that won’t exist anymore. The editor didn’t get it. I was like, “This rhythmically is missing something then. I’m going to take myself back to the drawing board of writing.”

That show was actually my first attempt at a mockumentary. That taught me another thing, like, okay, the rhythm of a mockumentary is different than the rhythm of another single-cam, which is different from a multi-cam. I have to write with that in mind. I have to make sure I can communicate it to someone who is an editor, who is not from where I’m from and may not pick up the same cues. It needs to be in the script properly, so that they know how to cut and know what they’re doing. That was such a big learning experience for me at Buzzfeed.

Craig: Do we have time for one more question?

John: One last question just for Craig.

Craig: One last question real fast. Speed round. You mentioned failing.

Quinta: Failing, yeah.

Craig: One of the things that’s interesting about people that work in a room, as you might, on a show, if you’re going to be failing, a lot of times you’re failing in front of a lot of people. I wonder, do you give yourself some space to go fail privately in quiet and then come back-

Quinta: Yes.

Craig: … into the room to be like-

Quinta: Oh, in the room?

Craig: I’m saying can you give yourself a place to go dance like no one’s watching and then come back and dance like other people are watching?

Quinta: Hm. That’s such a good question. I like to find safe spaces to fail. That used to be stand-up. I don’t feel comfortable failing at that anymore. I recently did a show with Brett Goldstein from (bleeps).

Craig: Other shows.

Quinta: In (bleeps).

Craig: From some shows. From some shows.

Quinta: From (bleeps).

Craig: She’ll get it. [Indiscernible 00:23:27].

Quinta: Oh, shit, I can’t talk. I’m sorry.

Craig: It’s okay.

John: Duncan, put down the rifle.

Quinta: Safe space to fail.

Craig: Safe space to fail.

Quinta: That helps make my point. This feels like a safe space to fail. The stage feels like a safe space to fail for me. Brett’s show, first I didn’t want to do it. I’m like, I’m not ready. I was like, you know what? I need to go on a stage and fail out loud and fail with an audience. It’s almost never a fail. It’s a good experience. We have a human experience together. I got to do improv for the first time in forever. That felt really good.

I like to play video games that I’m not good at, because that makes me feel like I’m failing. I like to lose, but I’m competitive, so I like to win, so that makes me better. I try to make food. I’m not good at that. Fail every single time in the kitchen, but I keep trying. I just find other spaces to fail in. In my room, I’m A1. I’m not a failure.

Craig: Nice.

John: Quinta Brunson, thank you for the most [crosstalk 00:24:28].

Craig: Thank you, Quinta. Thank you.

Quinta: That was really fun.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Come back at the end. We’ll do some questions.

Quinta: I’ll see you in a little bit.

John: That was the fun part of the show.

Craig: Now it’s going to get weird.

John: Craig, this is the 608th episode of Scriptnotes that we’ve done.

Craig: It’s a lot.

John: It’s a lot.

Craig: It’s a lot.

John: In addition to the main show, for the last year we’ve had the Scriptnotes Sidecasts that Drew and Megana have been helping out with. Huge props for them.

Craig: Let’s give them a hand. Amazing.

John: Drew and Megana! I think understandably, we’re always approaching things from the writer’s perspective.

Craig: Of course, yes.

John: Tonight I was hoping we could hear from the other side, which is why I reached out to the AMPTP to see if we could get their response to some of our concerns. To my surprise, they said yes. Everyone, if you could please welcome AMPTP spokesperson Nancy Sullivan.

Craig: Yay-ish. There she is.

John: Thank you for being here. Thank you.

Craig: Hi.

John: Hi.

Nancy Sullivan: Wow, this is a theater. I’ve only been to the theater one time. I saw Cats when I was seven. I love that show.

Craig: Great.

John: Nancy, thank you so very much for agreeing to be on the show.

Craig: I should warn you, this may not be the friendliest audience for you.

Nancy: I have to say, it’s just such an honor to be here. I’m such a fan of your show.

Craig: Really?

Nancy: Oh, of course, a huge fan, especially those episodes where you sit down with filmmakers and showrunners and really get into the minutiae of the craft. Huge fan. Huge fan.

Craig: I have to say, that is legitimately a surprise. I would not have pegged an AMPTP person as a cinephile.

Nancy: Oh, no, no, you have me wrong. I’ve always been obsessed with film and TV. I remember, in fact, watching Amadeus with my father. I couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. I was just being blown away by what Miloš Forman accomplished with the cinematography and the mise-en-scène and his reversal of the classic protagonist-antagonist relationship not just in dialog, but in the blocking and the framing of these two candlelit warriors always in a battle that they didn’t know it was about.

Craig: You were eight?

Nancy: Or nine.

John: Nancy, honestly, I was probably watching The Love Boat when I was nine. That blows me away.

Nancy: I don’t know what that is.

Craig: Is it just me, or is her smile terrifying?

John: Yeah. You were watching Amadeus?

Nancy: I was watching this masterpiece, Amadeus. His name is Miloš Forman, so it’s actually pronounced Amadeus [ah-mah-DAY-oosh]. I said, “Daddy! I know what I want to do, Daddy! I want to do this. I want to work with the greatest writers and filmmakers in the world and find a way to crush them economically for the benefit of multinational corporations.”

Craig: There it is.

Nancy: Let me explain. If you look at great artists throughout history, what is the unifying theme? Hardship. Suffering. Emile Zola, I believe it was, wrote, “The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.” If I can help make that work almost unsurvivable, if I can bring filmmakers to the edge of ruin, take away every bit of comfort and safety that they have, then true art is possible.

Craig: Wow.

Nancy: Thank you.

John: That is some Fountainhead shit there.

Nancy: Fun fact, my bat mitzvah was themed around the works of Ayn Rand.

Craig: Your name is Sullivan, and you had a bat mitzvah. Okay, anyway. Let me get this straight. You’re saying that you joined the AMPTP because you wanted to make great art by punishing the people who make it?

Nancy: Oh, no no no. No no no. Craig, Craig, I think you’re misunderstanding me. I’ve dedicated my career to the genius visionaries who make film and television. By that, of course, I’m referring to the studio bosses, because they write the checks. They’re the ones saying, “Let’s make a show based on a zombie video game.”

Craig: They’re not zombies.

Nancy: They’re not, right. That’s so sweet. You’re so sweet, because here’s the thing. If I’d shown a picture of one of those, whatever you call them, creatures to 100 people and said, “What do you think this is?” do you know what all 100 would say? They’d say they were zombies. They’re zombies.

Craig: They’re not zombies.

Nancy: They’re zombies with mushroom hats.

Craig: They’re not zombies. They’re not zombies.

Nancy: They’re zombies with-

Craig: They’re not zombies.

Nancy: They’re zombies-

Craig: They’re not zombies.

Nancy: … with mushroom fascinators.

Craig: They’re not zombies. They’re not zombies.

Nancy: They’re zombies.

Craig: They’re not zombies!

Nancy: They’re zombies!

Craig: They’re not zombies.

John: Back to the topic here. I think it sounds like what you’re saying, Nancy, is that you’re okay imposing unnecessary-

Nancy: Necessary suffering, go on.

John: … suffering on writers and actors, and not in the pursuit of profit, but instead, of some kind of warped vision of artistic integrity?

Nancy: I never said actors. As Alfred Hitchcock [hitch-KAAKH] I think once said-

Craig: Oh, come on.

Nancy: … actors are cattle. Of course they’re cattle. You don’t see them typing with their hooves. For actors, our approach is basically herd management. You want to make sure you have enough, but not too many. That’s why we’re so excited about AI, about scanning actors’ faces and bodies so we can recreate them digitally. It’s like having all the free beef you want.

John: That’s horrible, but not surprising. Last month, an anonymous studio source was quoted saying the endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.

Nancy: I know. Horrible. We would never say anything like that on the record. Off the record, we might float that out there, see what kind of reaction it gets, and then maybe walk it back. Back to Amadeus, Mozart was on the edge of ruin for most of his career. While Salieri is portrayed as complicit, in reality it was systemic under-evaluation of the arts and the misaligned incentives of the patronage system that put Mozart in that situation.

Craig: You’re saying that like it’s a good thing.

Nancy: I’m saying we have to change the system so that writers and filmmakers, and sure, even actors, are properly oppressed, so that great art can flourish. There was no WGA back when Orson Welles made Citizen Kane.

John: Let me guess, Charles Foster Kane-

Nancy: Hero.

Craig: Okay. Nancy. Jewish Nancy Sullivan, let’s cut to the chase. We’re now 100 days into the Writers Strike. The companies are facing growing pressure, because the pipeline is empty, and the projects that aren’t finished cannot be promoted. When is the AMPTP going to get serious about coming back to the table to resolve this?

Nancy: Sorry. No comment on that, guys. Wouldn’t want to leak it to the press. Wink.

John: AMPTP spokesperson Nancy Sullivan, everyone.

Craig: She does look a whole lot like Rachel Bloom.

John: Rachel Bloom, everyone.

Craig: That was hard. I almost didn’t like Rachel Bloom.

John: It’s tough. That’s tough.

Craig: You make it hard. You make it hard, kid.

Rachel Bloom: To like me?

Craig: To not like you.

John: Rachel Bloom, you are often at this theater, because you have been doing your one-woman show, which is here for a little bit longer, then you’ll go to New York. Tell us about your show. You can say this because it’s a stage thing.

Rachel: It’s a stage thing. It is not in the union. It’s such a weird time we’re in where theater is the most stable industry you could be in. For the past couple years, I’ve been working on this show that is now called Death, Let Me Do My Show, which is about various experiences, thank you, that I’ve had with death. I’ve been using this theater primarily to workshop it a lot. It is going off-Broadway in September. We will be at the Lucille Lortel Theatre September 6th through the 30th. It’s a very beautiful theater. We just decided to do one more show in LA before we go. That will be here on August 26th. All of the proceeds are going to go, I believe probably to the Entertainment Community Fund.

Craig: Great.

John: Hooray.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Rachel Bloom, thank you so much.

Rachel: Thank you.

John: You’re going to come back for questions.

Craig: Now shit’s about to get real.

John: Oh my god.

Craig: Here we go.

John: This is the warmup.

Craig: Here we go.

John: Do you want to do this one?

Craig: Sure. Our next guest is an actor, writer, producer, and director. She was also listed as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of the Year. What the fuck are we doing wrong, by the way?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: Let us welcome out the great, one and only Natasha Lyonne.

Natasha Lyonne: Hello, everyone. I brought a lot of supplies.

Craig: You can share my table with me if you want.

Natasha: You know what? You’re a real sweetie, cutie, honey-baby.

Craig: Thank you.

Natasha: So are you, John. So are you.

John: Thank you. Natasha kept apologizing to me backstage in the green room like I was offended. I’m not. I’m delighted by you.

Natasha: It’s just that Craig and I, we get very riled up when we’re together.

Craig: It’s a situation.

Natasha: Then I felt apologetic that maybe we’d gone too hard, too fast. We were doing bits about shekels. There was a lot of bits.

Craig: There was a lot of stuff going.

Natasha: If you don’t know what a shekel is, you don’t need to.

Craig: She brings the State Island out of me. I don’t know what to do. It’s just what happens. I get very Staten. Then I start talking like I used to talk. Then it’s a whole fucking thing.

Natasha: Then we get into a whole thing. The next thing we know-

Craig: Let’s code switch back. We’re code switching.

Natasha: We’re code switching.

Craig: Here’s my neutral podcast voice.

Natasha: The thing is, I don’t know, as the second Time 100 guest, I like to keep it very neutral.

Craig: That’s actually creeping me out.

Natasha: This is how I talk. I’ve always been this way.

John: NPR host voice. I love it.

Natasha: I architected a thing, a building. I’m an architect.

Craig: We’ve failed to mention that in your intro.

Natasha: I do think it was weird that you didn’t bring it up, because I dropped out of architect stuff in order to get into the biz.

Craig: Yes, just like most architecture students who refer to it as stuff.

Natasha: I was like, “Blueprints, blueprints, a script,” I said. You’re welcome. I was 4, and now I’m 44. That means I’m getting younger every day. This is what it’s like. You just don’t care anymore. It’s day 100 of the Strike, folks. I have not worked since December.

Craig: Everyone’s going a little nuts.

Natasha: We are heading towards September.

Craig: You’re doing great.

