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: And this is Episode 475 of Scriptnotes. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show I’ll be talking with legendary screenwriter Eric Roth about his writing process and his very long career which is probably the envy of any screenwriter out there.

Craig: Screenwriters envious? What?

John: What? I mean, Craig, can you think of anybody else who has had the length of career that Eric Roth has had?

Craig: Well, you know, my go to on this one is Robert Kamen.

John: Oh yeah

Craig: Who is right up there. I mean, Robert Kamen as we like to point out stretches all the way from Karate Kid in the early ‘80s to Taken and more in the 2010s. So, he’s been crushing it for a long time. But Eric Roth is no doubt one of our all-timers.

John: Yeah. So the first movie I can think of that was Eric Roth’s was Forrest Gump. But that was at the midpoint of his career. So, his first movie credit is back in 1970.

Craig: Wow.

John: And he’s still working more now than ever. So he has A Star is Born. He has the upcoming Dune. He has a lot of other projects. He has Mank which he talks a little bit about on this interview I did with him which is a Netflix thing.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So he’s got a lot of great stuff out there. So this interview was done a few weeks ago on Zoom. It was for the Writers Guild Foundation. It doesn’t sound as crisp and clear as when we’re doing our live shows all in a room, so keep that in mind. But I think there’s really great stuff in here.

Craig and I will be back at the end for our One Cool Things. And a bonus segment for Premium members where we talk about, oh, that thing that happened this week. What was it, Craig?

Craig: The thing that was the week and that was our presidential election.

John: Yeah. So we’ll be back at the end to talk about that. But for now let’s transition to a few weeks ago and my discussion with Eric Roth.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. It is my great, great pleasure to welcome you to this WGF event. We are here talking with the legendary Eric Roth. I’m so excited that we’re going to have a good long chat here on Zoom in front of 500 to 800 people watching us. So, we are in our respective homes. Just for folks who maybe don’t know your credits off hand I’m going to read just a shortened list of some of your credits. Forrest Gump. The Postman. The Horse Whisperer. The Insider. Ali. Munich. The Good Shepherd. Lucky You. Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Ellis. A Star is Born. The upcoming Dune. The upcoming Killers of the Flower Moon. Producer on Mank. There’s so much to talk about with you. But thank you for being here. It’s a pleasure to see you.

Eric Roth: I do. I’m glad you do this. I said to you earlier they sent me a list of people who could moderate it and I don’t really know you that well and I thought, well, he’s a talented guy, why not talk to you, you know? I love that.

John: So I’m excited to get into this. And usually in one of these things we would start back in the beginning about how you got interested in screenwriting and all that stuff and we’d spend about 20 minutes getting up to something like the present time and then start talking about the things we should talk about. So I’m going to do it the opposite way. I’d love to talk about what your writing process is like, what you’re working on, how you work in October 2020 as we’re recording this. What does your daily writing life look like?

Eric: My writing life really hasn’t varied since I gave up the typewriter which wasn’t as long ago as you might think. Because I’m really a luddite. I still work and I’ve talked about this a lot, so if anybody is bored with it they can tell me, but I still work on a DOS program. I have two computers. And I think half superstition and half a fear of not being able to learn Final Draft or something. It’s a program called Movie Master that actually is what they formulated Final Draft from.

The problem with it is that after like 40 pages it runs out of memory. So you’ve got to make sure – it’s about an act break, you know. And so I can’t do anything with the internet on that computer. That’s just solely for work which is good. And I still have to print out everything and I can’t email on it. So, the problem starts to become if you’re getting lucky and somebody is going to do the movie, it’s on their computer with Final Draft and creating the real document.

Other than that I start at like eight in the morning every day. I mean, I always use the example of John Cheever. He’d go to work every day. Take the train in from Long Island in his nice suit and a hat and he’d go and worked in a basement in New York City in Midtown. And he’d take off his pants and he’d take his shirt off, worked in his t-shirt and his underwear. 12 o’clock he’d get dressed again, go have a martini lunch. Come back. Work till four or five o’clock. Get dressed again and go take the train home. So it was like a job. And a great job for him and better than anybody probably.

And I feel the same way. I’m pretty disciplined. I don’t do as many hours as John Cheever. But come one o’clock, I mean if I’ve done four or five hours that’s about all creatively I feel I can do. And then I’ll work again at night. I’ll start around 10 o’clock and if I’m going good I’ll go as late as I can go. If not I’ll just do an hour so I can go to bed.

If I’m really crunched I get up really early like three or four in the morning and see as much as I can do. [Unintelligible] I like to bet the horses, so that’s my afternoons a lot. I have too many children and too many grandchildren, so I spend a lot of time, if I could, aside from the Covid. I’m a blessed human being. I mean, I’ve been lucky enough to be able to – I think the biggest thing that I taught myself and it’s obviously to be successful to do it, but I tried to pick – and I’ve been wrong many, many times – but projects I felt would somehow enhance my own self number one, and two some kind of legacy that I wasn’t just writing things for pay, which is a nice thing too. But if I could have a choice why not something I really cared about because I believe wholeheartedly that passion is two-thirds of the game and the other third is this kind of bastardized art form we do which is really a craft of a kind. And you can be a great craftsman. I’m not sure you’re an artist as a screenwriter, but that’s a whole different conversation.

John: There are so many threads I want to pursue off of this, but I’m going to start at the most recent one which is the degree to which a successful screenwriter like you are is largely – there’s an aspect of stock picking. Because you have your choice of the projects you could work on. Obviously you’re initiating yourself things, things you get offered. And there’s a decision process about which ones you’re going to pursue. So it sounds like you’re trying to pick projects that challenge you. Are they the ones that scare you a little bit? Are they the ones that you know you can do it? What is the decision process? Is it about who else is involved?

Eric: I think in a more intellectual way I try to pick things that the themes interest me and then who are the people involved and the characters. And I’ve done a number of adaptations. People think I’ve probably done more than I really have. But, I mean, even things like Benjamin Button was just a bad F. Scott Fitzgerald story if it’s possible that he wrote something that was bad. But of course the idea was a guy aging backwards. And I never came up with that one. But the theme of that I said well that’s interesting to me.

Elvis Mitchell, if you know who he is, the critic from the New York Times. And he does a NPR show. He’s a wonderful man. And he said that he felt – and it sort of stopped me because I thought it was kind of accurate, and I’m jumping. My mind works this way. That my films are about loneliness. And so I guess somehow – and then he started talking about it, and maybe you can make that case and maybe you can’t. But it resonated with me. I think there’s some truth to it. So maybe I pick out themes that have to do with some melancholic kind of [unintelligible]. And something about loneliness, you know.

I never had my own room my whole life. So, I guess I don’t know if I need that. I mean, I lived with my brothers and then – my brother I mean. And then I went to college and had roommates. And I got married very young. And then et cetera. So, maybe that’s part of it. This desire to have human contact nearby. I get very kind of funky in a hotel room alone at night. So not that I do anything exciting. I get too aware of everything I guess.

John: Now you can chart some of that fear of loneliness over the course of the 15 movies that I listed. But talk to me about the movies that I didn’t list, because I’m sure over the course of your career there’s at least as many movies that you spent a tremendous amount of time on, you worked your ass off on, that don’t exist. And to what degree do those movies still stick with you? The scripts that you wrote that are not reflected in your bio?

Eric: I’ll tell you one thing. I’m very lucky that my batting average is pretty great. So I don’t have that many. I regret they never made a movie that Brad Pitt was – it was actually Brad Pitt’s idea, Hatfield McCoy, that I think is a really good script. I told him eventually, said I’m going to give this to Kevin Costner to do it on television, very successful for him. I liked that very much because it was like about – that feud was kind of very interesting because there was no difference between the people. It wasn’t like the Hutus and the Tutsis, where there was religious differences between the Jews and the Arabs. You know what I’m saying.

And these people all came from the same place. But anyway it was interesting. It came down to the coal companies paid one group for the coal that was under their land because there was a lot of coal in one area and not the other. So that was one.

I wrote a big space thing that probably I don’t know if it was worthy of getting made, but the idea was that three prehistoric men were taken – they were triplets I guess – were taken to another galaxy where they’re like sponges, you know. I’m trying to think what else.

John: I can see a loneliness to that.

Eric: It’s very lonely.

John: It fits Eric Roth’s canon of loneliness.

Eric: Hatfield McCoy, the main character is lonely. So that one worked. I’ve had, just bragging I guess, like 25 movies made. And some of them I think are better than others. And some are my fault and some are other people’s fault.

I think I’ve had maybe seven that didn’t get done.

John: That’s amazing. That’s a remarkable batting average.

Eric: I think I started slipping as the business changed in the sense that I was able to write kind of the movie star driven movies to a certain extent. And then as that changed, you know, as movie stars became too common there was a change of course. And so I think those became – A Star is Born is kind of important to me because it reestablished for me that I could still do this in a way. Not that I had a question mark. But I think there were a few things that kind of lagged in the interim. I’m sure there will be others that come to me that didn’t get done. There’s a few. And there’s a few I wish didn’t get done.

John: We won’t make you names the ones you wish didn’t get done.

Eric: I’ll name them. I have no problem. I’ll tell you a very quick story that–

John: Tell me which one.

Eric: So this one I think people enjoy. So I wrote a movie called The Postman early on. And I wrote it for Tom Hanks and a whole bevy of directors were going to do it. Good directors. And it was supposed to be a satire, sort of Swiftian look at post-apocalypse idea, was supposed to be after nuclear war. A man who delivers the mail. Etc. Etc. And it was very tongue and cheek. But I thought it was kind of a good satire.

And then a number of years passed and Kevin Costner hooked onto it and he made it. And during the making of it the writer Brian Helgeland who is a wonderful writer who did Mystic River and he won an Oscar and really talented man. He had done the rewrite and he called me and he said, “What do you want to do?” He was very generous. “Do you want your name on this? What do you want to do? Do you want to just keep credit? Whatever you want to do.” And I said let me check. And I asked my agent. I said what do you think. And she happened to represent Kevin Costner and said, “You’ve got to put your name on it. I’ve seen the dailies. The movie is amazing.” I said really. OK. All right. I’ll take my credit.

And the movie won a Razzie as one of the worst movies ever made. [Barbara] gave us a Razzie, so it was pretty great.

John: I want to get into sort of the profession and this idea of rewriting and being rewritten and rewriting other people, because we’ve both done a lot of that. And I think we can clear up some misconceptions about that. But I want to get back to a little bit more of the daily work that you’re doing. Because you certainly treat your writing like a job. It’s not a thing you occasionally do. You treat it very seriously. You said you’re at your desk at eight in the morning.

There’s a scene for you to write. What is your first step in approaching a scene that you’re writing on a day? Outlining? What are you doing?

Eric: Well to go a step further, if it’s an adaptation I’m underlining the book and I find I underline the whole book, so then you say where do I begin. I’m not huge on outlines. I know, and I think every one of my movies has had the same truth. The first scene has never changed once I figured out what it was. And the end scene. The only one I can remember is in Munich Steven switched it to be at the World Trade Center for a good reason. It was in a different location, but the scene was basically the same. But the middle is this great big adventure. So I don’t know what it is. And it’s obviously a little more concise if there’s a book. But if it’s more original writing, no matter if there’s a book or not, then sort of that’s what the journey is for me.

So when I start a day, assuming I’ve gotten through the first two or three scenes, hopefully when I leave the computer I know the next two or three scenes, what I’m going to write the next day. That makes me feel very good. I sleep at night. If I don’t it makes me a little anxious.

John: Talk to me about when you say you know the next two or three scenes, that you know in a general sense what’s going to happen or how you’re going to get through the scenes?

Eric: I know what’s going to happen. I know where the characters are going. That doesn’t mean it works out always, but the characters lead me down there. And as long as I can stay with as I say the theme that’s all important to me. Like for instance I’m doing this little thriller right now for Oscar Isaac and Ben Stiller that I think is quite good. It’s from Jo Nesbo who is a Swedish mystery writer. He’s pretty terrific. Short story. And it’s an oddball story.

It needs me to keep figuring out where they’re going to go next, because it’s not a chase per se but it is in that English style of Strangers on a Train kind of thing. And so I know for instance that I know the next scene is in Paris in a hotel. I know what happens there. I know they have to then figure out how to get to sort of a farmhouse. And I know what happens at the farmhouse because I figured out that he does something deceptive. So I know those three, so I’m hoping when I get there I’ll know what the next three are. I know the trajectory of it though. I know what the outcome of the script is.

So, I’m on my track. Now this one has been a little trickier because I tried to be a little probably – I think it ended up being more clever than half. I tried to make it a little more post-modern kind of like adaptation or something. And I’m still with that but I had to tone it way down. So this one I actually had to rewrite quite a few times.

John: Can I stop you for one second? You say you rewrite a few times. So this is as you’re still doing the first draft you’re making big changes? Or this is after?

Eric: I start on page one every day.

John: OK so you are that kind of classic, like go back and read through what you’ve written and move forward?

Eric: I read everything and I make little whatever comments, fix grammar and spelling, whatever else. And it makes me go through another process and makes me more familiar with it. And they do say though that if you’re going to spend your time doing that you don’t give as much time to the ending because mathematically you’re running out of time at some point.

John: But let’s talk about the first new scene you’re working on. So you’re talking about the scene that’s happening in a Paris hotel room. You know sitting down basically what needs to happen in that scene, but what is your process in terms of figuring out who is going to say what, what’s the action in the scene, like how it’s going to unfold? Is that just a sitting and thinking thing for you, or is that fingers on the keys kind of decision?

Eric: I think it’s a little more intuitive. I’ll give you an example. I’m doing this thing for HBO, a TV show that Alex Gibney is going to direct with Laura Dern. And it’s a six-parter. I’m just doing the first episode. A true story about a woman who is a psychiatrist and her job is to interview serial killers and recommend to the court whether they’re sane or insane to be executed. And so I’ve sort of just begun, but now I’m coming to the interrogation of the guy that becomes our lead character in the first episode. And except for basic stuff I wanted to get out where he asks her questions, where did you go to school. I mean, it’s sort of expository stuff that’s just bad writing.

But I just started writing dialogue between them. And so some of it works, some of it doesn’t, but I just sort of feel my way. And I’m pretty good at it. I mean, I try to write a little off topic. I think the subtext is much more important than textual. So, that’s a thing I’ve had to learn over the years and it’s not something that I think you’re just given unless you’re just such a wonderful writer. But the best writing is not talking about what’s going on.

And so in this one I’m just trying what’s it going to sound like between this serial killer who killed like nine people and her. And so try to keep human and humorous of some kind and also get as much information we can get out of it. So I just dive in. And I’ve always done that. So it’s not a matter of just self-confidence from being successful. I think it’s just – and I embarrass myself by sort of saying the dialogue out loud. I’m like the worst actor ever. Because everybody’s voice sounds exactly the same. Which does remind me, I mean, as a rule that you want to have everybody’s character be something unique and sound different.

This came to me in a way, even though I think I knew it somehow instinctively from being just I like literature, so I read a lot. That Michael Cimino, if you remember that director, Michael and I were doing a movie. I had a rewritten a movie called The Year of the Dragon. It was OK. But it was by the same guy who wrote Silence of the Lambs. But he had given Mickey Rourke a wallet that had the character’s full life, like pictures of him in Vietnam and his children and driver’s license. I’m sure Mickey Rourke never looked at it, but it spoke to the fact that he had to know that person inside and out psychologically. And that’s how I feel as a writer that you have to do that. You have to know every one of your character’s complete lives.

John: You’re saying that you need to know your character’s complete lives, are you writing that down or are you just spending time thinking about that? How much of that bio work is something that a person could actually read versus just stuff you are thinking about in your head?

Eric: No, I don’t write it down. Except for little scribbles. Like in this thriller I decided that she was going to be a – because I thought it was clever – that she was going to be like Gillian Flynn, like someone who wrote Gone Girl. So she’s an author which I think is interesting because then it makes you wonder whether this whole thing is just a tale that she’s spinning, you know. So then I started figuring how old is she? And you go through it. And what are her neuroses? I’ll give something a little bit away, but like in the Laura Dern one I have her being like because she’s always stressed because of these horrible people she’s dealing with, I’m going to try to make her like a kleptomaniac. I just want to see it works.

So, what does that say? And then what does that say about your relationship, because her child then becomes a kleptomaniac? You know, that’s what I want to try. I probably shouldn’t say this too loud because it’s giving away something. But it’s just interesting to me. And so I don’t think I’m wrong. I’m maybe not right, but maybe that is a question.

I always think I’ve done that, though. That I just said to hell with it. Let’s get old and go down like the same bridge. I don’t mind trying things that are a little bit out of the norm, you know.

John: Now, you describe this Laura Dern project, there’s the Ben Stiller thing. It seems like you’re working on a bunch of things simultaneously. How many different projects are underneath your fingers at any given point?

Eric: This is unhappily, because I’m not really – it makes me very anxious. But I do have them stacked up which is nice for me, congratulations, but it just happened to be they dovetailed. And sometimes that happens. And the good news is I spent four years on, or five years on this book, with Killers of the Flower Moon, which everybody should read. It’s a wonderful book. And my screenplay I think was accurate to the book, but it was the book and the story of very quickly Osage Indians 1821 – 1921 I mean – poorest people in America and discover oil in this terrible land in Oklahoma they’d been driven to. And then every killer in America comes to kill 184 of them for their money. And this really heroic guy comes in.

So that’s still, you know, that’s supposed to start filming once the Covid clears out, and it’s Marty Scorsese, in March. So I have that. So there will be continuing rewrites with that. Leonardo wanted some things changed we argued about and he won half of them, I won half of them.

So that’s happening. And then these other two are works that are ongoing. And then there’s some older ones that pop up and I have to then address, which is just a factor of having been lucky enough to have a lot of work and some things are just dragging. We had this whole situation that’s developed with Cleopatra. I had done like seven drafts of Cleopatra at that point for Angelina. And it became a mess with the hack at Sony and Scott Rudin and this and that.

And now the project was announced the other day that Patty Jenkins is going to do one with Gal Godot and a very good writer named Laeta, I forget her last name.

John: Laeta Kalogridis.

Eric: Exactly. And so I’m debating whether this is going to be worth me racing with them. Probably not.

John: Yeah.

Eric: But that’s an old project. In other words I hadn’t worked on it for five years or something. But I think, look, that’s a function of some luck. Some people have given me the opportunity. And obviously I’ve been successful at it, which sometimes by design and a lot of it is not, you know.

John: Talk about rewrites. So talk about the rewrites that you go through in terms of getting the project up to the point where you’re happy with it. And then the rewrite process after you’re happy with it to get other people happy with it.

Eric: I mean, when I’m done – when I feel it’s done I’m done. And then I’ll turn it in. I don’t like turning it in just to a producer. I usually try to go around them and turn it into the studio at the same time if I can. And then we get the notes. I have rules about notes and now because I have enough cache I can say you cannot – only give me bullet points. I say would you consider this character doing that? Would you consider…?

I mean, I don’t like when they write these ridiculous essays on showing how clever they are with the notes, you know. And obviously if I did something stupid it wasn’t my intention to write something stupid. So that’s notes.

So then I’ll begin to rewrite. And rewrites are hard for me because I think I’m more of an instinctive writer. So, then I’m lucky enough to have worked with some really great directors. Some who are writers of their own and that’s easy in some respects because they get it and we can work it out together. Like Michael Mann. He’s a very tough guy and is hard to work with, for the right reasons. But he’s a writer so we would battle things out. But he knew if I didn’t quite have it we could feel the direction. While on the other hand, who can I think of, Robert Redford was a little more difficult because he wasn’t a born writer. So he wanted to prove things.

Marty Scorsese and David Fincher are very different people but phenomenal. Marty is the most willing to have you be inventive. And he’ll figure out how to film it and if he thinks it works. And he’s very generous if he doesn’t think it works. He says, “Let’s try it this way.” And David on the other hand is very, very specific. Very literal in a great way and as smart as a whip. And really fights you to get to where you want – he says, “I want you to tell me what you’re trying to articulate.” He just has a different way of doing things. And they both end up in different places. Their movies look different and they’re different people but they’re both incredible experiences which is incredibly rewarding. Which will just give me the time that – I have a movie coming out called Mank that I produced with David and his father wrote and we worked on the script to hopefully bring it up to where it’s really great. But it’s his father’s script.

And it’s about Herman Mankiewicz’s writing of Citizen Kane and his world with Marion Davies and William Randolph Hearst and Orson Welles. And I think it’s an incredible movie. I’m tooting trumpets here but it’s black and white. It’s as skilled as David Fincher can be I think. And I think it’s probably limited for appeal to people because it’s such a narrow subject, but it’s a master work I think because of David’s abilities.

John: Its appeal is exactly the folks who are listening to this Zoom right now. Because it is about a writer’s relationship with a director and a visionary film that may or may not come into being based on how people did the stuff.

Eric: I think one of the reasons David brought me on was because I’ve been sort of an insider in Hollywood in that way for many, many years. You know, I’ve worked with everybody from Kurosawa through Spielberg through whoever. So I’ve had many relationships with many writers, directors, actors. So I know the process. I know what’s wounding about it. So when he asked me what does it feel like to feel like you’re not going to get credit I can write that. I know what that feels like. So it’s a real experience yeah.

John: Well talk us through that. Talk us through advice for writers who are dealing with a director for the first time and what those initial conversations are like. How do you feel out a director and sort of understand what that relationship is going to be like in that first meeting? Because I’ve been through some of them and I’ve come in with assumptions. Sometimes I’ve been right. Sometimes I’ve been wrong. Sometimes it has gone well. Sometimes it has gone really, really poorly. What advice can you offer to folks who are listening about that first conversation?

Eric: I want to talk about sort of earlier in my career because I think it’s a little different now because I’m kind of cocky. I’m a little cocky now.

John: You’re a legend.

Eric: Well, a legend, so funny. But I can come in and I can back up things. I say you might want to [unintelligible]. Early on I did – this is a good story and it’s not [unintelligible] it’s true. There was a director named Stuart Rosenberg who had done Cool Hand Luke and he was a very good Hollywood director and a nice man. And I was really young. I mean, I was 19 when I went down and rewrote The Drowning Pool in Louisiana. And then I was on Onion Field with him. And Onion Field ended up getting made by a man named Harold Becker and it’s an interesting movie.

But Stuart and I fought for like two weeks over one particular scene. And I thought it was a great scene and he didn’t think it was so great. And he finally said to me, and this just always stuck with me that “you can leave it in the script but I’m not going to shoot it.” So that was the end of that conversation. And that was the truth. So at the end of the day if the director is not going to be flexible you are stuck. So, you better try to find a way to be as best communal as you can be and also make the scene as good as possible. So you have to find, I think, and sometimes I’m good at it and sometimes I’m not as good, another way to do the scene. Another way to tell that piece of drama if that’s what you need to do. And each director approaches it differently.

Amenable to a point and yet I get very stringent if I think that they’re varying from what the piece is about. And then I think – I’ve been lucky because the people I’ve worked with, I mean, in the main are really good directors. I mean, it’s also something I don’t think I could do. I mean, I tried it when I was younger and I actually won some awards, a short. But I always felt like this isn’t me. I thought if I went on to direct I’d be like a B-minus director and what was the point of that, you know? And I didn’t want to leave my family and a whole bunch of other reasons.

But the directors have been, I mean, I think have yet to figure out the way they want to get at something. And if you want to be a dick about it you’re going to have a lot of problems. On the other hand I don’t think you should just roll over. It’s a balance. It’s a tightrope walk.

John: Yeah. A thing that people have a hard time understanding about the job of a screenwriter is obviously we’re putting words on the page the same way the novelist is, but there’s a whole social aspect to it. You have to be able to read people in the room and understand what they’re actually going after. Even before you get to directors, initially with producers and with studio executives, find out what they’re actually really after and what the note is behind the note.

Eric: Yeah. That’s well said, John. In other words it’s really trying to read the note behind the note. Because the initial note will just annoy you. I mean, in most cases you probably thought about it. Just somebody gave us a note on something recently that they felt there was too much description and I took umbrage at it. Said I’ve been very successful with a lot of description. But I got it. In other words I think it made it harder for them to read. It was too dense. And once I settled down and I thought well that’s OK. So in other words you have to be somehow – unless they’re nasty, then you don’t need to suffer that in any way, shape, or form.

But I think you have to be finding a way to be as communal – look, it’s a communal craft, right. Even though I do believe it’s a film by is a director’s film when all is said and done. They put all the pieces together. The architecture, the ship is the screenwriter. And you’re not going to go on the journey without that. But the director has to get it to the right place in the right way.

John: How different is it now than ‘70s/’80s, your early credits? How different is it doing this job? Or is it not really that different?

Eric: I don’t feel it’s that different oddly because I guess maybe I just stay with my process. I used to, I mean, just on a personal level I had a lot of kids and a lot of little kids. And I used to love to just – they would run around and I would just write in the living room, sitting down to type something. But I don’t know. I had a couple oddball little interesting movies made in the ‘70s that probably would be, you know, interesting today if they were streamed. And then I had some big movies. So, I don’t know. I think eventually it comes down to feeling like the same task to me. But, you know, I’m looking, you know, it’s like my dad said when you talk how does it feel to be 80, or whatever he was at the time, he said, “You know, I don’t look out of those eyes. I don’t look out of 80-year-old eyes, I look out of whatever eyes I am.” And that’s the same thing at 75.

I’m quite – this is just a kind of sweet, sad thing, but lovely in its own way. I’m very close with David Milch who I think is our American Shakespeare from television. David has some challenges with some Alzheimer’s. So I went and visited him. I visit him like once a month. And he was talking about how time goes so. And I said sure does. And I thought to myself, gee, when I was 60 I said, well, I mean 15 years from now 75, or 20 from now, that seems like forever. Well, it was a blink. It was a complete blink of the eyes. And now I’m 75. I said do you have any regrets. And he said, “I wasn’t more generous of spirit.” Which meant he felt that he had been too selfish his whole life. And whether that’s true or not we can think about.

But it made me think. I mean, I think that’s an important kind of lesson. I’ll put that in something, you know. Because that’s just something important.

John: Thinking about David Milch and his tremendous success in television and you said the American Shakespeare and I can believe that, he was making television at this pivotal moment where it became just a dominant American art form in terms of a written art form. And the writers who created that were so acclaimed and rightfully. It’s a little frustrating to me. I’m wondering if it’s frustrating to you that we as screenwriters are writing the features that are so iconic and yet there hasn’t been the same appreciation that we sometimes are writing these films that are known for that.

If you were to go back and rewind your career 25 years would you have still done features and focused on features, or would you have been more attracted to 25?

Eric: No. First of all I think, you know, I was taught that television is smaller than life and that movies are bigger than life. So I still look at the 40-foot-screen as being 40 even though it’s irrelevant I guess now. And I’m not sure I’m as good a short story writer as you have to be, even though I think I’ve written some good TV episodes. I wrote one for David that they never aired because it was never shot because of this show getting canceled. I thought it was probably as good of writing as I’d done. But I can just be brave because it wasn’t sort of my betting the farm.

No, I grew up with movies. My first experience was watching like War of the Worlds in the Brooklyn Paramount balcony. And it was like oh my god. This is like something that takes me somewhere else. Then I was very big on psychedelics in the ‘70s and late ‘60s, so I liked sort of mind expansion stuff where you can try to go further and farther. So I never felt that way about television.

And I think the difference is that you have some incredible writers who are also directors though. And that’s a great advantage. Because Ingmar Bergman or Fellini. In other words you could start naming them, Antonioni, and then Francis of course. So these people could then realize what they wrote. So, I don’t think there’s anything better than Godfather II probably that has ever been done. Or to me 2001 changed my life in some way. So Kubrick was able to get that out of his writer and was able to write what he did.

