Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 704 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you construct and communicate the geography for where your story is taking place, and how does that translate onto the screen? We’ll look at examples from our own work and others. Then we answer listener emails on a plethora of topics, from imposter syndrome to revisions to disappearing agents. To help us do all this, welcome back returning champion, Liz Hannah.

Liz Hannah: Wooo.

John: Oh my gosh, Liz, it’s so nice to have you here.

Liz: Thank you. Do I get a T-shirt? I feel like a five-timers club or something T-shirt is necessary.

John: Absolutely. We’re getting the robes made. It’s going to be so good.

Liz: Merch. Get me with the merch.

John: Hey, Liz, how do you talk about yourself as a writer? Are you a feature writer or a TV writer at this point? You have several amazing feature credits, but the most recent two things I associate you with are limited series. Are you feature land, TV land? What do you think about yourself as?

Liz: I often just say writer, and then if anybody asks, I’d say feature and television. I definitely avoid defining myself in any way. I don’t know. It’s a really good question. I feel bifurcated in my brain. I don’t feel one way or the other.

John: When you talk to your team, to your agents, and I assume you have a manager as well, what is the split in terms of the projects you’re pursuing? How are you talking to them about bring me these things, reach out with these things?

Liz: What I look for in features is much smaller now in terms of what I feel like I want to do that I haven’t done. I haven’t done a big four-quadrant movie. I’ve done rewrites on them, but I’ve never originated one. That’s a bucket list type of– at least for me, my favorite movie growing up and the movie that made me want to be a writer is Raiders. Wanting to do something like that is always in there. I’ve always flirted with it and never found the right one. That’s always one.

Then it really is, for me, filmmaker, team-based. That could be director, that could be producer, that could be whomever is involved that’s originating it. That is, I’m very now experience-based and I want to have a good experience. I don’t want to work with people that will make it not good. That is really how I– I talk about it really much more, I think, holistically in that way.

I’m also focused on directing now in features that I’m generating a lot of that material myself. By a lot, I mean slowly over the course of many years, there will be potentially one.

It’s a much more, I think, organic conversation of just, “Where do we want to go? What are we looking for?” and then also having the ability to be flexible. If a filmmaker comes up that I really like, that I have a relationship with, that I want to work with, then it goes there.

John: I changed reps about a year ago, a year-and-a-half ago. Time is a void into which all reason disappears.

Liz: I was at the chiropractor the other day and I was like, “I can’t believe it’s September 8th.” She was like, “It’s September 9th.” I was like, “Great.”

John: Great, love it. As I was changing reps, I had to make a list of these are the things I want to do, these are my priorities. I’ve mostly stuck to that. It’s interesting because I think people perceive me as just a features guy because all my credits are features for the last 20 years. The money I’ve actually been making and the things I’ve been doing have actually been on the episodic side. It’s just that there’s no visible evidence of that yet. I say that I’m mostly a features person, but that’s actually not entirely true given what I’ve been doing.

Liz: I think it’s interesting because pre-strike and post-strike, my business has mostly been in television. That’s where I’ve definitely had the most consistency. Also, post-strike, it’s so hard to make anything, that it is one of those things that, like, I swear I’ve been working for three years.

John: Yes, same here. We’ll get into some of that. Also, in our bonus segment for premium members, let’s discuss how we talk to our kids, other people’s kids, about what it is that we actually do for a living. There’s so many jobs which is like, “I’m a police officer, I’m a firefighter, I’m a baker,” where it’s just really clear versus what we do is, like, “I write things, but not things you can read, not books.” We’ll just talk about age-appropriate ways to talk to kids about what it is that we do for a living, be it features, or TV, or some murky middle that we can’t quite even articulate to ourselves.

Liz: Love it.

John: Love it. We have some news. The Scriptnotes book, which I don’t know if you’ve seen the Scriptnotes book. This is the galley-

Liz: So exciting. Love it.

John: -of the Scriptnotes book. We got our first review. This is in Booklist, which is a trade publication, which is one of the first people to put out reviews of things because it helps signal to booksellers, “Oh, this is a book you want to check out. We got a great review.” We’ll be able to link to the real one in October, but we got the advance of it. The last sentence in the review is, “Bound to be a staple, this guy, just like the podcast, is accessible, engaging, and informative,” which is nice. Also, they tagged us for young adult, which means that we could also be on the list for younger people to read it. We were pretty careful with the language in it so that it actually feels good for anyone 13 and up to be able to read this book.

Liz: Love it. I’m so excited to read it.

John: Yes, excited to send it to you. Reminder that the book is available for pre-order everywhere you buy books. You can just go to scriptnotesbook.com and see where it is in your market, UK, Australia, US. If you’re in another country overseas, wherever you buy English books, they’ll probably have it. Just check there. If you do pre-order it, send your receipt to Drew at ask@johnaugust.com, and we’ll be emailing you something very cool very soon. Send that through.
Drew has a very long list of people who’ve sent through those pre-orders, so it’s exciting. Liz Hannah, do you do Connections on New York Times?

Liz: I do. I do Connections.

John: We were talking about it two weeks ago, and we were commenting on how much we loved it and how great Wyna Liu is. I mispronounced her name as Wyna Liu, and I know that because she actually wrote us in. She wrote back to us and said that she’d listened to the episode in which we mentioned her. Drew, what did she say?

Drew Marquardt: Hi, John and Craig. Thanks so much for the shout-out in your Connections episode. It was so kind of you, and I’m thrilled you liked the game. It was my first time hearing your show, and I really enjoyed it. Glad to have something new in the rotation. Hope you’re doing well.

John: We’re doing very well to know that Wyna Liu is listening to Scriptnotes. Hi, Wyna, and thank you. Sorry I mispronounced your name. We’ll pronounce it right from now on because we’re probably going to mention it a lot because we love Connections so much.

Liz: It’s the best.

John: It’s the best. Liz Hannah, have you ever worked on Bob: The Musical?

Liz: I have not.

John: Did you know about Bob: The Musical?

Liz: I didn’t until this morning.

John: Bob: The Musical is a very long development project at Disney. I’ve worked on it. Craig, I think, didn’t work on it, but knew of it. Everyone in town has worked on it. It must have millions of dollars worth of scripts against it. There’s finally a director announced for it. Randy Mancuso is set to helm Disney’s long-awaited Bob: The Musical. I’ll put a link in the show notes to the Deadline article. Just a thing to track. It would be just a nice thing to tick off that, “Oh, this thing actually happened.” It’s sort of, “How would this be a movie that’s actually been in development for forever?”

Liz: Is it good, is always a question.

John: I hope it’s fantastic.

Liz: I hope so.

John: You know the premise of it, right?

Liz: I do. I read the premise. I was like, “This is great.”

John: That’s a great idea for a movie. That’s why it’s been in development for forever.

Liz: Totally.

John: Also, you’ve got to hit it just right and moves change. Within the concept of a man who hates musical wakes up in a musical, there’s a lot of ways to go with that. I’m sure the drafts have gone through all these things. I have no recollection of all of what I wrote on that script. [laughter] Liz Hannah, have you seen Showgirls?

Liz: I have.

John: What is your impression of Showgirls? When did you see it? How did it land for you?

Liz: I saw it probably when I was younger at a sleepover or something like that, and then actually saw it in college. Then watched it again as an adult probably not that long ago, like 10 years ago or something like that. My impression is that it only got better with every rewatch as I aged into it. The appreciation I have of it and what it did at the time and what it was trying to do only grows. I’m happy for it– I saw it played at Vidiots recently or is going to play at Vidiots, and I’m happy for its renaissance.

John: I saw it screening over at the Academy as part of their summer camp series. It is an incredibly enjoyable movie until it gets to a horrifying rate that completely ruins your ability to laugh at and with the movie, completely falls apart. We were talking a few episodes ago about Joe Eszterhas and his career as a screenwriter and just all the things he wrote. Craig was saying, “Oh, we should have him on.” Several people wrote in to say that Joe Eszterhas actually has three to four autobiographies. Can you imagine writing one autobiography, much less three or four autobiographies, Liz Hannah?

Liz: He has three or four autobiographies that he wrote about himself.

John: About himself.

Liz: He didn’t ghostwrite other people’s autobiographies.

John: No, they’re his.

Liz: I would only be so lucky to live a life where I could write three to four biographies. I feel like, “Could you write one?”

John: Here’s how he did it. The first one is Hollywood Animal. That’s 2004, which my Amazon purchases shows that I must have bought at some point. I don’t recall. I don’t have that book.

Liz: Obsessed with that.

John: Obsessed. I don’t think I read it. 754 pages. That’s a long autobiography there.

Liz: That is almost as long as the tome about Che Guevara.

John: Exactly.

Liz: That is like 900 pages.

John: A similar career.

Liz: Same, by the way. Similar people.

John: Similar people, just the same. Devil’s Guide to Hollywood was in 2006. Crossbearer: A Memoir of Faith about his return to Catholicism was 2008. Then he has– the fourth book is Heaven and Mel, which was a Kindle single actually, but it counts. 2012, which is about his experience working with Mel Gibson on the Maccabees movie, which never shot.

Liz: First of all, Heaven and Mel, iconic.

John: Great.

Liz: How have we not gotten there yet? Really elite title. I feel like it would be funny if he wrote about a biography with each generational iteration of somebody watching Showgirls and how it’s interpreted. It’s like with each generation, the first generation hates it, the second generation loves it and thinks it’s regarded incorrectly, and now the third generation is like, “There’s some really tough stuff in it, but there’s some really good stuff in it.” That would be fun. The first one, it being that long, feels like he can maybe cover it all. Also, how old was he when he wrote his first one?

John: I don’t know. 2004. We can do the math to figure out how old he was. He was not a young person as he was writing Basic Instinct or Showgirls or any of these things. I feel like you only get to write the screenwriter autobiography when you’re like, “Okay, I’m done with my career,” because you’re inevitably going to just burn a lot of bridges and talk about the things. The movies I’ve worked on that I could talk about that would actually be good stories would also make me unpopular with the people who I needed to write about.

Liz: Unhireable.

John: Unhireable, that’s really what we’ll say.

Liz: I think any autobiography or memoir, you have to be very conscious that people will, even if you’re telling, from your perspective, stories that are complementary, they might not be interpreted that way. You have to be conscious that anything that you’re divulging is something that somebody else doesn’t want out there. To write three of those, including one about Mel Gibson, who has such a great reputation, it’s fascinating.

John: It is. Choices that we could make, but have not chosen to make.

Liz: Hey, who knows?

John: Absolutely. The year’s young. [chuckles]

Liz: The year’s young, the world’s on fire. Let’s see what happens in 2026.

John: People ask, “Liz Hannah, do you write mostly features or TV?” It’s like, “I write autobiographies.”

Liz: Yes, that’s right. Memoirs [crosstalk].

John: Memoirs. It’s a memoirist.

Liz: Thank you.

John: In episode 702, we talked about Last Looks, and we had a couple people write in about Last Looks. Before we start with these emails, Liz, what is your process for Last Looks? What are the things you’d like to do before you hand in a script?

Liz: I’ve totally stolen this from Sorkin, which is I do a– I think we–

John: We talked about this. We were talking about transition pass.

Liz: You and I recently talked about this at the Sundance Lab, which is I do a full transcription pass. I basically have a blank page in final draft. I have my final “draft” of my script on the right, and I just type it up. I try not to think about it as I’m typing it up, and try to just let it flow. Inevitably, there will always be things where I’m like, “This action line is taking too long,” or, “This dialogue is bad,” or you’ll organically come to it, but it really is a final pass.

John: You’re really doing that on most of your projects where you are side-by-side.

Liz: Yes.

John: Wow. How long does that take you to type up a full script?

Liz: It’s like two hours. It’s the time of a movie. It doesn’t take very long.

John: Very good typist.

Liz: Thank you to Bedford Middle School for teaching me that. It doesn’t take very long because also at that point, I do feel quite burned out by my own script, so it’s the only way for me to, I think– For me, it’s the way to read things that I tend to gloss over when I’m going through those final passes. Sometimes it’s fine to do that because you’re like, “It’s done. It’s set. I need other people to read this at this point.” Sorkin says he does it for every feature. I stole it with The Post, and I’ve done it ever since.

John: We had two people write in with suggestions. Drew, help us with that.

Drew: Tom in Cheltenham writes, “My very final last look is now always on Weekend Read. Once I have endlessly polished and tweaked a draft and read through on my computer, I export to Weekend Read. I then read through it on my phone, not my iPad, and the amount of stuff I catch is unbelievable. Maybe it’s just the way my brain works, but there’s something about seeing the text laid out differently with different line breaks that allows me to actually read it fresh.

This isn’t about typos or orphans or widows or page breaks. I’ve caught all those by now. This is about pure readability. It’s about catching sentences that don’t quite flow or could be improved or extraneous words that simply don’t need to be there. I get so used to seeing the exact same text and the same pages laid out the same way that at some point I stop actually reading it. Weekend Read is as close to reading your own script for the first time as you can get.”

John: It’s a good point. When you see things in a different format, it’s the same reason why back in the day when we used to print scripts and you’d pull a page at a time, you’d catch things just as in print on the first time and you’d see things that are different. That tracks to make sense. It’s not the intention of Weekend Read, but it certainly is a good use of it.

Liz: I also think that everyone should alleviate themselves from the stress of having a typo-free draft. It will literally never happen. Just to make everybody feel better, there’s a typo on the first page in the third sentence of The Post in the draft that went everywhere, and it’s still there. I will never recover.

John: Absolutely.

Liz: It just is what it is.

John: It broke the film. Absolutely.

Liz: It broke it. Everything.

John: It ruined everything. It all collapsed.

Liz: It is funny because it’s Chiron is misspelled, and so it’s also in bold and underlined very explicitly. There you go.

John: Fancy. One more suggestion here from John.

Drew: He says, “To have Weekend Read or WriterDuet read the script for you. It’s the one step I never skip. I don’t want to do it because I’ve spent so much time going over the script again and again, but it finds something every time. Repeated words, misspelling, something wonky from a copy and paste. The voices are pretty robotic, but performance doesn’t really matter, and it’s better than reading it out loud myself as my brain will skip things that I’ve read 100 times.

John: When you hear it read aloud, you definitely notice it. That’s why table readings are so mortifying for us because, “Oh God, there’s a word left out of that dialogue block, and I never knew it until this actor was sitting around the table.” Very publicly, everyone says, “Oh, yes, the writer screwed up here.” Drew, you do the most work in Weekend Read because each week you are curating the list of Weekend Read scripts that we’re putting in there. What is this week’s collection of scripts?

Drew: As we’re recording it, this week’s collection of scripts is Witches because I think we’re going off of the last Scriptnotes. As this comes out, the feature Friday to come is creator-driven comedies, so it’s all writer stars.

Liz: Ooh.

John: What are some of the things in that collection?

Drew: We’ve got Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, 30 Rock, Abbott Elementary, Atlanta, Feel Good, Fleabag, Girls, Insecure, Master of None, Pen15, Rami, Workaholics. There’s just a few.

John: That’s great. That’s actually a good grouping of things that I wouldn’t have actually thought of that being a creator-driven comedy, but where the person who created the show is the star of the show, and it’s all centered on them. That’s great.

Liz: Love that.

John: Reminder, Weekend Read is in the App Store. It’s free to download, so check that out. Each week, Drew will have new scripts for you to read. In Episode 702, we talked about Accountability Groups, and we had two people write in with their experiences with accountability groups.

Drew: Bill says, “I’ve found accountability groups to be a silver bullet. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I had to email five pages by 5:00 PM. No one had to read them. I just needed to send the pages. One strike for every day that five or more pages weren’t handed in on time. Three strikes, and you’re kicked out of the group. I had a first draft in what was, for me, record time. It costs nothing to be on the receiving end of an email that doesn’t require a response, but being there for each other in that capacity meant everything. It manufactured the kind of structure and deadlines that writing, especially on spec, especially a first draft, often requires.”

John: Wow. That’s great. In that sense of you’re out of the group, there’s not a financial penalty, but there’s a social pressure to stay in there. What did Ethan have to say here?

Drew: “For my last script, I set hard deadlines and a goal of writing three hours a day. Only words on the page counted to my time. I used a stopwatch and writing log to track the hours and minutes. For every three hours, I paid myself with a Magic the Gathering booster pack. I successfully finished a polished script in 12 weeks. Pay yourself for your work, and you associate the work with payment.”

John: All right. These are examples of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. Basically, it’s ways to get yourself to do things. Paying yourself with Magic the Gathering cards, it rewards that little pleasure center in your brain until you start to feel like, “Oh, actually, maybe the writing is actually the pleasure center.” It becomes less about the Magic the Gathering cards to do it. I don’t know. I think these are good things to try if you’re looking for ways to actually get stuff done and get out of your way in terms of the habits that are stopping you from doing stuff. Liz, have you tried either of these methods or anything like this?

Liz: I haven’t personally. I will say, and I really don’t mean this in a dismissive way, but it made me laugh because I was like, I’m currently, over the course of the last 10 months, been potty training my child, and we are doing a potty training chart. He gets a sticker, and then at the very end, he gets a car. Let me tell you, every book tells you not to do it. Every podcast, everybody, every mom is like, “Oh, they’ll just do it.” It’s the only way. It’s the only way. I will buy him an actual car when he’s 16 if he’s still doing this. I don’t care. This is the way.

It is interesting psychologically how it works, and it does make me think about, and has in the past, even prior to this email, made me consider a reward base for myself of completing pages. I think I would be too tricky for myself and still buy myself Sugarfish at the end of the day, even if I didn’t do the pages. I think it’s whatever works for anyone is what you should do. It’s hard to self-motivate to write, particularly when you’re writing a spec. However you can motivate yourself to do that, be it a sweet treat or be it FOMO of not being in a club, if you don’t tend your pages in a time, then great, do it.

John: We have a screenwriter coming on in a couple weeks, and she was talking about getting her first script written. She went through a 12-week bootcamp-y situation. Yes, you’re learning something in that, but it’s mostly the accountability. It’s mostly like, “I am blocking out this amount of time, and this is the [unintelligible 00:19:53] and my identity for these next 12 weeks is the person who’s writing this script,” and that’s really meaningful.

I would say over the course of a 20-year career, I’ve been more productive, less productive, but you’re deep enough into it, you know you can get stuff written. Eventually, you’ll get out of your own way, you’ll get stuff done. If there’s weeks where I’m like, “Oh, I cranked through a bunch of stuff in weeks I didn’t–” You give yourself a little bit more grace because you just know what you can do and you know when you need to change things up and when it’s just normal.

Liz: I think the reward of having a first draft is the best reward possible for me. Being able to say that there is a completed draft of a screenplay that I can then rewrite and make better and it will never be as bad as it is in this moment is truly the greatest relief there is.

John: Honestly, for me, one of the greatest feelings is sending in a script, just getting it off of mind and just knowing, “Oh, I should have this freedom, I just have this lightness,” of like, “Oh, I don’t have this thing hovering over me.” As we’re recording this, everything is turned in at the moment. There’s some stuff I got for Drew, but everything else is done and it is nice to just like, “Oh, I could do anything.” I saw a movie at 10:00 in the morning. It was–

Liz: Oh, love attending a movie.

John: Yes, so good.

Liz: It’s the best.

John: Next up, let’s talk and follow up Three Page Challenges. Episode 702 was a Three Page Challenge, and we had two folks write in with their feedback on the Three Page Challenge.

Drew: Jason writes, “In the most recent Three Page Challenge, you questioned a writer’s choice to have a male character call his female friend a bitch during a scene. The consensus was that it was too aggressive. While I do agree with you, I did wonder something. Did we all assume that the male character was straight? I’m sure you’d agree that the levity of the exchange is different if it’s a cis gay man versus a cis straight man. What’s the most elegant way to deal with this default cis straight issue?”

John: I think Jason’s asking a fair question. As we were recording this, Craig pulled out the bitch and I did stick a little bit on, we don’t know enough about this character to know whether it’s actually okay for him to be saying it. The fact that he was saying it tipped me towards the idea that he could be gay or that it might be reasonable in his vocabulary to say this thing. In terms of overall, I just feel like–

Imagine a scene where we are introduced to a male character and we’re not told anything about him. If it’s not actually relevant in the scene, it feels really forced to try to put it in there because in that initial description for the character, something about the way he’s presenting, so what we’re seeing, what his behavior is like, that is useful. If it’s not relevant to the scene, it feels forced to try to jam it in there. Liz, what’s your instinct on identifying someone’s not just gender but sexuality when they’re first introduced?

Liz: I think to me, it goes to the authenticity of the read and the authenticity of the character and making sure that the character and your intentions are being interpreted in the way that you want them to be. If that character has any quality about them that would change the interpretation of their words, then I think it’s important to call that out. I would want to make sure the importance of that attribute, whatever it is not just for one scene and for intentionally creating an authentic character that lives in the world and is presenting in the world as a certain way.

Be that a cis straight white guy, then if it’s important to this character for that to be there and for him to be interpreted in the way, then that’s an important thing for me to read into it. If it’s not, then I don’t need to know that. I don’t think making choices about characters for one scene, for them to be a certain way is right.

John: Yes, I agree with you. I now want to go back and look through my scripts where I do have gay characters and see, “Did I call that out right away?” Obviously, in Go, that information is pushed back and hidden, so I’m sure I didn’t do it in that. In other things, I wonder if I did call it out from the start or whether the genre we’re in, we’re just going to assume that this character’s gay.

Liz: There’s a script that I wrote where it’s very important that there’s a character that’s not white because of the circumstances of the entirety of the script. I called it out in his character description because I didn’t want there to be any misinterpretation about the read. I think that is, whereas other characters in the script, it was not important to call out who they are. I don’t think you need to, because you define one character, define every character necessarily. You can, obviously, but I think it’s important. If it’s important to the character and to the read, to define them.