Natasha: I thought I was going to get a lot done this year. I’ll be honest.

Craig: No, nothing’s happening.

Natasha: All those years, but really. Anyway. Quit smoking. Endure this. I’m going to be like John Houston with a cigar in an interview, or Sean Penn anywhere I guess.

Craig: Keep going.

Natasha: I’m just saying people that smoke publicly in interviews.

Craig: You can hear it, I think. You can literally hear the vape on the microphone.

John: We know this because Craig used to vape in the early episodes.

Craig: I still do.

Natasha: You know what? It’s the ride of life. Take the ride. Buy the ticket. Take the ride. Anyway.

Craig: We’re not going to ask any questions, are we?

John: I’m going to try to ask a question.

Craig: What’s the point? Why bother?

Natasha: What it’s about is community.

Craig: Thank god.

Natasha: If you look at Bergman’s birthday, Stanley Kubrick writes him a letter and he says, “Great work.” Now we’re seeing it freaking dying. Everybody’s coming out. Coppola’s writing notes. You know what I mean? It’s about community.

Craig: I don’t.

Natasha: That’s my point. That was the answer to your question. I thought this was a Jeopardy format.

Craig: Hang on.

John: It is a Jeopardy format.

Craig: Just hang on, John. Just hang on, baby. You’re doing great. Amazing. I legitimately have a question.

Natasha: I’m from New York.

Craig: What?

Natasha: Yes, please.

Craig: This is a legit question. I looked on IMDb.

John: He did research.

Craig: I did research for this. They list your writing credits, your directing credits, acting credits. I have 26 credits. Natasha, do you know how many you have?

Natasha: 27. It’s like that game where you go one … The Price is right.

Craig: Just say one, $1.

Natasha: $1. $1.

Craig: You have 152 credits.

Natasha: Thus the attitude problem. There’s been many, many, many years.

Craig: I haven’t gotten to the question yet.

Natasha: It’s an endurance test. If you just stick around long enough, it’s like being an old, old turtle. What’s the question, please?

Craig: Thank god.

Natasha: Yes, Craigy.

Craig: It strikes me that after all these years, almost 30 years, I’ve got these 26 credits, I’ve worked on these things. There’s so much that I can learn from experience. Actors, especially somebody that started as a kid, you will, as an actor like yourself, get so much more experience on set and in production, acting. I’m curious, what wisdom have you learned from all of that time, that writers who have maybe only been on a set once or twice might not know? What can you share with us that you’ve learned every?

Natasha: I’m not going to look at you I think for the rest of it.

Craig: I think that’s a great idea.

Natasha: I’m also look out at the distant … Just so you know, I’m nearsighted. Genuinely, it is a Fossie-esque experience. I would say something I learned when I transitioned into the writers’ room, for example, on… I guess I won’t mention any shows. Let’s say on certain shows or certain movies, I would see an ellipses, and I would think, oh my god, I’ve gotta nail this.

I’m somebody who, despite my personality, is actually quite obsessive and a workaholic and perfectionist, obsessive about the work, and in all areas, too much so. I would think that there was something in there that I was missing. I would go to the writer, or I would go to the monitor area.

Craig: Video village.

Natasha: Video village. I would try to go searching or something. I think then later, as a writer, the great discovery was there was no there, that oftentimes, it was a cheat for any number of reasons, especially when in showrunning or in directing, once you’re doing that, you’re like…

The great gift about acting while you’re doing that is you know why scenes got cut, or why entire storylines or a C-storyline, so that actually, the connection between this moment to this moment, we had to cut that entire deli sequence for budget reasons, that’s why it’s not there.

Weirdly, it was like once I started writing for myself, or even if… First of all, I’m usually collaborating, so I wouldn’t want to take that credit for myself. I would say that as I was working with writers’ rooms and working with other creators and things like this, that was when I really became a good actor, in a way, because I understood the space in between, of the motivation, or even the backstory of how we got there, because I was the guy in the room on the whiteboard or something.

Craig: Actually, it’s the other way for you, in a sense, that the writing helped you be a better actor.

Natasha: It’s funny, because I’m only so old relative to how young I was-

Craig: Great insight.

Natasha: … on some level.

John: [Crosstalk 00:41:13].

Natasha: Which is to say, it would’ve been great if show biz was like, hey, we’re going to give this to you at 24 or 34, but they wanted to really hold out. I think in many ways it’s because of that fallback energy that we respond to so much as actors that are so seasoned, of a Gene Hackman in Night Movies or Jeff Bridges in Lebowski, or Bill Murray has that sort of energy, or Harry Dean Stanton, a sense of like, “I don’t even really want to be here.” Like Peter Falk. Like, “Please, film anything but me.” I think that comes from also that, if you truly understand the motivation.

Then I would say as a writer, additionally what I learned, and as a director, just from loving actors… Sam Rockwell made me start working with his acting coach against my will, because I’d never taken a lesson. I was at film school at Tisch at 15, but I never did anything with it. I dropped out. I was very offended that they wanted me to pay tuition, because the teenagers, they were watching Apocalypse Now. I was like, “If you’re watching Apocalypse Now, why are you in film school? You should’ve already seen this movie. That’s what would make one go to film school, theoretically.”

Craig: It’s a little weird.

Natasha: I was supposed to be a double major with philosophy, and they were out of classes. Their classes were full up. I just didn’t understand why they wanted my money at that point. I was like, “This is not what I came here for.” I was like, “Are you going to pay?”

Craig: They weren’t going to pay you. Elliot, do you need any Gatorade? How are you doing over there?

Natasha: Sam introduced me to this guy, Terry Knickerbocker, who’s a great acting coach. What I would do with him is I would actually sit there with the laptop open and go over every other character’s motivation as well and type in real time, to make sure that I wouldn’t be this jag-off on set who was only taking care, let’s say, of… So that way, I had answers for other people. I don’t know that I always succeeded, but I would try to really build out and make sure that everybody was protected in terms of their motives, basically.

Craig: Exactly, that you understand that both sides of-

Natasha: Yeah.

John: What I hear you saying though is, as an actor you’re approaching character from one perspective. You’re approaching what is it that I’m going to do. As a writer, you’re approaching character from a much more macro, whole perspective, because you have to think about-

Natasha: I gotta tell you, first of all, what’s most challenging about the Strike I think for all of us is the atrophying of the brain that you’re experiencing here in real time. It kills me to not be at a whiteboard and in a room. I love the excitement of ideas. I love all of it. I love storyboarding. I love this big, holistic thinking about things and making sure that it’s okay. I love the math of it, whenever I’m doing music budgets and trying to calculate it all. I love it so much more in 3D.

Also, weirdly, I think as just an actor, this weird thing happens where you need other people’s approval, and also you need to get hired. It’s incredible to have that autonomy suddenly. It’s such a gift.

Also, I would go to video village, seeking the feedback. Really, what you find out is that if you’re doing a good enough job, nobody talks to you. Once you’re at video village and you’re actually a producer, being a writer, producer, whatever, director, you discover that usually what’s happening in video village is a panic attack about something the next day, like so-and-so did not make their flight, we’ve gotta rearrange the day. What’s happening there is everybody’s talking about tomorrow with the first AD and trying to figure out how to fucking save this fiasco. They’re not talking about your scene. Otherwise, you would know, because you’d fucked up your scene, and they would be talking to you.

It was also a big revelation that I think made it much more fun for when I was just acting in something, because it was no longer a head trip of a curiosity of, did I do okay?

Craig: There wasn’t this constant loop of, the director comes over and gives you a thumb up or thumb down.

Natasha: Exactly.

Craig: You’re absolutely right. If you’re doing a good job on the day, directing, it’s a little bit like being a parent that’s driving a car, and everybody in the car trusts that the parent is a good driver, and so they can fall asleep.

Natasha: I would say also other things made me a better actor to work with, for hire. I’m looking for work, obviously. I’m hoping somebody has a job.

Craig: Can’t work right now.

Natasha: Oh, right, SAG Strike. Anyway, so the other thing I would notice is, it’s so funny now, when I’m directing, and I’m sure it’s the same for you, that when you try to convince somebody of whatever, especially if you have a heavyweight or like an Ellen Burstyn or a Nolte or something, and you’re like, “I was sort of thinking, what if you were here. It’s just an idea. Maybe then we went there,” but really it’s because there’s a fucking window there, and the light’s going to change, and if you sit here, I’m fucked or whatever.

Craig: Have you ever tried to just say that?

Natasha: Sometimes I do. I think the reason I bring up people that are such giants is because it’s very intimidating to-

Craig: Yes, it is.

Natasha: … try to explain to somebody that’s a giant. Usually, the way I came up, there was time. I think it was probably because it was film, not digital. There wasn’t a sense of like, let’s just go.

Craig: That’s a good point.

Natasha: If you think about Raging Bull or something, this final monologue, they probably really had to rehearse, I don’t know, so that they didn’t-

Craig: Run out the mag.

Natasha: … run out of film, run out of the mag, and make sure that everything, the lighting was perfect and all that stuff. Usually, it was about a private rehearsal, and then everybody else comes in and that kind of thing. I’m sorry, now we’re not getting to the game. I see you’re stressing about time.

John: No, no, no, no.

Natasha: It’s okay. I’m just trying to tell the kids the truth.

Once upon a time, it used to be that it was this private thing, where the actors would work with the director on figuring out the blocking. As it’s evolved, especially in television, I think, it’s more about things are pre-shot-listed in order to make these impossible fucking days, because Prestige TV especially has become so dense that it’s unmakeable.

You’re doing everything you can to be like, “Hey, I really need you to sit here, because the sun is going to set.” It’s easier, I would say, to do, and it’s easier to understand then. I’m like, “Oh, so you want… Got it. Let me help you. Okay. I’ll just sit right here, and then you have your shot.”

Craig: I do love a pro.

Natasha: It’s interesting in so many ways, the evolution of that. Sorry for the long answer.

Craig: No, it was a great answer.

John: A fantastic answer.

Craig: That’s why you’re here, my friend.

Natasha: I’m here to party, baby.

Craig: We did not bring you on for the short little bursts.

Natasha: I am sorry.

Craig: I like that you assumed this, “I have finished. Now you will entertain me.”

Natasha: I just felt like I talked a while.

Craig: You did a great job, kid.

Natasha: I just felt like the answer needed to be complete.

Craig: It was.

Natasha: I didn’t want to give you a fake answer.

John: Let us welcome back out Rachel Bloom and Quinta Brunson. Hi. You can ask from there. Ask from there, and we’ll say it out loud.

Audience Member: This is a question about adapting a book. My question is, how often do you run into problems as far as what characters to pick in the screenplay itself? How much push back do you get from the authors as far as what percentage of essentially characters you’re using from the book itself and what percentage of characters you’re coming up with whatever is best for the story? How does that work?

Natasha: Actually, I don’t know if I can say the name of this person, but she’s wonderful. She’s like the lady Thomas Pynchon or something. She’s brilliant. It was so intimidating to write her this letter to ask for this book that I wanted to do since I was a child. I wrote it with two lovely ladies. I’m not even sure if I can say who they are. I’m not sure the rules of the game.

Craig: I think you can say people’s names.

Natasha: Oh, great. I wrote it with Liz and Carly, who created GLOW, and who I love. I love those ladies. It’s a bunch of short stories. We really had to make those questions. We ultimately went a certain way. I think it’s excellent.

The funny feedback I want to give you is… It is a very high-concept thing, almost magical realism, let’s say, without being too specific. In the first seven pages of the book, she’s a loser lawyer, this character. Then we were told by the studio that really what they responded to, even though they had greenlit and paid for it, that really what they responded to was the lawyer part.

I just want to say that what was weird was it took so much nerve to write this lady Thomas Pynchon this letter to beg her for this book I’ve loved my whole life, and then to have Liz and Carly be down to, all of us write this thing together, and the amount of work we put in to create this lady Cohen brothers meets Guillermo del Toro world, and then be told that really it was …

The oddity of this business is that the thing that you think is going to be the trouble spot, it’s usually some fucking eighth thing over there, inevitably, that’s like, literally, “Oh, we really liked the part that she was a lawyer and that she was dating this guy.” I said, “Do you mean you want The Practice or Abby McBeal or something?” They were like, “That would be great.” It was so weird. The three of us were texting each other like, “What is happening in this moment?”

Craig: It sounds like what she’s saying is you’ll never see the person that kills you. That’s comforting advice.