I think, I don’t know, maybe there isn’t an American Shakespeare in screenwriting. I think part of that is because you have to be a director maybe to do that. And then maybe Chayefsky was, you know, of a sort. There’s probably a few others, you know.

John: Yeah, I mean, and Sorkin would be in that list, but he’s also–

Eric: Aaron is wonderful.

John: Tremendous television stuff that he’s done before this. Nora Ephron.

Eric: I would think, like Bob Fosse, he’s pretty amazing. I mean, he’s a director though. I think there’s a major advantage in being able to direct and if you’re able to be good at being a director.

John: I’m going to tackle some questions from our growing list of questions here. This one is about adaptations from [unintelligible]. He asks, “There’s a ‘don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.’ How do you negotiate what should be kept in an adaptation and what should be left out when you’re adapting a true life story?”

Eric: That’s a great question. We just had this discussion the other night because I watched The Trial of the Chicago Seven. And I thought Aaron did a really great job. And I first had a chip on my shoulder, I was a little jaundiced because I knew Abbie Hoffman quite well and I knew some of the people and I had been involved with [unintelligible]. Anyway, and then it got, I’m not sure, I have to ask him because there’s a scene at the end of the movie, because I think the move eventually really becomes pretty great. And he has a scene where someone gives a speech in the courtroom and I’m going to guess that he wrote a speech that was not what was there. And so then we got into a debate about what you can do.

I said, well wait a minute, this is like an historical event. And it’s a trial. And then somebody pointed out I had done the same kind of thing in something of my own. And so that I think I guess your first rule is you’re a dramatist, you know. I’ll give you another example.

I did a script for Tom Hanks called Garden of the Beast which is an historical book which was about the American ambassador to Germany during WWII who was kind of a very big Nazi aficionado. Spoke German. Had gone to school in Germany. And then he saw kind of the errors of his ways as certain things happened. But I dramatized a couple things that Tom objected to. One was that I had a scene – I don’t think this is a big deal – but Hitler used to watch King Kong like three times a week. And so I had a scene where he and the ambassador are discussing whatever the drama was while King Kong was being played. Now that probably didn’t happen. I don’t think that changes the course of it or anything. But Tom took to me to task for it.

And then I had Hitler offered him a ride back to the embassy and I had him get in the car with Hitler with all the people on the streets. And I wanted to see how that felt like for anybody being inside of that and with flowers all over them. Tom objected to that. And he wasn’t right or wrong. In other words so that – my first job is I think as a dramatist. And we say this actually in the Mank movie that you can’t view somebody’s life in two hours. You only can do an impression of it. And the genius of Citizen Kane is that I think it’s the first movie that showed, and maybe there’s a Russian movie, that showed a character from multiple points of view. That’s very rare. In other words usually it’s [unintelligible]. But if you have a wife you have her point of view. If you have a child.

The other thing is I usually pick kind of bad books. So, you know, bad books and bad plays make really good movies because one of the reasons is you can just go take off on your own. So you can change things. I think you have to be careful in certain respects to what is the sensibilities of people. In other words I don’t think you just blithely decide to change what somehow is slavery or holocaust. In other words I think you have to be very careful.

But I mean there is a criteria that you have to dramatize it if you’re a dramatist. So you’re going to combine things. And this Killers of the Flower Moon is a perfect example because that was where I realized I had done the same thing at the end of a particular courtroom that’s at the end of the movie. And I had dramatized something that was not happening there, but I wanted to have.

So, I say go for it, but be a little bit cautious because you can get your assistant kicked if you’re going to start rewriting history that’s affecting people’s sensitivity. And I have never tried to do that. But, yeah, I think there is a burden.

I mean, look, a lot of people don’t like Forrest Gump. They think it’s a poke in the eye at liberalism and all sorts of things. I don’t have the same feeling about it. And Bob Zemeckis and I are quite different. He’s very, at that time, more universal poke in the eye guy. He didn’t give a shit if he made fun of the Black Panthers or Ronald Reagan. And I was a good staunch, I was born as a red diaper baby and I had great communist beliefs. Became watered down over the years.

So the movie was criticized probably rightly in some respects, but I think as Quentin Tarantino said, “I think people have lost the sense of irony.” Because the whole thing is supposed to be – it’s supposed to be a satire, you know. But I think you’ve got to be careful of that is my point. I think you have to really look – and particularly today, because people are very aware of their everything – heritage, what they feel about themselves. I mean, they should. They should.

John: Speaking of Forrest Gump, a good segue into a question from JJ. Can you talk about the process of getting hired for adaptations in particular? How do you get started doing adaptation work? So I think it could be, you could talk about Forrest Gump, obviously many of your later projects they came to you with a book and you could say yes or no. But earlier one there were going to be projects where do you want to do this. Do you want to come in and talk to us about this? Your pitching approach to a book. What are those initial conversations like as you’re describing how you want to take an adaptation?

Eric: Well that’s a good question. The good news is that those were things that were presented to me by like studios. It wasn’t anybody else really. Or a producer. There was an entity. It wasn’t me bringing them a book and trying to stand on my head and say this will make a good movie. So that was I think ahead of the game. Forrest Gump came as a book. I didn’t think it was a great book. And the man who wrote it should rest in peace. He gave me something that was like a gift. But it was a little farcical for me. And then I thought well this is a good way to tell the story of this year that I just lived through with time passing and all that stuff.

And I’m trying to think. Benjamin Button was as I said a short story of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s. He just did it for money. He did it for Colliers Magazine and had no stake in it at all. So I had the sort of permission to do whatever I wanted with it.

Munich was a true story. I was rewritten on Munich by Tony Kushner who I thought did a pretty great job in certain areas. Other areas I still resent. Not him personally. I mean, we can talk about that getting rewritten if you want. That’s why I brought it up.

John: Well let’s talk about rewriting. Because that’s a thing I promised we would get into. So, obviously you’ve come onto projects where there was already a script and you were coming in there to do work on it. And you’ve also had projects that you started and then someone else has taken over the project. So let’s start with when you’re coming in on an existing project and there is a script and you’re talking with folks about stuff. What are those initial conversations and how do you treat the material that you got from the start? Are you treating it like you’re treating a book that you’re being sent? This is the starting place and I’m going to write a new script? Are you trying to incorporate as many scenes as still possible there? What is the decision process for you?

Eric: I think it depended on where they are in the sequence of getting the movie made. Because I would never want to go in and destroy somebody’s having a movie get made. I’ve some good jobs in more limited basis. I thought I did good on Black Hawk Down. I thought I did some good writing on that. Leonardo and Russell Crowe was in. Ridley Scott directed it.

John: Was it Blood Diamond?

Eric: No. Something of Lies or something. Anyway, my point being I just don’t think I did much to help them. And they didn’t want much. But I don’t think what I did was great.

On the other hand I’ve come in on things like Cleopatra where I started from scratch. There had been a couple scripts before I did and good writers, but I just had a different point of view. And Benjamin Button was another one. And usually if I have the time I’ll put in the effort and start over if I think there’s a way. Or I’ll just say I can’t be helpful. I think it’s a more interesting conversation about not so much the work but I’ve rewritten people where it’s bruising to other people. And it’s one of the things I don’t like about doing it. As writers we scavenge each other. And then they don’t have a – something I’ve always spoken to that when you fight for credit and then if you don’t get it you don’t exist in that sense, however much time. And I feel the Writers Guild should change that. But I’m in the minority. I felt like they should have an additional writing credit or something, because everybody should at least share in what they did.

But the Writers Guild feels in the main that it diminishes the credit of the writers that get credit.

And then I’ve had obviously people come in and rewrite me. And I haven’t liked it. I said, you know, you feel like you’ve failed, you’ve been rejected. I knew for instance on this movie The Horse Whisperer, I liked Redford very much but I lived with him for like two months, two or three months. And I realized at one point he’s going to look in the mirror and not want to see me there. And so that’s what happened. And so a good writer, Richard LaGravenese, came in and did very good work. And I’m still not wild about the movie which I don’t think had enough adventure in it, but not Richard’s fault.

But that hurt. I was wounded by that. And you sort of lick your wounds. But I guess I’ll give you a funny story because it’s about this. I think it’s about rejection, you know, which every writer feels from day one. And I asked Warren Beatty the other day, I’m dropping a name here, but have you ever – I don’t know why this occurred to me. I said have you ever been rejected in your whole life. And he had to think for a long time. I said are done thinking? He said, “Yeah, I wanted to do Fistful of Dollars,” or one of those Clint Eastwood westerns. They picked Clint Eastwood. And he said, “But I got to do Bonnie and Clyde, so it worked out OK for me.”

John: It worked out.

Eric: The only thing he could think of about rejection. He didn’t say there was a woman who didn’t want to go out with me or whatever.

John: No.

Eric: A man. Whatever he felt. But that was it. I said pretty good. I think him and I’m dropping another name. I worked for Mick Jagger on a thing and he’s the other one I thought this guy has never had a moment’s rejection in his whole life, you know.

John: We have real time follow up here. So Body of Lies was the movie that you were thinking about.

Eric: Thank you.

John: So we have 1,000 people here in the audience.

Eric: See, bad title. Bad title to begin with.

John: Not a good title. Not a good title. Titles are important. They help frame what things are going to be, the projects.

Eric: Oh boy, is it ever. And names, by the way. Don’t you think character names are key, too? Unless it’s a satire or something. If I see a name – here’s one of the things I don’t like about Dune. Because I had read Dune when I was like 15 and I thought it was OK. I wasn’t as wild about it like 16-year-old boys mostly are. But then as I went back into it now to do this version for a guy I like very much, I did a good rewrite on Arrival, which I think I did a good job on, for Denis Villeneuve.

So we were cogitating the whole thing and there was a character named Duncan Idaho in it. And I said wait a minute this is like the planets are billions of miles away. This isn’t a translation of some other language. That’s his name. And I said well how the hell does that work? But that was a famous character and still will be.

John: So you just don’t have characters saying his name aloud very often in the movie hopefully. So it doesn’t bum people so much.

Eric: I mean, it’s fun to do – I think if you can give characters to somehow reflect the tone of the movie, like I did something today. I called the villain in the thriller Mr. Lime. And the reason was because that was an Orson Welles’ name in The Third Man. So those few who will know that will – or they’ll just think that’s a stupid idea.

John: A question here from Ellen Cornfeld. She writes, “How to learn to trust your own voice when you are a people pleasure by nature and surrounded by smart voices giving you terrific feedback on your scripts?” So, basically really a question for you. You’ve written this thing. You had an approach. You had a point of view. There’s a thing you want to do. Now you’re getting these notes back. How do you stay true to your own voice and your own instinct when you start getting that feedback?

Eric: I think you have to find a different approach and try to hopefully make that similar to what you could then live with to be, you know, that says what you want it to say. It’s difficult because you feel inundated. There’s sort of a higher power that’s looking down and giving you these [theote] of notes. And obviously I have the power more now because I’m more successful, but when I was younger I’m sure I felt kind of a little buffeted by it.

But I’m not saying not to stick with your vision but I think you have to maybe find a way to do your vision differently I guess. And that’s probably I guess a little more communal in that respect, or a little more where you can mediate things. Because it’s not black and white I guess. And sometimes you’re surprised at the end.

What happens, I mean, eventually which is kind of funny is that you stake your claim on something and you really stick your sword in the ground and you’re not going to move and then you slowly move and eventually it’s gone and it becomes gone and you don’t remember even you were involved with it, you know, and that scene just goes into some void in the ether.

So, I think you have to be brave in a way. Be brave without being stupid I guess.

John: Always a good combination. I’m going to combine a couple questions here. People are asking about writing for an actor or writing with an actor in mind. Do you prefer writing something where you know who is going to be playing that role? Or would you rather have it be blank as you’re starting?

Eric: I think there’s an advantage to both. In many cases I’ve known who the actor was, so that was easier. Like Tom Hanks for Forrest Gump was the dream. Brad Pitt was Benjamin Button so I knew what he could possibly do or not do. I was a little more taken with in The Insider that Russell Crowe when he was hired I had already written the part and the part was very difficult because I couldn’t interview the real guy. So I had to go on basically who is the guy and I tried to then develop a character which you could always do. You say, well, who is this man who was a scientist for tobacco companies? And what does that say? That he wants to be a big fish in a little pond of scientists? Or he is insecure about his science knowledge? In this case he actually really just wanted to get his pension.

So I wrote what was I think a full-blooded character and then Russell came on and Russell had a lot of questions. And I can’t tell you the number of times I had to get on an airplane and go down there because Michael Mann didn’t want to fight with him and he didn’t want to have that kind of relationship. So I would go and say – because Russell wouldn’t come out of his trailer and I’d say what’s going on. He’d say, “I don’t get this.” And so you go through it and you hopefully convince him that this is the way that it should be. And then you make some accommodations. Things on that movie I’ll never forget is that Al Pacino called me one morning and he said, “You have a three-page monologue here. I could do it in one look.” I said if you can do it in one look do it. And he did. He did.

John: That’s good. It saves some camera. Saves some reel.

Eric: And he really did. He really did.

John: Eric, what’s been your experience, because I’ve had the same thing with actors who are incredibly challenging to deal with over little things on scripts and stories and I’m always wrestling with to what degree are they being reasonable but they can’t connect these dots either intellectually or emotionally they can’t make it work? And to what degree is it insecurity? With a Russell Crowe or with other actors you’ve dealt with how do you think a writer can or should interact with actors who are doing that thing? It could be on an independent film, a small independent film set that our people are working on, or a giant mega budget picture. What works?

Eric: I mean, I think rehearsals are really important. And read-throughs because I think you get a sense of what they can do or can’t do, or where there’s going to be bumps. Like for every movie I’ve written I think I go to the set, because I have anticipated what’s going to be a scene that’s going to be a problem. Or I’ll go to watch what I enjoy. But I think you have to befriend the actor in a good way, even if they’re a dick. And try to find a way so you understand their psychology.

I mean, I’m going to do it, and he’s a nice person, I’m going to do a movie in the future with Joaquin Phoenix which is a really tough subject matter, but he works very differently. And he really wants to get into the weeds and the emotions and the things. Like he doesn’t rehearse at all. He doesn’t like rehearsals. But I’ve already established a relationship with him and I think we intellectually can understand what we both want from it. So he’ll trust me to some extent and I’ll trust him. And some of that is just having the experience of having done it for so long, because I work with so many people.

But I remember as a young boy I was literally 19 years old walking on the set of The Drowning Pool, same Stuart Rosenberg had directed, and Paul Newman was the star. And they needed a rewrite and I came with my new pair of corduroys and my nice new briefcase and walked on the set. And Paul Newman said, “Our savior is here.” And I said good luck to him, me and him. And I don’t know they accepted me then. I guess I’m amenable. I mean, I don’t kiss ass particularly but I think it is a team effort of a kind.

So, if you can be smart about the way. I mean, I don’t think there’s any one way to do it, but I think part of it is your own personal skills with people.

John: As you’re talking about this 19-year-old you walking onto this set, if you could give advice to that 19-year-old you, obviously you made some really good choices along the way, but are there any other pieces of advice you wish you could whisper to that 19-year-old?

Eric: I think writing wise I wish I could be a little more concise. I think I tend to over-write because I’m a frustrated novelist. And so I write these long prose things and I think it probably gets in the way of things. So if I could articulate things a little more articulately in a smaller way. I don’t know. I can’t think of too many movies that I missed, in other words that I was offered and I said no. There’s a couple. The biggest one for me was I was offered to do Cuckoo’s Nest originally. And I was doing The Onion Field. And my agent said they’ll never make that movie. And then literally like a week later Jack Nicholson signed to do it.

And I did come back and I rewrote the fishing boat scene, because I was good friends at that time with Michael Douglas. But that was the only one I think that I said wow. But I don’t know, Bo Goldman who wrote it, even though he rewrote somebody, a guy named Larry Hauben who just out of the blue decided to write a script from it because it was owned by somebody. But Bo Goldman I think may be one of the better screenwriters who ever lived. I mean, he did Howard and Melvin and he did the best divorce movie, Shoot the Moon, I think. I haven’t seen it in so long. And Scent of a Woman.

John: All right. So, you’re going to whisper to him like do Cuckoo’s Nest but basically do everything else. Just follow your instincts because it’ll suit you very well.

Eric: Look, I don’t think everybody has that leisure. They have to work. So that you don’t get to always do – I think what you need to do though is try to do, and I’ll give you a funny example of this. So I had no money and I really needed work and I did Airport ’79 The Concorde. And I wrote a very wonderful line called, “They don’t call it the cockpit for nothing.” Anyhow, I tried to write, I mean, this is arrogance in a way, but I tried to write the best disaster movie, that’s what they called those then, ever made. You know?

And actually I got sort of half kudos for it. The critics in the New York Times said this is either the worst disaster movie ever made or the best. So, but I did try to make that something special for me. You know, I put in like Saint-Exupery about flying. I had Alain Delon reading poetry. You know, it was ridiculous, you know.

But I think you have to believe in what you’re doing and hopeful you make the best of it.

John: All right. Eric, thank you for making the best of it for all these amazing movies you’ve done and thank you for this conversation. I want to thank the Writers Guild Foundation for having us both here. So, they do amazing work throughout the year.

Eric: Yeah, they’re amazing. Amazing.

John: These panels are great fun but all the outreach they do to developing writers and other folks is remarkable. So please do support the Writers Guild Foundation. Thank you, Dustin, for putting this together. And, Eric, thank you so much. It was great to chat.

Eric: Thank you. I loved meeting you this way.

John: Yeah, it’s nice. Cool.

Eric: See you at the movies. Not really. See you on the television screen I guess.

John: And when do we see Mank?

Eric: Mank will be, I mean, I think late November/early December maybe. Dune will be next year. And Killers of the Flower Moon the year after maybe. But Mank I want everybody to look at. I think you’ll find it pretty special.

John: Exactly.

Eric: Thank you.

John: Great. Thanks. Bye.

All right, we are back here in the present. We are recording this on a Friday morning. As we record this it has not officially been announced that Joe Biden has won but it seems kind of inevitable that he’s won. So we’ll be talking about that in our bonus segment. But this would be the time where we would do our One Cool Things.

Craig: Yes.

John: Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?

Craig: I do. So last week my One Cool Thing was maybe America. This week my One Cool Thing is the person we should be talking about, but instead we keep talking about this orange ding-a-ling and his nonsense. Or alternatively in a hopeful tone we talk about Joe Biden and the fact that he is going to be the new President of the United States. But the person we should be talking about Kamala Harris. Because in our ridiculously long short life as a country we have had zero, that is exactly zero, female Vice Presidents or Presidents. Zero. And now we have one.

And, also, she is a woman of color. This is the first Black woman to serve, aside from the first woman to serve as either President or Vice President. The first Black woman to serve as either President or Vice President. The first Indian woman to serve as Vice President or President. This is the most historic election since Barack Obama’s election. And I am just amazed and thrilled and I feel a little bit annoyed that Orange Thunder keeps stealing the limelight when this is the big story. That we have finally broken through the stupidest barrier of entry to high political office that we have. So congratulations us.

John: Yeah. And I hope that by the time people are listening to this podcast we will have seen her on a stage and Joe Biden on a stage and other things so we can say like, oh, that’s right. This is what it’s going to look like and that’s kind of exciting and cool. Because you just need the visual sometimes. And I think probably because of the pandemic we just haven’t had the visual at times.

Craig: Right.

John: And I think when we see that that will be great.

Craig: And also good for all of us. More Maya Rudolph, clearly.

John: Oh, come on.

Craig: This is a huge Maya Rudolph boom ahead, which is good for everybody. We get four years of her saying Joe Biden which puts a smile on my face every damn time.

John: It’s going to be great. My One Cool Thing is two related things. First off is one of the few physical magazines I still read which is MIT Technology Review.

Craig: What?

John: This magazine dates back to like the 1900s. It’s a very storied magazine talking about technology and sort of how things evolve. And one of the fun things about the magazine is that they will show like 30 years ago, 60 years ago this is what we were writing about and sort of compare stuff.

The best comparison for it would be Wired Magazine if it wasn’t so gadget focused. It’s really just more about the overall science and technologies behind things. But the actual article I want to point people to is by Richard Fisher in this last month’s issue called How to Escape the Present. And what I liked about it is it was talking about how human beings grew up in sort of cyclical time. It was all just the seasons and they planted crops, they grew stuff, and your ancestor’s life was not different from your kids’ lives. Basically everything stayed in this little circle.

And eventually we started figuring like, oh wait, there was the past. The past happened. And we started to think longer about the past. We started to be able to think about the future and like plan for future things. He points to a moment in the 1700s where you started to see writers talk about what life would be like in the 20th Century and the 24th Century and had these sort of grand visions of things.

And his point is that we’ve sort of stopped doing that. If you look at sort of how we think about the future it’s really, really short term. And in fact we sort of are obsessed with only the present. And that we are on these incredibly short cycles. So we have the 24-hour news cycle. We have two or four year election cycles. And it makes it very hard for us to do the long-term thinking that we need to do. It’s sort of like a cliff we run into and we can’t think about what happens after that time. And I think, Craig, in our lifetime I’ve definitely felt that.

I feel like as a kid I used to have a better sense of where the future was headed than I kind of do now. And it’s weird talking about this after this election, because I don’t even have a good sense of like what happens next week right now. And this present-ism is really troubling.

Craig: Well, we are told constantly to live in the now, as if that’s a virtue. I’ve always been a thinker about the future kind of person, because I like it. Our brains are not very good at this. We know that. But it is true that our culture essentially has made us obsess with a belief that by analyzing the state of affairs in this second we will somehow be able to control what happens next, or get certainty about what happens next, when all we really know for sure is that we will never have that, ever.

So we are taunting ourselves and torturing ourselves with this feeling that well if I just keep watching TV certainty will be created in my mind. Are you like this John? People will text me in these situations. I don’t know why it’s me. And they’ll say, “Can you just tell me what’s going to happen?” Like I would know? I don’t know. None of us know. Everyone wants certainty and they look to somebody to give them some kind of reassurance. But we don’t know until we know.

Math is a beautiful thing. It became incredibly clear, for instance, that Joe Biden was going to win because math is math. And much like Covid it doesn’t care what Donald Trump thinks. So that was nice. But I agree. I that we are locked in this obsessive now-ness because an industry that turns our attention into money has risen up to dominate our culture. And so it will keep doing that.

John: But speaking specifically to our audience, people who are writing movies and television shows, I do think that we only think about the future in clearly dystopian terms. We basically have a model of The Terminator, we have Hunger Games. Basically Mad Max. Everything is going to fall apart and what it’s going to look like when–

Craig: The Last of Us.

John: Yeah. The Last of Us. Go for it, Craig. What’s it going to be like when everything falls apart? And sure, we can do that. But we sort of stopped doing Star Trek. We stopped thinking about the future in terms of optimistic ways. And I feel like there’s a need and a vacuum out there for an optimistic vision of the future and sort of what we should aim for rather than what we fear.

Craig: Well, even Star Trek in its most utopian era, which was its network era, created a very virtualized view of where we as a human species would go and then immediately flung us into space to start shooting people. That’s sort of what happens. Because drama is drama. And that’s how it goes. And the earth is always under threat. And the whales are going to do something. And this is going to happen and that’s going to happen. I mean, that is part of what we do.

John: Famously The Next Generation wanted there to be no conflict among the crew. And I was like you need conflict for story. So I’m not asking for no conflict. I’m just asking for a vision of the future that is expansive and possibly hopeful.

Craig: Sure. I mean, look, for art that is ultimately boring. What we like to see is triumph. So triumph requires bad stuff happening. The things that are the toughest are the ones – and you don’t see this very often – where there’s a vision of the future, there is a struggle, and the struggle fails. But then the purpose of that art is to say there but for the grace of God go we, can we figure our crap out and not be like that?

John: Yeah. A movie that you and I both like and refer to often is Her.

Craig: Love it.

John: Which does posit a near future that is – the future doesn’t look bad. So his situation is not great, but the future itself is not a thing to be afraid of.

Craig: Right.

John: And just give me some more Hers out there, folks. I’d love to see it. Let’s make a few more of those.

Craig: Absolutely. I will not be delivering that. [laughs]

John: [laughs] It’s not in Craig’s–

Craig: Not coming from me.

John: All right. That is our show for this week. So thank you everyone for listening. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Rajesh Naroth.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. But for short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts. They’re great and they’re very comfortable. They make a great gift for the holidays. You can find them at Cotton Bureau or in the links in the show notes which you can find at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find the transcripts there.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we are about to record about the election. So Craig, thanks so much.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

John: So, Craig, I went into Tuesday, well Monday and Tuesday, sort of getting into the election period noticeably more optimistic and hopeful than most of the people around me and on Twitter. And I felt like I wasn’t allowed to sort of express optimism because I was going to be ridiculed for it. And then as stuff happened on Tuesday I felt like oh should I have been more pessimistic. And then I realized like, oh, but being more pessimistic wouldn’t have actually helped this feeling right now. What were you feeling on Tuesday?

Craig: Yeah. On Tuesday I was feeling pretty confident that things were going to go well for Joe Biden and therefore for America and therefore for humanity. And they did. It was important to remind myself as Tuesday went on that we were facing an odd situation where the first votes were going to be counted last.

And this is something that I guess, I mean, look, on some level I’m sure most Republicans who are screaming falsely about fraud understand this all too well and they’re just yelling because they don’t know what else to do. I’m not sure Donald Trump understands it because he’s legitimately stupid. But the votes that are being counted now, those votes were cast before the votes that were cast on Election Day. And we knew that the votes that were cast before were largely going to break Democratic because for some reason, and I can’t explain why – I could – Democratic voters seemed more concerned about not getting Covid than Republican voters.

And sure enough that’s what happened. But therefore you had to be braced for the fact that on Tuesday or by Tuesday evening that things were not going to be simple. I was not onboard with the Ragin’ Cajun, James Carville, stating that it was going to be a huge rout and we would all know by, I don’t know what he said, 10pm Eastern Time or something. No. No.

John: Yeah. So I wasn’t there. It’s always hard to remember sort of what you were thinking at a certain point in time. But I was thinking that like, yes, if we did have a decisive victory in Florida then clearly it was going to be over. But when it became clear that it wasn’t going to happen that melting dread kicked back in.

It’s an experience I’ve felt enough in my life that I recognize what it is and sort of how I need to address it. And for me it was like go into the other room, sit on the floor, and actually just sort of doing the breathing exercises to calm myself down and just to not participate in the torture of it. And I just went to bed early. And that was the right choice for me.

Of course I’m thinking back to the 2016 election and the special episode that you and I recorded when the results came out.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And that sense that time forked and we ended up on the darkest timeline and then 2020 was just like the darkest part of the darkest timeline.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And so I was feeling on Tuesday night like, crap, am I in the coin toss where it actually went the other way? And that is such a terrifying feeling to know that, OK, this could actually all go horribly south.

Craig: Yeah. And so I did the same thing you did because I understood that being on Twitter and absorbing everybody else’s anxiety was not going to be good for me. What ends up happening, when people are anxious they’ll teach you – were you a lifeguard? I know you were an Eagle Scout so I figure you were a lifeguard.

John: I never actually lifeguarded but I’ve done a lot of CPR training.

Craig: Got it. So you know, as did I when I was going through that as a teenager, that when someone is drowning they’re very dangerous to you, because they’re in a full panic and they will try and drag you down. Not on purpose. But they will cling to you in panic and forget that you’re a living person and they can swamp you. And that’s pretty much what’s going on on Twitter on Tuesday. As I look around I just think everyone’s anxiety is just spiraling out of control and they can swamp me with this and it doesn’t have any connection to what’s coming. Right? Because we just haven’t seen it yet. It’s the thing of we’re looking at light in the sky but that’s old light.