John: As we were talking here, I pulled up my script for The Nines. “Gavin Taylor, 30, walks into a meeting with his laptop bag over his shoulder. He’s a tidy, banana republic sensibility and an easy smile that belies his manic schedule.” I’m not calling him out as gay from the start, although it just feels like you’re going to see behavior pretty quickly that lets you know that he’s gay. We also had, specifically about episode 702, someone wrote in about loose part. There’s a location described as loose park, and we’re like, “What is that?” It bumped for us.

Drew: Tara wrote in that loose park is actually a famous park in Kansas City, Missouri.

John: Saying that, it bumped for us because we were like, “I don’t know what this is,” and yet it is appropriate to the thing. It’s one of those weird things where it bumps on the page. It’s not going to bump for anyone watching the movie. For somebody who knows Kansas City, it makes sense for that. To me, it’s being aware of what information your reader probably has and is going to assume. Liz, you’ve run into this, I’m sure.

Liz: Yes. When I wrote The Post, for instance, it takes place entirely in DC. There were major monuments and things like that where scenes had to take place. I just anticipated that we would Google if we didn’t know what they were. In other scripts I’ve written, it’s not important where it takes place. In a lot of scripts, I feel like I don’t necessarily have a defined base or area. It’s more general because you just don’t ever know. It reminds me of the previous question. I think unless it’s really important to the scene work or to the script, then I wouldn’t necessarily be that specific.

John: The other case for specificity is that if it was MacArthur Park, if it was Genesee Park, or whatever thing, I think because the word loose just feels like a normal English word, then we’re simply like, “Wait, it’s a loose park? What is a loose park? Is it like I’m not [unintelligible 00:26:28]?”

Liz: Was it capitalized?

John: It was all uppercase because it was the scene description. It was the scene header.

Liz: Oh, got it.

John: Because of that, we’re like, “Wait, what is a loose park as opposed to a tight park?”

Liz: Totally.

John: Totally.

Liz: Obviously, didn’t you know?

John: No. Show all revision sets. We also talked about this in Episode 702. Liz, as you’re going through revisions, do you tend to just switch to the next revision, color, and keep it in the same file? Are you making a new file? What is your preferred way?

Liz: The idea of show all revision sets just made me break into a sweat. That is terrifying. I keep it all in the same file. I live in blue. We’re talking about features that I’m just at this point revising myself. We’re not talking about production or anything. I just keep it in blue, and I clear, and I save a file that says which day it was and that has the revisions. I use Scriptation to do my notes for every draft for myself. I also have the PDF of my handwritten notes for each draft of the revision saved with those files.

That’s often more what I reference than if I go back and look at the revision set because the revision set is only a half thought because you can’t really see like, what did I strike out? What did I cut? I don’t really remember.

John: The stars and the margins, they are useful for showing what literally changed, but they don’t show intention at all. You don’t know why they have been changed. Sometimes it’s like you deleted an extra space, but was there a word there? Why was that there?

Liz: It’s funny because I have opposing arguments where it’s like when I’m turning in a starred draft, I actually don’t want them to have as much information of why I’ve made these decisions because I want them to know that I heard the note and I made an executive choice of how to do that. Hopefully, they agree. I think if we go into it becomes more by committee of making a decision of how we do this.

Whereas for myself, I want to be able to go back into my brain and be like, “Now why did I make this decision that this has to go here?” I recently rebroke a pilot into a feature, and going into my notes to myself in my earlier drafts was really helpful in being like, “I think I cut some scenes. What scenes did I cut?” Finding out how characters moved around and stuff was helpful.

John: We had a listener write in talking about how they use show all revision sets. That was actually helpful for them.

Liz: Good for them.

Drew: Happy in LA writes, “Because my wife and I tag team a draft, we often write on top of each other’s work. Revisions stack up quickly, so we found it clearest to change the color each time one of us takes a pass. Sure, the result can be a rainbow of colors, but it makes the progression easy to track. Once a sequence feels solid, we’ll flatten it with a clear revised for just those sections. Anywho, that’s just how we’ve fallen into writing together, and it really works for us.”

John: That absolutely makes sense. If that’s a thing that you as a team works for you, that’s awesome. That’s great. It’s always going to be challenging to figure out what is the right workflow for people, and you just have to experiment to see what it is that works.

Liz: I think it’s also really specific when you’re talking about working with a writing partner versus writing with yourself solo. Writing for yourself solo, who knows what’s going on inside my brain and nobody else does need to know. When you’re working with another partner, you actually do have to show proof of product and proof of thought in a lot of things. I’m working with somebody on something right now, and we do the same shared revision set, but we strike through things rather than just cut them so that we can show, this is my pitch for what we should lose, or this is my thought of where this could move to, and things like that, so that there’s a little bit more of a blueprint to how to get to those stars.

John: For the work you’re doing with somebody else here, are you just passing a file back and forth? How are you collaborating?

Liz: We take turns. On first drafts, we break out acts. It’s a series, so we’ll break out acts and separate them and then we’ll swap. In revisions, we’ll do it just different. She’ll take a pass and I’ll take a pass or vice versa.

John: I feel like there’s a missing, not missing solution, but the problem set that we’re trying to solve isn’t really addressed by the two cursors on the same screen at the same time problem, which is the classic shared script, nor is it really well resolved by passing a file back and forth because then you’re just duplicating files and stuff like that. There’s a middle ground. The late night shows, many of them are using Scripto, which is very much set up for this kind of thing and has a more robust checking in and putting stuff together, which is probably overkill for two little teams, but I think it is a good problem space to be tackling.

Liz: There’s definitely– I’ve written a lot with partners in my career, and there definitely feels like at least once in every single one, one of us is like, “Who has the draft? What draft are we on? Am I doing the pass first?” Just having an ability to streamline that conversation and not rely on my having dated it perfectly. Also, sometimes you’re doing multiple drafts in one day and keeping track of those. Yes, John, I think you should do this. That sounds great.

John: Absolutely. We’ll work on it.

Liz: Thanks, John.

John: Last bit of follow-up. In Episode 701, I talked about how Do, Re, Mi– in the US we have it as a movable system. In other parts of the world, it’s a fixed system. Craig then made an absolute slander saying there are no good French composers. In the moment, I said Debussy, but I said, “There must also be a lot more.” Our listeners wrote in to contribute, Charles Gounod, Berlioz, Poulenc, Duparc, Jacques Offenbach, and the list goes on. There are many good French composers and Craig was being stupid.

Liz: Of course, Craig’s not here to receive that. We will make sure he hears about it.

John: Let’s get on to our marquee topic, which actually does come from a listener question, but I think we can build it out to a bigger thing. Can you read Richard’s question for us, Drew?

Drew: “I just had my first movie made, which was so cool, but we did come into problems when the crew began building the set, notably, the house where 70% of this film takes place. I had to admit, with much embarrassment, that the layout in the script just didn’t make sense. We lost a bit of time restructuring the scripts so that the geography was coherent, i.e., whose bedrooms were where, how the kitchen links to the living room, where the stairs led, et cetera. How early do you guys think about the physicality of an interior space? Do you try and create floor plans and maps? How would you advise writers to avoid getting into these sorts of issues?”

John: This is a great question. I think actually a great topic. The project I just handed in, there are scenes that take place in a house where we need to– it’s not quite continuous shot through the house, but we need to be able to feel like, from the front door up into her bedroom, you could do that as a continuous shot. I had to really think through like, “What would this house be like and how would this fit?”

To be honest, there were rooms that I did not need. I didn’t need to know where the mother’s bedroom was. I couldn’t tell you where in the house that was. I feel like I’m always trying to be able to move the camera around and find where people are at in a space, interior and exterior as well. If there’s characters who are walking along a path in the forest and having two separate conversations, I need to be able to think about, “How far apart would they be? What would it actually feel like to be in this space with them?” Liz, as you’re working through projects, and especially if you’re collaborating with somebody on a project– another writer on a project, how often are you having conversations about the places themselves and the layouts of things?

Liz: I think it’s a really good question. I think my first instinct always is to be the most economical while being articulate as possible on the page, because I think– which I would just preface before going into anything else. I think if I’m the reader and I’m either thinking too much or too little about it, that’s a problem. I do think going to this question, I will say that– to answer, I think about it a lot in terms of how much I need the audience to know and where I am. There’s a specific project that I’m working on right now where geography is very important. The entire project takes place on a compound of two places that has two home bases. We’ve had many conversations.

We drew out what it looks like. There’s a map of it so that we can be on the same page when we’re describing this. I failed miserably in my first attempt at describing the proximity between these two places. Then we had conversations of how do we have a blanket answer for ourselves that’s a one sentence that we can quickly go to in multiple scripts that tells us the answer to the proximity of the two places. The other thing I would say, and this goes also to, I think is not specific to every writer. I definitely don’t think it’s a blanket statement, but I am generally not precious about most things if they’re not vital to the plot or the characters.

If it’s a preference that I have made, then I’ll probably say that. If we, within conversations with the– If it’s a series and I’m having these conversations with the production designer early on, and they pitch me something and I’m like, “That’s so much better than what it was in my head,” I would rather go into the script and make these adjustments or on the day make these adjustments with the director with blocking than to hold tight to whatever my vision was in my head.

I have a more specific thing of if drama is happening within a scene, let’s say within the house. I’ve written a few different projects where– I wrote one last year where there was a main house where things took place that needed to basically have a two-level central area because a death happened and somebody was pushed off of the top area. I spent a good amount of the first page of the introduction of that house describing the architecture of it and the geography of it, so I never had to go back to it again.

That took me a really long time, legitimately time-wise, to both articulate to myself and then find ways to make it so that it was engaging for an audience to read. Not just like, “And then here’s this room, and here’s this room,” but something that feels emotionally engaging and is telling me something about the characters, like why they live in this house, why it is important not just for the story but for the emotional arc of these characters, before I came here, of like, “This is the reason they bought this house, this is the reason that kid lives in that room, that’s the reason that this kitchen is here,” et cetera, et cetera.

John: There’s a project I wrote where it’s not quite an haunted house movie, but the house is incredibly important. You needed to know a sense of like, from the entrance, there are stairs that lead up, and this is where the dining room is because things will tie together in ways that are important. I needed to, when the characters are introduced to this house, have scenes that are leading them up and through places just so the audience would actually have a sense of how things were connected and what the geography was, and if a person needed to sneak out, how that would work, and how it all fit together.

There’s times where you need to be incredibly specific and explicit about where things are, and there’s times where you can just shorthand it because– especially if they’re in a place and they don’t need to go into or out of that place, it ends up mattering a lot less. You may need to describe what we can see through the windows and sort of how things fit together, but it’s not crucial.

Now, a thing which will still happen even if you’re in one space is the choreography within that space, we need to believe that you, at least the writer understands and the writer sees it and have some faith that like, “Oh, this actually would work and work well together.” The experience that you were describing in terms of like, “Oh, it doesn’t have to exactly match what I see in my head as long as it works.”

In Big Fish, there’s a moment where Will calls home after his father died. It doesn’t work for me watching it because in my head, I put the phone on the other side of the bed. Literally, I’ve seen the scene in my head one way for five years to that point. Then when I saw the cut, I’m like, “That’s wrong.” I was like, “It’s on the wrong side of the bed.” It’s like, “Of course, it doesn’t matter at all.” You can tell when some writers aren’t really putting themselves in the scene. It’s just characters talking, but they’re not physically present in the space with the characters.

Liz: When I was writing Lee, I had gone to Farley Farm, which is where she had lived and where one of the timelines takes place in the film. I remember driving there and being like, “Please let there be a patio outside.” I hadn’t written the script yet, but I had an idea for how I wanted it to end and how I wanted it to take place and to be staged and things like that. I was just like, “Let’s bank on some double doors.” That I was like, “We can get in.” Thankfully, there were. I also feel like early in my career, I blocked too much in my writing, which I think is really typical when you’re starting because you are–

John: talk us through what you mean by blocked. Theater stage blocking.

Liz: Yes, I would theater stage block the characters and where they would be throughout, which, in some ways, is important. For instance, in Lee, she’s drinking a lot and she’s making– Her act of making a cocktail is a breakup of some of the scene work that’s happening. Actions like that were really important for me to write in and to find other moments like that are happening like that. I’m not talking about that.

I’m talking about literally motivated movement that is going to be an actor and a director’s choice on the day, and is frankly just too distracting to read when you’re reading a script. You’re reading something, you’re not watching something. When you’re watching something, they move, and you’re reading something, you should imagine how they move. That should be part of the audience’s interpretation of it. The act of removing that from my vocabulary partially also removed a lot of my tether to having a geography and relying on that.

John: All right. Let’s get on to some listener questions. Drew, help us out.

Drew: Benjamin writes, have any of the entries to the three-page challenge been produced as full movies? I’d love to watch one, listen to the segment of the show where John and Craig talk about it, and then watch the movie again.

John: To my knowledge, none of them have been. Drew, have you been able to find any evidence of ones that have?

Drew: Not that I know of, but I’m really curious about this. I’d love if people could write in.

John: If you were in a three-page challenge and the thing since that point has, Shawn, please let us know. I can half remember, I feel like there’s one three-page challenge where it was a scene of two people in a car, and there was a pack of cigarettes, and I feel like they ended up going through and shooting it as a short film. I think something like that has happened, but to my knowledge, none of these have been features or pilots of shows. That may be appropriate because a lot of times, what people are sending in through the previous challenges are like, “This is just a test of my writing. This is an example.”

We’re not picking for the things like, “Oh my God, but that is 100% going to be a movie that’s going to happen.” We’re picking examples that show interesting things for our listeners to focus in on. It could be things that are being done really well, but more often like, “These are things that are bumping for us, and here’s how we would address those.” I’ll be curious to see if anything has been made, but again, this isn’t the Blacklist. You would expect that many of those Blacklist scripts will shoot at some point; three-page challenge is not the Blacklist. What do we have next?

Drew: Clara writes, “Revising is so hard and intimidating. I found it so challenging that in my early career, I basically tried to avoid having to revise it all. Instead, I’d attempt to get it right with my first drafts. So many of us feel stumped or totally overwhelmed by the sheer volume of threads that we have to track unweave, and reweave in order to properly fix a script. Have you ever felt this way about revising, intimidated, not sure where to start, lost without a map? How have you overcome this both from a craft and from a mindset perspective?”

John: I’m sympathetic, but also I think revising is easier than the first draft sometimes because you have something to work off of. It’s like you’ve made some choices and you have to unmake some choices, but you also know who the characters are, you know what the places are. You, hopefully, have a sense of what’s not working and what you want to fix. My first bit of advice to Clara would really just be to, on a separate document, make a list of like, “These are the things I want to do. These are the things I want to change. These are my goals with this next set of revisions.”

Then once you have that list, then you can really look at the draft. It’s like, “Okay, what needs to change in order to make these things happen?” I’ve said this on the podcast a bunch, but my instinct is if you’re making some serious changes, it may make more sense to write the stuff that is new that’s going to change and then only bring into a new document the stuff that you can take from the original script rather than just try to open the old script and futz around with it because you probably won’t do as much as you should be doing. You should be doing a little bit more of what Liz Hannah does, it’s just retype the whole damn thing.

Liz: I have felt this way in a page 1 situation where, first of all, I’d send out a lot of admiration for somebody who can feel like they can get it on the first draft, because just even the pressure of that would make me never finish anything. The only way that I can ever finish a first draft is knowing that I’m going to be able to go back and make it better. The stress of that, if that’s something that drives you, great, but also maybe let’s find new tools so you don’t have that stress because that feels really difficult.

My thing is, I definitely have been in those situations where I’ve been so happy to have a first draft done only to realize that actually the story should be from a different character’s perspective, or that the tone isn’t right, or that it just didn’t work, and I have to go back to the beginning. It’s really overwhelming when that happens. I do something very similar to what John is suggesting, which is I make a list of the things that do work. I make a list of the things that I really like. It’s like positive talking, it’s like self-talk of like, “What do I like about myself?”

I recommend the episode where you guys were like, “Executives, this is how you should give notes.” That, I think, is how you should also give yourself notes, is to be kind to yourself first. Then rip it apart and make some very significant choices. On those page 1s that feel really overwhelming, I just do the big stuff. If it’s like I’m changing a point of view character or I’m adding in a massive storyline, which is something I just did to a script, then that’s the only thing I focus on on that draft. I do not try and do everything at once.

Even if I know there’s eight more things to come and eight more drafts, to try and do them all at once is just impossible for me. I just tackle one at a time and then that’s this character draft, and then I do the next one and the next one. Sometimes when you do those big things, you lose the other notes.

Sometimes the tone will change if you make it from a different character’s point of view, or the plot feels more propulsive, or feels more engaging, or anything. I would just say take it one draft at a time. Take it one step at a time. Take it one note at a time.

John: That makes a lot of sense. There’s a project which we’re maybe dusting off that’s like 10 years old, and there’s something I wrote. It was great to go back through the script and let you read it. It’s like, “Oh, I actually still really like this. This is mostly working really, really well,” but what’s challenging to think about it is that the scenes are very tight and the scenes fit together in a very tight way. It’s intimidating to try to make many changes to it because I do know the domino effect of making one change is going to ripple through a lot.

It’s multiple characters’ point of views and they are like, “Each transition is really important to get from one place to the next.” I just know it’s going to be an intimidating amount of work. Doing what we’re talking about here, which is really making a list of like, “These are the things I’m trying to do. These are the big changes I’m trying to make,” and picking one and letting that be this next bit of work and the next draft and then the next thing and the next thing. You’re right that sometimes these things, which were lower on the list, just get scratched off because those scenes aren’t there anymore.
The problems that you were trying to solve, they’re just not there anymore because everything has been shifted around in the script.

Liz: I think the other thing is that, sometimes you have a script and you’re like, “It just doesn’t work and I don’t know why.” I know the plot doesn’t work, or I like it, but I don’t love it. I don’t know if I’ve talked about this on this podcast before, but on Plainville, we did something called Crazy Idea Hour on every Friday. At the end of the day, we would do about an hour, and anybody could pitch on anything. You could pitch on a character, you could pitch on a story, you could pitch him needle drop, you could really pitch anything.

It was a way for us to step out of the very typical, “Oh, we’re breaking this episode and we only have eight or we only have however many and we have to tell the story, and just remind you to be creative and to use your imagination and to find fun ways, at least for me, to tackle problems that you don’t sometimes think of. Sometimes you’re looking at something from North and you need to be looking at it from East. On this other script recently, I had this like, “I really like it, but it’s not working, and I don’t know why.”

I just did one of those, I spent two days and just watched a bunch of movies and I listened to a bunch of music and then I was driving in my car, and I had a totally batshit crazy idea. I was like, “What if I did this?” The initial thought I had was, “This will be a lot of work and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do that because it’s so much work,” but then I put the script back on cards, I looked at it and I was like, “I think I can do this this way pretty economically.” It ended up really helping me-

John: That’s great.

Liz: -with the script. I think sometimes we can have blinders on of this is the way to fix it. I just suggest rooting yourself in a different place to think about it.

John: Remind me, you called it your Friday session or your Friday one-hour session?

Liz: Crazy Idea Hour.

John: Crazy Idea Hour. It’s very smart. I’ve not heard other people talking about it, but listening to showrunners talk about putting their seasons together, they tend to start with a week of blue sky and stuff like that. It sounds like it’s a way to bring the blue sky back in on a regular basis so that it’s not so focused on like, “Oh, crap. How do we move between these two scenes?” It’s more like, “What if we threw a grenade in there?”

Liz: Right. Blue sky, I think, at least for me, is both the most fun and the most stressful because I’m like, “Well, but eventually I’m going to have to actually make this television show.” Like, “It’s so fun to talk about all these things, but like, “No, I don’t know how a Glee musical sequence will make its way into the television show.” When you have a refresh of Crazy Idea Hour, it’s also fun because I think at least when you’re doing it yourself for your own feature, you can have–
I have post-it notes on my computer of things that I want to remember about a script or a feeling I have, or I haven’t been able to put this in the movie, but I want to think about a way to do it and that’s my touchstone for a Crazy Idea Hour for myself. In a writer’s room, I think also is very freeing to your staff to be able to be like, “I know you love this idea and you haven’t been able to figure out how to put it in the television show, now here’s an opportunity for us to workshop it with no rules or consequences for 15 minutes a week and see if we can get there.”

In Plainville, one of our writers was pitching this fantastic writer named Ashley Michel Hoban, who has gone on to run her own show. She pitched a scene in an indiscriminate episode, but a scene where we were trying to figure out how to have the tension of their text messages between Michelle and Coco really reach its echelon. She pitched something very similar to the Tango in Moulin Rouge, and so that it was like a musical sequence that– I will say that musical sequences were a part of the vocabulary of the show, so it wasn’t totally batshit crazy that she pitched us.

She pitched it the first week, and it didn’t work. There’s typically a rule in a writer’s room that if you pitch something once, you don’t pitch it again, and it’s shut down. I would say that’s correct. I always have that, I would say, restriction in a room, but in Crazy Idea Hour, if you pitch it differently and you’ve developed it, then it can come back, and so she brought it back every week for 20 weeks, and it never made its way into the show. Then the room had wrapped. I was writing Episode 7, and I was breaking it, and I was moving at the time and I was listening to this playlist that we had created for the show.

I was driving back and forth, and this one song came on, and it just laid on top of her idea. I called her and I was like, “I think I know how to do it. In this episode, can you just write me a paragraph of this song and figure out how we can make it?” She did, and we made it work, and it’s in the show.

John: That’s awesome. All right. Let’s do one last question here from Becca.

Drew: “I signed with my manager in 2021. He’s friends with agents at a reputable agency, and they signed me as well for both TV and film. He emailed me today and told me we were parting ways because the industry is tough right now, and they want to focus on clients whose scripts are ready to sell, which is understandable. No hard feelings there. Should I not contact any of the people that they connected me to that I had general meetings with? Agents as well? Because I’m assuming I’ve also been let go by them. Am I able to send a script out that they already sent out, or do I shelve it? Not sure of the etiquette in these situations.”