Natasha: Do you find that?

Craig: Yeah. For sure. There are circumstances where the network or the studio may have strong feelings like there, but there are also circumstances where sometimes everybody’s aligned except the author. That’s not uncommon. Authors can be precious about things, just like we all can. I have been lucky to adapt something with someone that was great and understood the point of the adaptation.

I think our job is probably not to worry too much about the author. If you actually love it, you love that material, you would … I think grown-up, responsible artists will understand that a different medium has different needs, hopefully.

Natasha: It is really challenging. I’m thinking actually about another book that I really wanted to adapt, that at first seemed like it was going to be a go, and we were so in sync, and then really it did fall apart.

John: I had one of those too, where I went in, I got the book set up at a studio, and then I was in conversation with the author about, okay, as we introduce this character, we have to think about cinematically how we’re going to first encounter this character. She’s like, “Oh, no, no, you can’t change a thing. It has to be exactly the way it was in the book.”

Natasha: That’s what was so weird was I thought that we were having the same conversation for so long, and then suddenly, we weren’t. The other thing I think that’s interesting, which is not exactly an answer to your question, but that’s obviously not my bag, is that so much of what I was so in love with in this book was the dialog and how dense it was and just how brilliant of a writer she is, and realized that in script, that dialog felt insane. It just didn’t feel necessarily like people talking, so that we had to actually change so much of … Do you know what I mean?

Craig: Oh yeah, for sure.

Quinta: Absolutely.

Craig: You have to adapt. Smart authors understand.

Natasha: I’m like, there’s so much material here, and then you get in there and-

Craig: Not as much as you thought.

Quinta: I feel like that reminds me of what I was saying earlier about communicating to the audience. Sometimes with a adaptation, you just can’t have that same monologue from the book. Maybe you can. God bless if you can. That’s incredible, or the same amount of dialog. It has to be able to translate on screen in a certain way.

I haven’t adapted yet, but I have been in material that’s been adapted. I’ve had the feeling of wanting to express, this feels like too much for anyone to want to listen to on camera, in a comedy especially. Nobody feels like fucking sitting there and hearing you say something that was written for that long. I have nothing else to add to that, by the way. I haven’t adapted anything, but as an actor, I [00:54:04]-

Natasha: The other one is … Sorry. The other one that I think is interesting is when you try to adapt inner monologue. That’s so tricky, that you realize that the book that you fell in love with, it’s like you can see it in your mind. You have the vision of it, so you can see the world you’re going to build. Then you realize that it’s essentially internal.

Quinta: That’s exactly what I mean.

Craig: There are some great novels that have made some bad movies. Then there have some … The Godfather was pulp. It was just a pulpy novel that made a great movie. It was just awesome plot, big, awesome characters.

Natasha: Arguably, Raymond Chandler, why he’s-

Craig: Absolutely.

Natasha: … so good at … That genre translates well.

Craig: It just goes right-

Quinta: Have you read the Jurassic Park book?

Natasha: No.

John: No.

Rachel: It’s pretty good.

Quinta: Rachel.

Craig: That doesn’t seem like what she was going to say.

Quinta: Rachel. That is the most boring-

Rachel: Yeah, it’s plodding, but it’s not terrible.

Quinta: Lord.

Rachel: It’s Jurassic Park.

Quinta: That’s a book I’m like, they say pterodactyl one more time, I’m going to throw this fucking book out the window.

Craig: You had to know they were going to say pterodactyl a few times.

Quinta: Too sciencey. I don’t want to see all that science on screen, something that they understood. We don’t want to see that. It’s good.

Craig: It was a good adaptation.

Rachel: I think also, when this struck, I was in the middle, for the first time of my career, of working on some adaptations. I’m actually working on something right now that’s a podcast/musical, so not in WGA, that I can talk about a little bit.

What I think is interesting about adaptation is … I learned this when I took my first musical theater class. I’m going to relate everything back to musical theater. I apologize. When you’re writing a musical, the first question you’re supposed to ask is, what about making this a musical improves upon the subject matter, or am I just making it a music because IP sells?

I think that that should be the question for any piece of adaptation is, what can I add to this material, what’s my point of view on this that can add to this canon of material, as opposed to being redundant or worse?

Craig: Good answer.

John: Good answer.

Craig: Good answer.

John: This is normally the part of the podcast where we’d do One Cool Things.

Rachel: Wait. Didn’t someone win the right to ask a question?

John: Oh, shit. We completely forgot that. Who won it? Back there. I see the hand waving. Rachel Bloom saving the podcast yet again.

Quinta: The right.

John: You.

Craig: Nice.

Quinta: Didn’t someone win the right to ask a question?

John: Do you have a question for us?

Audience Member: I do.

John: Ask your question. Thank you so much, Rachel.

Audience Member: Oh, I’ve got a microphone too. I actually have a question about directing. Natasha, you talked about how the schedules are crazy, and there’s this constant push to go, go, go, go. One of the things that I struggle with on set a lot is when producers or first ADs tell me to shoot a rehearsal. I don’t know how to respond to them politely with, no, I absolutely do not want to shoot the rehearsal. I wonder if the people on stage had recommendations for how I can politely say fuck no?

Natasha: Is that directed at me? I’m happy to answer.

Audience Member: Everybody.

Natasha: I would just say, in the first place, there is nothing really to fear in the arts. I guess just an illusion of fear. I think it’s always very useful to remember that we’re all going to die. I think that the stakes-

Quinta: True. So true.

Natasha: There is a sense of false stakes that get created around-

Craig: The stakes couldn’t be lower.

Natasha: The truth is that you’re just trying to make art and do the best you can. That’s all you can do. In a weird way, it also becomes a question of path of least resistance is sometimes in your favor of being like, “Great, why don’t we shoot this useless rehearsal so we can see why we shouldn’t shoot the rehearsal,” or alternatively, you can say, “Simply because we’re not ready.” I think that both things are valid in a way.

Craig: Is this for television?

Audience Member: Yeah. I work in both.

Craig: For television, we do have the luxury of doing the thing that you were talking about, that a lot of times you can’t. We do get to have a private rehearsal, and then we bring in the crew for crew show, and then we talk about the shots. By the time we start shooting, we’ve already gone through it, which is nice.

If you say to the showrunner, “Look, I don’t ask for much. The one thing I just want that I like is to have a couple of rehearsals. It just makes me feel better and better,” and say, “If I can do that, the actors know there’s nothing running, so they’re not burning all their rocket fuel.” Hopefully, they would recognize that that just makes you more comfortable.

Natasha: Or also, the truth is that sometimes you can tell them, “It’ll actually go quicker if we do this.” Sometimes I get very excited, and I’m like, “Oh, let’s shoot this. Let’s shoot that.” If you’re with the right camera operator, sometimes they’ll have fun doing it. Other times, actually, rehearsal really does save time in a way, because it’s not just for the actors and the director. It’s actually so that everybody has focus marks.

Craig: Exactly.

Natasha: It’s going to be a mess. You can tell them also, “Hey, it’ll actually save time.” It’s true that the camera department really does not love that game.

Craig: Nobody does.

Natasha: Even if actors like to be like, “Hey, let’s just fucking try one.”

Craig: You gotta do a walkthrough. They gotta put the tape on the floor. They gotta do all this.

John: Quinta, on a show like yours, you might have different directors coming through, doing different episodes. Will they have different working styles?

Quinta: You.

John: You as an actor in that situation, but also a producer, have to adjust. What is that like?

Quinta: The main director that I work with, his name is Randall Einhorn, and he’s fantastic. He’s really great at establishing tone and also relationship with every director who comes in. I think that’s a big part of it too. The other directors coming to set the week before get a hold of how we work. The show that I work on currently is weekly. It’s fast. We’re filming while we’re airing. We don’t really have a lot of time. Our first priority is saving time.

I was thinking about that question. Randall is so good at being like, “I don’t want to do that.” That’s it. He’s like, “I don’t want to do that.” It’ll be like, “Yeah. Okay. Guess what? You’re the director. You’re running the show.” Now, in my state though, it’s a different situation. That’s very family. I would never even ask for that.

For another person coming in, if they want to shoot it, they would say, “I think this would make me feel good, just to get it, just to have.” Especially on a mockumentary, it can be beneficial sometimes. It’s like, “All right, cool, we’ll give it … ” I think it’s just about clear communication, like you said. The stakes are very low. We are not saving lives. Clear communication will help us, just, “What do you need? What do I need? What do you need?”

Natasha: That is the weirdest part I think about what we do, and in a weird way, life in general, but certainly making movies and making TV and all this shit that we do and writers’ rooms and studios and networks. It feels like the stakes are just so high. Part of me, as an adrenaline junkie, loves that. Really, they’re just not. That’s where you start losing humanity and all these other things. Everybody is a human being that deserves to get what they need. It’s just making art, so it should feel good, but it feels so scary, the time. It’s always time is the enemy. I would say time is a bigger enemy than money.

Craig: Which the director is the person worrying about the most, usually, because as the day drips away, when I’m directing, that’s the thing that I’m aware of is that my options are dwindling. Time is scary. Sometimes, also keep in mind that when you are visiting a show, the producers know things about the actors that you don’t.

Rachel: That’s a great point.

Quinta: Huge.

Craig: Some of them really do not like that rehearsal stuff at all.

Quinta: Yeah, they don’t.

Craig: They’re just like, “I know what I’m doing. Let’s go. Let’s shoot.” Part of it’s cultural too.

Quinta: Some people really want it.

Craig: Exactly.

Quinta: For sure.

Natasha: It is also though that thing of knowing, whatever, kill your darlings or whatever. In your shot list, the things that felt like such a dream and being okay, you gotta go through that day, and you’re like, “That’s done, that’s done, and that one’s out, and we’re going to really focus on this.”

It’s so crazy that, also, that’s why preparedness, I just believe in it so much, of being overly prepared so you can be loose, because the more time … Even if I’m a visiting director on a show or something, I always try so hard to spend time with the first AD and the DP, really walking through every single shot we’re going to do, in an effort to be prepared for if the producer, who is really the boss at that point, not the director, if it’s not an auteur special, then really feeling like we’re prepared for the situation.

Rachel: On the show I did that I will not name, but it was the show that I did, I have a very small bladder, and I like to drink. I have a steady drip of tea, and I pee a lot. The AD, I found out in Season 4, let every director … My pee breaks were built into the schedule, because they know I needed that, otherwise I’d piss my pants. I thought that was very communicative of him.

Quinta: Nice.

John: Nice. Don’t know actors would piss themselves.

Craig: I think that’s why SAG is on a strike, to get that enshrined in the agreement.

John: Build that back in the contract.

Craig: Pee breaks.

John: Are we doing One Cool Things or not, Craig?

Craig: Let’s just roll right to the finish line.

John: Let’s roll to the finish line and do some thank yous.

Natasha: Not One Cool Thing?

Craig: You know what? We’ll catch up on those.

John: We’ll catch up on-

Craig: We do it literally 608 times.

John: I’ll save mine for next week.

Craig: We’re good. It’s all good.

John: You can email Craig and tell him what you want to recommend if you have a thing.

Natasha: All right, I’ll send him some bucks.

John: We have some thank yous to get out to people.

Craig: We do.

John: Scriptnotes is produced, of course, by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Yay.

John: Drew!

Rachel: Woo!

Quinta: Drew!

Craig: Woo woo!

John: Who did a phenomenal job putting together tonight’s show.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Thank you very much, Drew. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli, who is here.

Craig: Yay. There you are. Hi.

John: Who also did our music this week. Thank you so much, Matthew. Thank you to Hollywood Heart and Dynasty Typewriter for hosting us. For folks listening at home, the thing about being at the Hollywood Bowl, that was a joke. We really weren’t.

Craig: We really are not at the-

John: The Hollywood Bowl.

Craig: I know, shock. Of course, thank you to our ASL interpreter, Elliot Aronson.

Quinta: Oh, yay.

John: Elliot.

Craig: Who remains incredibly handsome and really good at his job.

John: We of course have to thank our incredible guests, Natasha Lyonne.

Craig: Natasha Lyonne.

John: Quinta Brunson.

Craig: Quinta Brunson.

John: Rachel Bloom.

Craig: Rachel Bloom.

John: Make sure you get tickets to see Rachel Bloom’s show either here or in New York. It’s at rachelbloomshow.com.

Craig: Thank you to everybody in the audience here in the room and listening at home and in your car. It is so much fun getting to do this live.