So I turned off Twitter and I went and played MLB The Show 20 for quite some time. Did pretty well. Did pretty well. My character in Road to the Show has finally made it through his six qualifying years in the major leagues. He’s a free agent. He got a great deal. He’s a really good pitcher. That’s not important right now.

Here’s what matters. What matters is that it started to turn around as it was always going to go. And I never thought that Florida was going to be Democratic. I mean, yeah, you can fantasize about it. You can fantasize about Texas. And certainly Texas is moving steadily in a direction, so that’s nice to see. But it was – what did we all say? Like adults. This is going to come down to Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and to a lesser extent Arizona. And that’s what it did.

John: It is interesting to wind back a year and think about sort of what this election looked like a year ago. And we were told like, OK, the Senate is unwinnable just based on the states and the races and that it’s going to be really tough kind of overall. And I think, yes, we felt this certain optimism going in and we are not the podcast to actually figure out what happened with the polls, but clearly something about the polls got it wrong in a way that has to be figured out.

I mean, the question of can you even poll the American public or is there something special about this situation. Because the 2018 polls weren’t so wrong. I think the closest thing that I encounter in my work life to this is when – you and I have both been through this – when we have a movie that’s opening on Friday night. Because leading up to a Friday night you get tracking. And tracking starts two to three weeks before a movie comes out. You start to see what the interest is among potential movie going audiences for this thing you created.

And you’ll hear like “oh the tracking is great, the tracking is not going so well, they’re going to spend a little bit more,” and it’s all this sort of – it’s basically polling but it’s for your movie’s opening.

Craig: Right.

John: Then, we’re here on the West Coast, we know by about 5pm or 6pm how the movie actually did on that Friday night because we get the East Coast numbers and it can be cause for celebration or it can be cause for absolute just devastation because you realize like, OK, we tanked and this is not going to work. And I’ve been through both and it’s just the same kind of rollercoaster.

Craig: Yeah. It’s unpleasant. And that said tracking is fairly accurate. I’m pretty good at reading tracking. And so back when we used to have movies friends would call me and say, “Can you tell me what my tracking means?” And I would say, OK, I think this is what it’s going to be, and generally speaking that’s what it was going to be. Within a small variance tracking is pretty effective.

I don’t know if our polling industry is broken. I think perhaps what we’re dealing with is a political freak and that’d Donald Trump. And if there’s any weird hope that I have, because I know the next two months are going to be awful, 2.5 months, and I know that he’s not going to go away and he’ll still be out there. And people who like him will still be out there. But one day he will be gone as time does its thing and I don’t think that this is a movement that exists outside of him. I think this is just him. And I think he’s warped polling as well.

John: I agree with you there. Because the whole issue of what is Trumpism, because he has no actual central philosophy. It’s just a kind of narcissism. And what that looks like independent of him is really hard to see. And, yes, there are some common themes of people who support him, but it kind of feels like it’s a “him” thing and not something that can be applied to another person.

I don’t see Ted Cruz, for example, being able to take the reins of that horse.

Craig: No.

John: And so we should acknowledge our ignorance about future events, but going back to my One Cool Thing from this week is be thinking about not just this next cycle but sort of an overall what are we trying to do, where are we trying to go. And that’s why figuring out how we’re dealing with climate change, how we’re dealing with systemic racism, how are we dealing with the projects that are going to take us decades is so crucial and so hard to think about when we’re stuck on what’s going to happen two months from now because we just don’t know.

Craig: Yeah. We are in trouble. And I keep looking back at this weird line in our history. You know, the McCain concession speech from 2008 is not old in the long run of it.

John: But it feels like a different lifetime.

Craig: Feels like a different nation. And I think in part that’s because between 2008 and now you see the rise of Facebook. And I think what Facebook has done to our national conversation is fatal. It is a fatal poison to our national conversation. It has united people who otherwise would have been separated by the insanity of their thoughts and statements. And it allowed them to – I mean, Facebook, when we look back at this there’s going to be a point where people say, “Wait, Facebook let QAnon be a thing for tens of millions of people for years.” They let it happen. And I don’t think we can wrap our minds around that yet. And we’re still dealing with it.

But what they’ve done, what they have enabled, is so horrifying. I don’t know what to do about it other than to say Facebook to me I look at the way I look at RJ Reynolds. A corporation that is just hurting people in our country.

John: Yeah. You can delete your account, so that’s what I’ve done.

Craig: And I have. Years ago, in fact.

John: And Facebook, yes, but there’s going to be other Facebooks. There’s going to be other things like that.

Craig: Yup.

John: And just being really aware of sort of how something that can start off with one intention and become a very different thing. One of my One Cool Things last week was this book about money and it gets into the creation of mutual funds and how mutual funds became money and they had to all be bailed out. And how bitcoin became money and how basically things that start with one intention, it can become a completely different thing. And we just need to be really vigilant about what can be the next thing that sort of pulls the country apart again.

It apparently didn’t take foreign interference this time to have us all at each other’s throats. And so–

Craig: Well, the foreign interference is lasting interference. What they did was pour a lot of gasoline on something and then it’s still burning. I mean, the dumpster fire continues on. Because all foreign interference is is gasoline. That’s it. Putin just puts some accelerant on there. But he knew that our dumpster of racism was full. And all he needed to do was just set it off and it would burn for four years. And it is, still, burning.

And that’s on us. So if we want to be optimistic about it we can say maybe this needed to happen. You know? Like we had a Civil War that didn’t let quite all the blood out. Maybe this is what we needed to do and this will somehow let the blood out. I don’t know. But it has had a lasting effect.

My great hope is that once we get a grown up administration back of professionals we can not only wrap our arms around the pandemic that is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, but we can also finally do the work that is required to harden our defenses against this very consistent, predictable enemy.

It’s not like we don’t know who they are, where they are, or what they’re going to do. We know all of that.

John: Yeah. Now, going into this, obviously to control the Senate would be amazing and there’s certain things you can do when you control the Senate that you can’t do otherwise, but the Trump administration has made it clear how important the President is just in terms of putting people in places that actually do the jobs that need to be done. And so that’s the Cabinet, but sort of all those roles in the government and sort of the trust in the folks who need to monitor the things that need to happen. Folks who need to actually mobilize the pandemic response. Just to have sane grownups doing those jobs is going to be so crucial and it will save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Craig: Well, what the Trumpy people call the Deep State, the word we used to use for that was Government. And the reason that the Trumpy people like Steve Bannon didn’t like the “Deep State” is because who those people were were the people who sat down and said things like, “I’m sorry, Steve Bannon, or Donald Trump, what you just said is either illegal or stupid. Or something we’ve tried a hundred times that doesn’t work. We’re smarter than you. We have more experience than you do. And we’re here to tell you you’re just wrong.”

And they didn’t like this. So, rather than say, OK, we will learn or get smarter or have the confidence to listen to people who have studied a topic their whole lives, or worked on something their whole lives, we’re just going to denigrate all of them or get rid of them. And instead fill these rooms with people that just nod along with the Chief Nut Job. That’s what we have.

And as a result–

John: Authoritarianism, fascism. Yes. We have all these things. It’s been bad. And so it will hopefully–

Craig: Get fixed.

John: It will get better. It won’t get fixed, but it’ll get better.

Craig: It will get better. A lot better.

John: As we wrap up election season, and it sort of felt like a show I was watching and participating in and I will miss some of it. I won’t miss most of it. But I wanted to single out some characters, some actual real people, whose stories I got to know in this show. Some people I’m going to kind of miss. So, Marquita Bradshaw who I only found out about very recently from Tennessee seems just amazing. And so she feels like a character in the story about someone running for Congress and she was great. And I was sorry she didn’t win.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Jessica Cisneros. Alex Morse. Abby Finkenauer who lost her seat in Iowa, she’s remarkable. She and I went to the same college. She was great and I just cannot believe that she wasn’t reelected. Mark Kelly. The last time I saw you, Craig, in person was at a Mark Kelly fundraiser.

Craig: It was the last party I went to before the country shut down.

John: Yeah. And Theresa Greenfield, also from Iowa. Again, just the kind of person you want to have in that office. And so my hope is that people will see these folks who ran, some of them won but some of them didn’t win, and will keep running because we need to have smart, dedicated people running for every office in this country to make sure we build a future that we all want.

Craig: Yup. Yup. Well, they’ll be back.

John: They’ll be back.

Craig: They’ll be back.

John: Cool. Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you, John.

Links:

• Eric Roth
• Thanks to the Writer’s Guild Foundation for organizing this event!
• MIT Technology Review and How to Escape the Present by Richard Fisher
• Why Joe Biden is Going to Win by Kendall Kaut
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode is available here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 476 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we welcome back a writer whose credits include Get Shorty.

Craig: Never heard of it.

John: Out of Sight.

Craig: No.

John: Logan.

Craig: Don’t like it.

John: Marley and Me.

Craig: Stinks.

John: Minority Report.

Craig: Terrible.

John: Godless.

Craig: No.

John: And the new limited series, The Queen’s Gambit, on Netflix.

Craig: Garbage.

John: I’m talking of course about Scott Frank. Scott Frank, welcome back to the show.

Scott Frank: Thank you very much for having me back. I really didn’t think you ever would after the last time. But glad to be here.

Craig: We didn’t want to. But I guess there was some sort of popular clamoring, and so we have to respond to our many tens of fans.

Scott: Many.

John: The real reason I wanted you here today is I’m watching your show and it’s great, but it occurs to me that you may be breaking some longstanding screenwriting rules.

Craig: Oh no.

John: About what you’re allowed to include on the page. So it’s a celebration and also an intervention for you, Scott. Because there’s some stuff you’re doing you’re just not allowed to do.

Craig: Yeah. There are a number of gurus who have never sold a screenplay or much less had a produced credit who are upset. We need to acknowledge their feelings and talk about why you, Scott Frank, are apparently no good. But also while we’re talking about that I do hope that we get into a little bit of a discussion about why you, Scott Frank, are in fact spectacularly good at what you do. And I have questions about it, like how can I be as good as what you do. Things like that.

Scott: [laughs] Drugs.

Craig: Other than those.

Scott: No, it will be a relief to be uncovered as a fraud by these other gurus. Finally we can get it all out today. So, thank you.

John: And we also have some listener questions that I think you are especially well-suited to answer, so we’ll get to those later on. And in our bonus segment for Premium members I want to get an early start on Thanksgiving and talk about some of the things we’re actually thankful for in 2020 because this has been a really crappy year. But I think there’s some things to be thankful for, so maybe we can brainstorm about some things we are grateful for that came about in 2020.

Craig: How much time do we have for that one?

John: It may be a short segment. But, hey, let’s talk about The Queen’s Gambit. So, Scott, give us some backstory here. Because I think I knew it was based on a book. It’s a book from 1983 by Walter Tevis. How did you come to make this as a series? Why a series not a feature? What was your on road to this as a series for Netflix?

Scott: Well I tried and failed to make it as a movie maybe a dozen years ago. Everybody, since it came out, Bernardo Bertolucci I think was the first director who tried to get it made as a movie. Various people were in and out of it over the years. Michael Apted, Tom Tykwer. Heath Ledger was going to direct it as his directorial debut before he died. I think Ellen Page was going to be the star of that. And right before that happened Bill Horberg and I tried to get it made. He’s the producer along with a gentleman named Allan Scott, who is known primarily for being Nic Roeg’s screenwriter. He wrote Don’t Look Now, The Witches, all sorts of things for Nic Roeg back in the day and is also a producer and a theater producer and so on.

He owned the rights outright. And we were getting together with him and trying to get it made and no one was interested. And then after I made Godless I realized, you know, the way to do this as a limited series, not as a movie, because if you do it as a movie it just becomes about the chess matches and does she win or does she lose. And it’s sort of reduced to that. But if I can do it as a limited series I thought I can kind of get into her head space as a character.

And Netflix had passed on a few things since Godless and I figured they would pass on this as well and I gave it to them to read and Cindy Holland just fell in love with it and said let’s do it. And so we ended up doing it. And it came together so fast that I was doing most of the adaptation during prep. So, it was one of those, which is not my normal way of working.

Craig: There’s certain similarities between you and me, not just the irritable bowel syndrome, but also—

Scott: Yes.

Craig: That you and I both came recently from feature world and now find ourselves in limited series world, and I want to talk a little bit about specifically some of the freedoms that you feel in that space. And I also want to talk a little bit about your choice, which is again a choice that I’ve made myself, at least for now, which is to not do what is typical in the limited series space which is to get a room full of writers and have people working on drafts and all the rest of it. You do it all on your own. Is it a case of you can’t take the feature writer completely out of the feature writer? Or is there just something about the freedom of a limited series that doesn’t necessarily mean you need to go all the way into TV writer room ville?

Scott: That’s a great question. The answer is simple. I only know how to do it the way I know how to do it. And I don’t know – I’ve written things with other people and that’s fine, where we started and began collaborating, and passed it back and forth. I’ve done that a couple times now. And that was great. Were all great experiences. But for this it seemed like I wouldn’t know how to assign, you know, episodes to people. I write it like a long movie and then carve it up.

In fact, so much so that there were six scripts but seven episodes, because I thought I kind of guessed how it would be carved up in the script phase, but ended up really organizing it in post. And so because I also know I’m going to direct it I have to write it all, you know. I can’t – it seems like make work to give it to somebody and then take it back and make it my own after that. I just wouldn’t know how to do that.

Now, if it were a longer series and a different kind of thing I might want a writer’s room, but even then I would only want a couple of people. The idea of looking at a big whiteboard and sitting there – I know people really enjoy it and ordering lunch and all that sounds like hell to me.

Craig: Ordering lunch is the worst part, I think. That’s the part that would absolutely paralyze me for sure.

Scott: I’m too self-conscious. I take too many naps during the day. And I kind of only see things the way I see them, so it’s tricky. But if something began that way I suppose I could try.

Craig: And do you think that now that you’ve had this experience back to back with Godless and with Queen’s Gambit that – and let’s put aside things like rewrites and things like that, but just actual starting from scratch, building a building – do you think you’re going to go back to features or is this were you live now?

Scott: I don’t know. I mean, I’m doing a few things going forward. Two are like this, and one is a movie. So, I definitely – it just depends on the story and what’s appropriate for the story. And in both cases, with Godless and with The Queen’s Gambit, it just seemed like the limited series was a much better way to serve that kind of story. But there are other ideas and things I want to do that feel more like movies to me.

And the challenge for screenwriters going into the limited series world, at least it’s a challenge I felt, is to be disciplined about it. Just because you have more time doesn’t mean you need as much time as you think you do. And you can kind of spend a lot of time sort of getting in the weeds because you have a lot of episodes to fill, or more episodes to fill, certainly more real estate than a movie. And you have to be very careful about that. You really have to be careful about that. Because people – and also as people watch more and more of these things I find that they’re waiting for it to happen as they’re watching.

John: Now, in prepping for this episode you sent through this really amazing, evocative image that you said sort of inspired the look of The Queen’s Gambit. So can you describe what you sent through here and we’ll put a link to this in the show notes, but it’s a very cool image of a chessboard. So tell me about what we’re looking at here.

Scott: So, it’s from a hotel lobby in Toronto. I’m blanking on the name now but it’s got a chess-themed lobby. There are giant chess pieces in the lobby and this interesting chessboard setup as well. And when we scout the cinematographer and I, Steven Meizler, we always bring the red camera along and we’re always taking both stills with it and moving images with it so that we can see how we might shoot someplace, even if we don’t end up shooting there. And this place we didn’t end up shooting.

But he was taking a still of this chessboard when this little girl ran by in the yellow dress. And the board, the dress, the chair, the wallpaper, all of it was the show for me. I looked at it and I instantly zeroed in on it. And I’d been trying to find an image to give to Uli Hanisch in the art department something, because I like to do that. I like to find an image or two and then they create a kind of larger palette board from that. Because I like to have a super limited palette because then you can control the look of the show so much better. And that along with natural light, I just feel like you have so much more control. Whereas too much color for me starts to feel – unless you’re doing it as a riot of color, but even then it should be just there are only a few in there. It just makes it easier for me to control it all. I may be wrong, but it’s what works.

Craig: I like that idea of control. It’s something that you and I have talked about a lot over the years about the writing as well. And it’s something that I always admire in your writing. Full disclaimer, I’m halfway through, so listen, I don’t know. If you guys want to get into spoilers that’s fine. If it’s awesome, like she kills everybody at the end, don’t tell me that.

Scott: She does.

Craig: I said don’t tell me that.

Scott: Yes.

Craig: But I’m going to assume that there is a big chess match at the end that is either won or lost, or it could be a draw. But as I’m halfway through what I’m doing is I’m watching the episodes and then I’m going back and reading your screenplay after the episode. And what always strikes me about your writing in particular is how there is just such a beautiful amount of control within scenes themselves. And it’s something that I learned really from you. Well, I mean, I try and get there as best I can, but I think that for most professional writers they have some kind of good instinct to start with. That’s why they keep working, I suppose. There’s just a good instinct about what is the scene about, what is supposed to happen in it, what is its greater purpose in the overall narrative.

And then there’s this other thing that I guess I’m just going to call finishing. Which is the far rarer thing. Because when we start to craft scenes and put them together, even if our instincts are right and the scene is where it should be, with who it should be, about what it should be, the pieces, it’s like a jigsaw puzzle where there are gaps and some of the bits are rubbing on each other and it’s not quite perfect. And then there are people like you, and maybe just you in your way singularly, who finish it. Who make sure everything fits perfectly, seamlessly. No gaps. No rubbing. No nothing. It all is machined to within a micron of its life.

And I want to ask you because the effect – the reason I bring it up is because the effect on me, as both the reader and a watcher, is that I am being taken care of. That this car will not wobble and that the control is perfect. So that my experience is solely what you want me to experience. How you want me to experience it. Or at least within the range of acceptable reactions to your material.

Can you talk a little bit about that finishing aspect? The perfection that is required to take what is good instinctive craft and make it something beautiful?

Scott: Whoa. Well, my One Cool Thing today…

Craig: You want to jump right to the end? We can do that. I can do my impression of you for the middle part and no one will notice a difference.

Scott: I mean, thank you. I don’t know what I’m aware of as I’m working in terms of that. I just know – like when we were just talking about the visual stuff a moment ago, I’m just trying to be specific. And I think a lot about tone even as I’m writing. I remember when I was writing Godless I realized, oh, it has to be in a voice that feels like the tone. It has to feel like the old west without being silly or kitschy, or feel ersatz. It just has to feel like it’s both authentic but there’s this tone to the script. And it took me a long time to sort that out and figure out how I was going to do that.

And with every script, you know, if I can’t – this sounds silly – but if I can’t hear it I can’t write it. And if I can’t hear the way people are talking it means I just don’t know anybody. And the character of the screenplay comes through the character that I’m writing about in a way. It’s almost like there’s a subtle point of view change that sometimes happens. So in the case of The Queen’s Gambit I was writing from Beth’s point of view. It’s really always in her point of view. And so that helps me with the tone, because I feel a certain kind of tone there. And it was very unusual. That’s what I loved about the novel. And so I’m trying to keep that in the script.

And what happens is I think many writers embrace the mechanical, or they lean into the mechanical because it’s so much easier to understand and see. If you follow a template, if you write an outline and then follow your outline. If you have all these things that are supposed to be in a good scene then you have a good scene. So, frequently you end up with scripts that look like scripts but read like nothing. And so what I’m always trying to sort out is what is the tone. And so I think what you describe as finished or even perfect as you said is for me more just specific. And what is it that makes this specific?

And in terms of the idea of control, you can tell when you open a novel or you read a script the first page. You don’t know whether you’re going to like the script or not, but you know if it’s somebody’s got you or not. I don’t mean hooked. I mean you know they’re in control.

Craig: Like they’re holding you in their hands. Yeah.

Scott: They’re in control. If they’re doing some generic description of something stupid you know they can’t write. You know they’re not going to spin good yarn for you.

Craig: Right.

Scott: So you’re looking for what is the kind of specific thing that brings me into it. That tell me what I’m looking at in a way that doesn’t feel like it’s telling me what I’m looking at. And you only do – you really do – only get two senses in a script. You get sight and you get sound. And so you’re using what do we need to see and what don’t we need to see. What’s important? What things will you describe in this room that will tell me what the room is in the least amount of words? And do you even need to describe the room first?

Frequently when you shoot a scene you’re starting close and you don’t know where you are until you need to know where you are. And then that rhythm is a different kind of rhythm and tells a different sort of story from a different – has a different feel to it. So it becomes feel. And so I don’t know if I’m thinking about it so much as I’m aware when I’ve lost specificity. I’m aware when the tone has changed. I kind of come out of my trance and go, wait, what’s wrong here.

John: All right. Well let’s get specific and actually look at your pages here.

Craig: Rip these apart.

John: Let’s take a look at the first two pages.

Scott: Tear them apart.

Craig: Tear them apart.

John: From the first episode. Because they are terrific and I feel like the image that you shared with us is so closely related to how your series is opening. That shallow focus that you’re kind of in a dream space as we’re beginning. So we’ll put a link to these first two pages in the show notes. But we’re opening in this Paris hotel room. A knock on the door. “Mademoiselle?” A splash. Someone stirs in a bathtub. More knocking. And we’re hearing things. We’re seeing some things but it’s mostly a sound experience. “Mademoiselle Harmon? Etes-vous La?” We make out a face in the dark. Breathing. Watching. Frantic pounding on the door followed by, “Mademoiselle! Ils vous attendant!”

Finally in the darkness, “I’m coming.” So we finally get to see Beth here. She’s getting herself out of the water. I remember as I was watching this how you established this room and we’re not quite sure what the space is we’re in, but suddenly the curtains are being pulled back. We establish that we are in a fancy Paris hotel room. She is clearly a mess. She needs to leave but we’re not sure why she needs to leave. Is she trying to just get out? Does she need to go to some place?

Then we’re going downstairs and we’re walking through this crowd as she’s going into this giant ballroom and then we finally get to the chessboard. She sits down and she says, “I’m sorry.”

They are two terrific first pages. We often do a Three Page Challenge on the show and I would say, Craig, I mean, you could have your own opinion but I think we would talk favorably about–

Craig: No. They’re garbage.

John: These pages.

Craig: Let me explain why these are garbage. [laughs]

Scott: Thank you, Craig.

Craig: No, the thing that I love about these on the page is how dynamic they are. Meaning the way that we talk about dynamics in music. Soft. Loud. Quiet. Rest. Play. Fast. Slow. Things keep getting changed. So we’re in the dark and then we’re in the light. And then we’re in more light, because the curtains open. And then we go from disheveled and a mess to beautifully made up and gorgeous. We go from a small space into a large space. We go from silence to then cameras. And when I see, “And now we hear one sound,” and the word one is italicized, “THE WHIR OF CAMERAS. A DOZEN PHOTOGRAPHERS gathered at the entrance snap her picture.” I see it. I hear it.

Not only do I see and hear it. I know where everyone is standing. That’s the beautiful. If you write well it means you saw it and you heard it so clearly that the people reading it can see it and hear it so clearly. That’s the point. And I try as best as I can to emulate this basic method.

And, John, you and I have talked a lot about transitions. And here every single scene number, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, on page one and two, has a transition. Every single one. And it’s a transition – even like for instance the transition between 6 and 7 is not just from a hallway into a giant ballroom. But it’s punctuated by “a hundred heads turning toward her” in that ballroom silently when the doors open. That’s what I’m talking about.

John: But let’s also be clear what you’re not talking about. You’re not talking about literally cut to with a colon or a transition to with a colon.

Craig: You don’t need to.

John: We don’t see any of that on these two pages. Instead it’s just that naturally, logically as the action is flowing we can feel the transitions moving us from this moment to this moment. And it feels natural. Everything is falling forward in a good way.

Craig: Yeah, like cut to is actually not a transition. Cut to is simply an acknowledgment that a transition is about to occur. But the transition itself is defined by the difference of things. And so what Scott does really, really well here, we’ll keep talking about him like he’s not here—

Scott: Great.

Craig: Is constantly considering – because you’re not – is constantly considering the difference between things as he moves from scene to scene. And this is what I mean about completion. These are complete pages. Every single thing has been thought through. We do say specificity a lot. Sometimes I think that the word specificity becomes too generic in an ironic way because it can be applied in so many different ways. So to just zero in a little bit more on specificity, what he’s doing is thinking constantly about how big or small, how quiet or loud, how full of people, how not full of people. Power dynamics. She is at one moment bigger than a little girl, smaller than a room full of people. Every single moment is completed like this. This is how you write.

All you need to do if you want to be a good screenwriter is be as good as this. No problem.

John: Now, I said at the start this was going to be a celebration of Scott Frank, but also an intervention because one of the things I noticed here on this first page.

Craig: Seriously. My god.

John: And we have to talk about this. “We can just make out a A FACE in the dark.”

Craig: We?

John: We. Scott Frank, you’re using “we hear” and “we see” throughout the script. I did a search. 47 times you are doing “we see” or “we hear.”

Craig: Oh my god.

Scott: Oh my god.

John: In one script.

Craig: You’ve done the worst possible thing 47 times.

Scott: I’m so ashamed. I’m so ashamed. A couple of things. I also never write “cut to” ever unless it’s in the slug line because I need it to make the transition felt in a certain way. Cut to is a waste of time and a waste of space on a script because if you don’t know it’s a cut then what. I mean, Tony Gilroy’s scripts are great to read. They’re all cut to. They’re kind of a version of what Bill Goldman used to do. But he doesn’t use slug lines. So it’s OK. I use slug lines and I feel – I mean, it’s whatever conveys the image. Whatever conveys what you’re doing.

And transitions, because I’m so pretentious I will quote Tolstoy.

Craig: Oh god.

Scott: Because like all screenwriters do. Tolstoy said transitions are the most important part of storytelling. And they’re certainly the most important part of movie storytelling because it’s all transitions. It’s not like you’re writing a play where you’ve got to get them off stage and on stage. You’re using transitions to create rhythm. You’re using transitions to create tone. Humor. Horror. Whatever it is, there’s another tool that gets ignored because people just end their scene and they go, OK, where am I now. And they don’t think about where they were. And they don’t think about how they might dovetail.

And you don’t have to get cute every time. But you have to feel like there’s a real transition happening. And good novels do that. Good storytelling does that. And so there is that. And the cut to feels like it’s in the way for me. There’s too many things that people don’t even really read anyway. Why is it in the script? Dissolve. I rarely do it, and if I do need it for a certain reason it’s in the slug line so it doesn’t take up any room.

Craig: Right.

Scott: And I want you to read it. I actually need you to read it. It’s not a format thing. It’s a storytelling thing. There’s a difference. People, again, lean into format because it’s easy to remember the eight things about formatting.

Craig: Like don’t use “we see.”

Scott: We’ll get to that. So, yeah, and I love using it. And I use “as” as the first word too often after a slug line. As we…whatever it is. It’s just whatever feels right and sounds right is fair game for me or for anyone.

John: Now I want to talk about fair game though, because one of the things you said in your description well this is an audio-visual medium, you can only write what we can see and what we can hear, and that feels true. I mean, we’re probably not cheating specifically on those things. We’re not describing smells. We’re not describing inner mental states like a novelist. Like a novelist has the ability to take you fully inside a character’s experience and describe things that we as screenwriters don’t describe.

But I do wonder whether we are over-learning this lesson in saying that you can only write about what you can see and what you can hear because just looking at your pages here Scott I think we are getting a sense of those other senses through this. The way that her wet clothes are clinging to her. You’re not describing the smells of that room. You’re not describing what the liquor is that she’s using to swallow the pill tastes like. But those are experiences that the character actually has. And so I do wonder if sometimes as we talk about screenwriting as being just what you can see and what you can hear we may be doing ourselves a disservice because good writing actually does involve all the other senses even if a person watching those movies isn’t directly experiencing those.