John: Oh, Becca. All right. First off, I want to clarify. It sounds like– so your manager says, “We are dropping you. We’re no longer repping you,” but you’ve not had any contact with the agents about what’s happened here, too. Becca, it seems like you feel like “you are a member of Hollywood card” has been pulled, and that you’re no longer able to do things, so that it’s simply not the case. I’m sorry that your manager dropped you. It does happen. I’ve heard that happening a lot more recently as things have tightened down a bit, but the agents are free to do whatever they want to do, and I wouldn’t assume that they have disappeared on you.

My advice, Becca, is you are going to email the agents, who are your agents, and talk to them about like, “These are the things I’m working on. This is what I want to be doing next.” I don’t know if they even necessarily need to acknowledge that you’re no longer working with that manager, but see where that is, and just don’t make an assumption at this moment that they’ve dropped you. In terms of the other people you’ve met, good lord, you’ve met those people, the other executives, all the people you’ve had general meetings with.

That’s why you try to get their contact information in those moments so that you can also continue to reach out with them and talk with them and continue to develop stuff. You are not required to have a manager in this town. You’re not required to have an agent in this town. Most of the work you’re going to get for yourself, it’s really the work you’re going to get for yourself, and so I think, yes, you do need to look for a new manager, but you also need to continue writing and continue trying to find places where they want to hire you to do stuff.

Liz: 100%, no notes.

John: All right. Great. That is resolved. Let’s go onto our One Cool Things. Liz Hannah, what is your One Cool Thing other than the wasp I see flying around you?

Liz: There’s a wasp in my office. It’s cool. He’s not cool.

John: No.

Liz: He and I are going to have a conversation in a little bit that will end with, I’m sorry to say, a death.

John: Not yours. Liz, it’s not going to be you. Not today.

Liz: Fingers crossed. My one cool thing is a candle company, which is called Dehv Candle Company, D-E-H-V. I love these candles. They’re hand-poured, they’re non-GMO, they’re lead-free. It is a female-owned LA business. They are in these concrete jars that once the candles run out, they comes with a botanical biodegradable thing where you can grow flowers, you can put seeds in it, you can grow anything in it. I love them. There’s one scent in particular that I just lit the other day because it’s September and I would like it to be fall, which is called Northeast. It’s a very fall, not overbearing scent. Check out Dehv Candle Company, local business. We love it.

John: Excellent. Mine is also a physical thing, so I make my scrambled eggs every morning, and I’ve been using this really good nonstick thing. It works well on our induction cooktop and I’ve loved it, but non-stick services of all kinds are not great for the world, the chemicals that are used to make it. I know this largely because Drew’s wife, Heather, is a chemist who studies these kinds of things. It’d be great if we’d had fewer of these forever chemicals in our lives. I’ve been trying out a new fry pan from OXO. It’s a carbon steel pan.

Carbon steel is light cast iron, but doesn’t weigh 10,000 pounds. Basically has its own natural coating on it [unintelligible 00:55:18] oil that sticks to it. It’s non-stick as long as you treat it properly and treat it right. So far, knock wood, it’s worked really well. It works really fast on induction cooking. I’ve actually had to turn down the heat on that because it just transfers the heat so well, and so eggs go a little too quick if you don’t turn down the heat a bit, but so far it’s been really good. You just wipe it out. You never wash it. I’m enjoying using my OXO carbon steel pan. They’re not expensive, so if you’re looking for a fry pan, I would urge you to check it out.

Liz: Love this. I need a new one.

John: All right. That is our show for this week. Script is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place we can send questions like the ones Liz and I answered today. You’ll find transcripts @johnaugust.com, along with a signup for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find the clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow while you’re there.

You can also follow us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. We have t-shirts and hoodies, and drinkwear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all of our premium subscribers and the folks who’ve sent through their receipts for pre-ordering the Scriptnotes book. If you’ve ordered the Scriptnotes book, make sure to send that receipt to Drew, ask@johnaugust.com, because we’re about to send out something really cool that we are going to be doing as we’re signing books, so you get to see what we’re doing there.

You can sign to become our premium member @scriptnotes.net. You get all the backup episodes and bonus segments, all the Liz Hannah episodes, the other four or five. You’ve been on a fair amount?

Liz: I’ve been on a few times.

John: More than once or twice?

Liz: I need that merch, need that belt.

John: We’re about to record a new one on talking to your kids about what you do for a living. Liz Hannah, it’s always a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming back on Scriptnotes.

Liz: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. You and I are both film and TV writers. It’s a little bit hard to explain to a kid what we do. Your kid is being potty-trained, so three, four?

Liz: He’s three and a half.

John: All right. Does he have a sense that you go someplace, you do a thing, but does he have a sense of what Mama does for work?

Liz: No, not at all. He knows that I go to an office and that he’s been to my office, but he does not know what I do. Maybe he knows I think that we write. I don’t think he would know enough to say we’re writers, but my husband, who is also a writer, works from home and has a home office, and so he knows that the computer is a thing that we work on.

John: My daughter growing up, we filmed a movie at the house, but she was too young to know that was there. She got to see a lot of big fish for Broadway. She got to see all the rehearsals for that. She really had a very good sense of like, “Papa works on this show,” and she got to see how it all fits together, and that was great. It’s like, bringing a kid to set gives a sense of like, “Oh, this is a whole thing to do.” Then she could see the show and see how it all developed. In terms of me putting words together and being paid to do that, it’s a hard thing to explain.

For a while, I had an office outside of the house, and then I moved to this room over the garage. I’ve talked about it on the show before, how for several years, it was like, “Papa’s going off to work.” I would leave. She didn’t know that it was actually just upstairs in the office, and so–

Liz: Son of a bitch. There he is. Get out of here. Hang on. This is the most exciting Scriptnotes [inaudible 00:59:01].

John: 100%. An element of danger that’s lacking in most Scriptnotes episodes.

Liz: I see you. Land. Break the window. Got him. Oh my gosh.

John: Nice. A murder happened live on podcast.

[laughter]

Liz: Woo. All right. I feel alive. This is, I will say, the second wasp that has appeared in my office, which is a problem.

John: That is a problem.

Drew: I was about to say I feel like–

Liz: We’re going to have to deal with this.

John: If it’s three, then it’s officially a trend.

Liz: This is an issue.

John: All right. Wasps come from someplace, so if you track down the source, you could maybe get rid of the wasps.

Liz: Or just maybe they should spread to their brethren that this is not free to come to live.

John: A deadly place. Stay away from that office. My daughter had no sense that I was actually working upstairs over the garage, but she would come in to see Matt, my assistant at the time, who worked downstairs. I talked to Matt not knowing I was upstairs. Once she finally figured out that I wasn’t going someplace, because she was asking for a while, like, “Why is Papa’s car still here?” It’s like, “Oh, he must have walked to work, which is not a lie. I did walk to work. Once she discovered I worked upstairs, I just sort of laid down the law, like, “You can never come out here while I’m working. I’ll be really upset if you come out here while I’m working. That lasted for a couple years. I actually got some years of quiet.

Liz: Productivity out of it.

John: Then at some point, kids stop caring about what you do and don’t want to be in your presence. Then she was not interrupting me for very much at all.

Liz: When I work from home, I often will just work in bed because I’ll just be writing. That really doesn’t help him think that I have a job because it also doesn’t help when part of my job is to watch things because then he’s just– it’s just really confusing. I had to explain to my niece recently what I did. Well, I didn’t have to, but she was at the house and she was doing some homework. Her homework was writing, and she was not pleased that this was a thing that she was doing. I was like, “Me and Uncle Brian, our job is basically homework.”

She just looked at me, and her mother was like, “Yes, I was explaining to you, they are writers, this is what they do.” I just truly felt like she was like, “Why would you do this to yourself? Did you lose a bet? This is a terrible idea.” I will say that, as an adult who I’m very thankful for my career, but I did really come to a realization about five years ago that I was like, “I decided to do homework forever.” That’s what I chose to do as a career.

John: Choices. When I was writing the Arlo Finch books, at least there was a physical thing I could show a person like, “Okay, I wrote all the words that are in this book,” and that was helpful to see. When we were writing a movie, it’s like, “We’re writing the plan for the thing, but they’re not going to want to read this script for a thing, and that’s not interesting to them.”

Liz: I think going into production is fun for them to have a sense of process of it. I wasn’t shooting something, but my friends were shooting something legitimately around the corner from my house for the last six months. I took him and he went on set. He couldn’t process that he was seeing one of his aunts basically on screen and that she was working, but he was also engrossed by it because he loves watching things. He had a great time.

John: He just got into trucks and vehicles because there’s trucks and vehicles that are great.

Liz: Are you kidding? What are you talking about? Literally the dream. If I drove a truck for a living, I would be a hero. That would be it.

John: Liz, you’ve got to do a Fast and the Furious movie so your kids can see it.

Liz: I know. Did you ever have– because this is something I think about a lot, did you ever have a moment where you were like, “I want to make something that my child can watch? Did you have that period?”

John: I’ve done that. Of course, I did.

John: Yes, you have done that. My experience was, and again, I probably have told this on the air before, we were shooting Frankenweenie. We were in London, me and my husband and my daughter were in London, and we’re touring the sets for the stop-motion Frankenweenie. They’re so impressive, so amazing. To scale, that’s just really cool. Then at some point, she realized that Sparky the dog dies. She sat down on the floor and would not move until I explained that Sparky comes back through magic and everything is okay. Everything is fine. To this day, she’s not seeing Frankenweenie because she’s just been so traumatized by that memory of like-

Liz: You’re like, “I made this movie for you.” [laughs] I think it’ll take him a while to see the post. That’s going to be up his alley for a while. Long Shot might actually come closer for him to watch more recently. I do often think about making something for him to watch, but then there’s a finite time of him thinking I’m cool, so I really have to make it now.

John: By the time Aladdin came out, my daughter had no interest in Aladdin at all. She’s actually never seen Aladdin.

Liz: I’m very excited to show my son Aladdin. We’re deep in Cars right now, so that’s a big one.

John: Cars was not a big movie in our household, and I’m grateful for that. Cars is just that thing that never fit my brain well.

Liz: It’s funny because then I have friends who have girls and they’re watching all the princess things. For me, it’s a hard no. I would just not function in that world. The Cars world, I’m thrived. Truly, in this moment. Although I will say that Batwheels was recently introduced to my house, and that really broke me. There’s an overstimulation and sound thing that I can’t handle. We really do generally live in a Pixar world in our house, which I think is just great for everybody.

John: Sure. Absolutely.

Liz: It’s like Pixar and Disney animation, you really can’t go wrong. It’s really meant for everyone, and it’s very accessible. For me, who basically gets overstimulated by two people talking at once, having too many flashing lights was really enough.

John: The thing you get to look forward on your behalf for is, at a certain point, you’re like, okay, now we’ll start Star Wars. Every weekend, watch one of the Star Wars and pick the right order for it, which is great. You’ll be just astonished how much little kids love the prequels. They love them.

Liz: Oh, yes.

John: They love them.

Liz: Less excited for. I will say that Back to the Future made its way into my house. My son went through at least six weeks where he dressed like Marty McFly every single day.

John: There’s a DeLorean in it.

Liz: It was a dream. When we went to visit my friends on set, they were shooting on the Universal lot, and he dressed like Marty and brought a tiny DeLorean. Then we went and saw the clock tower.

John: Incredible.

Liz: It was life-changing for every adult that was present and him, though he won’t remember it. We are going to see– Back to the Future is coming back to theaters for Halloween, so we are going to see it.

John: A thing you also get to do is he will have some TV show that he loves, and you will pull a connection and get to visit a set of that TV show, and that will blow his mind. My daughter loved– I don’t even remember the name of the show, some Nickelodeon superhero show. I was like, “I bet I know somebody who works on the show.” We went to visit the thing, and you saw how incredibly tiny the sets were and how minimal everything was. She was still like, her mind blown. She said, like, “Papa, can we fly to Hollywood?” Like, “Honey, we live in Hollywood.”

Liz: Girl, we live there.

John: This is our town.

Liz: That’s so funny.

John: She always saw Hollywood as that thing off there. It’s something like American Idol. You’re going to Hollywood. It’s like, “No, no, we live there. This is what it is.”

Liz: That’s so funny. We were with Dan Fogelman recently, which it’s like when I think you have a teenager or something like that, and you’re like, “Here’s the showrunner.” They’re like, “I don’t give a shit who the showrunner is. What does that mean?” Having to really restrain myself from telling my three-year-old who’s obsessed with cars like, “This is the guy who created it all.” He’s just like, “Where’s lightning?” I was like, “Yes, it doesn’t compute necessarily the same thing.”

John: I guess what I’m looking forward to is there’s going to be a tipping point where like, “Oh, my parents do something that’s cool, that’s actually great.”

Liz: Yes. I’m very excited for that.

John: Then they’ll resent you for it, and then they’ll go to college.

Liz: It’s like a flash in a pan a few years where I’m cool. I’m documenting all of the things so that he does know that I was cool at one point and did take him to cool things when he hates me. Then I can show them to a therapist and be like, “I actually did do things.”

John: I have evidence. I have receipts. I did the good things.

Liz: FYI, he did have fun doing these things.

John: All right. We had a very fun time chatting with you. Liz Hannah, thank you again for coming back on Scriptnotes.

Liz: Thank you.

John: All right.

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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’s Craig Mazin.

JOHN: This is Episode 703 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is mostly just trying to make Drew laugh.
[laughter]

DREW: So far, so good.

JOHN: Today on the show, how do you write a period film that feels accurate but also compelling? Most importantly, not a history lesson. We’ve got at least 10 tips for timely tales, plus some related listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, we are officially in the season of the witch. Let’s do our ranking of iconic witches. I have 13 witches-

DREW: Oh, my God.

JOHN: -from literature and film, and we will put them in the proper order-

CRAIG: We’ll rank them.

JOHN: -from God-tier to D-level.

CRAIG: You do have the witch from Into the Woods in there, I see.

JOHN: We could add the witch from Into the Woods.

CRAIG: Now, we have 14 witches.

JOHN: Yes, absolutely. It’s the Last Midnight.

CRAIG: [singing] It’s the last midnight
It’s the–

JOHN: So good. Although it’s a news to get through before we get started on things. Highland Pro, the app that my company makes, we turn on family sharing, which we didn’t have on before. Now, if you have it, anyone in your family–

CRAIG: Why were you guys anti-family?

JOHN: We were not anti-family at all. Basically, they hide it in the interface for you to do it. It’s like, “Oh, can we turn on the switch?” It’s irreversible once you turn it on, but we did it, and it worked.

CRAIG: I guess that makes sense, right? Once you start sharing with somebody, you can’t take it away. That’s a nice thing. I love family sharing.

JOHN: It’s not only witch season, but it’s also back-to-school season. I want to talk through, almost all the screenwriting apps have a version of student licenses or discounted student licenses. For Highland Pro, that’s free. If you’re a student at a university program, you get Highland Pro for free. You just need to send in an email from your email address at your university, so .edu if you’re in the US, but other countries, it’s going to be other things. Photo or student ID. Fade In has a similar thing. Student pricing is $60. Final Draft has student pricing at $90. WriterDuet has 50% off. $90 student pricing.

CRAIG: Oh, Final Draft. Jesus, Final Draft. WTF is wrong with them? By the way, it’s not worth $90. That software is worth $3. They’re charging students a discounted rate of $90, so what are they charging poor everyone else that’s getting fleeced?

JOHN: I think the most recent price I saw on there was $199.

CRAIG: Oh my God.

JOHN: I think it’s more than that. I think it might be.

CRAIG: No. Why are people still paying for this?

JOHN: Buy now. Let’s see what it says.

CRAIG: Do not buy now. Buy never.

JOHN: Final draft 13 personal license is $174.99. That’s 30% off the regular list price, which is $249.99.

CRAIG: $249?

JOHN: That’s a lot of money.

CRAIG: There are people who have paid $250 for Final Draft.

JOHN: All this is a roundabout way to say if you are a student in a university program, you should use one of these discounted systems for getting it. Highland is free, so you might as well try that.

CRAIG: Exactly. Highland’s free. The maximum you should pay is $60 for Fade In. If you’re a student, you don’t need Fade In either. Honestly, Highland, done, or WriterDuet is also like–

JOHN: 50% off.

CRAIG: Yes. What does that cost?

JOHN: Based on what level you’re getting at, there’s a free version of it.

CRAIG: There’s a free version.

JOHN: My daughter was in a screenwriting program last year. She was screenwriting class last year. They were doing it in Google Docs, and it’s just so painful. Just don’t do it in Google Docs.

CRAIG: Why? What? [chuckles]

JOHN: It’s so painful. Yes.

CRAIG: What? I can’t with higher education.

JOHN: Yes. Any of these, Highland, it’s just like, “Oh, it’s a really good program.” Yes, your father spent 10 years making this program. I’m glad that you enjoy it.

CRAIG: Right. Instead, use Google Docs. Was it the school asking them to do Google Docs, or was it the kids who prefer using Google Docs?

JOHN: Basically, I think the professor didn’t require them to use anything other than this. He said it was fine to use Google Docs.

CRAIG: No, it’s not.

JOHN: No, it’s not, because you and I both had to write– Have you ever written in Word? Your early scripts, did you write this in Word? Or you always were in Final Draft or Screenwriter?

CRAIG: My very, very first couple of scripts were in probably WordPerfect.

JOHN: Yes. It is possible to write in a normal Word processor. It’s just ugly.

CRAIG: It just sucks and laborious. [crosstalk] Yes.

JOHN: [unintelligible 00:04:03] was written in Word, and that was the last one I wrote in.

CRAIG: Honestly, we got a lot of problems in this country, not going to lie. Maybe number one problem is screenwriting professors telling students to work in Google Docs. That may be the worst thing America’s dealing with right now.

JOHN: Indeed. Absolutely. Rise of Fascism and–

CRAIG: Rise of Fascism is like fourth. Because I got other issues, like Final Draft pricing. [chuckles]

JOHN: Last bit of news. Once again, I am looking for somebody. A recurring segment on this podcast has ended up being that I need somebody to do a thing, so I asked our listenership, and someone in our listenership is like, “Oh, I’m exactly the person you need to do this thing.” Here’s what I’m looking for right now. We’re doing a new project, and we need a designer for it. We’ll have a link in the show notes with exactly what the whole description is and what the project is. Essentially, we’re looking for a UI/UX designer with front-end experience. Do you know what front-end experience means?

CRAIG: I assume that means the part that people engage with. That part.

JOHN: If it were a web app, then it’s the parts you click on and do that stuff rather than the background server stuff. This is a web thing. Mostly, we’re going to be looking at the other stuff that you’ve built. You need to have a portfolio that shows cool stuff that you’ve built, and most crucially, just taste. Taste is so fundamental here because you can learn anything else, but you can’t learn taste.

CRAIG: That’s called talent.

JOHN: Yes.

CRAIG: I have taste. I just don’t know how to code or design. I feel like I’m well on my way to getting this job. I just got to quickly learn what UX means, and I’m there.

JOHN: 100%. If you are at or above Craig’s level, you
should click through the link and see the kinds of things we’re looking for.

CRAIG: If you see the word UX and you pronounce it Ux, you’re disqualified. This is not your job.

JOHN: No, it’s not. We are looking for an individual, not looking for a company. This is for one project, and so we’ll probably be on an hourly or daily, or weekly rate, but we’d love to find somebody to bring into the team, work full-time. We are based here in Los Angeles. That’s great if we find a person in Los Angeles, but we can also work with someone remote. If you are that person who is the designer who has done this kind of thing, take a look through the notes. You’ll find the show notes, and maybe this is the job–

CRAIG: You know what? I’m going to take myself out of contention. It’s unfair.

JOHN: You’re busy, Craig. Realistically, how are we going to squeeze this on top of everything else?

CRAIG: I play a little bit less Skyrim on my Steam Deck, and I blew through Oblivion. Oblivion, by the way, I’ve forgotten. Kind of a short game, weirdly.

JOHN: Wait, I’m confusing them. Skyrim–

CRAIG: Elder Scrolls IV is Oblivion. Elder Scrolls V is Skyrim.

JOHN: Oh, that’s right, because you went back and played an earlier version. Is it up rest? Does it look decent?

CRAIG: Oblivion, they did a whole remaster because Oblivion came out in 2003, ’02, or something like that. It was like a company came and made it look decent, and it was fun to play again. Skyrim looks really good still.

JOHN: Skyrim is so long. I never finished Skyrim.

CRAIG: Oh, I did, and I’m going to finish it again.

JOHN: I restarted it a couple of times, yes.

CRAIG: I’m going to finish it.

JOHN: I can’t believe you were able to play it on a Steam Deck. It just looks amazing on a Steam Deck. It seems like it’s maybe too small. I’ll put it on my Steam Deck because I’ve not been playing anything other than Vertigo on my Steam Deck

CRAIG: It’s eight inches away from your eyes. It looks great. Anyway, Oblivion, like–

JOHN: Do you put on your readers when you play it?

CRAIG: No.

JOHN: Okay.

CRAIG: That’s actually an interesting thing. I realize I don’t. I guess because I can hold it–

JOHN: Yes, just at the right distance.

CRAIG: Just at the right distance.

JOHN: Is your posture up, or are you looking down?

CRAIG: No, it’s up. The only thing is sometimes my elbows get squeezy because my elbows are bent. I get that my ring finger and pinky finger start to go to sleep. That’s an indication that maybe I should put the Steam Deck down. You know what? I don’t, because winners don’t quit.

JOHN: At whatever point we actually get VR glasses that are really, really good, my God, that’s going to be an incredible game.

CRAIG: They’re getting there.

JOHN: They’re fatiguing to wear after a certain point.

CRAIG: The Quest is a heavy object. I really love that one game that I played on it, the one from the room people from– It was fantastic. I just wait for that one awesome game and then–

JOHN: With some follow-up. Two episodes ago, we talked about connections and the importance of connections. Jay wrote in with some connected and related business. I’m friendly with one of the top screenwriters in town, super A-list, multiple franchises, but our connection is through our daughters, who’ve become best friends at school.

CRAIG: Wait, so let’s see. This is obviously talking about me.

JOHN: Yes.

CRAIG: Let’s see. Who’s my–? Okay, go on.