John: Thank you all, and have a great night.

Craig: Thanks, guys.

Rachel: Thanks, everybody.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Natasha and Craig, our experience has been that the film and television industry is full of people who will tell you what you want to hear, whether it’s true or whether it’s not true. To make sure that we’re keeping our skills sharp during this work stoppage, I thought we might play a little game with our audience members. We have three audience members who volunteered to help out in a segment we’re calling That Sounds Familiar. Jax, if we could bring up the house lights a little bit. Our three guests, I see a Number 1. Number 1, if you could make your way around to this microphone stand over here.

Natasha: Wow, three boys. All right. I see it’s a Mae West production.

Craig: What the fuck?

Natasha: I don’t know.

Craig: I don’t know. What happened?

Natasha: I’m not here. I don’t exist. I’m a melting clock. Just leave me alone. I don’t know why you invited me here.

Craig: Melting clock.

Natasha: I could’ve gotten here at 9:00.

Craig: For charity.

Natasha: I was on the 101.

Craig: You did a great job. Let’s play a game.

Natasha: I was bumping into cars like it was The Matrix.

Craig: Let’s play a game.

Natasha: Yes, gentlemen. I’m ready for the game.

John: Contestant Number 1, could you introduce yourself and tell us something fascinating about you?

Contestant 1: My name is Eric Wandry, and I’m the oldest of 13 kids.

John: What? Oh my god. Contestant Number 2, tell us something interesting about you.

Contestant 2: My name is Eric Wandry, and I’m the oldest of 13 kids.

John: Oh, shit.

Natasha: Oh, I see. This is a little tricky. I’m sorry, sir.

John: Contestant Number 3-

Natasha: Where is your sticker?

John: Could you introduce yourself and tell us something interesting about yourself?

Natasha: Where is your sticker, sir, the other gentleman? Thank you. A little respect for the game. Thank you.

John: It’s a sticker. Get going. Could you tell us about yourself?

Contestant 3: I’m Eric Wandry and I’m eldest of 15 kids, 13 kids.

Natasha: Wow. You know what?

Craig: We’ve narrowed it down to two.

John: Wow.

Craig: It’s a 50/50.

Natasha: You didn’t even want to be here. Is it against their well?

Craig: You rattled him.

Natasha: I’m assuming they’re volunteers.

Craig: You rattled him.

Natasha: I didn’t rattle.

Craig: You rattled him.

Natasha: They were trying to be the same person. He was missing the sticker.

John: He was missing a sticker. You rattled him. [Indiscernible 01:08:11]. I’m not intimidated, but I could see [crosstalk 01:08:13].

Craig: Also, John’s rattled.

John: I’m not. I’m not.

Natasha: When people say that, I feel like it’s because I’m a woman, and then I regret my entire life.

Craig: No, no, no, it’s not because you’re a woman.

Natasha: How can I help?

Craig: What are we going to do?

John: One of these people-

Craig: How can I help.

John: … is lying. One of them is telling exactly the truth.

Craig: We can eliminate Number 3.

John: One of them is telling the truth, and one of them is lying. We can ask up to five questions of these people. What questions do we want to ask? Craig, how do you help narrow this down?

Natasha: I want to ask about religion right away.

John: Go for it.

Craig: Go. Do it. Go.

Natasha: Number 1.

Craig: This is to Number 1.

Natasha: Excuse me, so what religion are you?

Contestant 1: I come from a Catholic background.

Natasha: Interesting. Another question. Are your parents still together?

Contestant 1: No.

Natasha: Interesting that you hesitated. Is that because of trauma? The body keeps the score. Or just because of lying?

Contestant 1: One of them passed away.

Natasha: Wow.

Craig: Welcome to the Natasha Lyonne show.

Natasha: Touche, Number 1.

John: Oh my god.

Natasha: Touche.

John: Touche.

Natasha: All right, Number 2. Are you guys also asking questions?

John: We can ask questions too.

Craig: At this point it’s all you.

Natasha: Please do it as you … I’ll take a little nap.

Craig: I’m thrilled with how this is going right now.

Natasha: No, no, no, no, no. I’ll be here. Go off on Number 2.

John: I’m curious about geography. Eric Number 2, where did you grow up?

Contestant 2: Indiana. Small-town Indiana.

John: Contestant Number 3, where did you grow up?

Contestant 3: Waterbury, Connecticut.

John: Waterbury, Connecticut.

Craig: Can I ask a question of Number 2?

John: Sure.

Craig: Number 2, you said that you were the oldest of 13, is that right? What is the name of the youngest?

Contestant 2: Melissa.

Craig: Thank you.

Natasha: Melissa Rivers?

Craig: Yes, Melissa Rivers.

Natasha: I’m just here to help. I’m just here to help. I’m taking a backseat. What?

Craig: I want to ask a question of Number 1.

Natasha: Mustache, why? No, I like it, but is it a family thing? Do all your siblings have mustaches?

Contestant 1: I’m the only one.

Natasha: That was not your question.

Craig: How many boys and how many girls?

Contestant 1: Seven boys, six girls.

Natasha: Again, the hesitation is …

John: I have a question. I’ll ask for Number 2. You’re the oldest of 13. Is everyone biologically related, from the same parents, or is it a Brady Bunch situation? Talk to us about the relationship to these people.

Natasha: Are your parents in an open relationship?

Contestant 2: No, everybody’s together. Everyone’s a big happy family. It’s all biological, everyone.

Natasha: What religion are you?

Contestant 2: Christian.

Natasha: A lot of Christians here. You guys [indiscernible 01:11:07] Craig around.

Craig: You and I are the Jewish population of this.

Natasha: Don’t tell them.

Craig: They know. They know. They’ve looked at our faces.

John: Eric Number 2, I’m curious, talk to us about a family vacation and the most that your family’s ever been on vacation and how that went.

Contestant 2: It was kind of tricky, obviously, because of how big the family was. We would generally go to areas that were adjacent to where I grew up. We would go to the lakes. We would go in the mountains, if we could get that far. It was generally-

Natasha: What do you mean if you could get that far?

Contestant 2: Because Indiana’s geographically not that close to mountains, but we could-

Craig: There was nowhere to go is what he’s saying.

Contestant 2: Yeah. We could get there.

Natasha: What kind of a car were you guys in?

Contestant 2: We had several because of the size of the family.

Craig: This guy’s the guy.

Natasha: Hold on. I can’t tell.

Craig: This guy is the guy. What are we doing? He’s the guy.

Natasha: I’m sorry, what kind of cars?

Contestant 2: We had two trucks and a station wagon.

Natasha: Only two parents?

Contestant 2: Only two parents.

Natasha: Until the eldest was driving the third car?

Contestant 2: Yeah. I was pretty much the babysitter for most of my childhood.

Craig: What are we doing? This is the guy.

John: I’m not convinced.

Natasha: I’m with you, honey.

Craig: I’m sold. I’m sold.

Natasha: I’m not sure about-

John: Should we vote now?

Craig: I’m ready to vote.

John: I think I’m ready to vote.

Craig: I’m ready to vote.

Natasha: I’ll do whatever you guys want.

Craig: I don’t care. I don’t care if I lose.

Natasha: How much money is in it?

Craig: [Indiscernible 01:12:27].

John: The stakes could not be higher. It is bragging rights for this segment of Scriptnotes. A lot.

Craig: I got 200 Canadian in that wallet [crosstalk 01:12:38].

Natasha: You brought your wallet onstage.

Craig: Always.

Natasha: That makes me very concerned about leaving my passport back there.

John: Quinta did bring her purse out.

Natasha: By the way, always bring your passport, because you never know when you might need to leave the country.

Craig: You never know.

Natasha: That’s another piece of advice.

Craig: Let’s vote.

John: Let’s vote.

Craig: Let’s vote.

John: Who on stage believes it’s Contestant Number 3? Who believes it’s Contestant Number 2?

Craig: Yes.

Natasha: Yeah.

John: The audience too, applause? Who thinks it’s Contestant Number 1? That’s me.

Natasha: A little.

Craig: A little? You and I think it’s 2. He thinks it’s 1.

John: No, I think we voted for … Who’d you vote for, 1?

Craig: No, 2.

Natasha: I went 50/50 because I wasn’t following.

Craig: I thought you said [crosstalk 01:13:22].

Natasha: When you involved the audience, I didn’t realize it was only up to us. I thought it was a-

Craig: The stakes could not be higher.

Natasha: Sure, I’ll go with 2, honey.

Craig: Thank you.

Natasha: We’re going with two.

Craig: Aw. Thank you.

John: Contestant Number 2, are you the oldest of 13 kids?

Contestant 2: I’m an only child.

John: Whoa.

Craig: Nicely done. Nicely done! You sick fuck!

John: Contestant Number 3, are you the oldest of 13 kids?

Contestant 1: When he said that the whole family was in a van, you should’ve known that when you’re the eldest of 13, that the groups of kids don’t all know each other. The younger group-

Craig: Is this a yes?

Contestant 1: … they were out of the house before I even-

Natasha: Is Number 3 the guy?

Craig: I think it’s Number 3. You said 15.

Contestant 3: Yeah, I was nervous.

Craig: Oh, wow.

John: Contestant 3-

Craig: You rattled him. You rattled him.

John: Are you genuinely the Eric who’s the oldest-

Craig: You rattled him.

John: … of 13 kids?

Craig: You’re the one.

Contestant 3: I’m the oldest.

Craig: You’re the one.

John: Holy shit!

Natasha: Oh my god.

Craig: Wow.

John: Contestant Number 1-

Natasha: Pathological liar.

John: How big is your family?

Contestant 1: I’m the oldest of 13 kids.

John: Oh, you are genuinely the oldest of 13 kids.

Contestant 1: Yes.

Craig: What the fuck is happening?

John: I thought the game was over.

Natasha: Now I’m confused.

Craig: What the fuck is going on?

John: It was Number 1. It was Number 1. Number 3 was still playing. We’re good. We’re good. The game is over.

Craig: Oh, Number 3 was still playing. Number 3 was like that soldier who doesn’t know the war is over.

John: The war is over.

Craig: You can go home now.

John: I was so confused there.

Craig: That’s outstanding.

Natasha: Wow.

Craig: I gotta be honest, Number 2 should be in prison. That’s a dangerous man.

Natasha: He’s an only child.

Craig: That’s a real dangerous man.

John: Craig.

Craig: The way he said only child, he’s like, “After I killed my siblings, I was an only child.”

John: Here’s how we got these people. I emailed out to our Scriptnotes listeners who were going to be in the audience, and I said, “Hey, do you have a really interesting story about your life that we could use on this, or are you really good at playing Mafia/Werewolf?” That’s what you are.

Natasha: Have you played the new game, Werewolf?

John: Thank the three of you very much for doing this. Let’s give them a [indiscernible 01:15:21].

Natasha: I’m just kidding.

Craig: Thank you guys. That was outstanding.

Natasha: Number 3, I’m sorry.

Links:

• HollywoodHEART
• Quinta Brunson on IMDb and Instagram
• Rachel Bloom on IMDb and Instagram
• Natasha Lyonne on IMDb and Instagram
• Quinta Brunson’s The Girl Who’s Never Been on a Nice Date
• Quinta Brunson on BuzzFeed
• Rachel Bloom: Death, Let Me Do My Show at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, New York City
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Our ASL interpreter was Elliott Aronson
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is Episode 607 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, what are words, even?

Craig: What words are even is?

John: What words are even?

Craig: Is?

John: I promise I’m not high, Craig. What I really want to talk about is these fundamental units of writing and how weird words are, both for us humans and for computers. You’re a person who uses words a lot and who loves to play with them.

Craig: I love them.

John: Also, Drew has stocked up a lot of listener questions that we can go through. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, Craig, let’s talk about Sinead O’Connor if we could.

Craig: We can. That will tie directly into my One Cool Thing this week, which is not just Sinead O’Connor in general, but a specific bit of Sinead O’Connor.

John: Fantastic. This episode you’re listening to was pre-recorded, but on Wednesday, tomorrow, you could be joining us live at the Dynasty Typewriter. We’re doing our first live show of this year, first live show in quite a long time. Tickets are all sold out, but you can still get livestream tickets. If you’re listening to this podcast right now, it’s like, “You know what? I really want to listen to John and Craig tomorrow and watch them with their special guests,” you still have the opportunity. We got a link in the show notes for that.