So I wanted to explore that a little bit.

Scott: So, yes and no. Or no and yes.

John: Please.

Scott: Right train, wrong track. So, I would say what you’re smelling or thinking you’re smelling when you’re reading that is teed up for you by the description. And the tone of it. And what a screenwriter or writer is choosing to describe for you. They don’t have to say what it feels like and what it smells like.

I’m allergic to getting into too much other than sight and sound only because most often it’s done out of lazy writing. Most often it’s done because they haven’t done the job as a screenwriter already. It’s like when you read the introduction of a character and you get this whole thing about their life and he’s ambitious and he wishes – the audience doesn’t get to read that shit. They don’t get to see that. So if we don’t know who they are from their behavior and the first words out of their mouth, or have a good idea at least, then you failed.

And so the same thing happens with the other senses. Writers who try to do that, it becomes purple. They’re doing it because it’s stylistic. And it’s like this thing that we’re going to do and we’re going to describe this.

I find it not helpful and it gets in the way. So, you want to get out of the way. If you want to have rhythm and flow and feel like you’re moving forward, to describe smells and things stops you when you’re writing a movie. It doesn’t when you’re writing a book and you can describe why someone is smelling something or what it makes them think or whatever. Here if you convey enough sense of the scene you’re going to get all the other senses. You’re going to see it all. It’s going to be as I said teed up for you. That’s the trick.

John: So that’s what I want to push towards is that sense of you’re using the tools you have, which are what you can see and what you can hear, to create those senses that you’re not actually describing. So I’m not trying to argue for we should all be describing smells or textures, but I think you are making choices in terms of what the characters are doing, the environments you’re putting them in that naturally lead to those other senses. That give us a sense that these characters exist in a real world where they would be experiencing these things. They’re experiencing heat and texture and smell.

Scott: Yes. But that takes us right back to specificity. And that’s about choosing the right details that throw off enough description and feeling and tone as opposed to saying it’s a well-furnished apartment. You know? So you pick the things, the telling details are everything. And that’s what writers ignore. They kind of race through the description or they over-describe stuff that really has nothing to do with anything.

Craig: I mean, where you find differences is where I’m always fascinated. Where you present things that are different than what I would assume on the default.

John: Well, I want to talk about the senses as sort of my thesis for this episode which is that obviously sight and sound are crucial for screenwriting. Smell, taste, and touch are things we don’t directly put on the page, but they’re things that characters would know about and explore. And those are the five senses we most often think about. But there’s actually a bunch more and I see some of them in your first episode. The sense of movement. The sense of where we are at in a space. You move that camera a lot. And the sense of balance. Is a character standing on her feet or not standing on her feet? You’re finding visual ways to show balance.

Pain. Time. Temperature. Thirst. The sense of hunger or fullness. The sense of tension or stretch. These are all things that we actually feel physically that we have characters in spaces who can do these things. And so I want to make sure that as writers we are not just painting pictures for people, but we’re actually thinking about what it feels like to be that character in that space. I worry if on this podcast and as we talk about screenwriting in general we’re not emphasizing this enough in terms of what does it actually feel like to be in that place. And once you do that how do you find ways, how do you find actions that characters take that can sort of reveal those things. How do you make people feel like they are inhabiting these beautiful rooms that we’re drawing for them?

Scott: If we were in the room together right now I’d hug you, John. Well, actually if we were in the room together I couldn’t hug you because of Covid. But I would bump elbows with you. That is exactly the goal. That’s what you what to feel like. And I think the disconnect comes from how you convey that. How do you write descriptions or write words, the most basic way of putting it, that throw off those other feelings? And that, again, is the thing.

And people – it goes back to a couple of things. It’s a way of thinking. It’s not what Craig said is picking out different details than someone else would. It’s just a way of thinking. And thinking about this stuff is a way of thinking. It’s not a template. It’s not even rules. If people are telling you not to say “we see” or “we this” or “we that” then your script isn’t very good anyway. Because if it’s a really good story–

Craig: Right. No one cares.

Scott: Then no one is going to notice what you did. I mean, I read a Coen brothers’ script recently that was like formatted in Microsoft Word somehow. And I don’t even know – but it was a great read. It was so good. And it was not particularly screenplay-ish. But still because what they were saying was so great to read.

And so people get hung up on the rules in lieu of being creative. And so it’s a way of thinking. It’s a way of thinking. And you can get stuck. You can become so mechanical if you’re writing to the rules all the time. You know, you just have to be able to spin yarn. And what makes a good yarn? What are those things? And you can analyze it backwards from the end of a story. You can say, yes, you need conflict, and you need this, and your character. And you shouldn’t have someone show up on page whatever. But you know what? I have new characters that have shown up on page 90. I’ve had 30-page opening scenes.

Craig: I’ve seen them.

Scott: Melvin and Howard is a 20-minute opening scene. I mean, I’m going back but I always was blown away by that. They’re singing Santa’s Souped Up Sleigh in the front of the truck and he wins an Oscar.

Craig: Star Wars.

Scott: Star Wars. There you go.

Craig: Goes on forever before we meet Luke. It’s 25 minutes or something.

Scott: The Godfather.

Craig: Right. It’s a wedding. It’s a wedding. Absolutely. A lot of these kinds of analyses I always say are like pathologists showing you a corpse and saying this used to be a this, and this used to be a this. But it’s not the same thing as making life. And one of the things that I find fascinating about the way you evoke these things that we’re talking about is whether you are doing it intentionally or not very often you are relating these kind of intangibles through relationship. Rather than just sort of saying this person is now cold. Even in these first two pages there’s a relationship between her and a voice outside that is causing her to emerge from this kind of pseudo drowning state. And then when she’s getting ready there’s a guy in her bed that she doesn’t even know and we don’t even see his face, but that is a relationship. There’s a sense that there are witnesses. That there is a contrast between her and another person.

When she’s coming downstairs that little girl is looking up at her and witnessing her and things are happening between them. There is a relationship. When she gets her period for the first time, you know, a lot of writers I think would just have her in the bathroom going, “Oh no, what do I do? There’s blood everywhere.” And then she would come out and we would see that she had handled it. No. Another girl comes in and they have a discussion. There is a human connection. And from those human connections that you create, whether there’s a conversation, or they’re silent, you are able to convey a lot of these intangibles and just for my money that’s always more interesting.

And it’s always more true than it is when it is just sort of fabricked in there and meant to be evocative for evocation sake.

John: What you’re describing Craig is in addition to sort of like the standard list of senses, we also have – people have cognitive senses. They have the ability to understand how they’re relating to other people. That they’re being watched. They understand connections between things. And we understand connections between things. So we know what it’s like to be that girl in that situation even if we have not actually had our period then. We know what it’s like to feel the need of trust or fear or disgust. We know what those things feel like. And a good writer is able to evoke these things and can put some of that stuff in subtext rather than having to have direct conversations about those things.

Craig: And the relevance therefore is implied. So it’s not just purple. And it’s not just description for description sake. Or look at the lusciousness of my scene. But we understand that there is something with which we can identify. Something that has some universal meaning for us and this is the best fullest use of what we can do.

It is amazing what you can do on a page. You know? It’s amazing. When you read something really well done it’s remarkable how full it is. Which is why I get so lava-incensed when I hear people say don’t direct on the page and all I want to say is that’s all we’re doing. That is literally what we’re doing. We are directing a movie on the page. We are creating a full space. And then the director, whether it is you, Scott, directing your own work, or somebody else directing your work, is hopefully translating that from the space you’ve created on the page to the space in the real world.

But this is what we do. And when it’s done well like you’ve done it here it’s just beautiful. And, congratulations. I mean, it’s a hit. I know Netflix says that five billion people watch it because anyone who watches four seconds of a Netflix show counts, but I know even in real terms it’s a hit. What are they saying, is it up to 78 trillion people?

Scott: I don’t know. Actually if you watch it you have to watch all of it. You have to watch over half of it.

Craig: Well, that’s real.

Scott: They don’t count people who turn it on and turn it off.

Craig: Oh, I thought that they were doing that like two minutes thing.

Scott: No, there’s something they have as part of it. But I don’t know the exact numbers.

Craig: Here’s the thing. It doesn’t matter. Netflix is such a black box when it comes to that. But we can tell over on our side. Like I know when people are watching something on Netflix.

John: The discussion you have about it.

Craig: And this is being watched. This is a hit. Which I don’t mean to sound vulgar, but we make these things to be watched and this is being watched in a massive way. And I love that. I love that a show about a lady who plays chess is being watched in this massive way. It wasn’t always like this. You know, television has come a long way.

Scott: It’s very confusing. You know, there’s so much to talk about outlining and this and that. And I don’t know how to write an outline or treatments, but what I do outline are scenes. And if people put that same kind of thought into well what’s going to happen in this scene, and spent a lot of time in the scene and realized, oh, I don’t have enough character here. I don’t know who these people are. What am I going to do with them? I outline scenes before I write them. And then I write about the scene and, you know, do everything but write the scene until I end up suddenly it just starts to become a scene. Unless I hear dialogue right away I’ll start with the dialogue and just write dialogue and then begin to shape it with other things.

And I think that’s really important. The other thing that I would say, if people spent less time worrying about format and anything else and just focused on character, and just focused on who they’re writing about. I get stuck every time around page 60. I don’t know what to do. Because I realize I don’t have enough character. I don’t have enough character to figure out where we go next. So the characters are either behaving because the script says so, which is a pet peeve of mine, or I’m just thinking, OK, and then this happens, and then that happens. I’ve lost all of it.

And so, you know, if you spend a lot of time just thinking about who you’re writing about, every character. Even if they only have a line or two. They should be someone that’s understandable and readable. And so that helps you. Then when you get to your scenes you have all this information that you have that you can use to show, give it an attitude, what’s happening, how would they respond here, what would be the honest way they would respond. And maybe in your outline, they have to disagree here, but if it doesn’t feel like they would disagree then you need to either, A, have them agree and figure out what’s going to happen, or figure out what you did wrong where they’re not disagreeing anymore. It’s no longer true to the person you’ve created as opposed to again what the script says so.

Craig: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Truth to who you have and what would really happen there. I think the biggest mistake that is made by every writer, every writer, I mean, we all do it and then hopefully we catch it and fix it, is writing something that just wouldn’t be what would happen. Sorry, it just wouldn’t happen that way. You wouldn’t say that. You wouldn’t do that. There’s nothing that feels less satisfying than someone making a great sacrifice where you’re like would you though? Would you? Well there goes your big moment. It just doesn’t work.

Scott: Or the boss who doesn’t believe you or whatever just because – or the parents who don’t believe you. I’m telling you. I saw him. He’s a monster. No, he isn’t.

Craig: No, he’s not.

Scott: You know what? You got too much sugar. Whatever it is.

Craig: You’re not going to take even a moment to think maybe?

Scott: And you’re missing really good character filigree and plot stuff you can explore to actually get to that point. Instead of just skipping to it, maybe by earning it you may actually create some interesting character facets or something that would get you there so you believe it. Why don’t they believe me? Why don’t they want to believe Jack Bauer is trying to save the world for the 50th time?

Craig: I know.

Scott: But this time he’s wrong.

Craig: I know. If Jack Bauer shows up, if Jessica Fletcher shows up and says I think it’s murder, it’s murder.

Scott: It’s murder!

Craig: It’s absolutely murder. There’s no question.

John: So Jessica Fletcher is here to solve crimes. Our producer, Megana Rao, is here to answer our listener’s questions.

Craig: Segue Man.

Scott: Nice. Transition.

John: In a segment we like to call Question Time with Megana. Megana, please join us and talk through some questions that our listeners have sent through.

Craig: Hey Megana.

Megana Rao: Hi guys, how are you?

John: Hey Megana.

Craig: Good.

Scott: Hello Megana.

John: I feel in the mood for some crafty questions since this has become a very crafty episode. So what do you have for us this week?

Megana: OK, awesome. So, Sophie in London asks, “I’m currently writing a TV series based on historical events in 1920s Argentina. I’ve never written any true story scripts before and I’m struggling with the sheer amount of research each thread pulls me into. How do you balance staying true to the history and communicating essential facts while crafting the heart of the story and character’s development? How do you know when you’ve researched enough and when it’s time to start writing pages?”

John: Ah, a crucial thing. So, people can fall into the abyss of research forever and actually never write their things. Scott Frank, so you are setting the story, the ‘50s and ‘60s?

Scott: Mm-hmm.

John: And so how much research did you do? How much did you not do? What was the process? When did you stop researching and just do stuff?

Scott: I didn’t do much of any research on this one because I had the novel and I had Gary Kasparov and Bruce Pandolfini to talk to. So I did very little research in, you know, traditional. I have a researcher that I work with. I did a ton of research on say Godless. But research is a trap. It’s a wonderful thing because it gives you, again, telling detail. It gives you these things that you can find story. But if you’re just trying to write to the facts then you’re going to get lost. And the story should come first.

What is the good story? What is the story you want to tell? And you first need to figure out what is the yarn you’re going to spin. And, again, that’s a feeling. It’s not a crafty thing, it’s a feeling. What story do I want to tell here? What characters do I want to write about? And then as you get into that then you start to look to research to answer your questions. As opposed to look to research to sort of find your story. I mean, sometimes you do that. I mean, I did that certainly on Godless. But I didn’t know what I was going to write about. I just knew the genre.

You’re writing about something that’s true, so you have a lot of stuff there already. You need to sort of figure out, I would say, what the story is. And then use research to make sure that you’re being honest and true, but figure out again what yarn are you spinning. I’m going to just keep saying that.

Craig: Yeah. I would say to Sophie what got you interested in this thing in the first place. If it feels like you’ve given yourself a book report then, yeah, you’re going to get lost because what do you write about. How do you stress one aspect of this historical event in this decade in Argentina over another? What characters should you be focusing on? So you’re asking how do you stay true to history and communicate essential facts while crafting the heart of the story and character’s development. Why did you want to do this?

So what were the things that grabbed you? And why did they grab you? And how did they immediately in your mind connect to human beings and a story about human beings that would be relevant to anyone, whether they lived in 1920s Argentina or not? And that should help focus you.

You will probably swing back and forth at times between trying to figure out do I make the history, put these characters in a situation that reveals who they are? Do I make the characters and their relationship guide me towards which aspect of the history I should be focusing on in this moment? That’s a little bit of a push and pull balancing act. But keep coming back to what fascinated you. That will be your lodestone.

John: Yeah. I trip on the essential facts because facts – you’re not a journalist here. And so obviously you want to be truthful, but really emotionally truthful should be your goal. What are the essential themes, the essential questions, dramatic questions you want to explore here? And the true life details, the history, can help get you there, but you’re not trying to tell a history lesson. Or if you are trying to tell a history lesson maybe the screenplay is not the right way to do it.

Craig: All right. Megana, lay another one on us.

Megana: Cool. So Truthy asks, “I’m adapting a first person short story about a young woman struggling with depression. More than external events the story deals with the protagonist’s internal journey with her mental illness. I feel like having first person voice over narration in the screenplay would really help, but I’m concerned that voice over can seem like a writing crutch and that somebody detest the concept entirely. What are your opinions on using voice over narration and what do you think are the common mistakes people make with it?”

Craig: Scott, what do you feel about that?

Scott: I feel like the only thing worse than using voice over in this case is to use depressed voice over in this case.

Craig: I’m so bummed out.

Scott: Don’t yeah. Voice over can be great. It can be really fun. You know, if it’s used as kind of ironic or if it’s used – if it feels like it’s a character, you know. If it feels like there’s something – there’s a good reason for it. Goodfellas had great voice over. But then Casino was wall-to-wall voice over. It felt like they were just fixing something. But I love the voice over in Goodfellas beginning with “I always wanted to be a gangster.” It’s awesome.

And so you have to think about it. And frequently it’s a solve, but usually it works better if it kind of grows organically out of your concept. You haven’t said anything about, I don’t know what the story is that you’re telling. I just know that you have a depressed character. And I would just say that there are three things that get old fast. And I just had to wrestle with it. They get old fast on screen or in anything. Anger. Drinking, getting drunk. Drunkenness. And I would say depression/grief. So, those things.

It’s really hard to have a character wrestling with that unless they’re in some situation that’s really interesting. And, you know, what is – I don’t know where you’ve located this person and so I don’t know. It’s hard to answer the question. But voice over could work, but I don’t know how you’re going to use it. If you’re just going to use it to say how she feels and what she’s going through I think you can solve that better by putting her in situations that show us that. And giving her conversations that help us with that. Behavior that helps us with that. But be careful.

Craig: Yeah, Truthy, I think that the thing that’s maybe most concerning to me is that you’re saying your story deals with a protagonist’s internal journey with her mental illness. I don’t actually know what an internal journey with mental illness is. I’ve had my own mental illness. I know what the process of dealing with it is. I know how it makes me feel. I know how the nature of the discussions I’ve had with a therapist or with friends. And I know how it manifests itself in my relationships with other people. But there is no internal journey per se.

There’s a kind of story that externalizes an internal journey. You know, when Robin Williams goes to heaven/hell to find his dead wife, or one of those things. You know?

A great version of that is The Fisher King that Richard LaGravenese wrote which clearly shows an internal journey with mental illness by externalizing it completely in a kind of fantastical element. But if you’re dealing with a very kind of down to earth wide-eyed, clear-eyed view of mental illness it needs to be, I think, experienced through someone’s relationships and behavior. The first person voice over narration when you say it will really help, help what? Help us understand what she’s thinking? That is not the goal.

The goal is to have us feel for her. And a lot of times clear explanations of how someone is feeling takes away our feeling for them. It becomes more of an essay that we’re reading as opposed to something that we’re feeling heart-wrenched over because we’re seeing somebody struggle. Or somebody – I mean, what’s sadder? Having somebody tell us that they’re terrified but have to keep a smile on? Or watching somebody that we know is terrified trying to keep a smile on? See what I mean?

So, I think you might want to just consider that internal journey part first and interrogate whether or not that is a necessary part of how this story should be told.

John: The other thing I would stress is that if you do a first person narration you’re creating a very different relationship between the audience and that character. We get insight into that character’s thinking and thoughts. And that can be great and powerful. You know, Clueless is a great example of first person narration. And if we didn’t understand what was going on inside her head the movie would not work nearly as well as it does. So it bonds us very closely to that.

But it also can interfere with sort of the natural unfolding of story, particularly based on when is this narration happening. Is it happening simultaneously to what the character is experiencing on screen, or is it something that happened before and you’re basically retelling the story? You’re pitching a yarn, in the Scott Frank sense.

Many of the mafia movies are sort of like this is what happened, this is what happened next, and they’re going back and telling you how a thing happened.

So there’s not one right or wrong answer here. I think we’ve just experienced so many times in movies where something wasn’t working right and they tried to throw a voice over on it and it just made it worse. Make sure that you’re doing it, you’re being very deliberate about it and you’re really thinking how is this going to help the audience really identify with this character’s story rather than just being an easier way to have some things being said.

Scott: And that points out something really, really important, too. Which has two parts to it. The first part is you need to know what story you’re telling. That’s really what it is. Who is this – right now you’ve described almost a type. It’s almost that reductive. It’s a depressed person. So, without knowing where you’ve put that person and what story and what else is about this person it’s very hard to know how to kind of address your question.

But more importantly what John was talking about now about voice over is a lot of times, you know, the studio will ask someone to come fix something. The ending doesn’t work, but we think it will work with voice over. If you add voice over people will understand. And the problem is it isn’t about understanding. And they’ve cut out all the things, by the way, at the beginning that got you invested because it was “slow.” So, the problem is you need to feel something at the end. We can understand, oh, they got together, I’m supposed to be happy. But then there is really feeling happy when they get together. Or feeling sad. It’s a very different thing between understanding what’s supposed to be happening and knowing that, yeah, that’s right but really feeling it.

Your job is to make us really feel it. You know, you have to really feel – when you get to the end it can’t be this perfunctory exercise in paying off the beginning because of screenwriting rules. It has to be something that feels really, to use the overused word, earned. And that’s really what you have to feel.

And so voice over or description or explaining things, that’s sort of looking in the wrong place for a solution. You need to look at the character and the story that grows out of that character. All answers are there. Everything is there.

John: Now Megana while we have you here, one of the things – it’s been a full year since PayUpHollywood started and all that stuff. It seems like another lifetime ago. Are you getting any emails in from assistants, from people who are dealing with that? What’s the status of that right now? Is there any sort of news on that level?

Megana: Yeah actually. We’re just about to launch our next survey. We pushed it back because of the election, so I think it’s like November 16. And I’ll include all of that stuff in the show notes for assistants. I think in particular the survey is interested in how people have been affected by the different Covid shutdowns. But take a look for that survey because things seem to only be getting better.

John: Great. So we’ll have a link to that in the show notes. And if people want to send in questions where should they send them?

Megana: To ask@johnaugust.com would be fantastic.

John: And we always love when people attach a voice memo because that way we can hear your voice and know who we’re actually talking to. Megana, thanks so much.

Craig: Thanks Megana.

Megana: Thank you guys.

Scott: Thank you, Megana.

John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book I’m reading right now called Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light by Jane Brox. It is just a book about how light came to be. How humans got to have light. And to be able to push back the darkness.

Craig: God. I mean, isn’t it just god?

John: God did it all. And so here’s a thing that I feel like all the movies I’ve seen and TV shows I’ve seen that were set before like 1900 have been cheating. Because most people just did not have the ability to have real light inside their houses to do things. But we needed to film period things and so we just sort of cheat the light and make it seem like these things were lit when they really weren’t.

And our ability to do things at night is actually very, very recent in human times. I mean, moving beyond campfires, which you can’t do very much by, to electric light we went through this transition where we had candles, and candles were just terrible, and then lanterns were a little bit better, and finally get to electric light. But I’ve just really enjoyed her laying out the history of this stuff and how much human civilization has changed because we’ve been able to control light.

So, Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light by Jane Brox.

Craig: Fantastic. Scott, anything on your One Cool Thing list?

Scott: I have a very analog One Cool Thing. Because I’m obsessed with the fact that writing has become so much about screens and looking at screens. Even getting notes on things. It’s just all on screen. And so I have taken to carrying this little teeny tiny Moleskin notebook that has changed my life. It’s tiny. It’s like the size of your Air Pods case, maybe a little bigger.

And what would be great, or what is great, is when you’re out there and I’ll be reading something or I’ll be listening to a podcast and I’ll hear a word that I think is a great word. And I just put that one thought on that page because they’re not huge pages. I don’t feel required, or feel pressured to fill it up with everything. But I think about little thoughts and sentences that I hear and that I want to plug into whatever it is I’m working on or thinking about. And it’s great. You just carry a little pencil stub or they make these great little tiny pens now. And I feel like if we did that more we would kind of find these little things out there in the world that would be better than finding them on screen.

Because I can’t tell you how often I hear something I think, wow, that’s a good use of that word. That’s amazing. I want to remember that. Or, wow, that was a really interesting image I just saw. I want to remember that. And I love notebooks. I have a notebook for every project. But this is something different. You just take it with you and knowing that it’s in your pocket makes you feel strong. [laughs]

Mind blown, right everybody? Yeah.

John: I like it.

Craig: It doesn’t take much to make Scott feel strong. A small amount of paper.

Scott: A little notebook in my pocket. It’s my little secret.

Craig: No one touch my notebook!

Scott: Your little secret.

Craig: Um, Scott can’t find his little notebook and so we can’t get started today. If someone could find his notebook. [laughs]

Scott: [laughs] It’s with his medicine. He left it with his medicine.

Craig: Exactly. Scott, you put your notebook and your wallet in the freezer again. Sweetheart.

Scott: By the way, you can get it on Amazon. The teeniest, tiniest Moleskin. You can get them on Amazon. They sell you like a six-pack or something.

Craig: Yes, of course. We’ve got to keep Amazon’s profit margins up, so here’s another thing you can get on Amazon. We’re heading into Thanksgiving. I don’t think either of you guys are big chefs, but–

John: I cook. But what you’ve posted here I’m fascinated by because it looks so much like a ShamWow kind of commercial.

Craig: No, no, it’s quite beautiful. And it’s cheap which is nice. I always like a nice, cheap thing. And it actually solves a problem. So when you approach Thanksgiving you are going to be making a lot of things with butter. That’s why Thanksgiving tastes so good. And there is a slight annoyance with butter. When you’ve got your sticks of butter you need to maybe grease a pan or something like that. You know how butter is wrapped, like the stick of butter is wrapped in such a way that you can’t unwrap it properly? I don’t know what they do. It’s like an origami thing around it. And then when you need to cut away a tablespoon or whatever you’re never quite cutting evenly. Plus the butter is always super hard.

This is a very simple gadget. It’s called The Butter Twist. You stick your stick of butter in this little plastic thing. Costs $15.49, or I guess the same equivalent as 4,000 of Scott’s little notebooks. Those cost a hay penny a piece. And you put it in there and it obviously holds the butter so if you need to grease a pan or something like that, but also if you need two teaspoons you just set the little dial on a thing and you twist it and it cuts that amount perfectly and drops it out onto your plate which is really nice. Because as you’re cooking like a big meal, like Thanksgiving, you don’t want to just keep screwing up knives and things to cut butter. That’s just a waste of dishwasher time. So, cute little thing. Works real well. $15.49.

The Butter Twist. Spread, cut, measure, dispense, and store your butter.

John: So unfortunately this only takes standard size sticks of butter. We use this weird Irish butter that’s really, really good, but it’s too wide to fit in that thing. So then we’d have to cut it and it would be a lot to do.

Craig: Yeah. This is really for…

John: Americans.

Craig: Well, and also for cooking. I mean, I wouldn’t waste the good Irish butter on cooking. Spread that on your toast. But for cooking just throw the crap in there. Your old Land-O-Lakes.

Scott: Craig, does this device fit in your pocket?

Craig: It does fit in your pocket. Yup. It does not come with a little pencil.

Scott: Just wondering. Just wondering if it fits in your pocket.

Craig: If you had a certain kind of small notebook you probably could write a word or two with butter on it.

Scott: There are marks on the butter where you can just slice right through.

Craig: Again, you must not have been listening to me. I mean—

Scott: About the dishwasher. Blah-blah-blah. Don’t you have to throw this in the dishwasher, too?

John: In fact one photo shows it going into a dishwasher.

Craig: Correct. So instead of the multiple things you just have the one thing. You can store your butter in it and, listen, I’m not talking to you. You don’t cook anything. You sit there at Thanksgiving. You’re asleep before Thanksgiving. Then they wake you up. They send you in there to eat. And then you go back to sleep. Sometimes I think–

Scott: They don’t even wake me up.

Craig: Exactly.

Scott: They don’t even want me in there. They’re glad I’m asleep.

Craig: They mush some potatoes around your slightly open mouth. I’m actually cooking.

Scott: They dip my hand in hot water, warm water, and leave me alone.

Craig: So that you’ll just get to the inevitable pants-peeing quicker.

Scott: Yeah. Dad’s in his chair.

Craig: We know exactly how it goes in your house. I’ve been there. I’ve seen this. [laughs]

Scott: [laughs] Yeah.

John: And that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by William Phillipson. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Scott Frank, are you on Twitter? I don’t think you are.

Scott: I’m on no social media.

Craig: He’s smart.

John: That is smart.

Scott: But I do have a little notebook in my pocket.

John: That’s right.

Craig: He can tweet with his little…he says to himself, “Oh, people would love that.”

John: Yes.

Craig: You’re going to like my own thing.