JOHN: We know each other from play dates and school functions, where we have a fun, casual relationship. Our conversations are about the general state of the industry or upcoming school events. I’ve always felt like I’m not in his league, so I’ve religiously avoided pitching myself or bothering him to read my stuff. Last week, his production company independently read one of my samples. Through my reps, not through him, I now have a general with one of his execs. He and I haven’t spoken about it at all. Should I, A, text him beforehand like, “Hey, funny thing, I’m meeting with your people this week.”

B, mention our connection in the meeting. “Oh, I’m actually friends with your boss. Our daughters go to the same school.”

Or C, say nothing and let it play out, risking embarrassing confrontation later of, “Hey, why didn’t you tell me you were coming in for a meeting?” How do you navigate connection that’s personal first, professional by accident?

CRAIG: I love the amount of neurosis that’s pouring off of this. It’s very familiar to me.

JOHN: It’s a very Los Angeles thing, too. I completely picture they were at the same exhausting kids’ birthday parties every weekend.

CRAIG: Sure, over and over and over. I love this. I would go with A.

JOHN: I would go with A, also.

CRAIG: Hard recommend on A.

JOHN: Let’s remind everybody. That is where you text him ahead of time. Say, “Oh, hey, I’m meeting with your people.” Otherwise, it’s just weird if they told you afterwards. Then if you’re in a meeting, you say, “Oh, I’m actually friends with–” then that puts everybody in a weird spot.

CRAIG: Yes. That’s an easy one. If it were me, meaning if I were this fancy guy and I got a text that said, “Hey, it’s blah, blah, I see you all the time, funny thing, I’m having a general meeting, LOL.” I would be like, “Oh, great.” Then I would probably say to that person, “Hey, I want to be in that meeting,” or “Can I read what he wrote,” or be nice to him, or nothing. What I would never do is not say anything, and then just be like, “The hell?”

JOHN: There’s a small number of people this top screenwriter could be, because I’m trying to think of a screenwriter rather than a TV writer. This person has their own development staff and own people.

CRAIG: There’s a lot of them.

JOHN: There’s a few, but it’s 10 or fewer.

CRAIG: A-list screenwriter, franchises, and so forth.

JOHN: We can think of a couple. I would say, Jay, it’s fine, it’s good. You’re overthinking and overstressing it.

CRAIG: Well, yes, but also, that is precisely the kind of overthinking and overstressing that is fairly normal for us. I just don’t want Jay to feel like there’s something wrong with him. There is something wrong with him, but it’s the same thing that’s wrong with most of us.

JOHN: The extra context we got on this is like, this isn’t Jay’s first job. He gets hired for things.

CRAIG: This is an easy one, A. What I do appreciate is that Jay is being considerate of this other person. Because, look, it’s a tough business. Everyone’s scrambling. There have been times where I’ve been aware that I’m talking to somebody who’s maybe in scramble mode, and I can feel that they want to maybe push on it a little bit. I get it completely. It is at least a good thing to be aware that it’s a little awkward and uncomfortable. The fact that this screenwriter has a company that could hire people for things, yes, totally reasonable.

JOHN: Yes. Another bit of connections follow-up. Jamie in Australia writes, “John and Craig mentioned the awkward situations that happen when a distant acquaintance approaches you, especially when you’re with someone who’s not in the business, or you feel the pressure to say, ‘Melissa, this is blah-de-blah,’ but you’re blanking on them.”

CRAIG: [chuckles] My nightmare.

JOHN: In those cases, proactively introduce the person you’re with. “This is my wife, Melissa.” In about 30% of the cases, your acquaintance will say, “Hi, Melissa,” and leave it at that, and you’re back to square one. For most people, this gives them a face-saving opportunity to say, “Hi, Melissa, I’m Kim. I was Craig’s junior assistant producer on his first feature.”

CRAIG: Okay, but here’s the thing. I’m aware of that.

JOHN: I do it. I did it this weekend.

CRAIG: Yes, and I do that, too. The problem is, no one on the other end is going to be like, “Oh, let me make everything easy for you. I’m Kim.” They don’t do that. They’re like, “Oh, hey,” and they also know what you’re doing. They all know it. There’s a moment where it’s like, okay, I’m going to get an A if I say, “Melissa, this is John. He’s blah-de-blah.” I’m going to get an D if I’m like, “This is my wife, Melissa.” Then she’s like, “Oh, hi,” and that person’s like, “Oh, hi,” I guess he doesn’t know my name.

JOHN: A small variation, which is worth trying, which I think I did this weekend as well, it’s like, “Oh, hey, do you know Mike, my husband? Have you met my husband, Mike?” Then it gives Mike an opening for saying, “Okay, I’m Mike.” Then the other person says–

CRAIG: Okay, let me give you a nightmare scenario. “Okay, have you met my husband, Mike?” “Yes. We all went out to dinner three months ago. We sat next to each other and talked at length.”

JOHN: Absolutely true. Absolutely true.

CRAIG: I feel like there are trade-offs. As you get older, your back hurts, your eyes start to– you get closer to death, sweet, beautiful death. You also get to just be excused a little bit for some of this stuff. Like, “Hey, you know what? I’m older. What are you going to do? I’m losing it.” I’m not. It’s just that I know a lot of people. I know too many people. As time goes by, you keep meeting people. It’s the worst. What are you going to do? I think people are like, “Oh, the old guy, he just can’t remember anyone’s names.”

JOHN: I’m sure I’ve said this on podcasts multiple times, but if I’m going to something like a premiere, not of my movie, but other people’s movies, I will, on a drive over, remind myself in the car, who are the people I’m likely to bump into just so they’re a little bit closer to my name.

CRAIG: You can panic about not knowing their names earlier?

JOHN: Or I can Google them.

CRAIG: Oh, God.

JOHN: I Google them in the car.

CRAIG: Lady whose name I don’t know.

JOHN: No, like a producer of this thing.

CRAIG: Oh, like you remember any details about them? Congratulations. I run into people–

JOHN: No, I remember they produced this thing, but I cannot think of their name. Fair.

CRAIG: That’s a reasonable one. It’s the ones that come up– I got to tell you, it happened to me the other day where I was like, “Oh my gosh.” Then I couldn’t remember who it was, and I should have. I should have, but I didn’t. You know what? I shouldn’t have. It was years ago.

JOHN: It was years ago.

CRAIG: It was years ago, one time years ago, but you know, I felt bad.

JOHN: Yes. There’s also people who I’ve only met on Zoom. I pitched something at eight different places on Zoom.

CRAIG: That one, I think, everybody. Because I just go, “Oh my gosh.” They make the little square in the air, like, “I only know you from this,” as if their face were not enough. Still, any excuse–

JOHN: I’ve only stared in depth at your face for hours on end.

CRAIG: I never saw it bobbing around on the top of the rest of this crap. Now, I know, “Oh, it’s you.” Listen, there’s no–

JOHN: There’s no easy way.

CRAIG: Does this happen to you a lot? You’re young.

DREW: It does a little bit. Although I’ve been the person who’s called out someone for not remembering.

CRAIG: What’s wrong with you?

DREW: Because it was egregious.

CRAIG: What do you mean [unintelligible 00:15:32]? [chuckles]

DREW: It was a person that I had done multiple friend dates with kind of thing, and seen shows with over years. Then I went to a birthday party and they acted like– It was like, “Oh, I have no idea who you are.” I called them out. I bought them a beer afterwards because I felt a little bit bad.

JOHN: There’s also people who have genuine face blindness. Brad Pitt cannot recognize anybody.

CRAIG: By the way, I’m going to start claiming I have face blindness. What a great excuse. Here’s my thing, Drew. What are you going to get out of that?

DREW: In the moment, nothing. It was just pure anger. Hurt, I guess. I’m not saying I was right. I’m not saying you should do that at all. I was in the wrong. This is 10 years ago.

CRAIG: Wait, 10 years ago?

JOHN: Maybe a little less.

CRAIG: How old are you? 12?

DREW: Yes. Yes, I was.

CRAIG: This is like, what, in a sixth-grade birthday party?

DREW: Yes. I was like, we’ve been to school together. We were in fourth grade together all year long.

CRAIG: “Yes, I’m Michael G. I thought you were Michael F.” My thing is, what do you get out of– They don’t know your name. You’re not going to change that. I would just have fun with it. I would laugh about it. You know what I would say, honestly? I would say this is amazing because I’m the one who’s usually doing this. I’m so happy that you’re the one doing it, so I get to enjoy this. Five minutes from now, I’m going to be you with somebody else.

JOHN: Craig, I don’t think we talked about you show up at a party, a friend’s party, and there’s a person there who is actually just a villain. They have done you wrong. They’re apparently friends with the host of the party. Those awkward situations. I’ve had a couple of those. I was like, “Good Lord.” I can generally just avoid the person.

CRAIG: Yes. Do you end up talking to that person?

JOHN: Sometimes it’s at a dinner party or something. It’s like, “Ugh.”

CRAIG: How does your friend not know you have some secret villains?

JOHN: Yes, just people in the industry who have just done me wrong. There’s one director who is just– He’s the worst. Everyone loves him, but he’s just the worst.

CRAIG: Oh, that’s fascinating. I wonder who that– It’s not Steven Spielberg.

JOHN: No. Steven’s great.

CRAIG: How great would it be if you were like, “Oh, man, you nailed it”?

JOHN: Nailed it. We’ve talked about one director who we wanted to have on the show, but he has a villainous history with another one of our friends. That kind of situation does come up. If those two people were at the same event, what do you do?

CRAIG: I don’t really have villains, I don’t think.

JOHN: I have very few, so that was a surprise to this person.

CRAIG: I can think of, honestly, one guy that I don’t want to be at a dinner party with, but I don’t think that’s going to be happening anytime soon anyway. Doesn’t seem like a dinner party guy, to be honest with you.

JOHN: All right, let’s get to our main topic today, which is writing period stuff. We talk on the show a lot about world-building. If you’re building a futuristic world, you have to be very specific about what’s in that world, what’s different, how not to overbuild, and all these things. What we haven’t discussed a lot, as I was looking through our catalog here, are actual period films and period series, things that are set in recognizable moments of the past.

CRAIG: We’re not talking about female reproductive health today?

JOHN: No.

CRAIG: I was confused. Go on.

JOHN: Yes, but I want to make sure that the stuff we’re writing is accurate, but also accessible for audiences. The tension is really between those two things often because done wrong, these can feel like history lessons, but done properly, it’s like, “Oh, this is the color and the context for the world. The history is the plate upon which you are serving the food.” Often, we can confuse the foreground and the background. As we have this conversation, it’s so easy to think like, “Oh, we’re talking about Victorian times or this.” Also, the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s.

There was a thing I was writing that was in 2010s, which is like, that’s period. You have to remember what is specifically different about this. Last weekend, I went to go see a screening of Showgirls at the Academy Museum. Showgirls and I have this weird history because–

CRAIG: At the Academy Museum.

JOHN: Yes. It was their summer camp. It was a so-called summer camp.

CRAIG: Okay, fair.

JOHN: Here’s the history, briefly, of my experience with Showgirls, is that script by Joe Eszterhas sold while I was in the Stark program at USC for a total of $3.5 million. One of us got a copy of the script. It’s like, “We have to have a dramatic reading of Showgirls.” We had a dramatic reading of Showgirls at my apartment. There were 10 of us, and we read through the whole thing.

CRAIG: Whole thing [unintelligible 00:19:59]

JOHN: Kind of, but it’s also just boring and bad. The movie is actually boring and bad, but also fabulous. It’s a maniacal glee, and the performances are awful, and yet it all works together until it goes just darkly off the rail and cannot be fun anymore.

CRAIG: You know what? We got to get Joe Eszterhas on this show, and I’ll tell you why.

JOHN: Please.

CRAIG: I’ve never met him, never spoken with him. He was ’90s screenwriting.

JOHN: He was the spirit of 1995.

CRAIG: He was it. Year after year, that guy was just crushing it, at least financially.

JOHN: Yes. Jagged Edge. I love Jagged Edge. I haven’t gotten to rewatch it.

CRAIG: Awesome.

JOHN: Basic instinct. Absurd, but sure. Iconic.

CRAIG: Love it. Then it started getting a little wobbly there. Also, Joe Eszterhas, pure screenwriter. Never directed, as far as I know. Did he?

JOHN: No.

CRAIG: I don’t think so. He was completely at the mercy of directors, which is why I would want to talk to him. Plus, there is that amazing thing that went down with him and Mel Gibson that people have forgotten.

JOHN: I’ve forgotten that, too.

CRAIG: Joe Eszterhas was working on a script for Mel Gibson. I don’t remember what it was. Mel Gibson, I think, has some sort of compound in Costa Rica. Joe Eszterhas was down there. Mel Gibson was apparently super off his rocker, angry. I don’t know why. Joe Eszterhas recorded some of it of Mel Gibson screaming at him, basically. The stories that must be there from Joe Eszterhas, I wonder if he would come on and just tell a story.

JOHN: In my head, I think I played with him with the Final Draft guy.

CRAIG: Oh, no.

JOHN: Yes, I’m sure he’s delightful.

CRAIG: The Final Draft guy, Rocco Three Shoes, or whatever that guy was, who we talked to. Who was that guy? [chuckles]

JOHN: I don’t remember either.

CRAIG: Quasi-mobster. [chuckles] He’s not really a mobster. He’s not a mobster, but he had that kind of vibe.
[laughter]

JOHN: We’re in business to stay in business.

CRAIG: That is such a mobster thing to say. No, what he said is, we’re not in the business of going out of business. What do you want from us? We’re not in the business of going out of business. Well, it’s not a reason to extort people. Hey, listen, what are you going to do?

JOHN: The whole reason I brought up Showgirls is watching that movie. It’s set in 1995. You’re like, “Oh, wow, that’s right. That’s what 1995 looks like.” It wasn’t trying to be a period. It literally just was that thing. One of the real advantages when we were making a story that is set in the time of motion pictures is we can go back and look like, what did it actually look like? That’s just so fantastic.

CRAIG: Yes. You can look at what it looked like. You can look at it or even look at what the glossy version of what it looked like looked like. The ’90s are amazing, because of our age. We graduate college. We come to Los Angeles. We go through this. 10 years of personal growth and relationship growth and career growth. It seems so separate to us from the ’80s. Everybody else is like, “Meh, it’s basically ’80s blobbing into another thing.” It was just sort of like ’80s plus. It is a fascinating time.

I had never thought about even the 2000s as being period until I had to write scenes in The Last of Us that are set in 2003. Suddenly, I’m like researching, what phones they used and what kind of– I couldn’t remember. Did people have widescreen TVs then, or were we still on square? What was our deal?

JOHN: We’re doing a rewatch of Community, which is a great rewatch if you haven’t seen the show. The phones in it are crazy, because iPhones show up at a certain point, but every other kind of phone you can possibly imagine. There’s sidekicks, there’s trios, a lot of flip phones, Blackberries, everything else.

CRAIG: Palm pilots, somebody has a Newton.

JOHN: Previous episodes, we’ve talked about [unintelligible 00:23:44] stuff obviously with Chernobyl, the deep dive into The Unforgiven. We had Robert Eggers on to talk about Nosferatu, which is period but also that heightened. Mike Makowsky was on to talk about Bad Education, which was ’80s. Mari Heller’s been on a couple times, and it seems like everything she’s done has been a period thing up until the last movie. She took a lot of period.

CRAIG: Yes, I think that’s right.

JOHN: Let’s talk about general goals, no matter what period you’re writing. Fundamentals, story first, history second. The historical setting is the backdrop. It’s not the protagonist.

CRAIG: Yes. There are certain cases where the nature of the story pushes the period forward dramatically because it is about living in the ’80s as opposed to a story that happens to be in the ’80s. I’m thinking of Super 8 or Boogie Nights. Those two movies were ’80s because that was so much of what the story was.

JOHN: All the same, both of those movies, if you needed to transplant them to a different decade, the central character conflicts, the thematic issues, you could find a way to do it in a different decade.

CRAIG: Always for all good drama, which is why Christopher Nolan is making The Odyssey. Always.

JOHN: Pick the scope of history you need. By that, I mean there are certain kinds of movies, it’s history with characters in it. I would say Lincoln is that, Oppenheimer is that, where the history is really foregrounded. There’s other movies where it’s a character story that is taking place in a historical world. I say Titanic is that, Almost Famous is that, where it’s just like the space around it is really, really important, but that’s not the focus of it. Even though Titanic is a real historical event, the movie isn’t about the history that was made there.

CRAIG: Right. It’s worth asking this question, does this need to be a period piece or not? The reason it’s worth asking is, because while it may afford you some interesting things to do in your script, it can be a little bit of a crutch. The first thing that somebody making a budget for that script is going to do is go, “Oh, no, it’s a period piece.” Period pieces cost more money. The end. Every single time. You’re spending more to transform what the world looks outside, even just replacing all the cars as a thing, getting the accurate clothing and the hairstyles, and all the rest.
Period pieces, in that way, can be a trap where people just go crazy with it. Like, “Oh my God, this movie’s set in the ’80s, everyone’s got crazy shoulder pads.” Well, not everybody was walking around with crazy shoulder pads in the ’80s.

JOHN: Most people’s clothes and most people’s– the stuff in people’s houses is actually from 10 years, 20 years before that. People hold onto their stuff. Really great production design, you’ll see that’s set in a period in that specific era. It’s not all new stuff of that era. It’s stuff that’s dragged along. One of the nice things about setting a movie in the present day is you get so much stuff for free. You can just go outside and aim a camera at something like, “Well, that’s 2025,” or whatever year you’re in. You get the modern buildings, you get the modern cars, you get everything else.
All that stuff which would have to be replaced if you’re doing it, say, in the ’80s. A reel showed up on Instagram yesterday that was talking about The Apprentice, the Donald Trump movie that Sebastian Stan was in. It was showing the visual effects they used to put buildings in proper context and make things look right. For an inexpensive movie, they were very, very smart about, “This building looks right, it will just replace the buildings on the side of it.”

CRAIG: Yes. The nature of a skyline is a very interesting research. People will catch you and laugh at you. If you’re making a movie that’s set in 1980s New York and the Freedom Tower is there and not the Twin Towers, people are going to laugh at you. That’s an obvious example, but it creates a lot of issues. At a minimum, just ask, at least why does this need to be set in this time period? Then if you have a great answer, terrific.

JOHN: One of the first movies I wrote, which never I made, thank God, it was a Western. It was like Aliens Out West. It was like a Western, but with an alien creature in it. Doing the research for that, I did not need to know about the 1880s on the East Coast. I just needed to know very specifically, in a Colorado mountain town, what was daily life like. That’s the right scope. I find so often when writers are approaching a period of things, I feel like, “Well, I need to know everything about everything.” It’s like, “You’re probably procrastinating and avoiding writing.”

I would say, all that said, don’t assume you know how things worked. Always stop yourself and ask the question, “Wait, is that really how it is?” Here’s some good examples of things you might not be thinking about. How are letters delivered? How did mail get from point A to point B? How do people light their homes at night? It’s so important. It’s going to be important for production, but also just for what a scene can make sense. If things are happening by candlelight, it’s just fundamentally different.

One of the projects that we’re running right now is in a medieval-y kind of world. Candlelight is tough. It’s challenging to live under candlelight. If you have two characters who are in a room by themselves and just lit by candlelight, everything else is going to darkness beyond that. That is–

CRAIG: Unless they’ve got that candle candelabra. I love a candle candelabra. There’s so many candles. Who’s lighting all those candles? What happens when they burn down?

JOHN: How much heat is that thing putting off?

CRAIG: How many candles did they have?

JOHN: Candles were so expensive. So much of a person’s daily income was spent on candles.

CRAIG: Candles. Then the candle maker, there’s probably a good word for candle maker, right?

JOHN: Candlestick maker.

CRAIG: No, that’s a candlestick. Candlestick is the thing the candle goes in.

JOHN: No, candlestick maker makes the candles.

CRAIG: No, the candlestick maker makes candlesticks.

JOHN: Oh my God. Are we going to fight on this?

CRAIG: Yes. Who’s making the candlestick then? Somebody else?

JOHN: All right. Drew is looking it up to give us the answer.

DREW: A chandler.

CRAIG: A chandler.

JOHN: A chandler.

CRAIG: Chandler makes candles. I knew there was a weird name for it. It’s like Coopers make barrels. All they did was add an H, and they were like, that’s good enough. Chandler. They should have done that with barrels.

JOHN: Chandler, yes. It was probably a hard C-H. That’s a certain one.

CRAIG: Chandler. Chandler Bing. He made candles.

JOHN: It was candles, yes.

CRAIG: Can we agree that the candlestick maker made candlesticks? Come on. It’s a weapon and clue.

JOHN: It is a weapon. That’s true. It’s a candlestick. You’re right. Okay. I will yield on this.

CRAIG: Thank you.

JOHN: What time were meals eaten, and what counted as– did they eat breakfast? How people addressed each other is important. Finding that what streets and roads actually looked like. Were they gravel streets? Gravel is actually a much more sophisticated thing than just a rut down the middle of a road. What was it like?

CRAIG: Here’s a weird one that I remember going, “Whoa, I didn’t know.” And this is why it’s great to look at photographs, because you can pull things from photographs and then go, “Wait, what is that?” and find out what its use was. In the video game LA Noire, which took place in post-war Los Angeles. We’re talking 19– I think it was like 1949 or ’50 or something like that. There was also a section before the war, where it was like the ’30s. I think in the ’30s in Los Angeles, there were no traffic lights. There was like a sign that went ka-chunk.

I was like, “What is that? That is so cool.” By the way, traffic, what a breeze. In the ’30s in LA? Whew. High wind. I love things. Those details. As you’re going through your details, there are details that it’s like, “Okay, I want to get this right. How many candles are in the room? Is anybody going to look at that scene and go, ‘Whoa’?” No. If there’s some interesting whoa, throw it in.

JOHN: If it creates an interesting moment, yes, for sure.

CRAIG: The characters don’t have to say, whoa, nor would they. You might go, “Oh,” that’s the kind of thing that makes you go, “I really am in a different time.”