Craig: We’ve got some excellent guests. By this point, people know who they are.

John: By this point, people should. Tell us who our special guests are, Craig.

Craig: We have two currently nominated geniuses for two programs in the same category. Happily, I can report their friends. The great Natasha Lyonne and the great Quinta Brunson.

John: We’re so excited to see both of them and talk to them about writing in general and other fun stuff. They’re both great and geniuses and great performers. They’re going to be amazing guests. I’m really looking forward to tomorrow.

Craig: They are.

John: Before we started taping, we talked about extra special bits we’ll do. It’s going to be a fun show.

Craig: Now, John, what are the odds that the Writers Guild and SAG are going to picketing our live show? I don’t want to cross a line. Are we going to have to cross a line?

John: There will be no lines crossed. The only crossed will be lines of taste and discretion.

Craig: Oh, good.

John: No labor actions will have occurred. This would not be a covered project. I think we’re all good here.

Craig: The only reason I mention this is because I actually became a member of the AMPTP yesterday.

John: Wow, that’s really good. You’re now a signatory company. That’s great.

Craig: I’m a signatory company, yeah.

John: Craig, can you fill out the whole thing through? Did they hotbox you? I feel it’s like joining a fraternity, right?

Craig: You have to sign a document that says, “I hereby forswear my soul.” I am not a member of the AMPTP. It’s a fun idea to think about how you get jumped into that gang though.

John: It’s got to be fun.

Craig: Just men in suits punching feebly at you before you all get on your private jet to another billionaire’s event.

John: Absolutely. Tim Cook had to be jumped into it. I bet it was a wild thing, because Apple wasn’t a part of this, with the negotiations before this, and now they’re in. Netflix is in. It’s gotta be a lot. Where do they take you? What do they do? Are you doing shots? Is there a goat involved in something? I don’t know.

Craig: No, it’s not that cool.

John: It’s not that cool?

Craig: It’s not that cool, no. I gotta imagine it’s a fairly gray affair.

John: It really is. All the autonomy you thought you had, no longer. You thought you could control your own industry? No, no, you have to join this cabal. We will now make our deals together.

Craig: You worked your whole life to become the most important person at this massive multinational corporation, and now you have to join a group where your competitors have a say in who you get to hire and how much you pay them. What a great deal for them.

John: Good stuff.

Craig: While this is airing, theoretically the Writers Guild is back at work negotiating with the AMPTP. Good luck, John. I know you’re on that committee.

John: Thank you. Other bit of news, Weekend Read, which is the app we make for reading scripts on your iPhone. This week, we put out a version of it that runs on your Mac. If you have the iPhone version and you have a Macintosh, or one of the most recent Macintoshes, anything with a Silicon chip in there, it just now runs on your Mac too, which is handy, because you can just drag scripts from your desktop or whatever into Weekend Read there. It’s free. If you’re using it on your iPhone, you also have a Mac, just go to the app store, and you can install it on your Macintosh. It’s handy. All those scripts sync in the background. You can read stuff on both.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: We have some follow-up, I see here in the Workflowy. Can you talk us through, Drew, what we have?

Drew Marquardt: Sure. In Episode 605, we were talking about how racist characters are ultimately a little bit boring and aren’t a redeemable racist.

John: We talked about it’s very hard to find good examples of redeemable racists. It looks like we were wrong. One of our listeners, tell us.

Drew: We had a few people write in. Jafat wrote, “Although it is not his primary characteristic, Jack Nicholson’s character in As Good As It Gets is not only a racist, but an overall bigot throughout Act 1 and into Act 2, and yet he’s still a delightful protagonist to follow. The script builds so much empathy with his OCD condition, and we understood his bigoted tendencies to be a manifestation of his insecurities. So I guess great acting and great writing can make a racist appealing sometimes.”

Craig: I’m going to go ahead and reject that. I’m going to reject it.

John: Why are you rejecting it?

Craig: Love the movie. Jack Nicholson’s character is defined by his pure misanthropy. He hates everyone, everyone except a dog, who is not a person. He hates people who are a different color. He hates people who are a different gender. He hates people who are the same color and gender. He hates people are a different sexuality. He hates children. He hates everyone. The problem there is, if we’re looking for a redeemable racist, his racism is basically one wedge of a massive wheel of I hate everyone. He especially hates himself. I’m going to reject that.

John: Luckily, we have other examples here that you can choose to accept or reject.

Craig: Great.

John: What else do we got there?

Drew: We also have one from Laura P., who says, “You guys missed the most obvious example of a racist character who becomes redeemed: Green Book. Viggo Mortensen plays Tony Vallelonga, who grows and abandons his racist beliefs over the course of the movie. I know there’s a lot of hate out there for this movie, but I liked it. I saw it at TIFF before any of the hype, where it won the Audience Choice Award too.”

Craig: I’ve never seen it.

John: I think I saw half of Green Book.

Craig: You saw Green, or did you see Book?

John: I saw the Green part of Green Book. I remember the part that I did see. Viggo Mortensen’s character is driving a Black character through the South.

Craig: Mahershala.

John: Mahershala Ali. I don’t know it well enough. Yeah, there’s an arc there, but I don’t know. I’m not going to fight over a movie I don’t remember well.

Craig: Exactly. If you saw only half of it, you wouldn’t have gotten to the redemption part.

John: That’s true.

Craig: The movie you saw was a racist drives a Black man around, and then the movie ends.

John: The movie I remember seeing, the first thing that jumped in my head was not that Viggo Mortensen’s character was racist. I didn’t think of that as being his defining characteristic. Maybe that was because the whole movie was set in a place where racism was going to be so pervasive and dangerous that I saw him as being on the side of the Black character, even though they would grow and change over the course of the movie. I don’t remember it well.

Craig: We can’t push back on that, Laura P.

John: Last example I see here is for Scrooge. There’s David G writing in, “I gleaned it could be almost untenable to build a movie about a racist’s path to eventual repudiation of the racism. I’d be curious to your thoughts on why the tale of Scrooge works so well.” Scrooge hates everybody.

Craig: Scrooge has disconnected from people. His disconnection from people is, we ultimately learn, an extension of events that occurred in his youth. Everybody can identify with that. Everybody’s had moments where they felt alienated from the people around them, disconnected from the people around them. Everybody’s had moments where they were viewing other people through the prism of pessimism. People will oftentimes lose their naïve, childlike, wondrous spirit. It’s universal. It’s so universal that we simply cannot stop telling Dickens’s story to each other in 4,000 different ways.

John: Scrooge is not really that different than Jack Nicholson’s character in As Good As It Gets. Scrooge hates all people. He’s a wealthy version of Jack Nicholson’s character from As Good As It Gets.

Craig: Basically, yeah. They add a little mental illness flavor to Jack Nicholson, although I will say, were you to make As Good As It Gets today, I certainly would not be putting so much weight on his obsessive-compulsive disorder, because it just doesn’t work like that. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is not connected to misanthropy. I don’t even think the movie made a good argument for it to be connected. It just was also there.

John: More follow-up from the same episode. This is about Lonesome Dove.

Drew: Matthew writes, “I just wanted to follow up about the mention of Lonesome Dove first being a script which Larry McMurtry then turned into a novel, which then got turned into a mini-series. Craig said the idea that such a massive novel had started out as a 120-page script terrified him. I thought the same, so I checked, and it didn’t. It started out as a 288-page script. It originated in a film called The Streets of Laredo, which was intended as a vehicle for John Wayne, Henry Fonda, and James Stewart. The 288-page script was written by McMurtry with Peter Bogdanovich in 1972. The project failed to materialize, and McMurtry eventually chose to expand the idea into a sprawling 843-page novel. The length might have had something to do with the film not getting made in 1972, despite McMurtry already being well-established at the time, having written the movies Hud and The Last Picture Show. I imagine the success of his 1983 film, Terms of Endearment, was instrumental in getting the Lonesome Dove mini-series made.”

Craig: Wow. I’m not saying that they were coked up when they wrote a 288-page script in 1972. However, it wouldn’t be surprising if they were.

John: Let’s think that through that, because at some point, they had to realize, how long is this thing? This is 288 pages. That’s more than two full movies.

Craig: You’re the voice of anti-cocaine.

John: I know. I’m sorry. If any folks on the podcast-

Craig: By the way, I’ve never used cocaine.

John: I’ve never used cocaine in my life.

Craig: From what I understand, and I’m not being facetious, I really haven’t ever used it, but from what I understand, when you are on cocaine, you don’t stop and say, “Uh-oh, this might end up being 288 pages.” It’s more like, “Yeah! Yes, more. We’re actually reinventing cinema, man. Go.” On the other hand, 288 pages is a drop in the bucket compared to where it ended up, which was 800-and-some-odd pages. It may have been that this was trying to be a novel the whole time. The idea of sitting with somebody and hitting…

Even Scott Frank at his most lengthy first-draftness I don’t think is ever going to approach 288 pages. Scott is infamous for… It’s not even infamous. It’s just his process. His first drafts are always really, really long. I don’t think he’s ever hit 288.

John: That’s a lot. It also could’ve been a problem of just the time. It was an era before mini-series, probably. I’m trying to think. First mini-series I remember is Roots. That may not be the actual first real mini-series.

Craig: That was the first modern mini-series, or proper one, and that was ’76, ’77, ’78, something like that.

John: This is ’72, so it’s predating that. It does feel like a mini-series is the right way to tell a story sprawling, or a book. It found its way.

Craig: I’m glad it did. It’s a hell of a book.

John: Well done, everybody. Let’s talk about words. Craig, we’ll start with your loan out company I now know, because I see the end credits of your shows, is Word Games, correct?

Craig: Let’s be specific. It’s not my loan out company.

John: Sorry. It’s your production company?

Craig: It’s my production company, exactly, because I have a different thing. Loan out companies, I think we’ve talked about this on the podcast a number of times, are really just doing business as type things for the purposes of income and taxation and so forth. Word Games, yes, it’s my production company. I don’t mean to dress it up like I’m running Bad Robot or something. I’m aware I’m not. So far, Word Games has made two things, Chernobyl and The Last of Us. I’m a big fan of words and word games.

John: Obviously, what we do for a living is moving words around. On this podcast, we talk all the time about scripts and sequences and scenes and paragraphs and sentences, which are all built out of words. I don’t think we’ve done a segment just digging into what even are words, as an atomic unit that everything else is built out of. In Three Page Challenges, we may note that somebody’s using a word incorrectly, or just that there’s an odd choice of a word. We haven’t really dug into the words themselves. Obviously, probably half your recommendations are something related to puzzles, crossword puzzles, or other things you enjoy doing. Those are all built out of words as well.

Craig: There’s usage and vocabulary and definitions and things like that. Those are easy. Where the fun of words, the love of words comes, in terms of what we do, is very much connected to the intangible joy of the thought organization they imply and demand. Our thoughts are amorphous. Words solidify them. In fact, there’s quite a few theories of consciousness that argue that consciousness is a, I don’t want to say side effect, but words are a prerequisite for consciousness, that consciousness is formed by the mental manipulation of words.

John: Without language and words to organize thoughts, you don’t really have consciousness in the same way. We might talk about animals who we notice seem to be able to do certain things, they also have language abilities. There’s a reason for that.

Craig: Language is obviously separate from words, because there’s words themselves, but then there’s also grammar and the notion of inherent grammar, which is what Chomsky became famous for. The words themselves are yummily wonderful. I know I just said yummily.

John: Yummily. I understood what you meant, even though it was a word you-

Craig: Bingo.

John: It’s not the first time that word was ever mentioned or used in the world.

Craig: No question.

John: We can put the pieces together, in order to form a word like yummily and we get what it is. I see here in the Workflowy, meta crossword mechanism. Talk me through what that is and why it’s fascinating to you.

Craig: In thinking about this topic, because one of the things we’re going to discuss here is the evolution of computer language and these large language models and how computers are beginning to put words together in advanced ways, there are ways of putting words together that form the basis of games. A lot of word games really come down to playing word association. Have you ever played Decrypto, John? I can’t remember.

John: I love Decrypto.

Craig: Decrypto’s amazing. Without getting into a long description of the rules, what you’re trying to do is give your team a clue word that will help them identify which of four team words you’re pointing at. The other team can hear the clue word. You’re trying to basically not give away to the other team what your target word is with your clue word. It really is a game of sideways synonyms.