John: We have t-shirts. They’re delightful. They’re at Cotton Bureau. They make a good gift if you’re looking for a Christmas gift for somebody. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes including the one where Scott Frank talks about Godless at the Austin Film Festival. We also have bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Thanksgiving. But, I want to express my gratitude and thanks to Scott Frank for joining us here on this podcast. Great discussion.

Craig: Thank you, Scott. Miss you.

Scott: Thank you guys. It was fun.

Craig: I miss you and I regret to say that once again you’ve done brilliant work. Pisses me off.

Scott: That’s my goal.

Craig: I know.

[Bonus segment]

John: All right. So my thought behind this is that Thanksgiving is coming up. It’s going to be a weird Thanksgiving because of the pandemic. And this has just been a weird kind of generally terrible year. I think this will go down, for the rest of our lives, we’ll know, oh 2020, that was the year that was just awful.

But there were actually some good things that happened this year so I wanted to take a moment to think about the happy things that happened this year and I have a couple things on my little short list. One is that I had a movie that went from like, oh here’s an idea, to oh we’re in production and it all happened in 2020 which was just a delight. It was a fantasy project that I always wanted to do, that I got a chance to do, and weirdly the pandemic was kind of good for it. Because it was animation and nothing else could get made everybody could just focus on, OK, we can do an animated movie. And that was a good thing that happened in this bad year.

Do either of you have some things you’re grateful for in 2020?

Craig: You’re talking to the wrong Jews. A lot of complaining over here.

John: Scott Frank, you had an acclaimed series that you were able to finish post-production on.

Craig: But he’ll never do that well again. [laughs]

Scott: No. I never will. I’m very grateful that I peaked in 2020. I’m very grateful that the show got the response that it did which is surprising and yet lovely at the same time. I am grateful that we finished shooting last year. And am grateful that the technology caught up so that I could do all of post from my house in Connecticut. So that was – I’m very lucky that way. I know a lot of people who had to abandon production in the middle and then go back to it and I feel very fortunate that I didn’t have to.

I also feel lucky that the whole Covid thing forced everyone to kind of, in terms of family at least, to be a little more connected. And it got me to settle down a little bit that way. And it was nice to just be kind of in the quiet and enjoying – I wouldn’t say enjoying because there’s a lot of anxiety, but just kind of being with my family. I really like that. Who would have thought? They didn’t like it, but I did.

Craig: No. They like being with me. I know that.

Scott: They do. They love you. Especially Jennifer.

Craig: And I love them.

Scott: Yeah, they know.

Craig: They know. We all know. Everyone knows. That’s mostly what I’m thankful is the time I get to spend with Scott’s family.

Scott: Yes. [laughs]

John: I will say as the parent of a teenager, you know, in general I would not see her kind of at all, but for this last year we’ve had every meal together. We’ve been with each other this whole time. And it’s been actually really good. So I am also grateful for the sort of chance to hang out with her for this last year when she normally would have been off with friends and I would have been doing meetings and I would have been doing things in person. And I just wasn’t doing those things so we were all just together all this time. And I’m really grateful that it well.

Scott: It’s nice. And my kids are out of the house, but still they would, when we were in the city we would see them, or they would come up here. Because two of them live in New York. And my son came out from California and stayed here and wrote music. And every weekend we would come up and see him and we never would have seen him so much.

And even with Jennifer, you know, we’re married 32 years. Just to kind of cook at home and be at home and just, you know, hang out. There’s something that felt like a reset. It’s a little confusing given that not everybody has that experience.

John: Craig, there’s nothing we’re going to get out of you?

Craig: No, no, that’s not true. I am thankful about things. This is a pretty rough year just for the world and it is a weird thing to think about what’s gone well, because a lot of people have been suffering. But here’s a couple things that went well in 2020 for me, or at least me and the family.

My wife had breast cancer. And the treatment went really well. There’s a little surgery in there that was not too drastic and kind of just went well. And then the radiation after went really well. She didn’t need chemo, which I was really happy about. Because I think both of us were just sort of dreading that. Because, OK, Scott you’ve been married for 32 years. I’ve been married for 24 years. And I always say like any change after that amount of time is a positive. What, lose your hair? You’re going to be bald? Hot. That’s so great. I’m down. Let’s do this.

Any change is exciting. But she didn’t have to lose her hair, so I was a little bummed about that. But she didn’t have to get sick or anything like that from chemo which was really nice. And it looks like it’s all clear.

You know, you feel like you dodge a huge bullet with something like that. My son has Crohn’s disease and he was in the hospital again last week, because he had had some emergency surgery a couple years ago. And then he had a following surgery a year later because when you have stomach surgery there can be these adhesions in your colon that will sometimes just block everything and then they have to do another operation. Which is why the only good thing about him getting an abdominal obstruction and having a second emergency abdominal surgery was that it got me out of running for Vice President of the Writers Guild. So that was great.

I was in the hospital with him while that was going on. But it happened again last week. But this time happily they just – they kind of put him in the hospital and put him on fluids and just waited. And he did not need surgery. And so that was – it was sort of like dodging these bullets. When there are bullets flying all around I guess at some point you’re like, OK, people are dropping like flies so mostly I’m just looking at where the bullets don’t connect and saying, there. That’s a very good thing.

So I’m really happy about that.

Here’s another strange, like you try and find these little upsides to Covid which has killed nearly or more than a quarter of a million Americans and is on its way to ultimately being the deadliest thing America has faced since WWII. In fact, I think it will overcome WWII and be the worst deadliest thing we faced since the Civil War I guess.

My dad died and we couldn’t have a funeral or a memorial thing because of Covid and everything, so we have to wait. But it occurred to me that when we finally do have it, let’s say after vaccines and things it will be summer or something, I don’t know, that we will have a memorial service maybe eight months or a year after he died. And in doing so I think can have the experience that we’re supposed to have when people die. Like I think this should be a thing anyway. Somebody dies, you should wait a year and then have the memorial service. Because then it’s fun and it’s positive and you can actually do the whole thing of like remember. All the things they tell you you’re supposed to do you can do them. Because you’ve had time.

Why do we make ourselves do this when we’re in the lowest point and in the most wretched grievous state? Everybody should get time. And then have a memorial and it can be fun. It can be the kind of memorial the person who died would like to have been at. So, there’s a weird silver lining to that.

So those are the things for which I’m thankful this year. And I would argue that all of those things are more important and better than the things that you guys are thankful for.

Scott: Without question. Just one big ray of sunshine. Thank you, Craig.

John: Indeed.

Craig: And I’m also thankful for Jennifer, Scott’s wife.

Scott: Of course you are. And she for you.

Craig: I know. I know. I know. I know.

John: All right. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Craig.

Craig: Thanks guys.

Scott: Thank you.

 

Links:

• If you’re an assistant or coordinator interested in a PayUpHollywood survey please email ask@johnaugust.com
• Queen’s Gambit
• Queen’s Gambit Script Pages Opening and Basement Chess Scene
• Queen’s Gambit Palette Inspiration
• Scott Frank
• Moleskine Notebooks
• Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light by Jane Brox
• Kitchen Butter Twist
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by William Phillipson (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can now be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 474 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This episode is coming out Tuesday, November 3, 2020. So if you’re listening to this while standing in line to vote, thank you.

Craig: And if you’ve already voted, thank you also.

John: And that’s the last we’re going to talk about the election in this episode. Instead, we’re going to try to lessen any anxiety you may be feeling today.

Craig: Think of this episode as a much of hot chocolate with the little mini marshmallows.

John: Or a dog sleeping in a sun beam.

Craig: Or that song you hear that takes you back to a fun night in college.

John: Let this episode be a half a Xanax and a glass of red wine. Not that you should ever do that. But people have.

Craig: Or if you’re more risk adverse a fuzzy blanket and a good book.

John: It’s Bob Ross painting fluffy little clouds for an hour.

Craig: It’s the Monday New York Times crossword puzzle. It’s just so easy to fill out.

John: It’s McDonald’s French fries that you don’t have to share.

Craig: It’s a lost episode Ted Lasso where he goes grocery shopping with Nate.

John: It’s Elmo from Sesame Street giving you a hug.

Craig: It’s your high school coach saying he’s proud of you.

John: It’s a marshmallow roasted over a campfire to just the right shade.

Craig: AKA completely burnt. It’s a hot shower you can stay in for an hour.

John: It’s hitting the snooze button on the alarm clock and then realizing it’s Sunday and you can just sleep in.

Craig: It’s an episode where we answer some listener questions. We help a writer figure out how to his agent. We discuss the quiet moments before the big set pieces. And we just keep things calm.

John: Yeah. And, in our bonus episode for Premium members, we’ll talk about dogs.

Craig: I mean, dogs.

John: Dogs.

Craig: Dogs.

John: In the spirit of keeping things calm and quiet the only bit of news is that I’m going to be doing a panel for YALL Fest. So, if you’re a person who is interested in middle grade writing or YA writing, either reading those books or writing those books, I’m doing a panel on November 13. YALL Fest is great. And it’s all organized by middle grade and YA authors. And so it’s a national thing. It’s all online. It’s all free. My panel is on November 13 at 3pm Eastern, 12pm Pacific, with a bunch of other middle grade authors. But if you’re interested in writing in that space at all you should sign up for it because it looks to be a great, great program this year.

So there will be a link in the show notes to that.

Craig: Wonderful.

John: Now, Craig, why don’t you start us off? You suggested this topic of the calm before the storm.

Craig: I wonder why. I wonder why this came to mind. So, in movies and television shows we have all experienced this moment and it’s something that I think we write a lot without being even conscious that we’re writing specifically this moment. It comes before the end. Pretty much right before the end. Something big is about to happen. The final movement of the story. And right before the final movement of the story whereas the normal order of business is to propel things constantly forward everything just stops. The whole thing stops. It’s like everyone takes a break. Which theoretically is anti-dramatic and disrupts flow.

But in fact the calm before the storm moment, and I’m talking about right before the verdict of a big case, or right before the big battle in the war movie, or right before the performance in the singing movie, or right before the big final game in a sports movie, in the moment before that everybody has this quiet night before/moment before moment. And I wanted to talk about why we have those moments and what’s supposed to happen in them and what the value is.

John: Yeah. What is the dramatic purpose of these moments? Because as you describe them, yeah, I see them in all of these stories. In all of these movies. And I feel like it’s true because in real life there is a buildup and a buildup in anticipation, but there is also a moment before the thing that I know is going to happen is going to happen. And it can be a moment of anxiety but it can also be a moment of coming together. It can be a moment of synthesis of sort of what I’ve learned so far. So talk to me about this moment. What do you see there?

Craig: Well, it’s usually at a point in your story where all of the things the characters needed to do, all the things they were capable of doing, they have done. So, there’s a sense of you’ve earned a break. We need to know as the audience that you have done all the preparations. And then you have this moment that we right now as people are listening to this are probably experiencing. Because we are in it right now. On Tuesday we wait to see how this all turns out. We’ve done it. We voted. We did what we could do. And all of the phone-banking and all that stuff is over and now you have a moment of reflection. And before the big final action typically there is a shared moment.

It is shared between our main characters. There is some sense of a relationship that is completing. Oftentimes these moments are a drink or a celebration. In the last season of Game of Thrones, before the big huge crazy battel began there was an episode that was basically a long party. And in the party people were drinking and celebrating. They were essentially reconciled. All of the “family business” had been completed. What happens in those sequences? People give each other advice. People consummate relationships that maybe were meant to go to a higher level. And they have a moment where they can help define for us watching who they actually are. Because in those moments – I think when I watch those moments at least – what I’m seeing is something that most closely approximates those moments in real life where things feel slowed down.

Where everything just slows down to a stop.

John: Classically in a story we’re looking at a protagonist/antagonist relationship. And so there’s still going to be a battle, a final moment to come. There’s going to be that big showdown is going to happen. But then a lot of smaller protagonist/antagonist relationships along the way. And so talk about those family relationships, how the team has come together, those other smaller tensions are hopefully resolved in this moment so we can basically concentrate all of our energy and all our force on this last thing.

So it is that backstage moment where the two rivals finally sort of come together to do this thing. Or the two people on the team who were always fighting and bickering are now united in a common cause. This is the moment where that happens so it doesn’t have to happen in that final set piece.

Craig: Right. In fact, it needs to happen here because it can’t happen in the final set piece. The problem with those things happening in the final set piece is that they feel circumstantial. When you make an alliance in a moment where if you don’t make the alliance your head is going to come off that’s not a dramatically fulfilling alliance. That’s just an alliance of convenience. But in these moments before what happens is we do take a minute to quietly talk to each other about where we went wrong and how it can be better and right and how we are now unbreakable.

So our alliances are secure. There’s no more question of where we stand with each other. We solidify our position no only vis-à-vis each other but with the community around us, whether that’s a baseball team, a small town, a city. Or an entire country. Thinking, OK, another classic example, the rah-rah speech is a version of this. The “we will not go gently into the night” speech before you fight the aliens. Everybody is now on the same page finally. All on the same page.

And why? Because symbolically these moments are about preparing for death. We are getting our affairs in order. It’s remarkable how similar these scenes are to pre-death scenes. What do you do? You get your affairs in order. You say your goodbyes. You tell people you love them. You bury the hatchet and squash all beefs. You write your final messages. You complete the circle. And we need this in our drama because if we don’t sense the characters are prepared to die then victory just seems sort of inevitable.

John: Yeah. Now we’re talking about this from the point of view of the characters. We’re talking about it from our point of view as the writer. But let’s think about this from the point of view of the audience. Why does the audience need this moment of calm? Think about your experience watching a movie and if it’s just relentless, you’re on a constant forward march to this finale, you never get to catch your breath yourself. You never sort of get to resettle in the seat and enjoy the movie that you’re watching. It’s just relentlessly pushing at you.

And so it gives you a moment of a tonal break. A moment to pick up the popcorn that you sat down on the floor and get back into it. It’s just changes the dynamic for you so that you have some different textures in your movie, otherwise it can just be the same thing the whole time through.

Craig: Yeah. And it also decouples your feeling about the hero from their potential success. Because I don’t want to love someone simply because they win. I want to love them for who they are in a moment. And when they have finally struggled past their flaws and patched up the conflict between themselves and the people that they should love or protect, or be an ally for, you feel like they’ve earned your love. Before they go into that battle I go, “They get it. They’re good. If they die now they die. But if they win they win. But either way I love them now.”

As opposed to just sort of like, well, let’s see. Because if he wins, then hooray, but if not, screw him. He just didn’t have it. And we don’t like that. We want to know before the big swing happens that they’re good. We want to know they’re good.

John: It’s crazy that you bring this up right now because this is actually the scenes I’m working on this week are in this space of the script. And it is so fascinating that you need to give the story permission to sort of go either way. So that the central characters, we want them to succeed, but we also know that if they don’t succeed, if this thing that we hope happens doesn’t happen that’s also OK. And obviously we’re talking about in general movies where there’s a final set piece, a final sort of thing that needs to happen. But even the thing I’m writing right now which is not so set piece driven there’s a fundamental dramatic question that’s being asked at the start of the story and changes along the way. But it’s a binary choice. What’s going to happen?

And to have this moment of quiet at this place 85% of the way through the story it makes it OK with either answer, which is important.

Craig: It is. It doesn’t have to be right before something large. My own example when I was working on Chernobyl was our big battle is a courtroom case which isn’t even a courtroom case. It’s a show trial. So the verdict has been predetermined. There’s nothing less dramatic than that. But there is a break in the trial and two of our three main characters go outside and they sit on a bench. And essentially what happens is one of them says, “I’m dying. And I didn’t matter. But you did and I’m happy I was with you.” And the other one says, very convincingly, “No, no, no, you mattered the most.” And in that quiet moment where there are no stakes, nothing changes other than that, their feelings about each other, there is a conclusion. And we need it. We just need it so that we understand when they go back into the courtroom whether they both die quickly or slowly. It doesn’t matter. They have settled their affairs with each other. And they have essentially said to each other that they love each other.

If you don’t have it, then what are the symptoms of the story without these moments? A sense of rushing. And it’s so weird because you will feel people complaining about a sense of dragging everywhere except this one spot. This one spot they will accuse you of rushing if you don’t take a pause.

John: Now, a thing that you will sometimes notice as you’re looking through a script that’s not working in its last section is you may be trying to do this either during that last set piece or after the last set piece. We’ve talked before about how in a football movie it’s not really about winning the game. It’s about the quarterback’s wife being proud of him. Then that’s the emotional moment. But don’t mistake that for this quiet before the storm moment where you see important relationships resolve. Important things being solidified and anchored before that last set piece.

And so if you’re having problems in your third act this may be one of the issues is that you’re not getting into that last beat right, or you’re trying to pay off a thing after the movie kind of wants to be over. After the story of the movie kind of wants to be over. So you may need to pull something up earlier on.

Craig: Yes. Exactly. Because once it’s over it’s just a confirmation of what happened in this moment we’re talking about, the moment before. Where typically you look at somebody like across the field you’ll see the person that you had the night before with, that whole discussion. You’ll see them. They’ll smile at you. You’ll smile at them. Because, yup, what we said last night, that was true. That’s all you need.

John: Yeah. You’re establishing the emotional stakes for this last set piece as well. You’re reminding the audience of where the characters started, where they’ve come from, and what literally just happened right before this moment is that they are unified as they’re going into this last thing.

And so you see this on every episode of Glee for example. It’s all the tensions that happen during the course of the episode and then in the final performance there’s a look between two characters and it’s cheesy and you just know it’s going to happen. But if it didn’t happen it would be very frustrating.

Craig: You’d be like where’s my look?

John: There’s your look. So, what lessons do we want people to take away from this quiet before the storm? I think it’s just a reminder not to rush. A reminder that you need to actually plan for this. Because if you didn’t anticipate you need to do this it could just be – if you’re just doing sort of like the note cards of set piece, set piece, set piece, set piece, set piece you won’t think about how important it is to have these transitional moments. Because it’s not flashy. It’s not exciting. There’s no big giant fireworks happening in this moment. And yet the movies you love most probably have this moment and you’re just not paying attention to it.

Craig: Absolutely. Just imagine your characters when they have nothing being asked of them. The movie essentially says, oh, normally there’s an event after an event after an event. But unfortunately because of a scheduling problem there’s no event right now. The event will be in one hour. The event will be tomorrow morning. What do you do? What you’re doing is you’re giving them time off. And in their time off they can reflect on what has happened and how it made them feel. And what they think is going to happen tomorrow.

And they can be honest with each other and they can express that they’re afraid. And they can express why it matters more than it might otherwise. All of that stuff is the most important stuff. If you don’t have it your climax will be active. But it may not be meaningful.

John: Agreed. Great. Now in previous episodes we’ve discussed when it makes sense to write something as a spec versus pitching it, but it’s not always a binary choice. In many cases you’re pitching these nascent ideas to your reps, your agent, or your manager who are going to weigh in on what they think they can sell or help get you into rooms to meet.

So my personal experience with this, my first agent was a good guy, a good friend, and I liked him a lot, but he just did not seem to share my taste. I had a hard time expressing to him what it was that I was trying to write. So I wrote this horror western and he just had no idea what to do with it. And I wrote the first part of Go and he’s like, “I don’t get this at all.” And that was a sign that, oh, then maybe you just don’t really get me as a writer and I ended up moving to another agency.

But then I started to realize that in some cases I was having a hard time describing these ideas and sort of why I should write these ideas. And it wasn’t really just the other person’s fault. I was having a hard time communicating what this was just because I was new at this.

And Craig what was your experience as a newer writer? Did you have a hard time describing what it was you were trying to do?

Craig: No. But it took a lot of work. Because I was working exclusively in feature comedy, and this was the ‘90s where everything was generally high concept feature comedy, you had to actually have this really clear concept. You needed to be able to explain out how the movie was actually a movie and not just a comedy sketch. And you needed to give them a sense of set pieces. So there was a lot of rigging and moving parts that needed to be there. And somehow you had to do all of that without boring them to tears. And it’s really hard to pitch comedy – I’m sure Drew can get into that as well – because pitching is not funny. It’s a comedy-killing medium. So it can get sweaty and it’s hard.

John: Yeah. So let’s bring on a guest because he wrote in on Twitter saying that he was running into this exact problem where he’s having a hard time connecting with his agent about the things he was trying to write. Drew Champion is a writer whose animated show Archibald’s Next Big Thing has its first two seasons on Netflix and a third season coming on Peacock soon. Drew, welcome to the program.

Drew Champion: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Craig: Drew Champion is such a good name. I want you to be like one of those huge robots in Pacific Rim. Like Gypsy Danger. Drew Champion.

Drew: It’s a great last name that unfortunately growing up you had a lot of pressure. Like, oh, let’s get him on our team. He’s going to be great.

John: Good omen.

Craig: And then what happened?

Drew: Exactly. Exactly.

Craig: Blew a draft? Take on Champion. Oh god.

John: Now, Drew, talk to us about what you’re writing right now because you have a writing partner but you also write by yourself. So what’s your current situation?

Drew: Right now my writing partner and I we did this show, Archibald’s Next Big Thing, at DreamWorks and we’re kind of between shows right now. We’re doing a little bit of development for DreamWorks Animation. And at the same time together with my partner we are also doing non-animated stuff together. And trying to work that out. And then also I’m doing some solo stuff, non-animated, as well.

John: Great. And so in animation, so it’s DreamWorks Animation, the stuff that you’ve been doing so far is not WGA work. It’s Animation Guild?

Drew: Yeah. It’s all Animation Guild. Yeah.

John: And you have an agent and a manager? What’s your representation situation?

Drew: Just an agent. No manager right now.

John: Great. So what stuff are you having a hard time with right now. Is it stuff you’re working on with your partner? Or stuff you’re trying to pitch that’s just you? Or figure out if it’s just you.

Drew: The stuff that I mentioned when I messaged you on Twitter was just my personal stuff. It’s like this fine balance of writing a pilot and sending it to my agent and having it not really connect very well. And then thinking, OK, maybe writing the full pilot was too much work. Maybe I’ll just write an outline. So I wrote an outline, a comedy, and sent it to him and didn’t really connect. And so it’s like, OK, what’s even less work than an outline? Let’s just try a logline. And so my loglines haven’t been landing as well. I feel kind of like I want to – I need my agent to be on my side. It’s the gatekeeper. And I need to write something that he’s excited about so that he would be able to take it around and do those things. But at the same time I feel like it’s kind of wearing down some of my enthusiasm on some of my projects.

So it’s like this push and pull of where should I put the effort into and should I just write it anyway? At most one of these outlines could be a sample. So, yeah, that’s kind of where my situation is at.

Craig: That’s a situation. Well, a lot of times there is some sort of systematic best practices answer. In the case like this, and I don’t mean your specific case, but just the experience of trying to convince a partner of yours, whether it’s a writing partner or an agent that what you’re doing is worth pursuing, I think the best practice is what fills your sail with wind. And if someone is not filling your sail with wind then it’s just no good.

Now that’s not to say that agents should just read things and go, “Great!” Because then that’s patronizing and it’s not real wind. But it does seem like maybe what’s happening is the dynamic has become I show up and I’m like here, what do you think about this, and he goes, “Yeah, it’s OK. I don’t know.” All right, well what about this? “Meh, I don’t know.”

As opposed to sitting down and saying, “I’m not going to pitch you anything. I’m going to tell you how I see things going. And what I want. And how I want to get there. I want to tell you about why I’m passionate about certain things and how I think it would connect to other people and why.” And rather than serve up some food, explain the theory and the desire. And also explain the context of what you want from them. Because, I mean, just as a side note, agents don’t know what good is. I mean, apologies to all of them, but that’s not their job.

Their job is to get you as much money as possible or as much work as possible. They generally figure out what good is based on what everybody else says good is. Generally. I mean, some of them really do have excellent taste. But that’s not their primary function.

Think about maybe like a tête-à-tête I guess is what I’m suggesting.

John: Yeah. I think Craig’s suggestion in terms of having a general discussion about where you want to be working in the next two years is a good way to sort of start this rather than focusing on this one thing that’s going to go out as a pitch versus that thing that you’re going to try to write as a spec. Talk about the kinds of things you want to be doing so that he gets the sense of what you’re looking at with your partner and what you want to be looking at doing yourself.

One thing to think about in terms of agents and managers is it’s cleaner when we think about like a real estate agent, because that real estate agent you don’t go to them for advice on what color should I paint this wall. They’re just there to help you sell your house or to help you buy a house. That’s their function. And our literary agents are really good at that and they have a good sense of what the market is and all that. But you’re not necessarily paying them for their taste or their ability to predict this is the thing that’s going to be the one that’s going to set you on artistic success. Based on their experience this is the kind of thing that’s going to make it pretty easy for me to get you in rooms to talk about stuff.

And so in addition to having a general sit down with your reps I would say imagine those hypothetical general meetings you’re going into and what are the projects that you want to be able to pitch to those executives you’re meeting with rather than thinking about what it is – how you’re going to pitch it to your agent.

Drew: Right.

John: Do you want to pitch any of the stuff that you’re thinking about to us? Is there anything that you’re working on that feels like–?

Craig: Good lord.

John: Well is there any sort of general spaces, like talk to me about – imagine that we are the agent where you’re having the sort of general conversation. What kind of stuff do you want to be writing?

Drew: Well part of my situation is that I come from kid’s animation. And this is the first show I’ve ever worked on. So I feel like I have a good foundation and then breaking out of animation might be – it’ll be a struggle. It might be a little difficult. But with conversations with my agent it sounds like that doing half hour comedies is probably the most adjacent thing to animated TV, especially in the kids space, rather than trying to do a broody period piece drama feature. That might be a little bit more difficult to get me on. But to do something in comedy.

So that’s where I’ve been kind of focusing right now is half hour comedies.

Craig: Let’s put aside what maybe structurally seems like the business appropriate move. What do you actually want to do?

Drew: I want to do those brooding—

Craig: Great. We just got somewhere.

Drew: That’s what I want to do.

Craig: Do you think going from Archibald’s Next Big Thing to a brooding drama, do you think that that is impossible? Ask the guy who went from Hangover 3 to Chernobyl.

Drew: No. I mean, it doesn’t sound impossible. It just feels, well, it doesn’t sound impossible, but then it does sound impossible. Because then it’s like well who the hell is this guy? He was just writing about a talking Chicken for Tony Hale. Why is he doing such-and-such?

Craig: Well, you know, I’ll just say that there are a lot of examples of this. Sometimes we miss them. Or we forget that Walter White was the silly dad on Malcolm in the Middle. There is a lot of this. In acting and in writing and in directing. And the beautiful part of doing what you truly want to do as opposed to trying to fit into some scaffolding is that it’s actually much easier. Believe it or not it’s easy.

It’s really hard to wake up in the morning and write what you’re supposed to write. It is incredibly easy to wake up in the morning and write what you want to write.

Drew: Right.

Craig: And it will open doors in a way that – look, if it’s good. Right? It will open doors in remarkable ways for you. What happens is they tell you you can’t go through any of those doors. You have to go through this one door. You write something else, you come in, and all those other doors fling open. Fling open. It’s like they just didn’t believe it until they saw it.

John: So, Craig, a very specific example that I can offer Drew from my own experience. My first paid jobs as a writer were A Wrinkle in Time and How to Eat Fried Worms. They’re both kid’s books adaptations. And the only things I was getting sent at my old agent was movies about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. I was very, very typecast as the guy who writes those kinds of things. I was typecast and I was pigeonholed. That’s what I was getting sent.

And so I wrote Go largely as a kind of middle finger to I can write other things. Don’t just think of me as this one kind of writer. And I ended up using that as the script that got me a new agent and sort of got me started on a new thing.

What was great about Go is it was the movie I most wanted to see. It’s the movie that didn’t exist that I really wanted to see. And happily people could read that script and apply it to whatever they wanted to be. Some people said like, “Oh, he can write an action movie. He can write a comedy. He can write serious stuff.” It was a very useful script for me on that level, even if it hadn’t ever gotten made. It would have gotten me plenty of work.