JOHN: Here’s the challenge is you need to do the research so you have the answers to those kinds of questions that could be relevant and not shove so many of them in that it feels like, “Okay, you’re just showing off here.”

CRAIG: You don’t want it ever to feel like the movie stopped to go. Now, everyone in the mall will dance to Madonna because it’s the ’80s.

JOHN: LOL.

CRAIG: Their hair.

JOHN: Haha.

CRAIG: Well, I guess Wonder Woman did that. Wonder Woman did do that, but you shouldn’t. In general, it’s not a great idea because it takes people out of the story, and it turns it into more of just a look at us.

JOHN: Other things to keep in mind is a people’s sense of
time. Do they have clocks? Do they have watches? Even if they had those, I’ll see if I can find the blog post for this, but the idea of time as a resource that you control is actually relatively recent. People didn’t talk about saving time because you couldn’t do anything with time. Basically, you did your work, you tended the field and stuff, but there wasn’t any sense of like, “Oh, I need to save some time here. What was time?”

Time, as a thing you can sort of touch or control, is a pretty recent invention. It’s really kind of an industrial-age invention.

CRAIG: Yes, I mean, time management, definitely. The other thing to think about is how you prompted this when you talked about time. I think about just night in general, and the world at night. Depending on what time your period is, how dark is it out at night? Because boy–

JOHN: It’s probably really dark.

CRAIG: Your movie that took place in Colorado in the 1800s at night, it’s pitch black. If it’s overcast and the moon is dark–

JOHN: I feel like so often, writers never have been outdoors at true night, like out of the city at night, and you’re like, “Oh, man, it’s dark.”

CRAIG: It is dark, but also you do have the sky itself if it is not overcast. You have a setting– You don’t see this very often in Westerns, and I think it’s in part because it would look fake. At night, clear sky, back before light pollution, the world’s a planetarium. You can see stars ahead of you. It’s gorgeous. I only know that because I’ve been to Alaska, which is as close as we can get to that. It’s insane. You just don’t see that. I think I know because it just would look fake.

JOHN: Money. What was the money? Do people have currency? How are they doing this? How do they handle money? It’s always so weird to me that people’s entire life savings were in their pockets or in a box.

CRAIG: Of course, buried under a floorboard.

JOHN: How much things cost relative to wages? You don’t understand that people used to spend half their money on food.

CRAIG: Also, Louis CK. Are we allowed to cite Louis CK? He had this great bit about how in Westerns, somebody would come in to a saloon and ask for food for their horse, and a beer, a meal, a shave, a room, and then you would just hand a guy one coin. The guy’s like, “You got it.” The guy would bite the coin, and then you’re like, “Done.” What is that coin? Also, he’s like, the guy never adds up all those things. He’s like, yes, you’re actually short one, or I owe you two subcoins for this.

JOHN: I’m going to clip off a piece of that coin.

CRAIG: Everybody just vaguely was like, “That’s about a coin.” Two, better.

JOHN: You’re looking at who could own property is always a question. Obviously, it was only the white man who could own property. Even in Downton Abbey, the whole premise of Downton Abbey is based on the fact that Lady Mary can’t inherit Downton Abbey because of the entail, which prohibited a daughter from inheriting it. Do people smell? People always smell.

CRAIG: Oh, the smell thing. I think about this all the time.

JOHN: In your show, right now, they’re in a civilization where they have some running water, but otherwise, they would have been smelling a lot.

CRAIG: Yes. We presume that if you’re in a civilized settlement, like, say, Jackson, not only do you have laundry, and you showed a lot of laundry and cleaning, but you’ve also probably rummaged a whole ton of deodorant. It’s not like there are stores full of it that you can go rummage through. Maybe they’ve even started to make their own. The issue is more like when you’re dealing with, say, let’s go back to your little town in Colorado in the 1800s, everybody stank. Because everybody stank, nobody stinks.

JOHN: Nobody stank. It’s not notable.

CRAIG: I think about it all the time. I also have this thing about people that start kissing as soon as they wake up.

JOHN: We’ve heard this on the podcast.

CRAIG: On my show-

JOHN: Doesn’t happen.

CRAIG: -when two people woke up and wanted to kiss, one of them said, “No, morning breath.” “I don’t care.” “I’m not–” and I see it all. Why do people do it? I understand why they want to do it, but it’s not cool. Do you just immediately start kissing your wife when you wake up?

JOHN: Me?

CRAIG: Yes.

JOHN: All the time.

CRAIG: Oh, gross.

JOHN: No, never. We’ve both got night guards in.

CRAIG: Sexy.

JOHN: Playing it against each other.

CRAIG: Melissa wears this thing to prevent snoring. It does not work that well. It’s like a hockey tooth guard. It’s massive. She’s like, [mimics heavy breathing]. Oh my God. Sexy.

JOHN: It’s good stuff. Finally, talking about language and voice. This is a thing where you can just go way out, drop the deep end. Can you define something that makes the audience believe that they are speaking properly for the space that they’re in, and yet the audience can actually understand what they’re saying? That’s where I feel like you have to be aware of what the conventions are in other film and TV that the audience have seen, so it doesn’t seem weird.

You can make a very compelling argument for the accent should act like a British person who is speaking in the 1800s should have actually had a New York accent, but we’re not going to hear it right. That’s the reality.

CRAIG: I love the use of language in The Crucible, the
Daniel Day-Lewis version. I don’t know if it’s accurate, but I assume it’s accurate. People often would say, “I were,” instead of “I was.” I were, which we never say.

JOHN: But we can understand it.

CRAIG: We can understand it. It was so specific, and it felt– I have to assume it was accurate. It was such a lovely way of placing us in a different time, but completely understandable.

JOHN: Wrap this up to say that you, as the writer, are going to be making some of these initial decisions, but there are going to be so many more people who have to weigh in on them. A director, a production designer, historians, subject experts, props, the horse person.

CRAIG: The horse person, the picture car person, everybody.

JOHN: You need to be both able to explain and defend your choices, but also be adaptable to other people, their expertise, and make sure you’re just all rowing in the same direction, which may not be your initial direction, but is a good direction.

CRAIG: I will say that costume people, props people, those two in particular, get so excited about period stuff because it’s such a way to zero in. You just have to make sure that sometimes they don’t just turn it into an ’80s museum. With Chernobyl, we were just like, “Look, accuracy, 100%. Don’t feel like we have to push anything.” Did some people in the Soviet Union in the ’80s wear very bad suits? Of course, but people wear very bad suits now. Don’t give them very bad suits. Give them suits that were correct to a normal dressed-in person then.

JOHN: Agreed. All right, let’s move on to some listener questions. The first couple of these are actually about period stuff.

CRAIG: Okay.

JOHN: Eliza writes, “I’m writing a series that follows a family over several generations from present day to the 1930s. I know the arcs for each character, but I’m struggling with how to move between decades in a way that feels elegant feels elegant and motivated by theme without being too on-the-nose. Do you have any advice for transitioning across several timelines in a television series so it feels organic and thematically connected?” This is a television series.

CRAIG: Well, I guess the first question would be, are you moving within decades within an episode, or is it episode to episode that is a different decade?

JOHN: Let’s talk about why we’re asking those questions. Because if each episode is its own decade, I think you have a lot more latitude to just, you’re just restarting things, and the audience is with you. If you have to move between decades within episodes, that’s more challenging. The thematics, I think about the overall, what is the question that you’re trying to address in this episode or in this series overall, and those aren’t necessarily the transitions I’m worried about. I think actually the visual, auditory, story transitions are really what you need to focus on because if it’s– The bad example is I open a door, and then I open the door in the earlier period as we’re moving back and forth. Those things, the audience can understand what you’re doing.

CRAIG: If you’re inside of an episode and you’re going between decades, it’s the same game you play if you’re not moving between decades. The game is, what would make this interesting from here to here? There’s certain versions where you cut to black, start playing, fade up on a song from the 1960s, fade up, you’re in the 1960s. There’s the visual version where there’s a 2025 bus that’s– you’re looking at it as it pulls forward and stops, and then you cut around to the side and starts pulling away. There’s a billboard for cigarettes on the side of the bus, and you look around, oh my God, we’re in a different time. Play the games. Just play the games.

JOHN: See what feels right and natural. Since you’re saying it’s a family over several generations, you’re probably going to see young and old versions of the same characters, and that can work, but can also be really challenging. Just be mindful of, we’re seeing two characters who are roughly in the same space, but you think they’re going to be different actors. Just be mindful of what we’re actually seeing on screen, because if you have the 30-year-old and the 40-year-old version of a character, that’s a hard thing to distinguish.

CRAIG: That’s just clothes. If they are two different actors, then you can use objects. One actor takes his watch off, it’s all scuffed and scratched, and then the next shot is somebody putting that watch on, it’s brand new, and it’s like, okay, it’s him. It’s just from 30 years ago or something. Use props. Use wipes. Natural wipes, not Star Wars wipes. Use music. Music is a big one.

JOHN: Music helps a lot. Makes you feel like you’re in a
consistent, intentional place, and you’re moving from one thing to the next.

CRAIG: That actually ties back into something interesting about what we said earlier. Music is one of those areas where, if you are using a song to signify a time change, you actually have to use an iconic song. It doesn’t have to be the most overplayed song ever, but it needs to immediately go, “I’m from this time.” Not, “What decade was that from?” Because there are songs where you’re like, “I’m not really sure what decade that’s from.”

JOHN: Absolutely. There’s a lot of early rock and roll that could be from any of those.

CRAIG: It could be from anywhere.

JOHN: Nick has a question about period dialogue. “It seems like most films default to Shakespeare lite when it comes to dialogue for anything set before 1900. If John and Craig were doing something set in the past, like about a barbarian tribe during the Roman Empire, how realistic would they get in using the language of the actual time? How do you strike a balance between accuracy and specificity to the era while still making the dialogue understandable to the audience?” What Nick’s describing is we default to an RRP, received pronunciation, for a lot of historical things.

CRAIG: Ish.

JOHN: Ish, yes.

CRAIG: He said before 1900. I’m thinking, no. Westerns mostly take place in the late 1800s, and people aren’t talking like Shakespeare.

JOHN: We’ve established a Southern Western sound for the West, and if you’re in that general space, you’re okay. To a specific example of a barbarian tribe during the Roman Empire, you would probably want to have one voice that sounds like the Roman. Assuming everyone’s speaking the same language, we think it’s a reasonable choice. One voice for the Romans, and I think we have as an audience an expectation that they’re going to speak in a– that Rome is England, and so therefore, in our minds, it’s England. Therefore, the higher status people are going to speak more what we associate with a higher status British person, and lower class people will speak in lower class accents.

CRAIG: Because the English language is stratified by class in the UK version, we do tend to use RP to mean powerful, wealthy, educated, and then your East London to be rabble. At times, it borders on offensive. For instance, especially if you grew up in East London, where a lot of cool people live. Lord of the Rings, which I love, has this thing where the orcs are all cockney, and it’s insane. That’s what?

JOHN: Dwarves are either Scottish or Irish.

CRAIG: Dwarves are Scottish. The hobbits are southwest England. They’re Bristol and stuff like that. Mr. Frodo. I don’t know Mr. Frodo. Also, pirates, weirdly, are all from somewhere there, like Devon. I think they’re all from Devon for some reason or something like that. I don’t quite think that’s fair. On the other hand, you are implying they’re all part of a cluster because the orcs all grow up together. It would seem bizarre if the orcs were like, “I say, I do believe there’s man flesh out there. Let us feast tonight.” The Aragorn was like, “Oy, we just got to move on.” It would be stupid.

JOHN: Again, we approach everything with a set of expectations. If you’re going to abandon those expectations, you’ve got to have a really good reason to do it. In Nick’s example, if we have the barbarians, then the barbarians probably have a German tint to their accent. They have something that they’re probably still speaking English, but they’re speaking with an accent that implies that they have a just as good space.

CRAIG: Therein also is a problem. This was something that we dealt with on Chernobyl very early on. If you speak English, asking somebody to do an accent that is outside of their accent is fine if they’re good at it. Some actors are not good at it, and what you end up with is the Boston Syndrome. The Boston Syndrome, I don’t think, has ever been overcome by any film. Even films that were written by and performed by almost exclusively people from Boston still suffer from Boston Syndrome.

Good Will Hunting has Robin Williams in it, and he does not know how to do a Boston accent, but he tries. RIP, wonderful man, great performance, horrible Boston accent. Those guys knew it, and they were like, “Eh, what are you going to do?” The Boston Syndrome is real. When you ask a group of actors to say, you’re all going to be doing English, but this is slight German. Some of them will be fine, and some of them will be horrible. Now you have the Boston Syndrome.

JOHN: It’s a danger. Last question about period stuff. This one comes from Concerned. “My screenplay takes place during the American Civil War, and while its main story doesn’t focus on slavery itself, people that are slaves are featured in the script. My question is, how should I refer to them? Enslaved person feels modern in a way that could take people out of the moment and may confuse people, but simply referring to them as slaves feels wrong. Roast the question if I’m overthinking it.”

I think there’s two things we’re getting at. You have characters in your story who are enslaved, and I think you can say enslaved as far as scene description, but they need to actually just be character characters, and the fact that they are enslaved should not be the defining aspect of their characters. The people who are referring to them in the course of the story would refer to them as slaves because they’re not going to say, you can’t use modern words for these characters who are in this world where they would say slaves.

CRAIG: This feels a little bit crazy. Whether or not there is some sort of careful language that says we no longer call enslaved people slaves, although they are, that’s what they are. It’s bad. Being a slave is a horrible situation. No one’s saying, “You’re a slave,” and therefore, ha, ha, ha. That’s what everybody called people who were enslaved, and specifically at that time, that’s what everybody called them. In fact, that is what everyone has called people who have been enslaved up until, I don’t know, maybe let’s say 10 years ago.
If you’re writing a script that takes place then, and you are– even if you’re saying just in your description enslaved persons, you’re going to look wrong. Art is not here to conform to academic standards or anything. Art is here to express life, and that is what life was.

JOHN: The term enslaved person, it makes sense for why we want to foreground the fact that these are actual people and human beings who exist independently of their current situation of being enslaved. That makes total sense. In the context of the people inside world of this movie, they’re not going to have that information. Make sure that whatever you’re doing, as the person setting this up, you are being mindful of the reason we want to think of these people as human beings and treat them with the respect that all human beings need.

CRAIG: Unless your movie is making an argument for slavery, I really don’t think this is a problem. Also, I don’t think anybody is going to see the word “enslaved person” and not think slave. Ultimately, the information is exactly the same. You do what is true to that time. Therefore, people, let’s say, in late 1910s, when World War I is going on, they might call their German neighbors Huns. What I wouldn’t do in that script is say, every time in parentheses, slanderous against or crude against German because it’s just– Put yourself in the time. Put yourself in that place. Be inside of it. Be true to it. Don’t let that other stuff-

JOHN: Your instinct to never minimize the characters who are enslaved, to have that one identity of being enslaved, is the right instinct. I just feel like you’re not going to need to use that word in your scene description, probably at all. They have names.

CRAIG: They have names. Also, they’re people. That’s how you show that they’re people. Let’s say you are like someone’s riding by on a horse. They pass a field. Slaves are working. You’re saying enslaved people are working. It takes me out of the world that I’m in because, theoretically, it’s not you saying those people are doing something. It’s the people going by who are thinking it or observing it. It still has to sit within the context of those people.

JOHN: At the same time, in saying that, the sense that you don’t want people to be set dressing. Making sure that if there are people working in the field, find something more interesting than just that because then they do feel like set dressing.

CRAIG: Sometimes background is set dressing. That’s fair. There’s a movie in prison, and somebody’s walking by, and there are a lot of prisoners. Now, people can say a lot of imprisoned people. Sure, but there are a lot of them, and they are set dressing because they’re filling the world out in a natural way. In fact, sometimes showing how many people are just anonymously left to wither away or suffer is in and of itself interesting. It’s not like in Schindler’s List. All those people in the camp had names or anything. No, they didn’t. They were just continuation victims.

JOHN: All right. It’s time for our One Cool Thing. For our One Cool Thing, I have two examples of some new thinking when it comes to alternative power that I thought were both really cool, and I’d never heard about them before. The first is this thing called standard thermal. Right now, we can put up a bunch of solar, and you can get really cheap electricity out of solar, which is great. It’s the cheapest way you can get power for things. The challenge is when you have all that power, you can store it in batteries for a while. If you’re in a place where you need power other times of the year or you need heat other times of the year, what do you do with that extra capacity that you have?

This place called Standard Thermal, their thing is they use extra capacity to basically just generate heat, and they pump it into the dirt, which sounds like it would not work very well, but apparently, you can just store a bunch of heat in dirt. During summer months, you make a bunch of hot dirt, and then you use that hot dirt to create heat for the winter months.

CRAIG: Dirt just stays hot?

JOHN: Yes. You basically pile up, and you make these big dirt piles.

CRAIG: The outside parts of the dirt are insulating the inside parts of the dirt?

JOHN: Yes. Then you basically just pump the heat out of there to use as heating in buildings for the winter months.

CRAIG: How do you pump heat out of dirt?

JOHN: You’re running water or coolant, or you’re basically running–

CRAIG: Coils of water through it.

JOHN: Yes.

CRAIG: It doesn’t lose the heat over time, or just heat
loses it slowly.

JOHN: It holds enough onto it. Again, they’ve just built some test projects there in Oklahoma. What’s smart about it is, it’s just so cheap. It’s a cheap and very-

CRAIG: It’s dirt cheap.

JOHN: It’s literally dirt cheap.

CRAIG: I can’t believe I made Drew laugh.
[laughter]

JOHN: What I like about it is it’s just engineering, and you don’t have to invent anything new. You could do it on a site, and you’re not trying to pump stuff. You’re not trying to move electricity all around the world.

CRAIG: You don’t need rare earth materials to make fancy batteries or anything like that. You just–

JOHN: Battery technology has gotten really good. For when you need power at night, batteries are fantastic. When you need power in February and there’s not enough sun, this seems like a really good way of generating at least heat, which is some of what you need in a lot of places.

CRAIG: That makes all sense.

JOHN: The second energy thing, which I thought was cool, is this company called Pantalasa. I’m going to show you the picture to correct you, so you can see it. It are these nodes that float in the ocean. They look like these spheres with long tails. They basically just bob up and down in the waves. In bobbing them down constantly, they’re just constantly generating power.

CRAIG: Oh, that’s really interesting.

JOHN: Isn’t that so clever?

CRAIG: It’s basically just some electromagnet in there that’s moving up and down.

JOHN: Yes. Actually, what it’s doing is water gets pulled up, and then it gets shot out. It’s spinning these turbines.

CRAIG: Spinning a little flywheel or something.

JOHN: The free float, in fact, generates a ton of power.

CRAIG: Then there’s a battery inside that’s getting–

JOHN: The question is, it’s really easy to generate power on these things, but how do you get the power off of those things? One of the ways they could do it is use the power of electricity to create hydrogen. Then every so often, you send a boat through to pick up the hydrogen.

CRAIG: That’s a little explosive.

JOHN: Yes, but liquid hydrogen, they’ve actually done enough stuff figuring out how to handle that more safely. The other potentially really good use is maybe you don’t need to get power.

CRAIG: How do you get liquid hydrogen, though? You have to really reduce the temperature dramatically.

JOHN: I’m saying liquid hydrogen. I think it’s just compressed hydrogen. I don’t know.

CRAIG: That’s explosive.

JOHN: There’s ways to do it because hydrogen adds an alternative fuel power. It’s the thing that we’re doing more.

CRAIG: I love the idea of that wave motion.

JOHN: The other thing which is potentially smart for it is maybe you don’t actually need to get the power off that. Maybe you can just use that to do power, where you can just use it on the site. You can use it for direct carbon capture. You actually are just pulling carbon dioxide out of the air and converting it that way, or you could use it for long-term computing capacity because basically, you could compute on these things and then just satellites or whatever and beam it to other places.

CRAIG: You could surround an oil rig with these, and then you could use it to pump more oil. No?

JOHN: No.

CRAIG: Okay. Just you know, it’s just brainstorming.

JOHN: Right now, we don’t have good ways. I don’t have wireless. I don’t have electricity to transmit any power, but we can transmit data. If you could do a lot of compute-intensive stuff on one of these things, great.

CRAIG: We know this, that there is a massive amount of energy created by the moon because the moon moves the water around. If we could just start harnessing that, wow. That’s just wonderful. Big wave-capturing spinning wheels. It’s going to screw up some beaches and stuff. Who cares? Just the tide coming in and out, water flowing. I don’t know. It just feels like you’d be able to do it.

JOHN: The other thing I saw recently was the proposal for not a thing we were ready to build yet. Basically, you can just take a silicon that’s the size of a cafeteria tray. One side is just basically the silicon is used as a solar cell. The back side is just used as computer processing. You can just stick them in space, and they actually just float around and do useful, valuable things.

CRAIG: That’s nice. Maybe help us with generating everything through AI. Thank God.

JOHN: Thank God. You have an electric thing here, too. Talk about this.

CRAIG: I do have an electric thing here. I’m not a huge car guy, but I do get excited when they start to make electric cars really cool. We have a gazillion uncool electric cars out there, which is fine. They’re doing great. Baidu is making $20,000 a second. Tesla is making plenty that just sit there and do nothing because nobody wants them anymore, lol. Audi has a concept car. A lot of times, these concept cars are like, “We’re never making this.” They’re making this. It’s called Concept C. It is an all-electric roadster.

JOHN: It’s a roadster, I was going to say.

CRAIG: With a hard convertible top that looks like it folds in and retracts. It is so cool-looking.

JOHN: I would say it’s sexy, but it looks uncomfortable to me.

CRAIG: There’s no back seat or anything. I think it’s probably very comfortable for the person driving and the person right next to that person. There’s no space for anybody else. It looks so cool. It looks like an actual future car. The other thing I like about it is in the interior, they’re adopting this thing that I guess Mercedes or BMW had initiated. I think this will be the trend moving forward called Shy technology. The idea of shy technology is, no, we’re not going to put some massive screen in the middle of the dashboard and go, “Look, it’s our technology.” We just blend it in nicely. It’s muted, and it’s a screen. It’s not screaming at you. It’s not huge. There are still some physical buttons.