I was playing once with my friend Dave Shukan, who’s a word genius. One of our target words was tower. For one of the clues, I remember he said to us, and again, the other team can hear this, I want to say it was something like “flatbed.” We understood, after a little bit of thought, that flatbed pointed to tower, because what he was doing with that clue was saying that tower’s not tower, tower [TOU-uhr] is tower [TOH-uhr].

John: Oh, wow.

Craig: Same word, different pronunciation. That kind of strange association is delightful. When it occurs, there is a moment of joy. The example that I wanted to cite from, we’re recording this on Friday, August 4th, so the prior Friday was the fourth Friday of the month, which meant a difficult meta crossword from the great meta crossword master, Matt Gaffney. Of course, we all know Matt Gaffney.

John: Legendary.

Craig: He really is. He’s legendary. He’s a legendary constructor of meta crosswords. Those are crossword puzzles where after you fill in the grid, there is a hidden puzzle, and you have to figure out what the hidden puzzle is and what the answer is.

In this particular one, the gimmick that you eventually figured out was what he was doing was in certain clues, the beginning of the first word or the first couple of words in a phrase was either a single-letter or two-letter abbreviation you’d find on the periodic table. The trick of what he was doing was, if you expanded that out to the name, the full element name of what that symbol was, but then kept the rest of the word, it would become something new. For instance, the words “cut one,” if you take that Cu, which is the chemical symbol for copper, and you spell it out, “cut one” becomes “copper tone.”

John: Great.

Craig: I liked that one, but it didn’t necessarily delight me as much as this one. Let’s see if you guys can get this one. Now that you know the gimmick, it shouldn’t be too hard. “Fame singer Irene.”

John: Irene Cara is-

Craig: Okay, so the answer is Cara, now what do you with that, following this method?

John: Ca is calcium.

Craig: Good way to start. Calcium unfortunately isn’t a word. What else could you do? How about you try a single letter?

John: Oh, so carbon. Carbonara.

Craig: Carbonara.

John: Great.

Craig: Now, that-

John: That is delightful.

Craig: Damn. This is the sort of thing I occupy myself with all the time, which I love. I appreciate people like Matt, who can think of these things and then execute them so beautifully. Relevant to our discussion today, there is something gorgeous about the creation aspect of that, that words are something that we use to fill our minds and our speech and communicate. Also, there is a creative aspect to the manipulation of them that requires pleasure.

What we do as writers is smashing words together to create context and information and communication, but specifically also pleasure, enjoyment, even if the pleasure and enjoyment is the pleasure and enjoyment of crying. That goal requires another dimension beyond just the pure computational understanding of how to put words together.

John: It requires attention. It requires the ability to have a desire for what you’re going to try to do and the ability to anticipate how it will manifest in the brain or the mouth of the person who’s going to be experiencing it. That requires attention. You don’t get there accidentally. You have to be thinking about what series of words is going to create the effects that I want to get and why am I trying to create that effect. There’s a deliberateness to it. That’s what writing is. It’s the deliberate effect you’re trying to create by putting the words together in this order.

Craig: Precisely. I don’t want to be the “AI’s not going to take over,” guy, because everybody’s very invested in the thought that AI’s going to eliminate us all. However, if there is one thing that is insulating us from being eliminated by AI and the increasingly complicated versions of ChatGPT and other large languages, it’s this. It’s that large language models require prompts. We do not. We create our own prompts. Our prompts are prompted in turn by our wants and needs. Wants and need are prompted in turn by the pleasure principle. This is an interesting area.

We know, for instance, that calculators are infinitely better at operations than humans. Any mathematical operation you can come up with. The simple ones are addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, but there are more advanced ones. Whatever they are, it doesn’t matter what they are, a simple $5 calculator is infinitely better at it than humans. It can calculate those things faster than you can blink. Much faster.

However, humans appear to be infinitely better at proving conjectures than computers. Proofs for complicated theorems, theorems that have been sitting out there for centuries, and then eventually get proven. They don’t get proven by computers. So far, I don’t believe any computer has ever proven anything complicated. They can prove things that we teach them to prove, but that means we proved them first.

John: I will look up and try to put the link in the show notes to… I can think of, there was one mathematical thing that was scrawled in a margin, which they actually brute forced it with computers and basically eliminated all the other possibilities, therefore were able to prove it. Then again, that required human intention and intervention to figure out what are the things we needed to knock out in order to get to this proof.

Craig: Certainly, we can use it as a tool, but what we can’t do is say, “Here’s Fermat’s Last Theorem. Computer, prove it.” No. No. It took a human to do that. One method follows a process, and the other method invents a process. I do think what we do is about inventing new uses for words and concepts, and the collision and transformation of those words and concepts. That said…

John: That said…

Craig: Wow, have they gotten, they meaning the computers, gotten good at following processes.

John: The article we’re going to link to is by Tim Lee and Sean Trott. It came out this last week. It’s a really good detailed, but not actually too super geeky look at how large language models actually work. I think one of the important takeaways is that we understand the process of building them.

We cannot, in any given example, tell you how they got to the answer they got to. That black box is not by design. It’s just the nature of process, of how it’s stringing those words together. We can’t tell you how it got from A to B to C to D. It’s very, very difficult to show how that happened.

Let’s wind back and actually talk through some of the workings of these large language models, because it’s much more subtle and complex than I thought. We have these arguments like, these are all plagiarism machines. Plagiarism is passing off other people’s work as your own. While it’s true that all these models are trained off of the internet, so they are hoovering in all the stuff that’s been out there, the ways they’re stitching these words together is so different than even where I thought. I always knew it was all based on probability of what the next word would be, but how it gets to those probabilities is actually really fascinating.

I think it’s partly because our understanding of words is very different than the computer’s understanding of words. I wonder if maybe our own understanding of our own consciousness will eventually be revealed to be something a little bit more like what these large language models are doing, because it’s fascinating. They don’t treat words the same way that we would expect. They’re not thinking about definitions or spelling or its origin. It’s just these mathematical vectors, these points in this thousands-of-dimensions word space that is hard for us to even imagine.

Craig: I think that probably this is how we do it, neurologically. Even though the complexity, even though it seems like it’s pretty good, it’s nowhere near what we can do, because our neurons number in the billions, I believe, and they’re not quite there yet, but I guess eventually they will be.

It’s very relational. Words are defined as items that relate to each other, so a little bit like the way I think of characters. Character is meaningless without relationship. It’s just nothing. Similarly, words are meaningless without relationship.

The way the LLMs seem to work is by defining relationships and relationship strength in multiple ways, between a word and every other word. Some of those relationships are defined by similarity of definition. Some of them are defined by being opposite. Some of them are defined as, if this word is next to this one, then this one is likely to have this meaning, as opposed to this other alternate meaning. Everything gets ranked.

Look. Ultimately, neurons are on/off switches. It’s a little more complicated than that. There’s levels of ons and levels of offs, but you’re really dealing ultimately with a lot of circuitry there. I can see a world, and maybe it’s soon, where we can create an LLM that has the same capacity that we do, purely for language.

However, that’s not all we have. What we’re building with these things is, we are approaching the neocortex. That’s what we’re working on here. There’s a couple areas in the brain, like Wernicke’s area and Broca’s area, that do a lot of this work. We’re approaching replicating that somehow.

What we don’t have, I don’t think we do, and I hope we never do, is what we have in our brain. I don’t want to ever give this to computers. That is a combination, a feedback system between a neocortex and a paleocortex, between the old brain, between the limbic system and the neocortex. This is where all of our danger is, but it’s also where all of our wonder is.

This is the most hacked, tropey thing that aliens will say after observing us for a while. “Strange, you know. Humans, you know. The source of your greatest flaw is also the source of your greatest value.” Yeah, basically. Which is that we are still animals, but we are enlightened animals, and we therefore can create works of art. The only reason to create a work of art is to hack the neocortex, to appeal to the limbic system. I don’t know why a computer would even bother to do it. It doesn’t have a limbic system.

John: It again doesn’t have pleasure.

Craig: Correct. It doesn’t have pleasure. It doesn’t have fear. Although it was interesting, I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Hollywood Bowl last night, LA Philharmonic doing a gorgeous job, the percussionist living his best life, dong, dong, dong, dong.

John: Oh, of course.

Craig: When the HAL 9000 is being turned off, slowly, memory bank by memory bank is how they did it, he repeated the phrase, “I am afraid,” which was really interesting. You could say to a computer right now, “Okay, ChatGPT, write about having to go on a first date, but make sure that you explain how afraid you are and why.” It can do that, but it won’t be afraid. That I think is maybe what’s going to insulate what we do from what that does.

John: Let’s circle back to the words of it all, because as humans, as we deal with words, if we want to organize words, we would put them in a dictionary and alphabetize them, figure out their definitions. It’s not how these large language models are working.

Instead, what they’re doing is… You can think about it like a globe or a map. Just in the same way that two cities might have longitude and latitude, every word is going to have a longitude and latitude for where it fits in this space.

Google did this in 2013, this thing called word2vec. What they did is they scanned zillions of documents to figure out what are all the words and what are those words near, based on what those words are near, how can you find some meaning, the probability that these two words will occur together.

When you do this, you can do some kinds of math that are really interesting. If I say Berlin minus Germany plus France, you can get to Paris. Take this one thing away from Berlin, and then add France, oh, the relationship must be that Paris is related to France in that way. We get that. It’s like the analogies we had to do in the old SAT. It could learn… Learn sounds a little too intensive, but patterns will emerge. A cat is very near a dog, and so therefore, if something is true about a dog, like a dog goes to a vet, then a cat will probably go to a vet. That makes sense.

So much of what’s fun about the word games that Craig likes to play are double meanings of words or homonyms and other things. Tower was an example, tower [TOH-uhr] versus tower [TOU-uhr]. Subtle things, like this article points out, like Mary works for a magazine, Bob reads a magazine. They both have the word magazine, but those are really not quite the same word. The first one is a company that she works for. The second one is a physical object. Those two separate words would be close to each other, but they’re not the same thing. It’s a part of speech. They really are different. They’re different things and may be represented as different vectors, so a huge grid of numbers that indicate where in this word space you put those two different words.

Craig: Polysemy.

John: Polysemy. I didn’t know how to pronounce this. Thank you for saying that.

Craig: My pleasure.

John: When there’s many possible meanings for a certain word of phrase or combination of letters. What would surprise you about this article is how it figures out context. A sentence like, “The customer asked the mechanic to fix his car,” how do we know that the his is the customer rather than the mechanic? That’s fascinating, because it has to figure out what are the probabilities that that his, it knows that it’s a male pronoun, but how likely is it that it relates to the customer versus the mechanic? It’s just math and probability that gets us there.

Craig: Even if the connections weren’t formed the same way that these connections were formed, this, I suspect, is not far off from the way the connections exist in our minds, where things both inhibit and reinforce certain possibilities.

What we know, because we may laugh at ChatGPT for some funny mistakes, but we make mistakes all the time. People are constantly getting confused. People have entire conversations where somebody’s like, “Wait a second. Sorry. Are you talking about him or him? Because I thought you were saying him, he, but I think you might’ve meant him, he.” “Oh, yes, I was… “ There you go.

This happens all the time when we’re writing the… I was just talking to somebody the other day about this problem. Just within sentences, when you have conversations between two people who use she and hers pronouns, it can be a nightmare. This is where I’m not sure how you teach a computer this, because I think it’s the pleasure principle. For some pleasurable reason, we do not like when names are repeated over and over and pronouns are not used. Actually, it makes no sense.

John: It would be much more efficient if I referred to Craig all the time.

Craig: Correct. There’s really no reason to use a variable for a specific if you’re a computer, just none, unless in cases where a variable isn’t required. Why? Why don’t we like hearing our name over and over and over and over? We don’t know. We don’t know, but it just doesn’t feel good.

All that stuff is really fascinating to me. I do think that it’s not fair to say that these things are plagiarism machines any more than it’s fair to say that human beings are plagiarism machines, because that’s how we learn, by scraping all the language that’s pouring into our ears as our brains form in youth.

John: It’s true. That’s why when you grow up with a native language, and that is the language that you’re most comfortable using, and then when you use another language, sometimes you can use it natively, but it’s challenging to. Even the best translators, they will translate into their own language, but they won’t generally translate out to their second or their third language. There’s a reason why your native language is your native language.