And so I would say be thinking about what is the movie that you, Drew, specifically could write that best shows the kind of movie that you could deliver to the world. You also do have a fallback plan. You do have a writing partner and you have a deal at DreamWorks Animation so you can keep doing that stuff. That’s the kind of great situation you find yourself in is you can always just do another animated kids show. Take this opportunity to write the thing that you really wish could exist. And I don’t think it is about pitching it, honestly. I think it is just going to be a brand new thing that you write that shows that you are a different kind of writer. And a writer who can do this by himself without the partner.

Drew: Right.

Craig: It’s scary.

John: It is scary. But exciting.

Drew: I’m terrified.

Craig: Yeah. Good. I mean, you’d be kind of sociopathic if you weren’t. I mean, I was scared. But also there’s a freedom to it. I was talking to Alec Berg the other day about how as you go on in your career you get better at writing. It’s inevitable. You get way better at writing. I’m a much better writer now than I was when I started. But he did point out something that was absolutely true that when you look back at the stuff you wrote way, way back in the beginning you were probably – you meaning all of us – were freer. We were freer in our writing. We were less constrained by our fears or what we were trying to do. Ambitions. The market. Other movies. Insecurities. Whatever the hell it was, we were too stupid to know that you shouldn’t write some things. And in that we were wonderful.

And, after all, it’s that writer that got into Hollywood, right? So, they were doing something right. So in something like this the nice thing is you get to be completely free. There are no notes. There’s no rubric. There’s no syllabus. There’s nothing. You do whatever you want. It’s amazing. It’s free. And stick it in at the end of the day if you want. It could be a little side job for you.

Drew: Right.

Craig: And if it goes nowhere it goes nowhere. But what I would say is, and this is the meeting that I had with my agent way, way back. We sat down and I said, OK, so here’s the situation. I think that I’m a better writer than the opportunities I’m getting. And so I want to concentrate on that now. And we don’t have to worry about, if it’s OK with you, I don’t want to worry about money. I don’t want to worry about this or that.

Now, we can’t always not worry about money. But in that instance I said I just want to work with better material. I want to work on better material. Because I want to use what I have. I had been stuck in the same – working the same aisle in the same store for too long. I wanted a new position.

So it’s fair to sit down with that person and say, “I’m still doing the comedy. I’m still doing this. Let’s make some money. But also I want you to know I’m doing this and this is exciting because we can go out and make some fresh kills.” You know what I mean? We can open up a new front in this war.

John: Drew, how are you feeling right now?

Drew: I mean, my mind is just racing. This has all just been really interesting, really good stuff. I think this is really helpful and I feel energized to kind of open my mind to a different level of just being open and free to just explore some of this other stuff. That’s really exciting.

Craig: It’s crazy. Listening to you say that, it does strike me, because I’ve had the same feeling, that this business convinces you that you’re not free.

John: There’s a Stockholm syndrome that sort of kicks in.

Craig: Yeah. But we are. That’s the crazy part. We are. They just put blinders on us. And they’re very effective blinders. And of course, you know, we have obligations that we have to meet, and so we do have to work on things that we get paid for. But I guess what I’m saying is we’re giving you permission. And you don’t have to worry that you’re being self-indulgent. Because I’m guessing that you’re a lot like me in that you’ve always been the far opposite of self-indulgent. You’ve always been terrified as coming off as self-indulgent.

Drew: Bingo. Bingo.

Craig: Well then you know what? Indulge a little. You’ve earned it.

John: Cool. Drew, we are going to be looking for your credits. We’re going to be looking for the announcement of the project that you set up that you’re going to write now. And check back in with us and let us know what you do next, OK?

Drew: Yeah. You guys, this has been so helpful. Thank you so very much.

Craig: Our pleasure. Thank you for coming on.

Drew: Thanks for having me.

Craig: Sure.

John: Thank you, Drew. Suddenly we’re in a call-in advice show.

Craig: I like that.

John: [laughs]

Craig: Putting people’s lives back together. It’s lovely.

John: These call-in advice shows, they also sometimes have producers who come on who are reading questions. So let’s bring our producer on, Megana Rao.

Megana Rao: Hey guys.

Craig: Hey.

John: We are so excited to have you here with us. And you, how many questions do you get in at ask@johnaugust.com per week?

Megana: Oh lord. Probably like 20 to 30.

John: All right. And what is your criteria for sorting through the questions? And which ones make it on to the Workflowy?

Megana: So I think about questions that we have answered recently. Things that I think are unique and interesting and personally curious about. Yeah, and then I think things that are broadly applicable or if there’s a specific situation that seems, I don’t know, like you guys would have an interesting take on it. I kind of send all of that to you guys, get your feedback, and then the winners are in the Workflowy.

Craig: I mean, you know I don’t actually give any feedback. I accept what you guys do completely. Openly. Happily. I try and be as happy as I can. You do a great job.

Megana: But like cryptic puzzles from last week was definitely a Craig question.

Craig: I know. I know. And I was so – thank you for this.

John: Yeah, we kind of wedged that in at the end there.

Craig: I really appreciated it.

John: What do we have this week?

Megana: So Lisa wrote in about misdirection. And she asked, “I’ve noticed that mystery writers, particularly Agatha Christie, use confirmation bias to trick the reader into ignoring what’s actually happening. The reader gets a couple of clues that lead to a red herring, then happily ignores or downplays contrary evidence until the big denouement.

“Similarly, one of the meta clues in a mystery is the unnecessary-necessary character. The villain is introduced early on as a minor character who the reader ignores because their appearance seems normal to the plot. Then, when they are revealed, the audience doesn’t feel cheated that the villain came from left field. It feels fair.

“Any thoughts on how screenwriters can best use these techniques of misdirection?”

John: What a good question from Lisa.

Craig: An excellent question from Lisa.

John: Yeah, so what you’re doing with a misdirection is very classically like a magic trick. And magic tricks rely on expectation. What you expect is going to happen next and then defeating that expectation. Surpassing that expectation.

So in any misdirection, in a mystery, or whatever you’re trying to do, you’re leading the audience into making reasonable assumptions about what’s going to happen. So assuming that the protagonist isn’t actually the villain, that the movie is a reliable narrator, that the story is taking place on earth or in a specific decade. Basically that you’re not doing an M. Night Shyamalan on them. That things you are assuming are true are actually true. And I like that phrase the unnecessary-necessary character. Because that’s a thing I see a lot, Craig, is that the character who well naturally is going to be there because of sort of the situation and then they have a role beyond what you expect them to be doing in the story.

Craig: Yeah. I like the Shyamalaning – I mean, there’s a difference between a joke and a prank. Practical jokes, which are not jokes, are just things that rely on someone’s ignorance of something that they shouldn’t know anyway. And that’s Shyamalaning. Whereas a proper joke or a proper trick or misdirection it’s legitimately fooling you. Because you could see it if you were able to. It’s right there.

So what Agatha Christie does, and I study her so carefully, is she is in fact using things like confirmation bias. She is allowing you to make conclusions that you don’t even realize you’re making. And she uses all of the tricks that we’ve talked about before. The ways that we are irrational. And the study of Kahneman and Tversky who sort of established the science of human irrationality. Agatha Christie before the scientists ever got ahold of this concept was preying upon all of those things. Anchoring, for instance. We tend to be influenced by the first thing that we see. But we shouldn’t. It’s just the first. It doesn’t mean it’s the best or the most important. But she’ll use things like that all the time.

So, part of the trickery of it, Lisa, is actually studying how humans think wrongly about things. It is fair game to take advantage of that. Because whose fault is it for overemphasizing the first thing you read? Or for presuming that if a coin spins three heads in a row that it’s more likely that the next spin will be tails as opposed to heads. Well, it’s our fault. It’s not the writer’s fault.

So the writer is allowed to take advantage of that. It’s not just about our skill in being sneaky. It’s about our awareness of how our audience is broken.

John: And I would say there’s a difference between what writers can get away with in prose fiction versus screenwriting. And the central difference is that in a book characters can disappear. Basically unless the writer actually puts that character in front of your face they can disappear back into the woodwork. So a character can be mentioned and then sort of not mentioned for a while. And because you’re just getting information from the writer you don’t have a sense of like, oh, this character is important or not important. Versus in a screenplay and therefore in a movie there’s going to be a physical actor there in the frame, in the shot. And if you’re trying to do a misdirect where that person who doesn’t seem important is actually very important, or that waiter is actually secretly complicit in the whole thing, that person is going to physically be there.

So as a screenwriter you may have to put in a substitute reason for why that character is showing up there so much. So you might be thinking about this is the guy who won’t stop freaking out during the robbery. And so he’s panicked. And so we think that he’s just a guy who is in the bank during the robbery but he’s actually part of the villains. Or the hacker who can get you through into that secure zone. So the reason why that guy is always sitting there at the computer is because he’s on our side. He’s one of our hackers, but he’s actually that guy.

You’re going to need to think of some reason for why that character is around so much and it’s a bigger issue for a screenwriter than it would be for the novelist.

Craig: Yeah. There’s a great example. Are you guys Agatha Christie fans?

John: In high school I read through all the books and I’ve seen some of the movies but not in a while. So not nearly the fan you are.

Craig: What about you, Megana?

Megana: Yeah, I’d say so. I was like very much so a Nancy Drew person growing up. So I feel like that followed a similar sort of format.

Craig: No question. The example I like to cite is Agatha Christie’s, I think it’s her first novel, her first full mystery. It’s called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And so this is super early. I think we’re talking like 1915 or something like that. And here’s how it works. It’s a first person narrator, which is odd. It’s not typical for a murder mystery.

But this guy lives in a small town and Poirot rents a summer house next to him. And so he becomes sort of fascinated by Poirot, because Poirot is such an oddball. And lo and behold what happens? A murder. There’s like a big super rich family in town. And the rich guy is murdered. And so our narrator basically accompanies Poirot and sort of tails along as Poirot begins to take the mystery part and solve it.

And there was at the time a mystery writers club, I think, in London. And I believe either they did or almost kicked Agatha Christie out because of this. Because, sorry for spoilers for a book that’s about a hundred years old. What happens you find out is that the murderer is the narrator.

John: Yes.

Craig: And she’s brilliant. He never really lies. He just leaves a few things out. And it’s astonishing. In fact, and what’s so astonishing is that he was not unreliable as a narrator. He was reliable. He told you everything. But that’s the kind of thing that takes advantage of a natural bias that we are not even aware of. So as we’re reading and trying to figure out, or as we’re watching a movie like Knives Out, which is obviously a little different because you kind of know technically who did it early. But we know the audience is trying to figure it out. We know they’re doing the math. So, how do you beat them?

Well, somebody has got to be innocent. That’s probably the one who is not.

John: The only other thing I’d urge Lisa to think about is obviously misdirection in mystery is crucial to it, but misdirection is important for other genres of films as well. As an audience we are always approaching a movie with a set of expectations about the genre, about the world, the kinds of things we expect to happen in this movie. And most of the times as writers our goal is to meet and exceed those expectations. And so the audience feels smart. The audience is with you. I thought this was going to happen and it did happen and so I trust this movie.

But if you can build enough trust you can then also surprise people. And surprise relies on misdirects. This thing that you didn’t think could happen in this movie did happen. And it shakes you and it gets you really excited because you’re suddenly on a ride you didn’t expect.

So it’s the romantic comedy where they actually do break up and they never get back together again. That’s exciting. But you would need to lay in the possibilities for those misdirections early on.

Megana, another question for us, please.

Megana: OK, awesome. So I feel like this one is a great follow up. Brian asks, “How much should you reveal during a pitch meeting? If your script has a unique twist that you’ve never seen done would you reveal that twist or try to entice your audience by mentioning all the other things that make this script great without revealing the one thing that no one has ever done before? Because to do this would be giving away an idea for free. And I know how adamant you are about leaving no writing behind without payment. It seems there’s a tightrope you must walk by selling your script or idea without giving away ever single detail.”

John: Craig, do you reveal it all?

Craig: Yeah. It’s not writing. You’re talking about it. And these theoretically are professionals. So, they’re like, look, I’m going to read it before the audience sees it. I’m going to read it before we cast it, we shoot it, all that stuff. So what exactly are we waiting for? Because if I don’t like how it ends I’m not buying it. I need to know. And if the twist is unique and exciting and kind of mind-wobbling like, oh my god, he was a ghost the whole time. Well, that’s what they’re going to buy. They’re not buying set up, pretty much. I don’t think they are. Unless what makes your movie or your pitch unique the set up itself. In that case, sure.

But otherwise, no, go for it.

John: Yeah. Let me try to rephrase Brian’s question thusly. Hey, John and Craig, so I have a really unique idea but in the pitch meeting should I not actually make it sound unique or cool but make it sound like other things and hide what makes it unique and cool? Is that a good strategy?

Craig: Yes. [laughs]

John: The answer would be no. You should actually do what makes it unique and coo. And here’s the challenge is that obviously how you reveal that twist in the screenplay is going to be different than how you’d probably do it in a pitch. But you figure that out. And that’s the excitement of doing a pitch is figuring out where the listeners are at and how you get them to that moment. But, yes, you absolutely need to do it and so they have something to hang on. So they can really feel what’s going to be special about the project.

So, yes, leave it all on the field. You’ve got to give them what is special and unique about this, because otherwise you’re not going to sell it.

Craig: Word.

John: Word. Megana, thank you for these questions.

Craig: Thanks, Megana.

John: Now, when people write in to ask@johnaugust.com with their questions what are some helpful things you’d like them to do in terms of question length? Do you like the audio questions? Help us out?

Megana: Ooh, I love audio questions and I know you do, too. So audio, like if you can record and send me a transcript of the question that’s the ideal. Yeah, otherwise I think keeping it short and sweet and sort of getting to the point. Just like Brian is afraid to reveal too much, I feel like in a lot of questions the person asking is also afraid that I’m going to steal their story idea or that someone would if we read it on air.

Craig: Oh lord.

Megana: But that ends up making for a worse question if it’s really vague because you’re not telling me any details about your situation. So feel free to let me know you don’t want me to use your real name. But otherwise please send some more context and information. That’s always really helpful.

John: And we also love when you include your location because it’s just more fun to say Brian in Massachusetts than just Brian.

Megana: Totally.

Craig: Oh my god. Brian from Massachusetts.

John: Cool. Megana, thank you so much.

Craig: Thanks Megana.

Megana: Thank you guys.

John: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. So my One Cool Thing is actually three books that are all about money and I think I may have mentioned one of them before, which is Debt – The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber. It’s a great look at sort of how money came into existence based on just people owing each other stuff and it ultimately becomes money.

Two books I read recently, Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein, and The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood are both really good and very different looks at sort of what it is that we’re doing when we think about money and economies and sort of how stuff works.

Craig, did you have economics in high school or college? When did you first learn about how the “economy” works?

Craig: I actually had a class in eighth grade. I went to an odd school. I was at Hunter College High School in Manhattan until we moved away. And so they kind of did their own funky curriculum. And in eighth grade I remember our social studies class did have a long section on how the economy worked, how the stock market worked, how money worked, loans, interest, compound interest, inflation, all that stuff. It was interesting. I mean, I never had any desire to take Econ in college or anything like that.

But, you know, I think everybody should understand the basics of how corporations function, for instance.

John: Absolutely. How corporations function. Just the idea of supply and demand. And it’s weird because I had micro and macroeconomics in college. And as a journalism major we were required to take both macro and micro and they were really illuminating, but they’re also basically like this is capitalism and it’s almost like a Darwinian theory of how stuff works. But it just happens to work but it’s not kind of the only way things could work. And so it’s fascinating to look at other ideas about sort of how money and economies function together.

We talked in a previous episode, actually one of our first bonus episodes, was about the gold standard and why the gold standard is stupid.

Craig: It is.

John: It’s just so, so dumb.

Craig: So dumb.

John: But it’s hard to explain why it’s dumb unless you have some background in sort of how money comes to be.

Craig: Right.

John: If people are looking for any sort of starter books I think all three of these – actually the one that’s not about the origin capitalism which is just a little too obscure to start with, but either of these other two books are great ways to be thinking about what money is and how money actually functions in society. Because it never grew out of barter. This myth that people started trading, like I’ll give you two deer for a bushel of corn. That never happened. And it was always just IOUs for things.

Craig: Right.

John: Cool.

Craig: Excellent. My One Cool Thing is America, maybe. [laughs] That’s all I’m going to say. It may be America.

John: It would be great if America were very, very cool.

Craig: I will do a follow up One Cool Thing next week to confirm or deny that America is cool.

John: Yes. All right. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Peter Hoopes. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send your longer questions, but for short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We have t-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net were you get all the back episodes and bonus segments and a segment like this where we’re going to talk about dogs. So, stick around if you’re a Premium member because we are going to talk about dogs. Craig, thank you for a very calm episode.

[Bonus segment]

John: Craig, do screenwriters need to have dogs, or is it just highly recommended?

Craig: I’m going to go with need to. I’m going to actually make it mandatory. Of course, everyone needs to have a dog. Everyone.

John: I mean, basically you join the WGA and they give you the little card and they give you a dog. That’s just how it works. You got to have a dog.

Craig: Got to have a dog.

John: Talk to us about your dog situation right now.

Craig: Right now we have Cookie. She is a Labrador who we keep trying to sort of pretty up. We’ll put little ribbons in her hair sometimes when she gets groomed and then she keeps trying to make herself disgusting.

John: You said she’s a Labrador, but she’s a Labradoodle, right?

Craig: Labradoodle. Yes. Oh, did I say Labrador? Labradoodle. She’s a Labradoodle which is a wonderful breed of dog. Poodles are not my favorite. Labradors are wonderful. Labradors shed all over the place, Poodles don’t. Labradoodle, it’s like a Labrador that doesn’t shed. And they’re adorable. And very sweet and friendly. She’s very, very beta. She’s the most beta dog I think I’ve ever encountered in my life. And we’re actually going to be getting another puppy soon, pretty sure.

John: Oh, very exciting.

Craig: In part because as Cookie gets older I just keep in mind the line of succession.

John: Yes. You have to. You always need a dog. My first dog that was my own dog was my dog Jake who was a Pug who was fantastic and he was very classically a screenwriter’s first dog. I invested in him all of my paternal caring and it was an absolutely ideal dog for me to have. We had another Pug later who looked like a dog but actually had nothing in his brain. It was actually just some sort of weird alien. Who I still loved, but was just really a challenging dog.

But my current dog–

Craig: Ah, Lambert.

John: Lambert is just an absolute dream. You’ve met Lambert several times. And is some sort of Terrier-Poodle kind of mix thing. And has just been an absolute delight and a source of warmth and comfort at all moments.

Craig: Lambert and Cookie have met each other. They get along famously.

John: They have. And Megana brought them up to your house at some point. So I’ve never seen them meet, but I’m sure they were best friends.

Craig: It was too gentle dogs sort of looking at each other and seemingly fine with each other and then they both sort of went their separate ways. It was like, OK, yeah, you’re here, I’m here, great. And then Lambert sat down in his funny way where he just spreads his legs and puts his balls directly on the floor. Or where his balls would be.

John: Yeah. Now, what is – you’re a person who is interested in science and the evolution of things, what is your belief in terms of how dogs came to be and to what degree is it just us wishful thinking that they are so empathetic and they seem to understand us so well? What is your belief about dog evolution?

Craig: I mean, I’m just guessing, because I haven’t studied it or anything, but it seems to me like along the way certain wolves were taken in by groups of people and over time gentler wolves were bred with other gentler wolves and you started to get breeds of dogs that descended from wolves but were like the nice ones. And then it just kept happening. And obviously around the world there are different kinds of wolves that become different kinds of dogs. And then you crossbreed them.

And I think that initially was because they were incredibly useful. Because they domesticate so well. They were helpful for protection back in the day when there was no conceal carry. Your dog was your conceal carry. They protected the family. They helped you hunt. And they obviously also were there for comfort. They were loyal. So they have all of these properties that make them incredibly suitable to live with humans. And I think that is probably why we imprint our own beliefs on what’s happening in their minds.

My dog, for instance, she has a little routine. When I come home from wherever she runs frantically to me, sits down in front of me, gets kind of low, and then starts whimpering as if to say where have you been. She’s crying. And I could think, oh my god, this dog loves me more than anything. In fact, if I put my hand right on her chest I can feel her heart pounding. Like oh my god, this dog loves me more than anything.

But I know actually what she wants is one of those dried chicken strips. And she knows that when I get home and she does this and she starts whining and doing that she gets one. And the second she gets that chicken strip she’s gone. So, it’s mostly chicken, but it’s easy to see – of course, they do love us. I mean, there’s no question about that.

John: Yeah. I always find it fascinating when I look at my dog’s behavior and then I take a step back and look at, OK, in what ways am I behaving like a dog who is really just stimulus and response driven? I think I want a thing but it’s really that I want this other more basic thing. I really am just hungry. Or I really just need to be around somebody but it’s not – I’m creating these elaborate reasons for why I do certain things when really it’s just sort of stimulus-driven behavior.

And yet I look into my dog’s eyes and I see like, oh, well this dog clearly loves me. A strange thing about Lambert I’ve noticed is that Lambert, his favorite thing in the world is a visitor. And anybody who comes to the house he is so obsessed. And I think people come to the house and think like, oh, this dog must not like it here because this dog just seems to desperately like me very much, or want to get away from this house. And, no, it’s any new person who comes to the house, it’s just like come on in. Do you want to take the TV? Take the TV. It’s fine. It’s good.

He’s just so obsessed with that and it’s been one of the hardest things about the pandemic and the lockdown is that Lambert just doesn’t get to see new people. New people don’t get to come to the house. And so he’s stuck with the three of us.

Craig: Same with Cookie. She loves new people. She likes to bark when a new person arrives to let everybody know that a new person is here. And then she just melts.

John: Yeah. Aw, that’s nice. Melty dogs are nice.

Craig: It’s the greatest. Melty dogs.

John: And they’re very calming which is the reason why I thought we’d talk about them here.

Craig: Yes. If you have a dog definitely take moment now to just sit with your dog, turn off everything, sit with your dog and think to yourself how nice it is in their mind because they don’t know any of this.

John: They know nothing. And like when a water bowl gets filled with water, like you did magic. You were able to touch something and water came out of it and you put it there. You were able to do all of these things that a dog can’t do. They live in a world of magic and we are the magicians.

Craig: Right. So you might as well get a little something back and try to get your mind right in the same frequency as your dog’s mind where the rest of the world doesn’t matter. It’s just you and me. Eye contact. Scratches.

John: Great. We’ll end it there. Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you, John.

John: Bye.

 

Links:

• YALL Write John’s panel is on Friday, November 13th at 3pm ET/12pm PT
• Drew Champion and Archibald’s Next Big Thing
• Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein
• The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View by Ellen Meiksins Wood
• Debt – The First 5,000 years by David Graeber
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Peter Hoopes (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao 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: And this is Episode 473 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show short-form video company Quibi becomes short-lived video company Quibi. We’ll talk about what happened and prognosticate wildly about the future of the entertainment industry. Not based on data, just random hunches.

Plus, we’ll answer lots of listener questions. And, in our Bonus segment for Premium members we’re going to discuss scary movies like actually scary movies, not the spoofs that Craig wrote.

Craig: Not the spoofs that Craig wrote. By the way, I like that you’re saying that we’re going to prognosticate wildly based on hunches rather than data as if anyone else doesn’t do that. That’s all anyone does. They just wildly prognosticate.

John: Yes. But I would say in a blog post I might try to throw some numbers at it to actually sort of pretend that there’s evidence behind this. But that’s not – on a podcast we don’t talk about numbers. We just talk about opinions.

Craig: Lies. Damn lies and statistics.

John: That’s all we have for you here today. We have crucial follow up because on last week’s episode we asked our listeners what should replace the Slinky Movie as the placeholder for that ridiculous movie that is being based on IP that really should not become a movie. And so people wrote in with their suggestions, but I also did a Twitter poll. So, the poll I posed were Magic 8 Ball, Silly Putty, and Lincoln Logs. And so we talked about Magic 8 Ball. That came in second at 35%. Silly Putty was the winner at 37%. Lincoln Logs a mere 27%. But then it turned out that Magic 8 Ball, we couldn’t even use that because there is genuinely a Magic 8 Ball Movie in development.

Craig: Of course. From the description that you have shared with me from Variety it appears that what we said it would be is exactly what it is. [laughs] That’s pretty great. That’s pretty great.

John: There’s a Blumhouse version of this which seems to be like a horror kind of thriller thing. Probably a Monkey’s Paw element. But a lot of our listeners wrote in saying like “Don’t tell anybody but I pitched on the Magic 8 Ball Movie because it’s been at various places at various times. And one person shared the brief they got before they went in to pitch.

Craig: Oh.

John: And so I’ll read a little bit of this.

Craig: Yes.

John: So this says, “Using the Magic 8 Ball is a jumping off point for a movie. We’d like to follow the classic Amblin model. Something incredible happens and at first it feels like magic and is exciting, then shifts to real stakes and real danger. It starts fun, then gets crazy, and someone has to fix it. Here’s the kernel of an idea. The original Magic 8 Ball was actually an occult item with arguably real powers. It was hidden away but became the foundation for the toy we know. When someone finds the original prototype and asks the wrong question it sets into motion a fun action-adventure investigation into the mysteries of the occult. Inspired by the great myths of the world that we’ve seen depicted around the globe since ancient times, the Magic 8 Ball and our heroes attempt to explain the unexplainable.”

So that’s kind of a Jumanji to me.

Craig: Oh god. So here’s what happens a lot. It does seem like when people are trying to present writers with their general hope what they’re saying is what if you took this thing that no one should make a movie about and instead made a good movie. Like you know how they made ET and ET was a good movie and it was based on the thing that no one had ever heard of? Let’s do that but let’s base it on something that everyone has heard of that no one has any emotional investment in whatsoever. In fact, it’s generally viewed as disposable junk, detritus of childhood. Something that gets left behind or rolls into the back of your closet because it doesn’t matter. Because it’s stupid. [laughs] Let’s do that. But let’s make it as a classic Amblin movie.

And I just think you know what makes classic Amblin movies classic? Not making them about the Magic 8 Ball. Just going to go out on a crazy limb there.

John: So let’s talk for a moment about why the idea of a Magic 8 Ball Movie or any of these things that are based around IP, why we get approached with them. Because they have some brand awareness. The belief is like, OK, it doesn’t really have to be about the Magic 8 Ball, just we need to have that as the clutter-buster, the thing that we can put on a poster that people will recognize, but then actually we’re going to make a completely different movie that’s really a good Amblin movie. And there’s just inherent tension between there. You’re not going to be able to make that good Amblin movie if you are also stuck with this thing that does not want to be a movie.

Craig: Yeah. And we understand that there are two kinds of jobs that are out there. There are the kinds that we are selling to them and then there are kinds that they are selling to us. And it’s almost an entirely different business. There are certain restaurants you go to where you don’t know what’s on the menu at all. You get there but you’ve heard it’s good. And so you get there in receiving mode. I will look at this menus. Oh, look at all these interesting things. I think I’ll try this, and this, and this.

And then sometimes you’re like what do you guys want. Sushi. OK, let’s go get sushi. We are going to get it. They are receiving us. They will now give to us the thing that we want. And it should be like what we want. And that happens. And sometimes they’re sitting around and someone is like let’s make money off the Magic 8 Ball. We own it for some dumb reason and let’s do it.

And, you know, every now and then, look, you can do it well. Everything can be done well. The latest Jumanji version was done well.