When my younger daughter and I went to go buy her her first car, one of her must-haves physically, manipulable air vents. She’s like, “I don’t want one of these cars where I have to go into menus to move air vents around. I just want to be able to grab a thing and move it to get the air on me or off of me.”

JOHN: I understand that tone.

CRAIG: That’s a good example where I think actually our hands work better than technology. I don’t need technology to tell me where the air goes. Anyway, this car looks fantastic. I do have one other bonus, one cool.

JOHN: Oh my gosh. This is a rare treat. Coming with not one but two.

CRAIG: Our friend, Derek Hass, has a show called Countdown on Amazon.

JOHN: Derek Hass, who is responsible for the Chicago universe.

CRAIG: Every week, we watch it together. Melissa and I and Derek and Christy watch together in my house and have a blast. So much fun. The season is almost over. This comes out on Tuesday. Last episode is Wednesday. The specific one cool thing is that Countdown within its season, and I believe it’s 13 episodes, does something that I don’t recall another show like this ever doing. Structurally, it innovates something that I actually think is genius. I wonder if it will catch on. Other people will notice what it did. I think it’s a very smart thing. I won’t spoil it. I’ll spoil it off the air for you guys, but I won’t spoil it here for our viewers.

JOHN: People should check out Countdown on Amazon Prime Video. We’re supposed to just say Prime Video rather than Amazon Prime Video, but I always say Amazon.

CRAIG: We’re saying Amazon. We’re not even saying Prime Video. It’s Amazon.

JOHN: We’re saying Amazon now.

CRAIG: It’s Amazon. What are they going to do? Take away my Prime?

JOHN: That is our program for this week. Script notice is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Whit Morless. If you do an outro, you can send us a link to Ask@johnaugust.com.

CRAIG: It’s done by program.

JOHN: I know. I didn’t hear our program.

CRAIG: I was shocked. Keep going.

JOHN: Ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll also find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkwear. Craig, I’m sorry we’re not using the drinkwear today for this episode.

CRAIG: I have a lovely glass here.

JOHN: You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all the premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. We have a cool thing, I think we’re going to try in the next couple of weeks for our premium subscribers. Stay put. You’re going to get a little advanced sneak preview of a new thing we’re going to try.
You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Witches. A reminder, if you are the designer, who I should be hiring on for this project, please click through the link to look at that. If you’re a student who is at a university right now and wants to try Highland for free, just go to “apps” and click on Highland. You’ll find all the student licensing information there, or just install Highland and click on the student license button. That would also work. That works. Craig, thanks for a fun show

CRAIG: Thank you for a fun program. All right.
[music]

JOHN: Okay, Season of the Witch, we are going to talk through iconic witches, and we’re going to rank them in [unintelligible 01:03:51] here. You can get [unintelligible 01:03:52] tier A, B, C, or D.

CRAIG: We call that S tier.

JOHN: S tier.

CRAIG: S tier.

JOHN: Wow. S tier. What does S mean for you? Superior?

CRAIG: Yes. That’s just straight from video game.

JOHN: Oh, yes. 100% S tier. All right. You had proposed that we needed to add on a witch who was not originally on my list.

CRAIG: Yes. Of course. Well, it’s Meryl Streep. How can you not?

JOHN: Give us the case for her and where you want to put her in.

CRAIG: Well, I don’t know what the other witches are, but she is a tragic figure who both creates the problem of everything and also leads to the solution of everything.

JOHN: She’s the witch from Into the Woods. Does she have a name independent of that? Just a witch? Witch.

CRAIG: She has this gorgeous relationship with her daughter, who turns out to be Rapunzel. You feel so much for her. She sings two of the best songs in the show.

JOHN: Witch, iconic. Iconic is the-

CRAIG: If you are a musical fan, she is the most iconic witch there is.

JOHN: No, that absolutely cannot be true.

CRAIG: I disagree with you.

JOHN: We’re going to go through the list.

CRAIG: I know because you’re going to say Elphaba.

JOHN: I’m going to say Elphaba. We’ll get to Elphaba in a
second. You put her S tier. I would put her-

CRAIG: She’s S tier. Elphaba is A-tier because of Defying Gravity and for that reason only.

JOHN: You’re putting her S tier. I’m going to put the witch from Into the Woods at B-tier just because she was not even– We thought about this for a while, and she didn’t even enter my consciousness. All right, let’s go to the ones who are already on the list. Bellatrix Lestrange, played by Helena Bonham Carter in the Harry Potter franchise.

CRAIG: I don’t even think of her as a witch because that movie is full of women who have magic who are all theoretically witches.

JOHN: Is she C or D?

CRAIG: She’s D because she doesn’t really impact the story that much, and I don’t think of her specifically as a witch.

JOHN: Cersei.

CRAIG: Oh, wow. Cersei is a sorceress, but we’ll go ahead. Cersei is so classic and is about to have a moment, I assume, once Odyssey comes along. I’m going to go with A-tier.

JOHN: Oh, okay. That’s higher than I would guess. Cersei, she polymorphs people a lot.

CRAIG: She’s classic. She turns you into a pig.

JOHN: She does turn you into a pig. There’s a book about her that people love.

CRAIG: I don’t even know that book.

JOHN: Oh, it’s about Cersei. It’s a big seller. I’ll go A. I think she’s the oldest in terms of-

CRAIG: Exactly. She’s the orig.

JOHN: All right. Now we’re at Elphaba. I cannot believe you think she’s anything less than S tier.

CRAIG: She’s A-tier because she sings a great song, but she’s derived from an S-tier witch.

JOHN: Okay. Let’s combine them as one character. I think-

CRAIG: Whoa. Hold on. You can’t.

JOHN: Wicked Witch. Oh, so we can’t?

CRAIG: No, no, no.

JOHN: Elphaba does not exist without the Wicked Witch of the West.

CRAIG: Exactly. This is my point. Elphaba is a modern reimagining of the Wicked Witch of the West, but the Wicked Witch of the West from the bound books and most importantly, the movie, that’s S-tier.

JOHN: Wicked Witch of the West is clearly S tier, but I think they are– I can’t separate the two.

CRAIG: I’m giving Elphaba a gift by making her A-tier because she is derivative of it.

JOHN: We are in agreement that Wicked Witch of the West is S-tier because it’s who you picture when you think of a witch.

CRAIG: That is the witch.

JOHN: You’re putting Elphaba at A-tier. I guess I can see that if we had Elphaba without everything else around her, great. Hermione Granger from Harry Potter.

CRAIG: Again, it’s tough, I guess technically a witch. If we consider her a witch, then she’s– I’m going to say B-tier because I don’t think her magic is necessarily the thing that makes her awesome.

JOHN: The Sanderson sisters, otherwise the Hocus Pocus cutout.

CRAIG: Oh, well, I think they’re C-tier. I think they’re just a little cartoon for me.

JOHN: They’re not who I go to first for this. Drew, you’re welcome to chime in here if we’re getting something [crosstalk].

DREW: I just feel like I’m going to get so much mail on that one. With Hocus Pocus, I didn’t grow up with Hocus Pocus.

JOHN: I didn’t grow up with Hocus Pocus. It was around.

CRAIG: I remember it coming out, and I remember it not being particularly successful. Then I think over time, it became a cult thing, and it’s super campy. They should have had it in summer camp. It’s fun for people to dress up because it’s a great dress up. They were parodies of witches. They weren’t real witches to me.

JOHN: I do feel like C is too low for somebody who– It’s a seminal and important witch image for a generation.

CRAIG: I’m not in that generation.

JOHN: I think they might be B for our safety.

CRAIG: I’m excited for the hate mail.

JOHN: Maleficent.

CRAIG: Oh, well.

JOHN: Technically, Maleficent is an evil fairy, but she’s
coded as a witch.

CRAIG: Maleficent isn’t a great character, to be honest with you, from the original Snow White story. Angelina Jolie’s version, they try to zhuzh it up. I’ll give her a B just because, in her old lady image, handing out the apple, she’s spectacular.

JOHN: Oh, no, you’re conflating her with the witch. Maleficent is the villain in Sleeping Beauty. She has the crow. She has this.

CRAIG: Right. Maleficent. Sleeping Beauty isn’t a great story. Just the original.

JOHN: The challenge of it, you have your protagonist who is knocked out.

CRAIG: I don’t think there’s anything particularly special about her.

JOHN: C or D.

CRAIG: I’m going to put her in D, actually. Not a big fan.

JOHN: Morgan le Fay.

CRAIG: Well, I can’t put her into S because I put Cersei up there for historical versions. I’m going to say Morgan le Fay as a horror witch goes into A. She’s pretty amazing. If you’re a King Arthur fan, which I am.

JOHN: Again, an horror witch in the sense of she’s establishing a lot of templates for what we’ll explain this. Here, I originally had Sabrina the Teenage Witch. My daughter was like, “Oh, no, it has to be Selena Gomez’s character
from Wizards of Waverly Place. I’m going to put them in as a group component of–

CRAIG: Nickelodeon/Disney Teen Witches?

JOHN: Absolutely. A young TV show teen witch.

CRAIG: We might as well throw in Bewitched.

JOHN: Bewitched separately.

CRAIG: Okay. B, they’re fun, but not great for me.

JOHN: They are a teenager plus.

CRAIG: Yes.

JOHN: All right. Next up, we have Samantha Stevens, the protagonist of Bewitched.

CRAIG: I love Bewitched.

JOHN: I love Bewitched, too. Dora, come on. Paul Lind, oh my God, his uncle.

CRAIG: Paul Lind anything. [chuckles] I love her. Also, I love the sitcomy vibe as opposed to the adult sitcomy vibe. There was an interesting proto-feminism thing going on there.

JOHN: There really is. Also, just the sanitizing of witches. They’re like, “Oh, they made a show about a witch,” but this is in a conservative time.

CRAIG: Yes, but happily before Satanic Panic hit in the 80s. I’m going to say A.

JOHN: I think it’s fair.

CRAIG: I think she’s A.

JOHN: I think she did some good stuff here.

CRAIG: Yes.

JOHN: Next, we have Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch of the Marvel Universe.

CRAIG: Not a witch. Just can move stuff around with red.

JOHN: It’s interesting because if you look at her role in the Marvel Universe, particularly in WandaVision and more so in– particularly in WandaVision, they really were trying to pull the– to emphasize the witch aspects of it.

CRAIG: Agatha is a witch. I think of The Scarlet Witch as
not a witch, but a woman who can move stuff around using her red power. She’s incredibly powerful. If we were going on power alone, she’s S.

JOHN: She’s not doing a lot of witch stuff. That’s the thing, whereas as opposed to Agatha is doing witch stuff.

CRAIG: I’m going to say C.

JOHN: I think C feels fair for this.

CRAIG: Do you have the witches from Macbeth in here?

JOHN: I don’t have the witches from Macbeth. Okay.

CRAIG: Those three witches over a bubbling cauldron. Bubble toil and trouble.

JOHN: I like that for them. They’re iconic in the sense of the image. They are a coven. They are doing that [crosstalk] stuff. They have no real power. They’re just foretelling things.

CRAIG: Yes, but they’re pretty witchy. They’ve got a cauldron. Just the iconography of the cauldron alone. Just witches stirring a brew in a cauldron, there’s no-

JOHN: Baba Yaga, I think, exists independently of that. It may be an older story.

CRAIG: Baba Yaga also is incredible. Kind of a witch but not really. Do we have the witch from Hansel and Gretel?

JOHN: We don’t have the witch.

CRAIG: That’s S+++. To me, that’s the ultimate witch.

JOHN: She lives in a candy house.

CRAIG: No, she builds a candy house to lure them and then shoves them in an oven and eats them. S+.

JOHN: It’s a good fairytale witch. Can they compete with Wendy the Good Little Witch?

CRAIG: I love Wendy the Good Little Witch. I loved Harvey Comics. First of all, I love that Harvey Comics was called Harvey Comics. They didn’t even try. There’s Marvel, there’s DC, Harvey. Just some guy. “Harvey, what should we call this? Me, call it after me.”

JOHN: There’s a great movie to be made about either Harvey Comics or a fictional version of Harvey Comics. They’re desperately trying to compete against–

CRAIG: They had great stuff. They had Richie Rich, which I loved. They had Casper the Friendly Ghost, and then Casper Sidekick.

JOHN: Wendy the Good Little Witch.

CRAIG: Wendy was adorable. A. She was good, and she was legitimately a witch.

JOHN: I have no sense of what her actual abilities or powers were. They were just–

CRAIG: Same, but you know what? The word witch is in her name, and she actually was a witch. She wasn’t like Scarlet Witch, where she’s just like, “Oh, it’s a fun name.”

JOHN: I remember our last two on the official list. We have the White Witch from the Narnia movies.

CRAIG: Oh, I always think of her as the Snow Queen. Was she called the White Witch?

JOHN: She’s both.

CRAIG: She was fantastic. I would not know what Turkish delight is if not for her.

JOHN: I know about it.

CRAIG: I’ve had Turkish delight. It’s fine. I don’t quite know if it’s something I would sell my family out for. Edmund, you little bastard. I just love that in that version, CS Lewis was like, “Okay, so this is Jesus, and this is Satan. Oh, this is Judas. Now, what should be the 30 pieces of silver? Turkish delight.” That’s awesome. He made it candy. She’s great. She’s an A.

JOHN: I think she’s an A. She’s identified as a witch, but we don’t see her doing–

CRAIG: She petrifies.

JOHN: She petrifies. That’s her big skill, and she actually clearly has world-shaking power, which is great.

CRAIG: Yes, and she’s Satan.

JOHN: Let’s wrap it up with Willow Rosenberg from Puffy the Vampire Slayer.

CRAIG: This is a huge blind spot for me.

JOHN: Oh, yes. I’ve seen every bit of it. I will say Willow is iconic in the sense of she enters as a nerd who then gets into witchcraft just to help out, and then that pulls her into the dark side. It’s metaphors of addiction. Then she has a witchy lesbian lover. Fantastic stuff throughout. I think she is genuinely iconic in her overall play.

CRAIG: This is what I know that people love the Buffyverse. I’m going to admit something. I don’t know any of it. Then there’s so much because there’s Buffy and there’s Angel. I got to tell you, the only times I interact with it, people that make puzzles really dig Buffy. Sometimes datasets will happen where there’s a puzzle, and you’re trying to figure out how do these things go together. It’s like, well, there’s a willow tree, and then there’s an angel heart. Like, “Wait, all these are names from the Bu–” I’ve picked up stuff from that, but I feel bad.

JOHN: I’m putting Willow in A safely. The reason she’s not S-tier is that she’s still a relatable human. The young woman that we’re rooting for. She’s not just an iconic witch at all times. Our S-tiers are the Wicked Witch of the West.

CRAIG: I think so.

JOHN: You say–

CRAIG: The Weird Sisters from Macbeth.

JOHN: The Weird Sisters from Macbeth. Then did we put–

CRAIG: I put the Hansel and Gretel witch up there.

JOHN: Hansel and Gretel witch. Again, they’re iconic. They’re Halloween witches, all of them.

CRAIG: Exactly. All three of them look like Halloween witches to me in my mind.

JOHN: Good. Useful. We’ll put a little graphic up there for people to enjoy.

CRAIG: Now the emails come.

JOHN: Now the emails come from our premium members.

CRAIG: Could you not mention the–

JOHN: Because we didn’t think about it.

CRAIG: Because we didn’t think about it. What do you want from us?

JOHN: Craig and Drew, thank you for figuring out which witch is which on our program.

CRAIG: On our program.

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: You’re listening to Episode 701 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, how do you leverage connections to get work and help others get work? We’ll discuss the sometimes uncomfortable aspects of getting writing jobs and really almost any kind of job. We’ll also talk about the surprisingly good news for future writers in the recently released WJ numbers.

Then we’ll answer more listener questions we didn’t get to in last week’s live show. In our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, let’s continue our discussion of connections with literal connections, this being Lego. Here, we are looking at some Lego flowers. We’ve talked about Lego in a general sense over the 700 episodes of the podcast. I want to have a deep dive discussion on Lego and our philosophies regarding Lego because there’s the Lego we grew up with, and then there’s the Lego now, and how you’re treating these bricks we’re assembling.

Craig: I’m always here to discuss Lego, the plural of which is apparently Lego.

John: Which I love. Some news. The Scriptnotes book is now up on Goodreads. If you’re a person who uses Goodreads to review your books, you can mark that as a want to read and just helps people remember that, “Oh, this is a book that people want to read.” We look forward to hopefully some very positive Goodreads reviews once the book is out there in the world.

For now, a thing you can do is mark it as want to read. You can also preorder the book and send Drew the receipt. Right before we got on microphones, we were talking through a special thing we’re doing for all those people who sent us their receipts.

Drew Marquardt: We don’t have enough.

John: No, we do. We have a lot. It’s been a chore for Drew to sort them, but it’s a chore you love, right?

Drew: I love it.

Craig: Oh, yes. I can tell he loves it.

Drew: You see the twinkle in my eyes?

Craig: It’s always fun when you’re like, “But you love it, right?”

John: Don’t you just love it?

Drew: So good.

Craig: I said you love it.

Drew: I’m very excited.

Craig: Keep loving it.

John: We have a bit of follow-up here because last week was our 700th episode. It was a live show. It was so much fun to do. It was on YouTube, so thank you for everybody who participated in that. We forgot one thing from last week, which was that we actually had a thing we were supposed to do. It was something that had been set up a year in advance. Drew forgot the thing.

Craig: Oh, well, that’s all right. You’re only human.

Drew: Thank you.

Craig: You’re welcome.

John: People decided to see Drew on the livestream because everyone thought Drew was a child.

Craig: Why would they think he’s a child?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: First of all, that violates labor law.

John: Absolutely.

Drew: That feels like you guys, though.

Craig: Oh, that we would do that?

Drew: Yes.

Craig: It feels like we might. It feels like the kind of really good hypocrisy. Oh, we’re talking about the union and getting assistance paid. Now we make our seven-year-olds put this all together. We keep them in a room the way the musical Oliver! begins.

John: Yes, absolutely. It is a hard-knock life.

Craig: No, that’s Annie.

John: Oh, that’s right. I’ve confused my musicals. Well, they’re both about ragamuffin food.

Craig: Food. Glorious food.

John: I don’t know all of that.

Craig: Oh my God. We have to have an entire Oliver! podcast.

John: Right. Before we do that, we need to talk through this bit of follow-up here. Way back episode 645?

Craig: 645.

John: 645. Meredith Scardino was a guest along with Jen Statsky. We opened up an envelope that I had sent to Jen Statsky with my prediction for what was going to happen on the upcoming season of Hacks. I had written the prediction and sealed it and mailed it to her. She opened it live on recording. Meredith Scardino was like, “Well, I want to do that.” She made a prediction for what was going to happen on the 700th episode of Script Notes. Drew, will you open this and read what Meredith Scardino– this is a sealed envelope that Drew is opening.

Craig: I can confirm this. 700th show prediction, Meredith Scardino, June 1st, 2024. Over a year ago.

John: We were living in a different universe.

Craig: I hope it says something like, you both died.

Drew: “700th show prediction. One, compilation of best advice from guests,” which we kind of did.

Craig: Did we?

John: No. We brought people in for some advice.

Drew: “Two, then you go into an interview with special guest, one but not both Coen brothers.”

Craig: Wow.

John: No, we’ve not gotten the Coen brothers on this.

Craig: Oh my God, that would have been amazing. I’m not saying it would have been better than what we did, but we really should get one if not both. Did you say one but not both?

John: Yes, one but not both Coen brothers. She still think we can do it? She think we can bring the brothers back together for our podcast episode.

Craig: We’d like at least to get a Coen brother in here at some point. Oh, we could do a deep dive on a Coen brother movie.

John: Totally.

Craig: That might be fun.

John: They have one or two good movies.

Craig: They just have a few. Just a few, literally all of them. Miller’s Crossing, by the way, is one of my favorites.

John: I like Miller’s Crossing. I love some Fargo. I love–

Craig: Fargo, of course, Raising Arizona, No Country for Old Men. It goes on. You know Barton Fink is the one I really want to do. We’ve been talking about Barton Fink for a long time.

John: It’s a screenwriter movie.

Craig: It has that Barton Fink feeling.

John: Funny that a Barton Fink movie has Barton Fink.

Craig: Where would I find another writer? Kidding. Go to the commissary. Throw a rock, you’ll hit one. And Fink? When you throw it, throw it hard.

John: Meredith Scardino, thank you for this card. Also, your handwriting is fantastic. It almost feels like architect handwriting. It’s tidy and neat. It’s printed. It’s all uppercase.

Craig: You know what I like? It’s not gendered handwriting. I wouldn’t know if this was a man or a woman. There could theoretically be a slight serial killer aspect to this handwriting. If you look at it, the kerning is really chaotic. It’s very ordered and yet it’s also saying, I might murder.

John: The I is very close to the P.

Craig: You see what I’m saying?

John: There’s some weird spacing there.

Craig: There’s signals there. If you are close with Meredith, just keep an eye open, is really all we’re saying. Just keep one eye open.

John: She makes the both and the brothers, they’re very different Bs too. It’s like she’s just choosing–

Craig: Like there’s a lot of different people up in there.

John: She’s cutting and pasting things out from a magazine.

Craig: There’s a little bit of a ransom note.

John: I love it. Thank you very much for sending it.

Craig: Also, she has great– her cardstock here is a great imprint on it. It says–

John: It says, from the drywall experts of Scardino & Sons, established 1859s. Awesome. So fantastic. We have some more follow-up on streaming services and creator pay.

Drew: Jeffrey writes, “A couple under-the-radar platforms worth mentioning. Vimeo On Demand. Not a subscription streaming service and very few consumers know about it or use it, which is a shame because the revenue split is extremely favorable for filmmakers.