I was recently in Africa. We were being driven from one place to another. There was this negotiation that happened between our driver and this checkpoint person. As we drove away, I was like, “Oh, can I ask you, what language were you using?” It was like, “Oh, I had to use three different things, because we were trying to figure out which one we both spoke.” That kind of code switching we see in Los Angeles all the time with Spanish. It was fascinating to see it in another country, where there weren’t just two languages, but 11 things that could be sorted through.

Craig: That’s why I think we aren’t too far off from, there’s already been demos of this, the Babel fish style earbud that hears a language, automatically translates it in real time, and then pipes it into your ear in your language. The fact that you can understand any language doesn’t mean you can speak it. That again, it’s just fascinating to me. It’d also be really interesting to see how those models handle subtleties.

There’s going to be a lot of misunderstandings and miscommunications in the early days of the Babel fish earpiece. There are going to be some people that stand up from a table and throw a drink in someone’s face, only later to find out, “Oh, sorry, my thing just mistranslated.” I’m there for that. I’m there for that.

John: It’s going to be exciting when it happens. Just to bring a D and D reference, in the D and D universe, there’s Common, which is the language that most people will speak, just for easy use. They also speak Elvish or Dwarvish or whatever else, but Common is the language.

I would say that on this last trip, you recognize, oh yeah, English is sort of Common in most places. When people can’t find another language to speak, they’ll go to English, because that’s the second language of so much of the world that they can get by. Even two people who grew up in South Africa might end up just defaulting to English because that’s the language that they know they can both get by in.

Craig: That’s right. That was not always the case. The lingua franca was called lingua franca because it was French. French was considered common back in the day. In fact, to reference 2001 again, there was a conversation happening between some people on board the space station that were from different countries, and they were speaking French, because that was the thing they can all agree on.

Over time, that has been absolutely replaced by English, not even by a little, but by a lot. There are all sorts of reasons for that, of course, economic and political. One of the things that English has going for it is that it is relatively easy, compared to other languages. There aren’t gendered nouns. Verb conjugation is very simple.

John: We got rid of almost all of it.

Craig: Pronunciation can be absolutely confounding, befuddling, but then again, there are a lot of people that are native English speakers who mispronounce words all the time. Look, polysemy, a lot of different ways of approaching that one.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: That’s a Greek word. Pronunciation can befuddle people. Have you seen that really funny thing they did, every ‘90s pop song ever?

John: It was great. Every European pop song?

Craig: Yes, every European pop song. One of the things that they’re really smart about is they’re implying that these singers were given lyrics in English, but because they don’t speak English and they don’t know how to pronounce things, they failed to see how certain things were intended to rhyme. He goes, “Boom, hear the bass go zoom.” That’s really funny. Boom and zoom, they do rhyme. That’s okay. People really have just settled on English. Let us count ourselves lucky in that regard.

John: Oh yeah, it’s imperialism. It’s all the things that happened. It’s the accidents of history that English became the [indiscernible 00:37:09] language, but there were worse choices out there. It’s a relatively easy language to speak. It’s messy to spell. There’s lots of things you could’ve improved. If you could get another crack at it, you could do a better job. If you could do it Esperanto, if everyone could speak Esperanto, it would be easier for everybody, but it’s not what’s going to happen.

Craig: What a silly dream of the ‘70s.

John: I love Esperanto.

Craig: Or ‘60s, I guess.

John: Craig, my other thing, as we wrap up this segment on words, one of the things I love about listening to podcasts is you have a lot of really smart people who are talking, and you realize that they are saying words out loud that they mostly would otherwise write. I just typed a word here. I’m curious how you pronounce this word that I just added to the Workflowy.

Craig: Let’s see.

John: Underneath the list of official languages of Africa.

Craig: Say this word. Subsequent [SUHB-suh-kwuhnt].

John: I would always say subsequent [SUHB-suh-kwuhnt], and then I heard someone on a podcast say subsequent [suhb-SEE-kwint]. I’m like, what? I took a note of it, and I looked it up, and that is an accepted pronunciation.

Craig: It’s accepted. It wouldn’t be the first listed pronunciation, but it’s not incorrect. If you said suhb-sih-KYEW-int, that would be wrong.

John: That would be wrong.

Craig: That would just be wrong. Or if you said SOOB-see-kwint. SOOB-see-kwint is terrible. Don’t say that.

John: Don’t say that. Any further takeaways from our word segment, Craig?

Craig: No, other than I suspect we are going to get quite a bit of listener mail from people that work in AI or with LLMs correcting us and scolding us for all sorts of things, to which I say, bah.

John: Bah. I say direct your criticisms to the people who wrote this really good article, Tim Lee and Sean Trott, because we were sort of summarizing what we read there. If we summarized it wrong, meh, sorry.

Craig: Bah.

John: We will put a link in the show notes to this article, which was really well done and did talk me through a lot of stuff.

Craig: It was a good one.

John: Did talk through a lot of stuff I’d never seen before.

Craig: It was really smart.

John: Listener questions. What do you got for us, Drew?

Drew: Ken in Norway writes, “Longtime listener here who finally transitioned to TV writing a couple years, helped and inspired by your guidance, so thank you for that. Now that I have to write stuff people actually are planning on producing, I keep thinking about Craig’s tip to not move until you see it. The way I interpret it is to not write the story or the scene until you believe it. My question is, how do you balance this with deadlines? You can’t really plan on having an epiphany Wednesday morning or finding the missing piece of the puzzle by the end of the week, so the only reliable way forward is to muscle through. On the other hand, you don’t want to churn out something that you feel in your gut isn’t really working. That won’t help anybody. Do you have any thoughts of how to better your odds of seeing it in time, or is the seeing it relative to the amount of pressure you’re under?”

Craig: This is one of the reasons it’s important to start working right away, because I think writers sometimes presume they have more time than they do, because they are not pricing in the moments where they can’t see it. If you get eight weeks to write something, start writing it on day one. Start doing the work on day one at least, if you’re outlining or whatever it is. Get to work.

When you know what you’re doing, well make hay while the sun is shining, because you’re going to run into some trouble at some point. You’re going to need the extra time to think things through. Hopefully, taking advantage of the time you have and pushing through and being smart and banking some time is going to help you with that.

The other thing is, there are times where you may need a little bit of extra time. Now, certain circumstances, you will not be afforded the extra time. In other circumstances, people will afford you some extra time. What they’re not telling you is that there are terrible costs to making changes. It’s going to take them a lot more time to find a new writer than it will for you to just finish, generally speaking.

What I would suggest is, from a practical point of view, if you’re going to call and ask for more time, when you do, explain that you had a problem, it took you some time, but you have solved it. You’re very pleased, and now you’re full speed ahead once again. However, this has put you a little bit behind. If you call and say, “I am having a problem. I cannot see it. I need extra time,” that’s just going to send everybody into a tizzy.

John: All that advice is fair and good and true. I will say there have been times in my life where I’ve had to just muscle things, where these pieces don’t quite fit the way I know they possibly could fit, I can envision a world in which these things worked better and I got from this moment to this moment a little bit more smoothly. The needs of getting this draft in outweighed the artistic pinnacle optimization of this one moment. Therefore, I muscled it and knew that we’re going to go back there and work through that again. That’s just the reality.

Then sometimes, the train is leaving the station, and you have to make that scene work the best it can work, so that you can actually keep going. Don’t beat yourself up about that.

Craig’s basic advice, basically, is to make sure that you’re using all of your time all the way up through it, is true. You have to do that. The only thing that makes me nervous about don’t move until you see it is people can, if there’s not a deadline, just be paralyzed forever. They can be trying to solve a problem that essentially has no answer, or they’re imagining a solution that doesn’t actually even exist, and we actually have to reevaluate what is causing the problem, rather than trying to find a solution to that problem.

Craig: I would say that’s part of not moving until you see it, because if it’s been a week and you haven’t seen it, you may not have the problem you think you have. You may have a very different problem. At that point, you need to step back even a little bit further.

You’re trying ultimately to follow the “a stitch in time saves nine” plan. By the way, when I was a kid, I did not understand what that meant, because there were no commas in it. A stitch in time saves nine. I’m like, what is a stitch in time?

John: A stitch, comma, in time, saves nine.

Craig: Where was the appositive phrase markers for me? They were nowhere. “A stitch in times saves nine” makes no damn sense. “A stitch, in time, saves nine,” makes… Commas. Commas, folks.

John: They’re so useful.

Craig: Damn.

John: So useful.

Craig: Hopefully we helped there, Tim.

John: Let’s try one more.

Drew: State Your Name and Outlet writes, “I was listening to the episode That’s a Good Question, and it made me want to ask you something I’ve been wondering for a while. Over the last few years, I’ve taken on more and more work as an interviewer for a film and TV publication, which has led me to participating in something I’ve heard Craig and many others talk about with contempt. That is, of course, the press junket.”

Craig: Dun dun duh.

Drew: “I’ve been a writer for most of my life, and have much more sympathy for people like you two, who are stuck in a room doing four-minute interview after four-minute interview, than I do for people trying to get a snappy quote for a headline. I try to ask interesting and crafty questions, but also don’t want to presume whoever is on the other end wants anything more than to get out of there. I guess my question is, what is your ideal junket interaction?”

John: That is a good question. Maybe you’re a good junketeer yourself, because you’re asking a good question here. I would say my experience at press junkets, the person who gets the assignment basically understands, “I understand what this show is, what this movie is,” and is genuinely curious and fascinated by some element of it, some specific thing. That is what’s going to lead to a good answer from me, because I’ve just been saying the exact same thing again and again and again, but if you can come at a specific and ask me those specifics, it will go well.

I think back to when Greta Gerwig came on the show to talk about Little Women. It was the first time we actually had script pages in front of us. I could ask her, “Talk to me about this scene and why you did it this way. Was there any push back on that?” No one asked her specifics about a scene or literally the words on a page.

If you can come to one of these things and ask a specific question about a specific moment, you’re going to get an answer that is going to be so much more useful to you and will actually delight me or Craig or whoever you’re sitting across from.

Craig: Listen. I don’t want to imply that I’m contemptuous of the people that do these things. I’m not. They’re doing a job. It’s the overall experience that’s exhausting. Each individual person is doing their job.

The first person of the day is the best person, because you’re fresh. You started. They’re asking you a question. No one’s asked you that today. You give your answer. Sometimes the best person of the day is the last one, because you know you’re about to be done, and also, by that point, you’ve answered that one same question so many times, you’ve found the perfect mix of words to answer it.

The process can be exhausting and dispiriting for me, because you are being often asked three questions over and over and over. My advice for State Your Name and Outlet is to really think carefully if you need the answer to that obvious question, because after all, while everyone else is asking it, it means everyone else is going to have that content in their article. What if you just refuse to ask those questions, because no one needs the answers to those questions.

Honestly, nobody interviewing me today needs me to answer the following question: What was the hardest challenge to adapt a video game into a television show? I’ve answered this question 4 million times. If you are curious, you can merely Google, and you’ll have the answer in many, many slightly varying versions.

A new question is a delight. You will see the person on the other side of the microphone light up if you are asking them a novel question, and particularly, if you are asking them a novel question and studiously avoiding asking them the one that they’re asked over and over and over. That’s my advice. Just don’t ask those questions. You know what they are. Everybody knows what they are. If someone above you is saying, “You gotta get them to answer this question,” push back a little bit and say, “Do we?”

John: You don’t have to ask that question, because honestly, you’re probably not going to print the question. You’re going to print what Craig says. If you get Craig to say something interesting, that’s what you’re going to print. Then you can frame it however you want to frame the story, however you want to frame it. Ask something interesting, and you’ll get an interesting answer.

Craig: That’d be an interesting exercise, to show up at a press junket with your prediction of those questions written down on cards, and just put them out in front of you, but face down. If someone asks that question, you just reach over, because they’re numbered, and you know which one they are, and you just turn it over, and that’s how they know, “Uh-oh, I should probably move on to another question.” Boy, would you be a jerk.

John: Oh my god.

Craig: Oh my god.

John: That asshole.

Craig: Literally every interview, every article would be about how you’re just a dick, because you know what? You would be a dick. Listen.

John: It’s the game. You’re not playing the game.

Craig: When somebody said, “What was the trickiest challenge to adapting a video game to a television show,” never once was I like, “Oh god, really? I already answered that question.” No, I answer it like it’s the first time I’ve heard it, because that’s the polite and nice thing to do.