John: Absolutely. And the Lego Movie. Transformers is not to my taste, but Transformers is a very successful movie franchise. And I think part of the reason why we keep seeing these things happen is because, well, somehow they made Transformers into a billion dollar juggernaut, so there you go.

Craig: Right. They did. Now Transformers seems like it’s – look, they’re robot trucks and they shoot stuff. I can see how you’d make a movie out of that. I mean, but it’s weirder when you get into like “we’re doing Checkers.” OK. So we’ve got flat colored discs.

John: So Transformers, they did actually have characters. They had names. They had some degree of personality. There was a nostalgia for a thing that existed before. It was not just the toy. There were things who could speak.

Craig: Right. There was conflict.

John: So let’s talk about the other contenders for our placeholder things, since we can’t do the Slinky Movie. And I should stipulate people think I’m ragging on the biopic about the Slinky Movie. I’m not. I hope that’s a really good movie. And the woman who created it and sort of got screwed over for it, I hope that’s a great story that they’re telling. The problem is we can’t say the Slinky Movie as a derogatory term because I want that movie to succeed. So that’s why we’re looking for a new placeholder. So people who thought I was slamming on the writer’s work who is doing the movie that’s based on the creation of the Slinky, I’m not. We’re trying to make it clear that it’s a whole separate thing.

Craig: Wait a second. Did you get undo criticism on Twitter? Did that – wait a second – on Twitter? Huh?

John: Yeah. Like people saying, “Way to slag on a writer.” I’m like who do you think I am?

Craig: Well, they think that you’re a person on Twitter, therefore hold them down, boys. Get me my hammer.

John: All right. So people have pointed out that on previous episodes we’ve talked about the Uno Movie as an example of a ridiculous piece of IP. So I think Uno is a high contender.

Craig: It’s still up there.

John: Other suggestions. Sudoku. Connect Four. Etch-a-Sketch. Trapper Keeper. Trouble or Sorry, which are basically the same game but one has a popper and I think feels like there’s higher stakes. Sea Monkeys. Hot Wheels.

Craig: Well they’ve tried Sea Monkeys.

John: And Guinness Book of World Records.

Craig: Hot Wheels they had in development and we know people that wrote on it.

John: I know people who wrote on that. McG was supposed to direct it one point.

Craig: That was a thing. And I get it. I mean, there are movies where like cars are running around, so I get it. That could work.

John: Time of Fast and the Furious.

Craig: Exactly.

John: It’s a car movie.

Craig: What I find fascinating about your poll is that it reflects this interesting phenomenon that occurs sometimes when – and it’s actually good news. You look at this and you go, well, no one really wants any one of these things. Roughly a third want the Magic 8 Ball, a third want Silly Putty, and a third want Lincoln Logs. So what does this mean?

What it means is that what we should be doing is more like the tomato sauce business where Prego offers eight different styles of Prego for everybody. Meaning we should have, this is this kind. Oh, do you want your dumb movie with a certain 8 Ball-ness to it? Or would you like a nice Silly Putty version. We should offer multiple versions.

John: Yeah. We should. Craig, I leave it to you, but my instinct is to go with Uno for right now because I don’t think there is an Uno Movie about to happen any time soon. And Uno to me is the right combination of like it’s just Crazy 8s but with branding on it. And that feels like the right placeholder movie to me. What are you thinking?

Craig: I like a movie where it’s an object, like a single object you can hold. And Silly Putty, by the way, somebody tried it at some point. I’m sure.

John: Because there was a Stretch Armstrong Movie for a long time.

Craig: I wrote a couple of drafts of that back in 1998.

John: Excellent. Or like Flubber. You feel like there’s a thing you could do with Silly Putty.

Craig: There’s a whole genre of stretchy, bouncy stuff.

John: So Pet Rock is one, but Pet Rock is not a strong enough brand.

Craig: It’s old school, too. I was thinking about – I was just looking at music yesterday and I do this all the time now. I don’t know if you do this. So, I was looking at the song, it’s from 1982. And I was thinking it could be in something that might come out in a couple of years and then it would be 40 years old. And I was thinking, well, in 1982 when I was 11, 40 years earlier was 1942.

John: Yes. Into World War II. Yes.

Craig: Right. Like songs from the 1942 era to me were like from another planet. They were as if someone had cracked open the tomb of Tutankhamun and a song had come out along with the dust and ghosts. And now I think like, oh, people will probably like that song. Wait, no, anybody who was my age then will have no idea what the hell it is. Maybe that’s good? I don’t know. But Pet Rock is even older.

So my daughter or your daughter hearing about Pet Rock would go, oh, so that’s like something from the ‘30s vis-à-vis when you were our age. We’re so old. [laughs]

John: Back then they must not have had money for stuffed animals, so they must have just had to paint eyes on rocks.

Craig: Yeah. Or glue the little googly eyes.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: OK. So here’s my vote. And I think we can use, again, more than one. The Uno Movie is solid. I’m totally down with that. I think I’m going to go with Lincoln Logs. I like Lincoln Logs. Lincoln Logs because it’s so out of date. It’s so ancient. It was even old when I was a kid playing with Lincoln Logs. I think I inherited them from an older cousin. So, Lincoln Logs seems about right.

John: Sounds good.

We have more follow up. This is from a former Three Page Challenger. Craig, do you want to read to us what Mitchell from Toronto wrote?

Craig: Mitchell from Toronto writes, “My script, ATOM,” it’s all in capital, so I don’t know if it’s Atom or ATOM. What do you think, John? Probably Atom.

John: I think it’s Atom.

Craig: Atom. “My script, ATOM,” it could be A to M, “was read by Jeff Probst as part of your Three Page Challenge way back on Episode 269. You both seemed to enjoy the pages and were fairly complimentary of the writing. Craig compared it to Wall-E. I’ve since endured years of teasing and ridicule from former classmates, friends, and strangers. People yes, ‘That’s the Wall-E guy.’ Or, ‘Nice pages, Pixar,’ and it hurts my feelings.’

“But in all seriousness, having the pages read on the show was quite a boost. It was a tremendous surge of motivation. At the beginning it’s so hard to know if you’re doing things well, or if you’re just producing utter crap. So I rode that high and finished a draft that got me some attention. I flew down to LA for a week of generals and the experience was amazing. Telling the security guard on the Sony lot that I’m not with the tour and that I actually have a meeting was a surreal experience.

“I ended up meeting a young, hungry manager and whom I’m still working with today. And I can happily announce that the script has recently been optioned by a producer that I’m also very excited to work with. It’s been a long journey and admittedly I’ve spent more time on this script than maybe I should have. But appearing on Scriptnotes and hearing your feedback really gave me the courage to pursue screenwriting with confidence. So a big Canadian thank you for that.

“Also, if there’s time a good friend of mine who listens to your every episode on his daily drive is going to lovingly hate the following. Hi Aaron.”

We’re now doing shout-outs like Morning Zoo.

John: Absolutely. The call for your special dedication line. Mitchell, I’m happy for you. I’m happy that you finished that script. I’m happy that the feedback which was hopefully constructive sort of got you finished through this. It sounds like you’re doing the right things. You are continuing to write. You came down here for generals. Obviously you had generals scheduled before you got on a plane and came to Los Angeles. You met a manager who you like, who seems to have the same energy you do. And you’ve got this option. So, I hope things continue to go well for you, Mitchell.

Craig: I do, too. I’m really glad, first of all, that you wrote in because it’s nice for us to hear these things. It makes us feel good, too. Because this is what we want. It’s why we’re doing all this stuff. Because as you know one of us doesn’t get paid. [laughs] So at least that’s why I do it.

But mostly what I want to say to you, Mitchell, is because you’ve been working on this script for a long time by your own admission and because it’s now getting a lot of attention, you’re going to want to put even more of your eggs in its basket, which is fine. But if a script is a baby, I need you to have many more children. I want you to have the biggest family you can imagine. Which means that this child cannot suck up all of your attention. This is exactly the time you should be well into the next thing. Because everybody around you is going to be looking for that next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing.

And what makes John a professional or makes me a professional isn’t necessarily one script, or two, or three, but the breadth of them. It’s the churn. And through the churn you will get better and better and faster and faster. So love this script. Give it the attention it needs. Ride that wave. But that’s just one of about 20 kids you’re supposed to have.

John: Yup. So keep working on Atom, and great that it’s optioned, and you’ll learn a lot going through the process of working with the producers who have optioned this. That’s going to be great.

You are going to be pitching on the Uno Movie and the Lincoln Logs Movie.

Craig: Lincoln Logs is mine.

John: That’s going to be good practice for you as well. You’re going to figure out how do I do this thing. So do those, but don’t spend all of your time doing those because you have to write new things and new things that show the breadth of your talent and get people excited and give you more general meetings to go into because people have read your stuff and want to work with you. So, you got to do all of the things all the time.

Craig: Got to do all the things all the time.

John: Yup. So Craig this last week it was announced that the short-form video company Quibi is going to shut down or sell itself or somehow stop existing.

Craig: No!

John: And I’ve definitely been feeling guilty of something that’s not schadenfreude but it’s another word for that sense of like, OK, that was never going to work and I’m sort of happy that my expectation that it was never going to work has beared out. I mean, I’m not sure it’s–

Craig: It’s I told you so ism kind of thing.

John: It feels more like a French kind of term than a German kind of term.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And still I’ve met folks who worked at Quibi. The David Kwong event we had a zillion years ago I met folks who worked there who seemed so nice, and so smart, and lovely, and I’m sure they will succeed in whatever they’re doing. But Quibi just didn’t work and I didn’t think it was going to work.

Craig: Yeah. It didn’t work. And the only part of this that is even remotely pleasurable is just the sense that our understanding of how the world generally should work is kind of correct. Because this didn’t fit in with my – it’s like MoviePass. It just didn’t make sense.

John: No.

Craig: On its face you just said, “I don’t understand it. Maybe I’m a dumb-dumb, but I don’t get it.” And Quibi was kind of the same thing. In particular the part I didn’t get was the fact that $2 billion had been invested into this thing and when you looked at why what it came down to was people were investing in this belief that an executive had value.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Worth $2 billion. And my feeling is that that’s not how it works. That these platforms are ultimately fueled by and supported by creators. And that you have to find these great creators. That’s who is going to hold up your building. So when Netflix or Hulu or Amazon or HBO or any of these places go out and spend all this money to get Shonda or Ryan Murphy or Dan and Dave or Greg Berlanti it’s because they understand these are the men and women who are going to be holding up their empire.

The empire is not going to be pulled up from the top by an executive who with his, I don’t know, with his slide decks and his pitches. It just doesn’t work that way. And I’m just blown away that anybody thought it did. It’s like they never read Hit and Run. That great book about how Peters and Guber just stole billions of dollars from the Japanese on their way to ruining Sony/Columbia.

[sighs] You could just see it happening.

John: Craig, did you ever talk with Katzenberg about it? Because I had a 45-minute phone call with Katzenberg about it. There wasn’t a slide deck, but I definitely got the pitch and from everyone I talked to they got the exact same pitch.

Craig: He must have known because I never got a call from anyone. And they must have smelled it in the air.

John: The pitch inevitably goes back to the Da Vinci Code. He’ll always talk about how the brilliant thing about the Da Vinci Code is that the writer broke the chapters into such small little segments that you read one, and then you read another, and you read another one.

Craig: Oh god.

John: So he always would reference the Da Vinci Code.

Craig: So stupid.

John: And that was his sort of organizing principle behind why it was short-form stuff.

Craig: That’s so dumb.

John: The initial conversation with him I asked about, OK, so they’re short, and they’re supposed to be on your phone, but are they vertical or are they horizontal? And it’s like they’re definitely horizontal. And that was one of the fascinating technological things that he went through is that weird pivot thing. It had to be shot for both ways.

And talking with folks who had to deliver content to them it was a nightmare apparently being able to seamlessly deliver both things. Because you have to sort of shoot in two ratios and have to – weird save things. All that stuff was interesting and fascinating, but when it came down to me trying to make a deal to do this. So this was a project I was going to be working on with a director who I really like and if we could have made it all work we would have made it work. But the money just wasn’t right for me. It just wasn’t going to be worth my time and my energy to do it.

And that ultimately is kind of the problem. For some of these creators, like the Ryan Murphys, the Shondas, you got to just roll out the big trucks of money and they didn’t have the trucks of money to roll out.

Craig: Because they didn’t think that that was – what they thought was that they had figured out the problem. So he read a book. Congrats. He read a book. Boy, he’s never going to call me now. And then he did what a lot of non-creative people do. They analyze and look for an interesting talking point that would be something they could use at a lunch to make other people who also don’t create things go, “Ooh, that qualifies as an insight. Like the reason that the Da Vinci Code was so successful is that the chapters were short.” No it isn’t. And there are enormous examples of books with long chapters that are even more successful.

Stephen King has built the most successful publishing business probably ever by writing books with chapters that sometimes seem to go on forever. Forever. Forever.

He’s wrong. That’s just wrong. And even if he were right that’s like, look, we figured out how to make rats stop chewing on their own feet. Now we can take that medicine and put it in humans and it’ll make them stop chewing their nails. Why would you think that that would work that way? It’s two different things. It doesn’t matter. So it was just a deeply flawed concept from the start. Anybody that fell for that Da Vinci Code thing deserves to lose their investment money as far as I’m concerned.

And you could tell, also, that underneath all of it was like somebody somewhere in a basement at Quibi must have been saying, “But isn’t this YouTube?” [laughs] Doesn’t YouTube already do this? Hasn’t YouTube been doing this forever?

John: And YouTube itself really struggled to monetize that kind of content. They tried YouTube Red. Our friend, Rawson, directed a series for YouTube Red.

Craig: That’s right.

John: And it was really challenging to do. Just because people watch things on their phone doesn’t mean they want to watch premium stuff on their phone the same way. They don’t want to pay a subscription.

Craig: And Quibi wouldn’t let you play it on your television either.

John: Yes. And that was a fundamental misunderstanding of not only could you not play it on your television, you couldn’t set clips of it on YouTube or TikTok or anything else. You had no way of sharing the thing that you were watching which is exactly why you had this thing on your phone is so it’s so sharable.

Craig: Have you ever, I won’t say ever, but since the dot.com bust of the late ‘90s, mid-late ‘90s, have you seen something that seemed quite so DOA? I mean, at no point. It landed and it was almost like 100th Monkey Syndrome. Everybody just sort of agreed silently that this was not a thing. I mean, no one wanted this.

John: Yeah. So certainly not MoviePass because MoviePass was genuinely useful and revolutionary to people at a time.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: They’re like this can’t possibly last, but I get why people – it was really good for people to use.

Craig: It was the free ice cream store. It was a great idea for us. Not for them.

John: I’m drawing a blank on something else that from the moment it came out people were like, no, no I don’t want any of that.

Craig: Yeah. Just like right off the bat as it landed everybody just went, “What?” It was like stop trying to make fetch happen. That’s all that kept coming into my mind. Was like stop trying to make Quibi happen. Because it’s one of those things where you just know it’s not going to happen. We don’t need it.

John: Here’s what actually it reminds me of. Sometimes someone will run for office. Someone will run a presidential campaign and you’re like, no, no, no, no. No. You should not do that. Nobody wants you.

Craig: Nobody wants this.

John: Nobody wants you running for president.

Craig: Bloomberg. It’s like Bloomberg running for president. Everybody went, uh-uh, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Do not want.

John: Not a thing.

Craig: Not a thing. You’re not a thing. Stop trying to make Bloomberg happen.

John: So let’s talk about the good that Quibi did or the argument over whether Quibi’s existence put money in people’s pockets, which I think it die, but also it didn’t put as much money in as I sort of wish it could have done. So here’s the balancing act.

Between $1.75 and $2 billion spent making Quibi happen. Not all of that is on content. Some of it is on infrastructure and back stuff. But people were being paid to do stuff. And people were being paid to write and create these shows which debuted on Quibi. They had this weird business model where Quibi only licensed it for a certain amount of time, so you were allowed to package up the stuff you made and sell it again as a movie. So creators actually owned the content underneath it in ways that was good.

So I want to acknowledge that it got people paid and increased production in Los Angeles and outside of Los Angeles. And more people working is a good thing.

Craig: Sure.

John: Let’s talk a bit about that. But then there’s also the troubling problem of because they were doing these 10-minute or 11-minute episodes they kept falling underneath union caps for things and so they were paying writers less than they would otherwise have to be paying for the kinds of stuff that they were making. Same with actors and directors and crews. It felt like they were manipulating low budget agreements in ways that is frustrating.

Craig: Generally when a new company comes along and says, “We’re doing a new kind of thing in a new sort of way. We’re not going to be doing the WGA thing, but we have something that’s actually better. The WGA thing is old school we’re new school. And this is better for you. It’s better for us. It’s a win.” It’s not better for you. It’s only better for them. Just generally speaking. They’re not charities. They’re always looking to jam you. And if they’re giving you something you should take a good long look at it and see if it’s worth anything.

You can take your eight-minute episodes that we had and then write a movie based on it ten years from now. Hmm. When is that going to come up? And how much is that prospective possibility worth vis-à-vis what you’re not giving me now? So that part obviously – we should always be caveat scriptor on stuff like that.

The notion that $2 billion moved from investors towards creators is a good one. Obviously the creators didn’t get the $2 billion. I don’t know exactly how much were put in creator’s pockets. It did seem like Quibi was going crazy and making a thousand things a minute. In that sense it’s like, OK, good, well some money sort of made it out of the robber barons and into the pockets of working artists. But generally also it is better for working artists for things to succeed and be ongoing. That’s where the real money is.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Otherwise we’re just helping them build their own house.

John: Yeah. And I think we also should separate the just because you’re making money doesn’t mean you’re making art. And I feel like sometimes people were being pulled away from doing stuff that could have been artistically meaningful or actually had a cultural impact because they were making these 10-minute episodes of stuff for Quibi. And so the degree to which you’re wasting people’s time and creator’s time is another thing to be keeping in mind.

But you can say going into this you didn’t know that it wasn’t going to be successful, although we just kind of knew it wasn’t going to be successful. And I think there’s–

Craig: We just knew. We all knew. [laughs]

John: Everyone was making a show for Quibi I think had to go into it saying like, “This probably isn’t going to work, is it?”

Craig: This is just something to do for the next two months. But this is not a thing, right? We can all agree.

John: So I want to take this moment as an opportunity to talk about the state of the industry overall. And when you and I were entering into the industry you could write on the back of your valet ticket sort of like these are the major players. These are the studios. This is how everything works. It was really pretty straightforward when we entered. And in some ways it’s more straightforward because there’s been so much consolidation, but it’s also weirdly murky now. So I thought we’d just take a moment to talk through what we mean by the majors, by the other major production entities, and sort of the state of the industry in 2020 and sort of where we see things headed.

So, Craig, as you started who were the majors? When someone said, “You’re going to take out a pitch, you’re going to the studios,” what did we mean by the studios?

Craig: So, in the movie business you had Warner Bros and Universal. You had Sony/Columbia which included Tri-Star and Screen Gems I think.

John: Screen Gems still.

Craig: There was Paramount and there was Disney. And that was kind of it.

John: And Fox.

Craig: Oh, sorry, and Fox. You’re right. Absolutely. And Fox.

John: So we basically thought of six majors. And so as Craig was doing this I bet you were actually sort of thinking about a map of Los Angeles and imagining the drive around. I always geographically sort of place these people. Because Sony is the weird one that isn’t really close to anybody else. And Fox was sort of off the–

Craig: Well let’s just say this. I have worked almost exclusively for some combination of Disney, Warners, or Universal. They are all near where I live.

John: Yeah. And so I worked a lot at Sony, obviously, for Big Fish and the Charlie’s Angels movies. But I’ve done some work I think everywhere. And even Sony which had different labels and brands it was still kind of Sony. Like Columbia kind of ruled the roost there. And we should also say that we’re talking as feature writers because that’s mostly what we are here, but each of these places had a television business as well. So Disney bought ABC. So Disney controlled ABC. Universal and NBC got combined. Paramount and CBS were combined, and then they were separated, but now they’re combined again. And then Warners and Sony which didn’t have their own broadcast TV networks still make a lot of TV for other places. Famously Warners is the studio behind Friends. Warners also has HBO which is obviously the premier cable place.

So, you can think of these as feature writers these are the major studios. But they’re also the major players in television.

Craig: Correct. And more so as – I mean, even when we started it wasn’t quite that way as much. But in the years following the kind of elimination of the financial syndication barrier suddenly CBS and Paramount were the same thing, and NBC and Universal were the same thing. UPN and Paramount were the same thing. And the CW and Warner Bros were the same thing. And ABC and Disney were the same thing. Everything started to squish together. And the squishing together has not stopped nor do I think it will stop any time soon.

John: I could not have believed that Fox would sell to Disney. That was inconceivable to me when I started in this industry. Sort of two huge things could just be smooshed together and yet that’s happened. I think it’s an open question of whether there will be more smooshing to come.

Paramount feels like a place – Paramount/CBS feels like a place that someone would take over and combine with something because it’s just the smallest of what’s left. But I don’t know who that is. It may be one of the other giant players. So it could be Apple or Netflix, which are completely outside entities that didn’t exist before. Amazon, which didn’t exist before. So even as we’ve lost majors you really have to look at Netflix and Apple and Amazon as majors because they are making the amount of shows that a broadcast network would make. And they’re starting to make features as well.

Craig: In a strange way the test that some of these places have is our value as a company that creates media greater than the worth of the real estate we’re sitting on? Because Paramount has in the past been a major producer of television. All the Star Treks. And of movies throughout the years. Raiders of the Lost Ark and the aforementioned Transformers. But as they reduce and reduce and reduce what you end up with is this enormous amount of real estate.

Same with Fox now that Fox has been absorbed by Disney. That lot is an enormous amount of real estate. And it’s prime real estate. It’s like having five acres in Manhattan or something. Well, maybe not that crazy, but it’s a lot.

John: It’s a lot.

Craig: And the thing is I don’t know if Netflix needs all that real estate, right? You’d think, well, wait maybe Netflix will just buy Paramount and they’ll have the lot and they’ll make Netflix stuff there. But they’re making stuff everywhere else. So, I don’t know. It’s interesting.

John: Yeah. And so a thing people might appreciate is that if you come to visit Los Angeles you will drive through Century City which is the border between West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, but there’s a place called Century City. And it’s called Century City because of 20th Century Fox. It was literally the backlot of 20th Century Fox. And after Cleopatra they had to selloff a bunch of land.

I’m sure I’m butchering the actual history there. But it is called Century City because of 20th Century Fox. The amount of money tied up in that real estate is huge.

Craig: Yes.

John: At this moment I think the plans are just to keep using the Fox lot for production because you need space for production, but ultimately that land is going to be worth so much more for other things. And it’ll go away at some point.

Craig: It will. I mean, so you have these large sound stages. And Paramount has well over a dozen of these mammoth structures that are empty. They’re just big rooms for making movies and television. But since so much production has shipped elsewhere because it’s cheaper to do elsewhere these things are just empty. So what happens?

Well, you can look at Universal. Because I think Universal has been the smartest and canniest in terms of how it uses its own space. It has a great backlot. There aren’t too many good backlots left. Disney has a little one. Warner Bros has a terrific one. Universal sort of had the classic one. And for many years it was a tour. And it still is. You get on a tram and you ride around. Look, there’s Jaws Lake.

But what’s happening now is more and more they’re converting their land to theme park space. They already made Universal Studios Hollywood. It is a very successful theme park, or at least was before a global pandemic forced us all into our hiding holes. And they’re building more such stuff. And I think that that’s going to continue. I think that a lot of these spaces are probably better served as consumer-facing spaces rather than empty production space.

Because when you walk around Paramount, which is a wonderful lot. And to me at least the most Hollywood of them because it’s the only one in Hollywood and it just feels so open and Hollywood-ish. And it also has a great backlot. That’s kind of an enormous, flat, asphalt space waiting to be something. And right now I’m not sure it is anything.

John: It’s going to be a skyscraper at some point, or a bunch of skyscrapers.

Craig: Or a theme park, you know, with Raiders of the Lost Ark land. You know?

John: We’ll see what ends up happening. But a possibility is that these places could combine, they could clear out, we could redevelop this land. But the other big change that’s happened and is clearly only going to accelerate is the move from traditional television, traditional theatrical release, to streaming.

Craig: Right.

John: And as things move to becoming streaming first it changes not just how audiences see things but the need to spend money on certain things. So, I definitely think about marketing departments. Because for a classic movie that’s being released in theaters you’re spending $30, $40, $50 million advertising that thing because you have to make your money back your opening weekend. If something is debuting on your streaming service you don’t have to do that. And so Netflix does not spend very much money marketing its movies in a classic sense. They buy billboards in Los Angeles and New York, but that’s kind of it. They’re not buying TV commercials other places. And they are saving a tremendous amount of money.

So, saving money is good for that company but it’s not great for the people whose job it is to buy and sell those ads. It’s not great for sort of everyone else in the media industry. So that’s a huge change that’s happening. Or if they are buying ads they’re buying ads on their own services so it doesn’t really count. If Disney is buying ads from ABC it’s kind of an in-house transfer of money.

Craig: And this is the thing that we’ve been saying for a long time. I mean, maybe as long as we’ve had this podcast we’ve been saying that the reason that the movie business has changed the way it’s changed is because of marketing and because of the cost of marketing. Because it costs more to market a movie than to make a movie. And if it costs more to market it than to make it then marketing is the more important thing than the movie. And that means the movie has to serve marketing needs. And that’s why movies became what they became.

Television doesn’t have that. Streaming doesn’t have that. And so what we’re seeing from a creative point of view is a renaissance because streaming services are allowing creators to make things that are more important than the selling of the things. They’re taking risks. In fact, they’re going in the opposite direction that movies have been going in. And movies tragically are now even in a more desperate place where they have to be marketing based because when theaters do open back up people aren’t showing up unless it is the most compelling thing ever to get there.

I am terrified for the feature exhibition business. I mean, for the first time ever I don’t know if it will be there. We’ve always scoffed at the “theaters are dead” because the things that everybody thought would kill theaters never, ever did, or would. But now there’s trouble because of the pandemic. So, yes, the big marketing departments are not going to be big marketing departments. And that is not good for the people who work there. It is good for the quality of programming. It’s good for the creators of programming. I love the people who market – the folks that I worked with at HBO who marketed Chernobyl were amazing. I love them. And I can’t wait to work with them again.

And what was great about them was that they were really servicing the program. Those people will still be there. And maybe what happens is a lot of the people that were working in feature marketing move in to fill the desperate need for folks in the TV side, in the streaming side, because they’re making so much. They’re making so much. Even if they don’t market it that much they still need people to cut teasers and trailers and next weeks and recaps and all that stuff.

I think that people will be able to find their jobs. But this is a good thing overall.

John: Yeah. I just think your Chernobyl experience was different from the experience of somebody who makes a series for Netflix in that you were occupying prime real estate on HBO. You actually had a time slot for a weekly show on HBO. Versus something that drops all at once on Netflix, you know, I talked to folks who have those kind of shows and basically three weeks they’re in they’ll tell us if we got enough eyeballs, but that’s basically all we can do.

Craig: Yes.

John: We get constant pitches here at Scriptnotes from people saying like, “Hey, I have a show that’s debuting on Netflix. Can I please come on to talk about it because there’s basically no other marketing that I can do for the show?”

Craig: Right. That is true.

John: That’s a real frustration.

Craig: HBO is still putting things out in the old school way, which I love, and I think that more and more companies are going to start looking at that model. Because it is I think a better model for certain kinds of shows. Not for all of them, but for certain kinds. And those shows do need good marketing.

But you’re right. Netflix doesn’t really market anything until the day it comes out. And then the marketing is should it be on the splash page or not. They don’t do much in that regard. So, that’s true. That’s true. I can’t argue with that.