Another one is Kanopy, which is the library and university-based streaming platform. When your film is on Kanopy, the residuals are decent compared to other streaming services. Best of all, you need is a library card to use it.”

John: It’s Kanopy with a K because, of course, it’s Kanopy with a K. Vimeo On Demand I have used for things. Not for things I’ve made, but to watch other people’s things. It’s good. I’m glad Vimeo has persisted in the world of YouTube.

Craig: I go there when it’s a result. I never think about going to places. I just go where–

John: Another reason I end up on Vimeo is when people have a trailer that’s not released yet, they want me to see it. A password-protected thing.

Craig: I will see some things there. Sometimes when I’m looking at, they’ll send me, “Oh, hey, here’s a director if you want to hire them for your show.” Then they’ll send a movie that they did or another episode. They’ll put it on Vimeo.

John: Exactly.

Craig: It’s password-protected.

John: It’s good stuff. Last bit of follow-up here from Dan who’s asking, “In regards to renting a movie on Apple TV or Prime, does one service provide higher residual payments or are they both the same?” They’re essentially the same. I think because it’s based on the actual price they’re charging, I think it does not matter.

Craig: The price that they charge is relevant, but the formula that we use is applied across all of the companies because it is a collective bargaining agreement term.

John: If you choose to pay $4.99 versus $3.99, that’s technically a little bit more. Also, just thank you for actually doing that and not pirating it.

Craig: That’s the most important thing. Don’t feel like you need to shop around for the highest price.

John: No. Not at all. Please don’t. Continuing the discussion of writers and money, last week, the Writers Guild sent out the Screen Compensation Guide, which was synthesizing data from 800 screen deals, feature deals, for high-budget features, which is high-budget features or anything with a budget of $5 billion or more, that was made during the term of the 2023 MBA.

We negotiated this new contract, and there were 800 screen deals made since that time. They looked through all the deals, and this is how you get a bird’s-eye view of what writers are actually being paid for the work that they’re doing. Craig, can you remind us of some of the terms we’re going to hear here? Talk to us about scale and what does scale mean for feature writers? How important is scale for feature writers?

Craig: Scale is the minimum amount that a WGA writer can be paid under a WGA agreement. Typically, we don’t see a ton of it in features. Scale is the rule of the day in television because so much of television compensation is moved over into producing numbers and things like that. For feature writing, you’re paid entirely as a writer, typically.

The lowest you’ll usually see is scale plus 10, so the company agrees to add 10% on so that you’re not losing money to your agent and going below that. Scale for original scripts is probably something like $130,000 now or something like that.
John: It’s over $100,000, so it depends on whether there’s an attribute or outline involved.

Craig: Generally speaking, if you’re going to be hired to do something as a screenwriter, you’re probably looking at six figures. Low six figures, at least to start, but not below scale.

John: As you and I, and this predates Script Notes, as we were going around meeting with studio bosses saying, “You need to really look at how you’re paying feature writers to make sure that you’re paying them better,” one of the things we were talking about is, it’s not just that you’re being paid a certain amount for this draft, but if you’re only being paid for one step, that is a crisis.

That was a real problem that we were seeing was that writers are being paid X dollars for one draft and there was no guarantee of a second draft. Therefore, they were being held hostage to these situations. As we talk about one-step deals, we would often describe that it’s an issue if they’re paying you or me for a one-step deal as higher-paid writers, but it’s really debilitating to younger, newer, lower-income writers.

Craig: The part of the problem was that studio executives were used to paying big writers, A-list writers, a lot of money, and not worrying about steps. If you hire somebody to fix a movie, “It’s a rewrite, fix this.” “Okay, well, it’s going to cost you $1 million.” You’re going to get a draft and be like, “Hey, well, blah, blah, blah. Okay, let me fix that,” or, “First, I could use some work. Okay, let me fix that. You paid me $1 million.”

They get used to that. They get used to not worrying about the paperwork of like, “Oh, sorry, the amount of yogurt you put in your cup went over the medium size. Now you have to pay the large.” Nobody likes to deal with it. The problem is, when you’re paying people a little bit, if you make them do more than one step, they are effectively getting shoved under scale.

All the way back in 2004, the last time that they were silly enough to put my dumb ass on a negotiating committee, what I asked was that, if a writer was being paid less than twice scale, they should be guaranteed two steps. In this way, the writer gets a chance to get the studio notes, get paid to write something else officially. The producer doesn’t have quite as much anxiety about that first draft and quite as much meddling to do. That request went nowhere until 2023.

John: In the 2023 MBA negotiations, that’s the thing we actually won. Future writers earning less than 200% of scale, you’re guaranteed a second step. That was designed so that it’s helping the writers who are most hurt by one-step deals.

Craig: It protects, in a way, the studio. This is why I never understood why the studios, why it took them 20 years and a strike to agree to this, it doesn’t cost them anymore. Okay, I pay you $200,000 for one step, or I pay you $200,000 for two steps. You see what I mean? Anyway, I hope that that has made life a little bit better and has retrained the studios a bit to see that two steps are helpful.

John: Anecdotally, based on what you were experiencing in these 10 years leading up to this, how many writers did you feel were encountering one-step deals in the future land? What percentage?

Craig: I would have guessed it would have been over 50. I would have said 60%.

John: That’s my guess too. At least over half, maybe two thirds. The good news is one-step deals now account for only 3 in 10.

Craig: That is definitely a reduction. It has to be.

John: It has to be. The better news is, when they actually break it down by the amount that the writers are earning, the median pay for one-step deals went from $250,000 to $450,000 over the course of this term.

Craig: What that tells us is they’re still reserving the one-steps for the people who are being paid a lot. They’re being paid enough that, really, doing two steps or even three isn’t going to push them below scale. In short, we protected scale. That was what this was always about. Sounds like it’s working great.

John: Looking through the numbers, at least one screenwriter got $2.25 million for a one-step deal. Good for them.

Craig: I get that. That’s fine.

John: The other factors in here, the other–

Craig: I wanted 2.7, but they only gave me 2.25.

John: 2.25.

Craig: 2.25. It’s a nice number. I like 2.25. You could tell that that’s a negotiated number. Nobody wants to be there.

John: No. It was between 2 and 2.25.

Craig: They were like, “Fine.”

John: Members with two-plus credits got the biggest bump of $100,000 for the last three years. Even new members with no credits were receiving $25,000 more than they were in 2021. It’s progress in future pay across. That matches anecdotally with what I’ve been hearing from people.

Craig: This was always a quality-of-life thing. The question that I am interested in is, again, it would be anecdotally, survey-style, do writers feel like they are doing more or less “free work”? I would hope that it would be a little bit yes. I mean, a little bit, yes, I’m doing less free work because, in my mind, this term was never going to increase the earnings that much. It was really quality of life.

John: That’s the hope, too. One way, if you are a future writer who is encountering these things and want to help figure out what it looks like on the ground, is that they’ve started sending out the survey leading into the negotiation cycle. It’s a good chance to fill out that form and let us know really where you’re at and what the biggest issues are for you. If there’s a thing that we’re not catching here, this is the time to speak up.

All right. Let’s get to our main topic here, which is connections, which is not just a fantastic New York Times game. Do you still play Connections?

Craig: Of course, played it this morning.

Drew: It’s great.

John: I’m trying to remember, today’s Connections involved– what was the purple category of this one? It was–

Craig: Well, there was Blank Land.

John: Blank Land, yes.

Craig: There were things with the antennae.

John: Like in Teletubbies.

Craig: There were Blank Doodle.

John: Yes, Blank Doodle, I think, was the-

Craig: It was Blank Doodle was the thing.

John: -the purple.

Craig: Oh, yes, and the other things were Blenders.

John: Dipsy Doodle. I didn’t know what Dipsy Doodle was.

Craig: Oh, you didn’t know about Dipsy Doodle?

John: What’s Dipsy Doodle?

Craig: The first thing I thought when I saw Dipsy Doodle, I knew that she was trying to fool us into heading towards the Teletubbies. Nice try, Wyna.

John: Wouldn’t happen.

Craig: Nope, not today.

John: I love Wyna Liu.

Craig: What’s that?

John: Wyna Liu.

Craig: Wyna Liu. By the way, I don’t even know what Wyna Liu looks like. I’m looking up Wyna Liu right now.

John: There’s an interview with her, and she’s a woman in her 30s, maybe early 40s. She seems to love what she’s doing.

Craig: She’s got a great name. Wyna is a– oh, look how happy she is.

John: Doesn’t she look happy?

Craig: Oh my God, she looks thrilled. She looks thrilled.

John: I also love the discussion around Connections. People will have whole TikToks on, let’s break down the most insane connections of them all, and they’ll talk to you.

Craig: Somebody said to me early on, I won’t say who it was. They were like, “It’s good, but there’s no way Wyna Liu can keep this up day after day.” I was like, “I have faith,” and she has.

John: It’s justified. That’s Connections the game, which is fantastic and we all love, but let’s talk about connections in real life. Connections between people, and especially people who need a thing from each other, and how we handle those connections in our town, and how we use connections, but even just saying use connections feels gross.

Craig: It’s a better word than exploit. How do you exploit your connections?

John: The good use of connections implies a reciprocity, a generosity, a good-for-everyone quality to it.

Craig: I think sometimes we feel like we are begging or that we’re charity cases. In fact, if the connection works, it’s not because the person that you begged took pity upon you. It’s because they thought that your thing is good and it will reflect well upon them. That’s really what that is. Otherwise, sometimes your connections, “Oh, my mom is best friends with your mom.” That’s going to get you a 20-minute chit-chat. Is it going to change your life or career? No.

John: No. Craig, you spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, I can tell.

Craig: Love LinkedIn.

John: How many connections do you have on LinkedIn?

Craig: I have zero connections on LinkedIn, John.

John: As do I. We’re not talking about LinkedIn connections or any of that performative networking. I think we’re talking about the casual stuff that does happen all the time, and this is the thing I’m sure happens with you, is that a friend asks you to put in a good word on a show that they’re trying to step on. That’s a valid, accepted part of the practice.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Let’s talk about the specific kinds of connections, when it’s okay to reach out, when you should step back a little bit. You were talking about our moms, our friends kind of thing. Weak connections are things like acquaintances, your dad’s friend’s friend, the guy you went to high school with but you don’t keep up with. If you’re reaching out to them specifically for this thing but you wouldn’t talk to them otherwise, that’s a weak connection.

Craig: It’s important to be mindful if you are the one that is being connected to, that the person that is asking you to talk or consult or advice, you’re their thing. You are probably the sum total, in many cases, of their connection to Hollywood. There’s an importance that they’re putting on this that you’re not. At least be mindful of it. I try and be as respectful as I can and I try to remember what it was like when I was grasping for crumbs, little hints of threads of things. Everything is high stakes, everything.

John: Let’s talk about strong connections. Close friends, collaborators, your writing partners, all that kind of stuff. Employers, supervisors, classmates in a program is good. Drew and I both went through the Stark program. The real advantage of going through a film school is you have 25 connections who actually you can get information from, they can help you out and stuff, and that is super invaluable. Those are the people who you should feel like you can count on and they can count on you. Again, it’s that reciprocity thing feels so crucial.

I think another aspect of reaching out to somebody is intent. Are you trying to exchange information? Are you trying to extract something from them? Are you asking someone that will take five minutes of their time or is it a lot more than that? If you’re asking someone to read something, that’s a lot to do. If you’re asking for advice on a specific situation, that’s a thing I’m more happy to take some time to do. Tell me about being a screenwriter in Hollywood, it’s like, “I got a podcast. Listen to this.” Now there’ll be a book.

Craig: We have a book. Advice for people reaching out, the more specific you can be about what you want, the more likely it is that the connection will at least happen initially. The hardest ones are the, “Can I just pick your brain podcast.” You can go pick my brain for 701 hours, but when they say, “I have three questions I need to get answered somehow,” or, “I have one situation that I’m wondering if you can help me with,” then it’s practical, it’s targeted, it feels a little bit like a mission.

It’s not an open-ended quest. When it’s an open-ended quest of just like, “Hey, I just want to talk with you about–“ then we’re just going to talk. It’s not great.

Craig: An example of the former, which is the specific thing, a friend reached out to say like, “Hey, there’s a thing they’re trying to put in my contract for this deal. Can I talk to you about it?” “Yes.”

John: Oh my God, yes.

Craig: 100%. To me, that’s not even connections at that point. That’s like, okay, we’re colleagues. We’re in the same business. That’s different.

John: It’s in the category of generosity, but a thing I do, which some friends do and other colleagues do, but I don’t see people do enough and I think that people should do more is, if I see a friend written up a deadline, like they sold a show or they did a thing, I’m always right there with an email saying, congratulations. I’m making it clear that I’m rooting for that person.

Craig: You’ve never sent me that email, not once.

John: Then I’ve said something like that to you.

Craig: I don’t think you have.

John: You probably have.

Craig: I’m different, I know. You know why? Because you just take me for granted. That’s why. I’m just the guy that’s there. I get it. I know how Mike feel.

John: Actually, you had a show that you were producing that was announced in Deadline, I didn’t email you [unintelligible 00:21:54].

Craig: You didn’t. Exactly.

John: How many other people– did other people email you about it?

Craig: Yes. They texts, mostly texts.

John: Texts, yes.

Craig: I don’t expect it. I don’t expect it, and also, I never do it because I don’t read Deadline.

John: That’s good for your sanity.

Craig: I think it might be.

John: Here’s what I’ll say about the dropping the email or the text. The email is good in the sense that there’s less of a pressure to respond to a thing sometimes, or like an Instagram congratulations to somebody. It’s just reestablishing. It’s making it clear that I’m rooting for you and some good things have happened in my life because that.

Like, “Oh, this is a good chance for me to catch up with this person,” or there’s actually a project I ended up doing when I sent through the congratulatory email. The guy said right back, like, “Oh, you should do this other thing.” I’m like, “Oh, yes, I should do this other thing,” and I ended up selling a project. Do those. It takes a minute to do and do it at the time.

Craig: Generally speaking, when it’s people in our business, if you’re already inside the business, I feel like you have a very specific need, want, that another person can help you with. Some friend that you and I both know called me the other day with this exact situation. “I have a problem. I think you’ve had this problem before. Let’s talk.” Those things are great. Then, of course, great job and so forth. I’m very texty about that sort of thing because I’m a teenage girl. I don’t know. Text is better.

John: Text is better for a friend or somebody if you regularly keep in touch with, or semi-regularly. For example, writer friends who I haven’t seen in six years but then I see that they sold a show.

Craig: Really?

John: I want to drop them a note.

Craig: I go text.

John: I think it was maybe I’ve actually never texted these people.

Craig: You may not even have their number. You may only have their email. That’s a different situation. Even then, I try and do the thing with text where it’s like, “Oh, can I text you via your email?” If it turns blue, just like that.

John: That works.

Craig: I always say, “This is Craig.” Never text somebody that you are not in an active conversation with.

John: If there’s not a thread back and forth.

Craig: There are a few, I have to say, that I occasionally get. It’ll happen once every two years. I’m like, “Thank you,” and I don’t know who it is because it’s a number. I’m saying this quietly like no one’s going to hear me. I can look back over six years of these. It’s too late now.

John: It’s not too late.

Craig: Can your phone do this?

John: Sorry, your name isn’t showing up.

Craig: They’re like, “Has it ever been showing up? Have you ever known who I was?” That’s what I would say. I wouldn’t. I am so against making people embarrassed for not knowing something about me. We need to have a whole podcast about how to handle the, I don’t know who you are. That’s like a whole situation. It’s a real life situation.

John: It’s in real life, for sure, too.

Craig: It’s a massive situation. It wasn’t when we started. The older you get, the more people you know.

John: There’s just more people.

Craig: It just becomes a real issue.

John: A situation that happened, we were at a restaurant way out on the west side, a place I never would have been. We’re sitting at this big table and having a good conversation. There’s a guy who’s in my eyesight who waves to me. It’s like, crap, I know I must know who that person is, but I don’t.

It was the challenge of I’m more recognizable than he is. He’s seeing me repeated in deadline stories and other things. I have no idea who he was. Fortunately, at the end, he did come over and reintroduce himself. Of course, an agent I had 15 years ago who I hadn’t seen in person in so long.

Craig: They all look the same. They wear the same clothes.

John: He did a very gracious thing. I think that’s the right approach.

Craig: He said, “Hey, it’s so and so.” There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s so much right with that. This is why it’s hard to go somewhere when your spouse, this is the case for both of us, is not in the business because they’re not going to know who the person is. When that person goes over, you are now supposed to go, “Oh, hey, Melissa, this is blah-di-di-blah.”

When I know who somebody is, I’m so proud. I’m like, trumpets, red carpet, this is so and so. Here’s what he’s done. Here’s what he did. Here’s where he came from. I’m like a Wikipedia article all of a sudden. Then the other people, I’m like, “Oh my God.”

John: Obviously, this is advice. If you’re the plus one going into one of these situations, get in there.

Craig: Get in there fast.

John: 100%. Let’s talk about other connection outreaches. Make sure to give people an out so that you’re not boxing them in. If you’re too busy, no sweat at all. Recognize when someone might be stretched thin. The last thing I’ll say is close the loop. Thank them for doing it. If there’s an update, give them the update because so often, I’ll give someone advice, I have no idea what happened. Just a follow-up email, “I just wanted to let you know this is what happened. It was great, and thank you for this.”

Craig: I can think of a couple of people that have emailed me years after I spoke with them, and did it perfectly. Reminded me of who they were. Acknowledged that I might not even remember it because it was just 30 minutes two years ago. Give me some context that might help me remember. Tell me why they’re updating me because this good thing happened. A lovely sentiment of thanks or gratitude.

John: My day is better because of it.

Craig: Then, thank you, goodbye. Perfect.

John: Perfectly done.

Craig: Perfect.

John: Wrap this up with an example of a connection that ends up paying off for everybody involved. Years ago, we were hiring a designer for the company, and I met with a bunch of people. One guy was great, but he wasn’t quite the right fit. He asked, “Hey, can I stay in touch?” I’m like, “For sure. You’re great.”

He was really good about dropping an email once a year to keeping up with where things were at. He ended up getting a job at Amazon and working on a very specific top-secret project. It was a once-a-year email and sometimes a short Zoom to catch up on stuff. We ran into a problem with our emergency pack, which is sold on Amazon, where we suddenly weren’t able to sell it because Germany was requiring this authorization. Basically, our whole account was shut down until we verified with Germany, but there were no appointments to actually do this video.

Craig: I immediately feel a pang of fear when you tell me that Germany, because of new regulations, is shutting something down. I start to panic.

John: For two months, it was this bureaucracy nightmare. Finally, I’m like, Jared works at Amazon. I don’t think he works anywhere in that department. It’s like, “Can you help?” He’s like, “Yes, I think I can help.” He was able, because he just knew people, was able to connect the things and thoughts.

I still had to do the stupid German interview, but I got it bumped up so I could, at 3:00 in the morning, talk to some German person. He made the thing happen. That’s because he was a smart person who was like, “Oh, I’m rooting for you.” He could help me out down the road.

Craig: You could make an interesting graph of how much you’re going to be helped by connections in your life. The graph will start with a line that is very low to the X-axis, and then it will not rise linearly. It will rise exponentially.

John: There’s a compounding effect to that.

Craig: The more you achieve, the closer the proximity to other people who are achieving, which means the more likely it is that you can help each other, and that grows and expands. It is very easy, I think, and reasonable to be close to the X-axis and look upwards at the people who are high on the Y-axis and go, “Well, this is unfair.” It is, but it is also just a function of reality.

I’ve thought about that a lot, actually. There’s really no way to create equity there. It’s just something that’s going to happen. At least, if you are high on the Y-axis, try to not just shut down the X-axis people completely.

John: 100%. I think I found myself doing during the WGA negotiations is we have all these big member meetings. We have them with strike captains and with members and all these forums. I wasn’t answering a lot of questions, but I was up there on the stage or I was in the audience. When people come up to the microphone, they say their name and they ask their question.

In my little notebook, I wrote down people’s names and I wrote down their question and put a star by them. That is a smart person. Sometimes afterwards, I would come up to them and thank them for asking a smart question. Just to establish a radar for, these are good people who are going to be the leaders of tomorrow, it’s always easy to remember the jerks and the idiots. When somebody is like, “Oh, that is a smart person who is asking a good question,” it’s helping you understand through the invisible mesh of trust and smartness that’s out there.

Craig: I try with the connection thing to also look for institutions. These are mentorships that aren’t already dealing with people that have other legs up. It’s not that I don’t talk to people who email me from Princeton because they get my name from the Princeton Alumni Guide. It’s just that I’m not as motivated. They’re Princeton. You got a lot going on. I’ve done my charitable work there.

It’s more interesting when other groups come and you have a chance to talk to people who don’t have– okay, well, that one didn’t pan out, but here’s 40 other people in the alumni handbag. I don’t know. I’d rather talk to other people. Sorry, my Princeton [unintelligible 00:31:51].

John: You’re setting some boundaries, too, which is a helpful way to–

Craig: Prioritizing.

John: Prioritizing. I think the final bit of advice we would probably both agree on is paying it forward. The degree to which you are benefiting from connections, make sure you’re creating connections with other people that can help lift them up.

Craig: Everybody who achieves a certain status in our business is going to get hit up by people. That’s inevitable. It’s not like you’re going to have any shortage of opportunity. Don’t never do it. Do it. You can’t do it all the time. You have to gatekeep somehow. You just have to because you have a job and you have a life.

The other thing is, sometimes, I remember thinking when I was starting out, this person just needs to give me 10 minutes of their life. I know that they’re wasting 10 minutes all the time. That is true. I am constantly wasting time. Also, I’m sorry, I can’t. If I just talk to people, then that’d be a rough life.

John: That’s one of the things. It’s like, I can’t have this conversation with each individual person, but I can have a conversation in aggregate among all these people.

Craig: Just listen to the 701–

John: Or buy the book.

Craig: Or buy the book. I keep forgetting we wrote a book. I wonder how I could forget that.

John: Let’s answer some new listener questions. Can we start here at the bottom of the list with Michael Neal?