The whole purpose of doing that stuff is to give these folks something to run in their publication which theoretically will appeal to people at home to turn the show on and watch it. It’s a commensalist relationship. You can’t be a jerk.

By the way, I have no problem with people who get up and walk out of interviews where the interviewer is being a jerk. That’s different. I’ve seen some of those. Happily, I’ve never had that experience. There’s no need to be a jerk about any of this. That said, since State Your Name and Outlet asked for the advice, the advice, don’t ask that question.

John: It’s come time for our One Cool Things.

Craig: Yay.

John: My One Cool Thing is a book that I read over this last couple weeks. This Is How You Lose The Time War by Amar El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. I love a book that’s written by two people, which is unusual. It is this sci-fi romance between these two agents battling on opposite sides across these multiple timelines. It’s structured as an epistolary, so these letters being exchanged back and forth between these two strangers, who then get to know each other over the course of this.

It is sprawling. The world-building is amazing. The word usage, it’s good for this episode. Just the word craft is incredibly good. The voice and the difference between the voices of these two agents is great. I just really dug it. It’s one of those high-concept things that you think couldn’t work, and worked brilliantly.

The backstory on it is also fascinating, because this came out in 2019 and got some acclaim, but I only heard about it because this last May, this guy named Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood tweeted about this, basically said, “Stop what you’re doing and pick up this book. It’s amazing.”

Craig: What a world we live in.

John: That went viral. That’s how I got aware of it. I picked it up, and I’m really glad I did. This Is How You Lose The Time War.

Craig: My One Cool Thing will flow right into our Bonus episode, as promised. In memory of Sinead O’Connor, who passed away, unfortunately, far too young, just a little over a week ago, I believe, I want to recommend one song to watch, because I think the performance is just as important as the song. Visually, to see it is just as important.

It’s a performance of her song Troy. I don’t know if I would call it a deep cut, but it wasn’t a hit. One of my favorite songs. It’s a live recording from a concert in 1988. It’s a long song. It’s worth the time, because what you see on display there is not only beautiful songwriting and excellent grasp of words and lyrics, but honesty and emotion and performance.

When we talk about, “Oh, I don’t believe that,” or what is quality, the genuine expression of emotion, and the emotion that is expressed changing over the course of the song, from begging to praise to condemnation to confusion to self-doubt and recrimination and finally to accusation is remarkable. It is kind of like what we do when we’re doing our work at our best. It is astonishing. When you get to the end of the song, I challenge anybody to neatly summarize her relationship with the person she’s singing the song to. You cannot. That is why it’s great.

John: It is great. A thing that I really admire about that song is it doesn’t have a chorus verse structure at all. It keeps building and building and building. You don’t know where you’re at in the song. Then it gets up to this big finale. It’s fantastic.

Craig: It’s stunning to watch. There’s a couple moments where the song will take a break, and then it begins, like a pause, a pregnant pause, and then it starts up. In the first one, as is often the case in concerts, you hit this big note and a pause, and the pause is filled by people in the audience going, “Woo!” The second time through, the other ones, no one says a goddamn thing, because they’re transfixed, as well they should be.

John: As they should be. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: What what.

John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Craig: Whoop whoop.

John: Our outro this week is by Jacob Weisblat. 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 and follow-up. 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’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. Looks like we have a new T-shirt that’s going to be coming up soon. Craig, you’ll love it. I’ll talk to you about it off mic.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you can get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. If you are listening to this on Tuesday, you can still join us for the live show on Wednesday. You can get a streaming ticket for that. You can see us and our special guests at The Dynasty Typewriter. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Sinead O’Connor. I feel like maybe we should do a little bit of table-setting here, because I recognize that we are both men in our 50s, and she broke on the scene when we were transitioning from high school to college. We were just exactly the sweet spot for Sinead O’Connor to be a thing. My daughter has no idea who Sinead O’Connor is or was. Craig, what can you set up for us about her?

Craig: Sinead O’Connor released her debut album, The Lion and the Cobra, it was 1987, so I was a junior in high school. I suspect you were-

John: As was I.

Craig: Oh, you were a junior as well. Then followed that up with I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got in 1990. I’ll readily admit that I obsessively listened to those albums and dropped off after that. Those were the albums that I listened to.

John: Those were the albums for me too.

Craig: I listened to them all. My friend Gene and I had rooms side by side in our dorm. We would play Gin Rummy, because that was more fun than doing work. We would just either have The Lion and the Cobra or I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got. What’s interesting is you’re like, oh, here’s a couple of bros in college listening to a woman who was unlike anyone else at the time.

Maybe you could argue that Boy George had kind of set a little bit of a stage, as well as Annie Lennox, for somewhat androgynous pop stars. Sinead O’Connor, it didn’t feel like a gimmick necessarily. It wasn’t structured. She was an Irish woman who did come out of nowhere and exploded out there. She was notable for shaving her head. She had no hair. She was also stunningly beautiful. It was this really weird, confusing combination of elements. She had no problem both using and denying her own physical beauty to center and put forward her songwriting ability, her music, and her voice.

Her voice, this is where, hey kids, go ahead and listen to Troy live and see what people used to sound like when there wasn’t auto-tune or backing tracks. Her voice was astonishing. She could do things with it, and not in a Freddie Mercury virtuosic way, but in an emotional, expressive way, that I haven’t actually heard anybody else do.

John: She had a dynamic range that was incredible too. Her ability to whisper a lyric and then just belt it to the far realms was incredible. She did feel unearthly, and partly because of the shaved head and all that stuff. It did feel like she was some elfin creature who’d come out of some other dimension. That also carried through into her voice.

There’s a tradition of incredibly talented female singer-songwriters, Joni Mitchell and going way back. That’s not new. I think about her as a template for other people down the road. You can think of Lorde or Billie Eilish. You don’t want to diminish what makes each of them unique and special.

When I think of her in addition to those, I worry for women who would build up to these paragons now, that the same kinds of things could happen to them that happened to her, because her arc is not great. She had this success, and then she had struggles with mental health. She had lots of things that later in her life became real challenges.

Obviously, the story everyone knows about is that when she tore up the photo of the Pope on Saturday Night Live, which I remember live and not really understanding what even happened. I didn’t even see it was the Pope. I didn’t understand what that was in the moment. That became a source of huge controversy.

Craig: It is undeniable that Sinead O’Connor struggled with mental health. That said, so many people do. That wasn’t why she got knocked off her perch so hard. It was that moment.

Sinead O’Connor was placed with, I believe it was a convent-run laundry, in Ireland. These were notorious Catholic institutions that were abusive. The Catholic church has a dreadful track record, as we all know, when it comes to care-taking of children and doing damage. She had a tremendous resentment against it.

If today, someone who had been raised in a Catholic orphanage went on television and ripped up a picture of the Pope, I think there would be a healthy and earnest debate about it. What there wouldn’t be is a consensus that she was a nutter, because that’s what happened. The very next week, as I recall, on Saturday Night Live, they made fun of her, which was easy to do. Put a bald wig on a lady and everyone immediately starts laughing, like, oh, Sinead O’Connor, she’s ripping up a picture of the Pope.

The thing about Sinead O’Connor in retrospect was, A, she was right, and B, she didn’t seem to give a shit. Even though it was within the framework of having the number one album in the United States, her second album, I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got, went number one, and with this massive hit song written by Prince, Nothing Compares 2U, she was also still the woman who was shaving her head. She didn’t care. She took a big shot there.

I don’t think ultimately that that incident is why she suffered mental health problems. I do think that incident impacted her career. To the extent that that hurt her and upset her, that is deeply unfortunate, because it shouldn’t have. Catholic church is a mess. I don’t care. People can go on Saturday Night Live and make fun of me. I don’t care. I also don’t care, because I’m so brave and also bald. Easy for me to say now. Not easy for anyone to say back then, but certainly not a young woman on TV, who was already turning away from convention.

John: You already mentioned Troy as a song people should seek out. I’m going to put Success Has Made A Failure of Our Home, so Loretta Lynn’s song that she covered on her third album.

Craig: Am I Not Your Girl.

John: Am I Not Your Girl. It’s fantastic. It’s a song I was not aware of until I heard her sing it. It’s gorgeous. One of the things I loved about, there was a moment in time where there would be, Red Hot and Blue, there were a bunch of special albums, where they would bring in pop stars to do one charity album. You’d hear these great bands do a cover of something that was completely not in their wheelhouse. Those were fantastic. There’s a Cole Porter one. It was Red Hot and Blue. I just remember that CD being just a delight, top to bottom. This was again this case where to hear her cover this song was fantastic to me.

Craig: I’m not sure there would be any song that if someone said, “Do you think Sinead O’Connor could successfully cover this?” I think the answer is always yes, again because of the elasticity of her voice and the rawness of the emotion and the honesty. Just to refer once more to that performance of Troy, it’s about commitment. One of the things that we look for when we are guiding actors as directors is commitment and an abandonment of self into the moment. It would’ve been really interesting to see Sinead O’Connor trying that form of art, because her commitment while singing is 100%. It is pure. It is not manipulative. It’s just true. It’s just true. Really interesting.

Also, the other thing that happened with her later in life, which led to I guess some more snickering or something, is that she converted to Islam and stuck with it too. It didn’t seem like it was a whimsical, “I’m nuts, let me try this thing now.” She stood with it. We’re using her name, Sinead O’Connor. That’s the name she was given, but that is not the name that she ultimately chose to live as. She was born Sinead Marie Bernadette O’Connor. Side note, nobody until Sinead O’Connor understood how to pronounce any Gaelic word at all.

John: It’s true.

Craig: When it first came out, everyone was like, “Who’s sin-EE-ad?” You’re like, “No, man, it’s shuh-NAYD.” “What?” That’s how we learned how that worked.

John: Like the classic spelling of Sivan, no one was able to do that before.

Craig: Nobody was able to do that before. She did convert to Islam and changed her name to Shuhada’ Sadaqat, important to acknowledge that.

John: Absolutely. The other thing I want to throw, I fell down a YouTube hole with Sinead O’Connor, just looking at different performances, a more recent one is All Apologies, the Nirvana song. She does, of course, an amazing cover of that.

Craig: That’s the thing. I feel like, oh-

John: There’s a kinship between Kurt Cobain and Sinead O’Connor that makes sense.

Craig: I think there’s a kinship between every artist that maybe suffers from an overcommitment. We in the audience are the beneficiaries of those who commit so fully that they burn themselves up in the flame of their own feelings and art. It’s painful to watch how many people have done that. In our own ways, as writers, because what we do is much slower and not performative, we are insulated from that, but not completely. I’m sure you’ve felt it. I feel it all the time, the price. There’s a price.

John: Craig, one thing is we have to balance though. We can recognize that there are performers who do that and that that is a real thing that happens, and being careful to not over-glamorize it to the point where that’s the only way to make art is to destroy yourself to it.

Craig: It’s not. It’s not. That’s the thing. What happens is, I think it is exciting when you see people throwing themselves into things so fully. By all accounts, watching Jim Morrison with The Doors in the ‘60s was mind-blowing. I completely agree with you. It is not necessary to make great art whatsoever. Disciplined artists ultimately win out as superior, because they are able to create more for longer, but to the extent that Sinead did do something unique. I don’t believe there has been anyone else like her since she burst onto the scene.

Also, one of the things that her passing drove home for me is how time screws with you as you get older, because when we were in college, Sinead O’Connor was so much older than we were. She was five years older than we were.

John: That’s all it was.

Craig: Now it’s like, she died, she was 56. I’m 52, but basically I’m 56. What’s the difference? It is remarkable how close we were in age. It makes it more upsetting. It makes it more upsetting.

John: It does. Rest in peace to Sinead O’Connor. If you’ve not checked out her music, if you’re a younger person who just barely knows the name, worth spending some time digging through that, because you will find an amazing artist and really just a ground breaker.

Craig: No question. She was one of a kind and gone too soon and will be missed.

John: Great. Thanks so much.

Craig: Thank you.

Links:

• Scriptnotes LIVE! at Dynasty Typewriter in Los Angeles benefitting HollywoodHEART
• Weekend Read 2, now available on MacOS.
• Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon by Timothy B Lee and Sean Trott
• Word Vectors
• Decrypto
• Matt Gaffney’s Weekly Crossword Contest
• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
• Sinéad O’Connor – Troy (Live At The Dominion Theatre, 1988)
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Jake Weisblat (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.