John: You brought up movie theaters, so I just pulled up the numbers for movie theaters right now. The three big chains in the US, AMC has 8,200 screens, Regal has 7,300 screens, Cinemark has 4,500. And then it’s a huge drop off, like below 500. Then you get to your Alamo Draft House, your Landmark Theaters.

As we talked about on the show, the barriers between the Paramount consent decree which restricted studios from owning theaters is basically dissolved. So, Disney could buy any one of these chains, or multiple chains. And I think they’re going to really be thinking about it.

So, the good news if Disney buys them for Disney is they control the pipeline. They have efficiency. They can do stuff there. But they also have to look at we just went through a pandemic where the last thing you want to do is to own a business that relies on people showing up in person to be there. So I don’t know if they’re going to buy up a chain right away. I don’t know if it makes sense for them to buy up a chain.

Craig: Well, they won’t buy it until they feel like it is worth nothing. And then they’ll buy it, because it’s worth nothing. It’s not good. It’s a really bad situation. And I do feel for – I mean, people give movie theater chains a lot of guff because they’re kind of monopolistic and they charge you $5,000 for popcorn and they’re generally dirty and they show 400 ads in front of a movie which is disgusting, and all that. But it was still the movies. And they were still movie theaters. And it still had that kind of movie theater thing going on.

And it’s kind of shocking because it might be that we were staying in that relationship out of habit more than out of love. And now that we’ve been forced to break that habit it’s sort of like, well, so once they let us out of the hospital do we start smoking again? I don’t know. I don’t know. We’ll see. We’ll see what happens.

I never thought. But here we are.

John: All right. Let’s answer some listener questions. So people write in with questions and we try to get to them, but they stack up. So we’re going to try to burn through a bunch.

Craig: Let’s go.

John: Craig, will you start us off with Ren’s question?

Craig: Ren asks, “I am working with a director on a short film. He originally approached with a concept but no script. I agreed to work with him on the understanding that he would be the director and I would be the writer and received sole writing credit. It is unpaid. Now—“

John: Craig, I’m going to stop you right there. Craig, I’m going to stop you right there. You’ve not read the rest of this question. What do you think Ren is going to ask us next?

Craig: I’m going to guess, I’m looking away from the question so I don’t read it. I’m going to guess that the director now does want writing credit. What should I do?

John: Ah, yes. So now read the rest of it. You are correct.

Craig: “Now after seven drafts he has sent back a new version of the screenplay to which he has added scenes without consulting me and has also added his name as a writer.” Oh, yeah. Well, that was pretty much the only way that story was going to go. “Is this as uncool as I think it is?”

Yes.

“Do I have any redress?”

Yes.

“He disappeared for three months prior to this and never sent notes. This short will be going into production this winter, coronavirus permitting.”

OK. Well, John.

John: Oh Ren. OK, so yes it’s uncool. Yes it’s so common that that’s why I can stop Craig in the middle of the question and ask him where he thought this was going. This happens all the time. And the director disappearing and showing back up again happens all the time.

If you had the time machine and could go back and at the start of this relationship had come to an agreement about sort of how this was going to work and written that down that would be great. But you have no time machine. All you have is your ability to say no right now. So to say all the feelings that you’re projecting at us you need to direct those feelings back to the director and explain clearly that this is not the arrangement we had. This is not the plan going into this. This is uncool what you are doing. I still want to make this short but I want to make this short as the writer and you as the director and that’s where we’re at.

If this director says, “No, I’m just not going to make this movie,” he’s not going to make the movie. So, who cares? He has not paid you any money. He doesn’t own anything. So hash it out with this director. Make the short if you want to make the short. Don’t make the short if you don’t want to make the short. You have the ability to say no and just don’t forget you have the ability to say no.

Craig: Correct. You wrote this thing. He, in rewriting it, has actually violated your copyright. He has created a derivative work without your permission. You wrote it. It’s yours.

So, now, that’s just so that you know that you have some actual leverage here. I think it’s fair for you to say we had an arrangement and whether or not you wish to work on this and you can, and by the way, I’m fine with you wanting to come and do some things on it, I don’t work on this initially for free and put in all the time to get you to this spot if I don’t know that I’m getting sole credit. This, that I did write, is copyright me. And you can’t make any derivative work from it. Any derivative work without my permission.

So if there’s no paper in place he can’t make it unless you allow him to make it. This is what you get when you don’t hire people and pay them. So, you have actually more leverage than you even realize and if he’s going to be a jerk about it it’s time to call up a lawyer.

John: Yeah. That said, this is a short film. We don’t know sort of what’s going to happen. So it may not be worth all of your time and energy and concern about this thing. He could go off and make something that’s kind of like your short and as maddening as that is it may not be worth pursuing if it’s not going to ever attract anyone’s attention. It’s just going to suck. Maybe you don’t want your name on it in the first place.

But if you feel like this is a good thing that you wrote that you feel like could become a good short, that could become a thing, yes, have this conversation and make it clear that you intend to protect your vision and your rights on this.

Craig: I reserve all rights.

John: Indeed.

Craig: I got that once. I was making a movie for Bob Weinstein.

John: Good stuff.

Craig: And we had a schedule. And we had, I don’t know, it was like 28 days to shoot a movie. And around day 14 he calls and says, “You don’t have 14 more days. You now have 10 more days. I’m taking four days out of your schedule.” And I was like, no, that’s crazy. That doesn’t even make sense and no. And he yelled at me and I was like but no.

And then he sent me an email an hour later that says, “As we discussed you will take four days out of the schedule. I reserve all rights.” [laughs] Anyway, I hit delete and did not take four days out of the schedule. What a jerk.

John: What a jerk.

Craig: And that’s the worst thing that anyone named Weinstein has ever done. Moving on. Next question.

John: James from Bristol asks, “I have a question about writing down pieces of dialogue you hear or which come up in conversation. I understand the urge to do it, to write down this great thing you heard so you don’t lose it, but I wonder do you guys ever actually use any of that? Do you not need to be mid writing a scene or movie which requires that specific exchange or something like it? Otherwise it just stays in the notebook unused and out of context? Or do you only write down things that apply to what you’re writing? How do you use this?” And Craig do you write down stuff that you overhear?

Craig: No. I think that that’s something that writers in movies do. I don’t think I’ve ever done that. I’ve never just gone, ooh, that’s an interesting turn of phrase. Let me get my little writer notebook and put it in.

John: So Nora Ephron did it. And I remember reading in books about like how she would hear an exchange and she would write it down. But I think it was generally in context of something she was working on. So When Harry Met Sally her ears were just primed to hear that stuff. And when she would hear it she would do it. And to me the rare occasions where I’ve picked something out of an actual conversation and used it it’s been because I’m working on that thing and so therefore I was ready to hear it and use it and place it in there.

So I don’t know that it’s overall worthwhile to do.

Craig: Yeah. It feels like you’re risking you had to be there syndrome. Because, you know, oh my god I heard three people say the funniest thing. When you hear comedians rely exchanges they overheard I assure you that they have made those exchanges far more interesting and funny. Always. Everything needs to be buffed up and expanded.

Sometimes what I’ll do is I’ll hear people say things and I’ll go well there’s an interesting conversation. But I’m not writing down their actual words. I’ll do the words later in a way that is better. But the concept or the thought or reaction is something that I will note.

John: What I will write down or note or I’ll just take a note in my Notes App on my phone is if I hear somebody using a word in a way that I’ve never encountered before or they’re clearly pronouncing a word that they’ve never actually heard aloud and they’ve only read sometimes I’ll take a note of that. A weird bit of usage on something. I will take a note of that. But that’s not quite what is being asked here. Because it’s not like, oh, I can have that character say that thing. Almost never does that actually work.

Craig: Almost never. All right, let’s try this question from Joe. This is about copyright for a sequel. He says, “Recently I finished writing a spinoff to a major cult classic that examines the backstory of a particular character and his motivations for killing another character in the original film. I sent the script to a friend and mentor who works for the Black List and she thinks I have something special that fans would love to watch. Before reaching out to the producers with my logline and query letter she suggested I look into the copyright section that my project falls under with the Library of Congress.

“I tried doing this before emailing Scriptnotes but I haven’t had much luck getting a straight answer. My question is can I copyright a spinoff inspired by another film or is this the sort of red tape that producers would take care of in the event they really like my script? Also, do I need permission from the original writers to use their characters in my spinoff?”

John, what do you think about Joe’s question?

John: Great, so Joe what you’ve written is kind of fan fiction. You’ve taken something that existed and you’ve written a new thing that’s inspired by and derived from that initial piece of writing. You have copyright because you’ve written something and you have copyright on the things you’ve written, but you don’t have control of those underlying material. And so you couldn’t sell this thing to somebody and they couldn’t make it without getting the underlying rights to the initial cult classic film, assuming that it’s still under copyright which it probably is because it’s not pre-Mickey Mouse or something like that. So somebody owns the underlying rights to this thing and it’s not you.

So you still own the rights to the thing you’ve written, but not the stuff before then. So I don’t know, the friend who is telling you to go to the Library of Congress. You don’t need to go to the Library of Congress. Somebody owns those rights and you are not the person who owns those rights.

Still, what you’ve done is fine and good and is a really common thing for people to show their writing talent. And so you have to look at this thing that you’ve written as being hopefully a fantastic writing sample for yourself. Maybe the people who own these underlying rights will read this and say, “You know what? This is a great idea. We should buy this script and make this thing.” But likely that’s not going to happen and that’s OK.

Craig: Yeah. I’m a little curious why your friend did suggest you look into the copyright because that sort of implies that maybe it is old or maybe the original film is based on another property that might be out of copyright, like a book.

John: Oh, that’s possible.

Craig: Like Sherlock Holmes, old Sherlock Holmes stories are not under copyright, but there are plenty of movies that if you borrowed from based on those things you would be violating the movie copyright. It’s complicated. But I think John has given you the best answer which is if you’ve written it and it’s good you should get it out there. And people will read it. You don’t need permission to write something like that. What you need permission is to exploit it.

So, you can’t make money off of it. You can’t exhibit it without permission. But if you want to sit in your house and write something like that, no problem.

John: Sara writes, “I just sold a show after pitching it to an executive I’d met in a general meeting. Now that the show has sold my manager is expressing interest in attaching himself as a producer on the project.”

Craig: Oh great.

John: “I can’t help but feel bad packaging fee vibes from this and I wondered how is a manager coming on to produce a client’s film or series helpful for the client?”

Craig: Oh.

John: “I’m not sure he’d be added to the project in any way, creative or otherwise.”

Craig: Really?

John: “Other than how he already was which is as my representative, representing my best interests.”

Craig: Oh?

John: “Should I let him produce my show?”

Craig: Oh, Sara, what a bunch of silly questions. No, no, no, no. It’s very important that you let the producer be the producer even though he’s your manager because it’ll make him feel better and he’ll get more money out of it. Ugh. [laughs]

You’re asking questions that you already know the answer to Sara because you’re smart and you’re insightful. The reason you feel bad packaging fee vibes from this is because it is exactly bad packaging fee vibes. In short the manager is no longer representing you. The manager is now being paid by the financier of the project. The manager’s responsibility is to that financier. In fact the manager as the producer has seniority over you. And a permanency that you don’t have because at some point if the studio says we don’t think Sara is getting it done then your manager as the producer will say, “Let me go break it to her that we’re firing her. And then let me go hire somebody else.”

And for what? So that you don’t pay 10 percent? Pay the 10 percent. And then they will represent you as you point out. But this is the problem. This is the problem.

John: So Craig and I have never had managers.

Craig: Oh, I have.

John: We have many friends who do have managers. And what they will tell you, so Malcolm Spellman would tell you, or Justin Marks would tell you, or other friends who have managers is that managers can add value and they can be helpful to your career in terms of introductions and giving you notes on things and sort of helping you do your best work. And some of them enjoy having their managers come on as producers because they feel like they’re protecting the writer in this part of this process. There’s somebody who is there on set defending the writer.

Maybe that’s the situation. But Sara that doesn’t sound like you feel that way from this manager that this person is really going to help you. So you’re not going to find any sympathy from me and Craig for this manager in this situation. I think, again, you have the ability to say, “No, I’m not comfortable with this.” And if the manager says, “Well, this is what I want,” then you’re going to maybe find a different manager–

Craig: What a great time to fire them. Yeah.

John: Yeah. It doesn’t feel like a good relationship to me.

Craig: No. No. And if they’re saying that, the manager is expressing interest you say in attaching himself as a producer on the project. The manager is expressing interest in making more money. That’s what the manager is expressing interest in. More money. Please, more money. Well, I want their money to be attached to my money. The more money I make the more money he’ll make. So, I don’t need the manager decoupling himself.

John: Craig, you’re so old fashioned. So old fashioned.

Craig: I know.

John: This is just for you, Craig. Will wrote in. He said, “Hey Craig, have you ever been interested in cryptic crossword puzzles? I’m an American with a British parent so I’ve had enough exposure to both, A, know about them, and B, get some of the more obscure cultural references that the clues often require. I was just curious to hear your perspective on them as someone who is a much more serious puzzler but probably has less grounding in British culture and slang. Are they delightful, crunchy, or obscure and aggravating?”

Craig: A cryptic crossword. What is a – oh yeah, that’s that thing I do every day. I love cryptic crosswords. In fact, I’ve stopped doing regular crossword puzzles.

John: Explain it, Craig. I don’t know what you’re talking about at all.

Craig: Sure. So what we call cryptic crosswords in the US are what the British call crosswords. And they work in a very different way than our crosswords. Our crosswords generally speaking there is a straightforward clue like President blank Clinton. It’s Bill. And you fill it in and they all intersect. And you fill in those things. And sometimes we’ll have themed crosswords puzzles. The New York Times most of their puzzles throughout the week except for Friday and Saturday have a theme where there’s like a little gimmick going on or something like that.

But cryptic crossword puzzles have a very different structure. First of all they rarely feature that kind of rotational symmetry that an American crossword puzzle has where if you turn the grid at 90 degrees or 180 it will always look the same. And secondly the clues work in a very different manner. The clues are basically divided up in two parts. There’s like an imaginary line somewhere in the clue. And on one side of that imaginary line is a definition of the answer. And on the other side of the imaginary line is some word play that will lead you to the answer.

And so I’m just look in – this is the example that they use in Wikipedia. Here is a cryptic clue. Very sad, unfinished story about rising smoke. Eight letters. Well, how does that work? So the definition in that case is very sad. And you have to figure it out. You don’t know if the definition is very or very sad, or rising smoke, or smoke. So the definition there is very sad. Well, OK, well I don’t know what the answer to very sad is. It could be a lot of things. Let’s look at the other side of that clue. Unfinished story about rising smoke. Well an unfinished story, a story is a tale. Unfinished means don’t use the last letter. Just take TAL. Rising smoke, well one kind of smoke is a cigar. So in that case smoke is a noun. Rising is a hint that it’s going backwards. Cigar backwards is RAGIC. And then about – so the unfinished story about rising smoke means take that TAL and put it around the backwards cigar and what you end up with is TRAGICAL.

Now, you can see why I love these things. There are so many conventions to these things. There are anagrams. There’s backwards. There’s taking odd letters. There’s letters that are hidden in between words, like bridging across spaces. It is so complicated.

And then you get into the deep, deep world of like the great Mark Halpin and his cryptic crosswords that do things like in every single clue not only is this clue really, really hard but also there’s an extra two letters in it that don’t belong there. What are those two? Pull them out and do another thing with those. Oh, it’s so deep nerd. It’s so wonderful.

Anyway, Will, the long answer to this could have just been substituted with a yes.

John: Craig has never heard of them. He has no interest in them at all.

Craig: Now, British culture and slang is really rough. So there’s the hardest, generally speaking what people consider the hardest routinely published cryptic crossword is one done by The Listener which is a UK publication. It is so, so hard. I consider myself to be I’ll say very good at cryptics. I can do very difficult cryptics. That one is just one notch above my head. I just can’t get there. And part of it is because it’s so difficult and the vocabulary is so obscure. And part of it is because a lot of it is sometimes grounded in British culture and slang that I don’t know.

But long story short everybody should do cryptic crosswords. Everybody should do them.

John: Oh my god, no way will I ever do cryptic crosswords.

Craig: You will.

John: What you described is just exactly what I do not want to spend my time doing.

Craig: Really? That’s the only thing I want to do. That’s literally all I want to do. David Kwong and I–

John: This and D&D. If you could combine D&D and this Craig would be in heaven.

Craig: Yes. David Kwong and I will occasionally just create cryptic clues for words. Chris Miller also a big cryptic guy. It’s just fun. It’s fun making them if you’re a dork like me.

John: Matthew as you edit this episode make sure to emphasize my sighs of disbelief and frustration.

Craig: I want to make a cryptic clue for your name. It’s going to be great.

John: Excellent. Cannot wait. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is actually podcast related. It is a program, a system called Descript. I’d heard about it before and they just came out with a new thing and a great video that sort of talks you through what it can do. It is magic in a way that is sort of scary.

So, for a podcast for example Craig and I are recording our audio separately. Matthew joins the two pieces together. But he does it all in a very traditional nonlinear editor. He’s cutting the audio together. And what we’re saying he’s just hearing as sound waves. So he’s just cutting sound waves together. Descript works differently. So if we feed this into Descript, and I’ve done this because I’ve tried it, Craig and I show up as text. And so it is transcribing what we’re saying as text and then you can edit it as text, just like you would edit it in Word or Highland, and edit the text. And then it goes through and it cuts the audio for you to match the written text.

It is crazy. And that was already kind of existing and there was a version of that. They’ve just now added video so you can do the same thing for video and edit the video just as text which seems impossible yet still works.

But the spookiest new feature I saw here which would be so useful but so terrifying potentially is it can also not only cut stuff out, it can generate words. Basically it will listen to – it will build up a voice based on the recordings it has of somebody and so if I said six in the podcast but I really should have said seven I can just highlight six and type seven and it will create my voice saying seven in that moment and match the pitch and tone for where I was.

It is remarkable. And it will change a lot of things. For something like Scriptnotes it’s probably not exactly practical. But for the Launch podcast I did about the Launch of Arlo Finch that was a fully written out scripted podcast and it would have been amazing to edit that show in something like Descript.

So, just check it out. We’ll have a link in the show notes to it. It is spooky what they’re able to do.

Craig: Wow. Great name for that, too. I like that, Descript. Descriptnotes. That’s the podcast about Descript.

John: Yup.

Craig: My One Cool Thing is a new book that’s put out by Dungeons & Dragons, the fine people at Wizards of the Coast. And it is written in part by a friend of mine who is also one of the party members in a game I play each week. A D&D game I play each week. And it’s called Heroes Feast. It is the official Dungeons & Dragons Cookbook.

John: I love it.

Craig: And it’s lovely. It’s adorable. It lives entirely within the kind of vibe of D&D. All the recipes kind of roughly map to various D&D races and classes. You know, elves I guess are veggie and dwarves like meat. You know, stuff like that. I don’t know where they come up with these things. But the point is it’s adorable. It’s adorable. It’s a great kind of gift. I mean, we’re approaching Christmas and it does seem like, OK, well if I’m married to a nerd or my boyfriend or girlfriend is a dork and they also like to cook – or maybe they just don’t and I need to buy them something cute. I mean, this thing is really adorable.

And I haven’t tried any of the recipes but I did look through them. They actually look pretty good. So if you are interested in things like Drow mushroom steaks, or Chultan’s Zombie, Yawning Portal biscuits, well, they’ve got them.

John: I’ve adventured in Yawning Portal. I believe he could sell me some pretty good biscuits.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: I’ll tell you, just because it’s short, the recipe for the Mind Flayer which is a vodka drink involves peeled ginger, sugar, lime juice, grape juice concentrate, vodka, and ice. And grapes. So, sure, it sounds like a spicy grapey vodka drink.

Craig: And the blood of an illithid who approaches you slowly, grapples you – grapples you – and then sucks your brain out.

John: Yeah. The ginger does feel like the spiky parts of the tentacles wrapping around your brain.

Craig: Wrapping around your brain. Oh yeah. You guys are going to be doing some illithid pretty soon, my friend. It’s coming. Just so you know, so the game that I DM that John is in I also play in but at a much deeper level of the dungeon, so I don’t know what’s coming because I haven’t gotten there as a DM. And I died again. It’s the second time I died.

Well, I mean, it gets serious. It gets serious. So, third character coming up. Pretty cool. I like this guy. War Forged Cleric of Light.

John: Love it.

Craig: Yeah.

John: It’s always good to try some new things. I have a backup character anticipating when my cult leader sorcerer dies.

Craig: Yeah, it’s probably inevitable.

John: It’ll be fun.

Craig: Like I said, it’s one of those dungeons. Well that was fun.

John: That’s our show for this week. So Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Matthew also did our outro this week which is phenomenal and inspired our bonus segment.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions, on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We have t-shirts. They’re great. You can go to Cotton Bureau or follow the link in the show notes.

You can find those show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find the transcripts there.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments.

And, Craig, thank you for a fun show.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

John: Another excellent outro by Matthew Chilelli. And it is almost Halloween so Craig let’s talk about scary movies. Do you like scary movies? I don’t even know if you do.

Craig: I don’t like them as much as some people. There are some that I like and I respect highly. I don’t go seeking them. My daughter is obsessed. Obsessed with scary movies and has watched, I think, all of them.

John: Yeah. So I fall into your camp where I definitely appreciate scary movies and I think there’s an artistry there and I totally admire some of them, and some of them I greatly enjoy, but I don’t seek them out very often.

And I guess I put them into a couple different buckets. There’s the slasher movie that is not actually scary but just sort of gory. There’s that variety and I don’t particularly care for it. There are thrillers. There’s Silence of the Lambs. Things that are incredibly scary but they’re not sort of supernatural. But those supernatural horror movies, those are the ones that I find so troubling and disturbing that I just really have a hard time watching. All the way going back to like the Amityville Horror would show on TV sometimes and I would have to have the remote in hand just so I could flip to a different channel because it would be so terrifying to me.

Hereditary was the same kind of movie for me in that I had to just watch it in little installments and just walk away because it overwhelmed me.

Craig: Yeah. I’m kind of with you on that. The Exorcist absolutely screwed me up. It screwed me up. I saw The Exorcist when I was 12. Obviously I was sneaking it in. And absolutely traumatized me. Traumatized me. Only now am I at the point where I can watch it and not feel stuff, like feel terrible dread in my mind and in my chest. But it absolutely scrambled me. And that’s so much more scary. The jump scare stuff, that’s not scaring me, that’s just startling.

And I don’t really care about the slasher ones. Like I think slasher stuff, it bores me. I’ll be honest with you. I just get bored by watching a guy walk around and stab people. Because I don’t care. I just don’t.

But the things that prey on basic – well we’ll just call them like Jungian themes like the innocence of childhood. Like I remember when I read Pet Sematary. I was terrified by that book. Terrified.

John: Yeah. So I’m trying to say this in a non-judgy way, but when I see people who are like obsessed with horror movies, especially really supernatural scary, scary movies to me I equate that with people who keep having to add more and more hot sauce to their food. Where something about how they’re wired, they need to get the most frightened possible. Like normal thresholds of things won’t work for them. And I just don’t feel that. Like I just need a little heat and I’m good. I don’t need to sort of go deep into that.

And the times where I’ve written scary stuff I will genuinely scare myself. It gives you an appreciation for sort of like how difficult a jump scare can really be to execute and how the misdirect that’s required for that. So full appreciation for the craft behind it. It’s just not a thing I sort of willingly go into to experience too often.

Here’s an example. So Mike and Amy they had gone to Ohio to visit family. This is years ago. And I went to the Mann Chinese Theater, like the six-pack theater there, and there was a scary movie that I wanted to see that people were liking a lot. I don’t remember the title of it. And so it was like an eight o’clock show. I go there by myself. I’m watching this movie and then I’m about 20 minutes into it I realize like I am really scared and I’m going to have to drive home and sleep in an empty house tonight. And this is not going to be good so I got up and I left and I drove home. Because I recognized that I’m going to freak myself out way too much watching this movie. Like those things get in my head in ways that other stuff can’t.

Craig: Well obviously the manufacturers that constructed you failed to kind of prevent against this one little bit. Clearly this is violating some circuit protocol. I mean, you should be immune to this sort of thing. I’m confused.

John: Yeah. What was the last movie that really scared you? Like the last new movie that wasn’t The Exorcist?

Craig: Hereditary.

John: Hereditary for me, too. Midsommar I guess I “liked” Midsommar. I thought it was sort of overwhelming, but it’s not scary in that way. It’s incredibly disturbing not actually scary. Whereas Hereditary I just have no idea what’s going to happen next and I was terrified for the people involved at every moment.

Craig: Right. It just – yeah. There is an intelligence behind it. So, The Exorcist and Hereditary in that zone what ends up happening is it’s not really about anything supernatural at all. The presence of a demon in The Exorcist, I mean, we don’t even see the demon. We see a statue briefly and then of course the famous glimpse of a face. But it’s instead about the way our actual nightmares work, which is taking things that we are incredibly familiar with and perverting them. It’s just a perversion. It’s something that is sweet and beautiful turning into something that is terrible and degraded and disgusting. That’s the part that always gets to me. I struggle.

John: Yeah. Even the clichés of like the children singing a nursery rhyme. The fact that that becomes a cliché is because it is that perversion of something that is so innocent and should be happy and it’s like, oh no, this is going to be terrible. Like I can’t watch The Conjuring or Annabelle or any of those kind of things, but it’s the same type of situation where you’re going into that dark basement where that toy is and that toy will be your undoing.

Craig: Yeah. In Pet Sematary, I mean, this is why Pet Sematary is so remarkable and why Stephen King is so incredible. The concept is so simple and so direct to our lizard brain and yet only he was willing to freaking do it. What is worse than a child dying? Not just a child, but a toddler. A sweet five-year-old boy dying violently, getting hit by a truck. And then you in your grief try to bring him back to life. And what he comes back as is horrifying and is evil.

That goes right into something so primal and terrifying to me. Ugh. Blech. So like the stuff where Freddy walks around and quips – the quipping ones are the most amusing. Yes. I don’t care about those.

John: Many horror movies do cross over into actual they are a comedy reflection of the original horror movie. And so they’re no longer fully scary movies. And then we reached with Scream and everything that sort of came after Scream that the meta recognition of horror. And the original Scream was actually genuinely scary to me. Jump scares but also the initial Drew Barrymore scene. That sense of like, oh, this person is aware of the clichés and the tropes and is using those tropes to kill me was its own unique new thing.

Craig: Right.

John: But that’s still a slasher movie. And the supernatural horror is the thing that I can’t stand.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I appreciate it. You know, I appreciate it when it’s well done. And a lot of people thought that there were things in Chernobyl that were really scary. And I didn’t really intend for anything to be scary.

John: Well here’s what scary about Chernobyl to me is when the guys are wearing the suits and they’re sludging through the water. That’s very classically Aliens scary where you’re in a place of darkness. There’s water. You can’t see clearly. And those are primal fears. That fear of not just drowning but suffocating and something coming out of that darkness at you. I can understand why that part was scary.

The other stuff was more disturbing than anything else, because there wasn’t immediate stakes. And that moment had incredible immediate stakes.

Craig: Well I guess what I was going for was anxiety. That’s what I wanted people to feel was anxious. And I suppose scared and anxious are twins.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Kissing cousins. Yeah.

John: They are. Yeah. Kissing is scary.

Links:

• Slinky Movie Twitter Poll
• Magic 8 Ball Movie
• Quibi Shuts Down
• Hit and Run by Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters
• Quibi Loopholes
• Century City
• Descript
• DnD Heroes Feast
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.