Drew: Michael writes, “I had my first kid at the beginning of the year.”

John: Congratulations.

Drew: “Well, my wife had the kid. I was the cheerleader.”

Craig: Well done.

Drew: “When I watch film and TV now, I find myself having much stronger reactions to scenes, even ones I’d seen before. They don’t even have to involve kids. When I talked to my mom, she said she had to stop watching horror movies for years after I was born, and I was her second kid. After you both had your kids, was there anything that changed about your viewing habits or how you reacted to film and TV? Was there something specific that surprised you?”

John: I’m trying to think whether my viewing habits changed greatly. Obviously, at a certain point when she started watching TV shows, I was watching a bunch of inane TV shows with her. I think we talked about it on the show. I used to swear a fair amount, and it just stopped completely suddenly. It really is awkward for me to swear now.

Craig: Whoa. I started swearing more.

John: You did?

Craig: Yes, because of those effing babies. I don’t think there was anything that changed in terms of taste. My threshold for, yes, I want to see that, went way higher because I had a kid. That is a question of, would you like to not be with your baby and see this movie that, whatever? Just because people are like, “Oh, it might be–“ It just changed. It changed.

I used to see movies all the time. I would watch a lot of different shows and things, and then it just changed after that. It does change you. This is why critics are unreliable. Think about what he’s saying. It changes. As your life changes, you change, your taste changes, your ability to appreciate or not appreciate something changes. The rhetoric of, I have deemed this good or bad, just doesn’t make sense. It’s an odd thing.

John: My sensitivity towards onscreen when children are in danger probably shifted a little bit. It’s not like I was like, “Oh, I want that kid in peril.”

Craig: You used to love it.

John: I think there’s always the aspect of watching something is that you’re imagining yourself in that situation. When you have a kid, that kid is an extension of you and you’re imagining that kid being hurt. It feels like it’s a part of you.

Craig: I think maybe I probably did also empathize more with parental characters whose children were in danger. It is a different feeling. It’s a bit intellectual prior to that, and it becomes incredibly middle brain when you’ve had a kid and your limbic system is getting triggered by Liam Neeson getting a phone call and taken.

John: My eyes are on Mike. Watching the end of Toy Story 3 when the kid is going off to college, just broke him. He couldn’t even think about it without sobbing.

Craig: Interesting.

John: That was directly a factor of having a kid and not being able to imagine our daughter going to college. Then the teenage years make you really ready to leave.

Craig: Get out. It’s almost like it’s all planned. They make it so that you finally are like– although my youngest is living with us right now, which is great. She could get her own place, but you know why she’s living with us? She’s like, “It’s better here.”

John: Honestly, it’s better.

Craig: Yes, it is. It’s cool. We’re good. You’re all right. Just stop making a mess.

John: Let’s answer a question that actually ties back into our initial connections question. We have a question here from Tara Garwood, which is related to connections.

Drew: “I’m almost finished with my first screenplay, a horror comedy, which I wrote under the mentorship of two well-known Hollywood horror screenwriters. As someone living outside LA, how can I best proceed with my first screenplay and mentors who are presumably willing to help me out?”

John: Great. Tara, congrats on this project. We don’t know how you got it to these horror screenwriters, but if they’re actually working in the business, they’re great connections for you here. The real issue is, how do you let them help you in a way that they’re going to be able to help you and not be too much of a hassle to them? They can connect you to other people, including a rep, a manager, somebody else. They can just get your script in front of people, and that’s going to be the most helpful thing to you going forward.

Craig: Sounds like you know what to do. You’ve got two people. They’re your mentors. You’ve written something. Depending on how close that mentorship is, you might want to say, “Hey, I’ve written the script. I’m not going to make you read the whole thing. Unless you really want to, just read the first 10 pages. Just read the first 10. You don’t even have to respond. If you do, I’ll send the rest.”

John: Assuming they like it– I went into this question assuming that they had read the whole thing, which would be great, but if they haven’t, that’s also fine. If they can help you find other people to talk to so it’s not just them all the time, will be good. That’s why I was trying to look for a manager or just like, who else do you think I should talk to? Who else could be a good connection here because that feels useful and important?

You’re outside of LA, which is great and it’s fine, but I think you need to find some other writers, people in this space who you can talk to so it’s not just on the backs of these two mentor people because they will burn out if they’re getting an email from you every two weeks.

Craig: Yes, eventually they will burn out, no question.

John: Cool. Let’s do a question here from Reid.

Drew: “John and Craig compared being hired on a weekly project as making a corpse presentable enough for an open casket funeral.”

John: That was Craig’s.

Craig: That’s me. It’s not always like that. Sometimes it’s like that, yes.

Drew: “Well, when you’re in a situation like this or in the throes of rewriting a scene for the fifth or sixth time, how can you tell if you’re actually improving it or are you just making it different?”

John: Sometimes you’re just making it different for the sake of freshness and just dealing with people’s egos and needs and situation. You have to be honest with yourself when it’s like, this is not a better version of the scene, it’s just a different version of the scene that starts in a different place, it goes to a different place, it has different words, but hopefully it’s serving the same function.

When you’re actually trying to improve a thing, I think you need to step back and look at, what is the function this is trying to serve? Is it consistent with the tone and the voice and the spirit of the movie, and especially the section of the movie or the section of the storytelling? Is it fresher? Is it more exciting for an audience to encounter? That’s hard. We’ve talked a lot about it in comedy. Sometimes you forget that things are funny because you’re just exposed to them so many times.

Craig: I remember reading about Mozart when I was a kid and how he was able to learn some classical piece when he was seven, and then just sort of extemporaneously create seven versions of it. I just thought, “Well, what are those versions?” Well, turns out if you are a writer, you could do seven versions of something. You understand, then, what versioning is. When you’re in a situation where you’re on one of these deals, you’re usually trying to make one person happy. Sometimes that one person is happy because you’ve made somebody else happy. You’re trying to make the head of the studio happy.

They say, “What would make me happy is if this star agrees to get on the plane and fly there to do the movie. Right now, this is what he or she wants.” Great. How would this do? “Almost, but they want this or they don’t want that.” Got it. What about this version? Really, you’re not writing anything that is expressive of you. You are versioning until someone goes that because you actually don’t know. Nobody knows. You’re just trying to get people to say, “Oh, yes. Okay, that. That’s what I think this should all be.” Then it is useful because then everybody can go, “Oh, we were making Meatloaf, but you wanted Baked Alaska. Okay. Let’s realign.

John: That is the frustration is often they’ll focus on the script because that script is the thing they can control, but the issue isn’t the script at all. The issue is the actor, the director, the location-

Craig: Always.

John: -the budget, it’s all this other stuff. The problem never was the words on the page, but the words on the page are the only thing that can change. That’s what they’re focusing on. You’re getting paid, hopefully well to do impossible things and do the least damage possible while you’re doing it.

Craig: There are, I think, a lot of situations where studios like an idea that is inherent to a script, and they find an actor that means something and a director that means something who also really like the idea of that script. Everybody agrees the script could “use work,” meaning the execution of that idea isn’t thrilling to them. There be dragons because what happens then is a parade of highly paid, extremely competent writers all versioning to figure it well, is it this? Is it this?

John: The truth is there’s no one decision maker. It gets off like a consensus situation. There’s not a king to please.

Craig: There is no king to please. Everybody’s fighting with everybody over it. Everybody wants it to be something, and none of them have the ability to write two words together, not two, and there’s the problem. You go in, as we’ve talked about this before, in those situations, you are a surgeon, you are a mortician. You are also a therapist, you are a diplomat, you are a priest, confessor, you are so many things to so many different people.

It is one of the great ironies of the feature side of our business that those are some of the highest-paid people in Hollywood who are still treated like crap in their own way. It’s like, “Well, we’re not treating you like crap, we’re giving you all this money.” Also, change everything because somebody that shouldn’t have any power whatsoever doesn’t like the word blue.

John: Oh, yes. Their notes are like, “I don’t like seeing people eat on screen.” Sure. I recognize that you’re number seven on the power structure here, but also if I don’t yield on this, you’re going to dig in your heels to the other side. I’m going to need you to fight on my side for something else.

Craig: Also, I’m not going to be here in two weeks. I’m gone, right? One actor, his issue was he just didn’t like dialogue when he was standing. He wanted to be moving. Well, I’ve got a director and a producer who are like, “This is a scene where there’s nowhere to go.” I don’t know. What if? Now, this is the problem I’m trying to solve. This is not a writing problem.

John: No.

Craig: It’s really not. Now it’s just this weird puzzle of like, oh, well, I still want this lovely scene where Vito Corleone is talking to Michael Corleone in the garden and explaining to him the innermost truths of running a mafia family. Let’s say Al Pacino was like, “But I don’t want to sit. I want to be walking.” Marlon Brando was like, “Well, I don’t want to be walking. I want to sit.” Now I’m not doing art at all.

John: No.

Craig: Now it’s Lego.

John: It is Lego. How does it assemble properly? All right. Let’s draw one cool thing. Mine is an article by Cate Hall in her newsletter, Useful Fictions, called 50 Things I Know. There’s an industry out of this newsletter like lists of stuff I’ve learned over the course of the years. They’re skimmable, but I thought hers were really good. I’m just going to hit the first three here, Craig, and see how you respond.

She says, “You are allowed to care about people who don’t care about you and even people who dislike you. The way you feel about someone can be totally decoupled from how they feel about you. In fact, uncovering your capacity to love people who will never fully reciprocate it is the definition of grace.”

Craig: Yes, that’s a beautiful thought.

John: It’s also a good theme for a screenplay. That’s a good dramatic question.

Craig: Yes, it is. The idea of unrequited love implies an unfairness and a wound. Here’s something that changes when you’re a parent. It’s unrequited love. Their love for you is not like your love for them, nor will it ever be.

John: It’s never going to be perfectly reciprocal.

Craig: Never. You don’t really, nor should you really require it to. That’s an example where you just go, “I’m going to care about you.” There’s no quid pro quo. This is how it goes. Yes, there are people that you can do that with.

John: Second point, if you’re unsure how to have better opinions, try just having fewer of them for a start.

Craig: Well, first of all, what is a better opinion? [laughs] I’m not sure what that means.

John: What is a better opinion? I guess you pull that apart. To me, it’s–

Craig: Maybe justified.

John: Justified opinion, yes.

Craig: Instead of just saying stuff because.

John: I feel like sometimes you have this instinct of like, “Well, I have to have an opinion on something.”

Craig: No, you don’t.

John: I don’t have an opinion. No.

Craig: I don’t know, and I’m not sure are wonderful phrases.

John: “The most dangerous people have an exquisitely tuned sense of just how much they can get away with when it comes to how they treat different people, so pay special attention when others have sharply diverging opinions of someone’s character. Lots of variance in opinion about whether an idea is good means there’s a good chance the idea is good. Lots of variance in opinion about whether a person is good is a warning sign. If you’re hearing a lot of diverging reports about a person, that’s a red flag, and that feels true to me.”

Craig: Yes, I can understand her point that people that you would want to treat well are saying, “Oh, this person’s wonderful.” Well, yes, because they’re probably wonderful to you. Then, ‘Oh, these are people for which there is no reward if you treat them well, and all of those people are saying this person’s a monster.” The agent that a big star loves but all the assistants loathe, yes, that’s going to be a person who’s probably not great.

John: Going back to connections, I got a call from a writer who was asking about an actor who I’d worked with, and I could tell him that obviously this should be on a phone call. Don’t text this. Don’t email this. I can say, I had a really good experience with them, and I know that other people have not had good experiences with them. I personally did not encounter that at all. I would say keep asking and check on people, but I also wonder if there’s just a bad mix of personalities and types.

Craig: Yes, qualifying, things like that, all the time. Absolutely. I’m very nervous about saying, “Oh, this person is “bad.” It’s best to talk about your experience with somebody. I try to lead with, I’m just one person. I do think that there are people about whom I’ve been warned who turned out to be great. Then my question is, “What’s the deal with you? You warned me about this person.” There are people who warn you, and they warn you in a careful way.

They go, look, here’s the context. The truth is all of us can be warned about. We all have something that isn’t going to work with someone else. We’re not compatible with everyone. The warning should be not something abusive, horrible, racist, whatever. It’s just these are the ins and outs of this person. If you don’t mind a person like this, great.

John: Those are 3 of the 50 recommendations on Cate Hall’s Useful Fictions. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. Craig, what do you have for us?

Craig: Well, it’s fun. We were talking about connections today. My one cool thing is a new game, Pips. Love it. Have you been playing it?

John: I tried the demo and did not click for me. Tell me what’s working for you about Pips in your brain.

Craig: First, let me admire the puzzle that I did this morning. Pips, it’s pretty simple. It’s a dominoes-style game. Unlike dominoes, where every square of a domino has to match up to another one, what they do is they give you a little grid, a little snaky grid, in which to place the collection of dominoes they’ve given you for that puzzle. They’ve created regions inside of the grid that have constrictions. For instance, in today’s, there was an area where the numbers in this one region had to equal 10. There’s another area where a plus sign region had to all have the same number.

I played it on hard because I got to be honest with you, it’s a pretty easy game. It’s a lovely little easy logic puzzle. When it clicks, there’s a very odd satisfaction to it. What I also like is, as much as I love words, there’s a lot of word-letter-based stuff here, connections, spelling bee, Wordle. I do the Sudoku occasionally. Sudoku is just Sudoku. It’s so number, crunchy, simple in its own way. It’s just straight dead logic. This at least requires me to move shapes around, which is not my strong suit. I like the spatial aspect. It’s fun and it’s quick.

John: Their games are quick. It’s interesting because The New York Times games were originally just digital versions of things that could be done on paper and pencil. This is an example of the thing that couldn’t happen on paper and pencil. Wordle couldn’t happen on paper and pencil.

Craig: No. Wordle could not happen on paper and pencil. Now, this is my chance to decry the removal of the acrostics. I don’t understand. I will never understand why The New York Times just– Mike, how much could it have cost to pay Henry Cox and Emily Rathvon every two weeks to bring acrostic? Come on. It was perfect for digital. If ever they were a puzzle made for digital, it was that. I don’t care if 12 people did it. I was one of them. Boo.

John: Boo.

Craig: Boo.

John: It wasn’t bad enough to make you cancel your account, which is why they didn’t do it.

Craig: I know, but I’m still–

John: There’s still time.

Craig: I’m still out here being– you know what? They’ve never encountered a cranky, rigid customer in the top of [crosstalk]. Listen to me, I’m still the most flexible customer I have.

John: That is our show for this week. It’s produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Spencer Lackey. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today on the show.

You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes. We are also scriptnotespodcast on Instagram. We’re posting stuff about the show and the book, and new vertical videos on there too.

We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkware. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes with the links for all the things we talked about today, and the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to those premium subscribers who make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Lego.

Craig, thanks for a good connections episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. We are looking at a vase full of– vase or vase? Are you a vase or vase person?

Craig: I’m a vase person.

John: I’m vase as well.

Craig: That’s a very New York way of doing it.

John: Yes. Full of Lego flowers. Can you describe it for the listeners at home?

Craig: Yes. It’s actually quite beautiful. I’ve made Lego flowers of a more chunky, tulipy kind. These are more delicate. It’s like a lovely bouquet with a couple of orange blossoms, some pink ones, some rose-looking ones. Then they even got that baby’s breath vibe going on and some nice stem work.

John: Yes. My daughter assembled these before she headed off to college this semester. It’s Lego. Things snap together, but there’s no blocks to this. There’s no three-by-two, the classic Lego block, to this all.

Craig: I will be honest, if you asked me, is this a Lego brand thing, I’d have to look close. I know that these little nubs, for instance, are very Lego-y, but this could be another brand of assembled plastic pieces.

John: I want to talk about that a little bit because I love Lego. I’ve loved Lego as a kid. I’ve built some things. I was looking around the office here. I have my Lego R2-D2. I have my Lego typewriter. I love them. Yet, at a certain point, the kits became so specific. The pieces are so bespoke. The flower here is the most recent example of these are not things you could apply to anything else. Basically, the kits are just to resemble this one specific thing. If you were to try to pull this apart and use them in other ways, they wouldn’t be useful. The joy of Lego growing up was just there’s a trash bag full of blocks, and we would just build houses out of them.

Craig: The Titanic does mostly have useful items.

John: Yes. You said on the show that you built a Lego Titanic.

Craig: I built the Lego Titanic.

John: The Lego Death Star, Millennium Falcon?

Craig: I built the Lego Death Star, the Lego Millennium Falcon, the big ones. Those I ended up just breaking down and giving them to my kids to play with.

John: [unintelligible 00:54:47].

Craig: Yes, because they were young and they wanted to. I’m not going to be that guy who’s like, “No, this is my Millennium Falcon.” I’m an adult here. The Titanic is in my office. This is awesome. It’s the biggest Legos out there. It’s huge. Then I built a lot of– this is what I do in prep usually when I go home. I did the Pac-Man arcade one and the Mario on TV, the Nintendo one. There’s a lot of fun things like that. I agree with you when they get too bespoke. For instance, I did Rivendell, the Lord of the Rings setting.

John: Yes, I saw that. It was on your table, yes.

Craig: That one’s a D&D one. The Rivendell one, I ended up breaking down. Like you said, it was too– by the way, it’s why I haven’t finished the D&D one. I just left it on the table because it’s sort of too far into not Lego.

John: There’s the spectrum of– there’s the model kits that you assemble, which are like, growing up, you glue together the thing, and it perfectly forms this one thing, which is exactly the replica of this thing. There was a classic Lego, which is just a bunch of blocks you can assemble any way you want to do. I just feel like we’ve gone so far over towards the assemble this perfectly to this thing.

It is a skill to follow those instructions and be able to do the engineering feats of what these new things can do, like what this typewriter can do, are remarkable. I’m sure it’s good for our visual intelligence, but also I worry that it robs us of some of our– it’s not a new thought. This is in the Lego movie, too, but it robs us of some of our individual agency to build things ourselves. Which is why our friend Phil, who’s just building this giant ship out of just a block seat himself, I’m inspired by.

Craig: If I weren’t imaginative as part of my job, but this is actually a weird refuge from that where I don’t have to create anything. I don’t have to worry about variations. I don’t have puzzles to solve about architecture. My job is to zen out and do something that I can do perfectly.

John: That’s what I miss about standardized tests where actually like there’s a correct answer to things because everything we do in our writing lives, there’s just like, is that the right way to do it? Sure.

Craig: There’s no [unintelligible 00:57:07]. It’s even worse. Sometimes there is a right way to do something, and everyone is like, “Yes, but do it differently,” which is the worst feeling. You want me to do the test wrong.

John: Yes, absolutely. I gave you the right version of the scene. Now you want me to start from the heart. It’s frustrating.

Craig: It’s frustrating. Yes, I still do love following instructions. It’s such a nice, simple–

John: Well, I think it appeals to your puzzle brain, too. There’s an answer, there’s a conclusion, it can be done.

Craig: Yes. Puzzles, the fun part is I have the pieces. I just need to understand how they fit together, whether it’s words, or numbers, or anything. With Lego, I actually am not thinking at all. It’s a way to stop thinking. I’m just obeying in a safe way.

John: This is actually interesting because you hate jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles, it’s ambiguous for a long time, that things click together. While there is that state of completion, there’s no instruction manual. It’s like this piece could be one of a thousand things in it.

Craig: Yes. A jigsaw “puzzle” is a bit like if I said, here is a Lego typewriter, here are all the pieces, here’s the instruction guide, but I’ve jumbled the pages and I haven’t numbered them. Well, let’s look through these pages. Do you think this maybe is where it starts? This is busy work. For what? A picture of a hamburger or a cat jumping over a thing?

John: I will say, building the Lego R2-D2, there were some ambiguous sections. I think the assembly books are really good, but there were some ambiguous situations where I don’t know if I did this right, and it’s going to take 20 steps before I realize if I did it right.

Craig: That is part of the process, is the, uh-oh, flip back and go, “Oh my God, I was supposed to put the dark gray piece and not the black piece. Okay, let’s undo, undo, undo because it must be right.” It drives me crazy. The one thing that I wish Lego would do– so they’re very good in a way now about supplying you with extra bits of little tiny things. The problem is they don’t tell you what the extra bits are. They should say at the end of a chapter, “By the way, we were hoping that you would have these extra bits, so if you do, don’t panic.”

John: So you didn’t make the mistakes.

Craig: If you have two extra bits of something, you probably screwed up. One thing that I know is true is the piece that you need to make it is there. You might think it’s not there. You might be panicking. It’s there. Either you’re not seeing it, or you don’t understand what the shape is, or it’s on the floor, or it’s in the box. It’s there.

John: It’s Scott Frank’s advice. Don’t move until you see it. It’s there.

Craig: That’s Steve Zaillian.

John: Oh, Steve Zaillian. You’re right.

Craig: Yes. Don’t move until you see it.

John: All right. Lego flowers, I guess we’re going to keep them. The weird thing about this bouquet is it’s really pretty from a distance, and it’s actually pretty up close. There’s a middle range where it’s just like, ugh.

Craig: I think I’m in that middle range, and I’m still appreciating it because– you know what? It’s arranged very nicely because I don’t imagine the arrangement was dictated quite that.

John: It’s going to be a different vase for each.

Craig: Right. Your daughter put that together. She has an eye for arranging flowers, so she’ll never be hungry.

John: Absolutely, because there’s always going to be a market.

Craig: People love flowers.

John: People love flowers. I used to buy flowers, and then I realized, this is dumb. I don’t really enjoy having them.

Craig: Or horrible. You know who loves flowers?

John: Elsa. Yes, sorry. I can appreciate watching a Martha Stewart where halfway the flowers are like, “Oh, that’s beautiful, but I don’t want it there.”

Craig: There’s a bunch of vegetables, and then they’re dead within minutes. It doesn’t matter what you do, they’re dead, and they smell. They smell while they die, and then the bugs come.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: What is this– and it’s, “Ooh, look at the sad flowers, they’re all dead.” Yes, that’s why I don’t like clowns either.

John: Oh, flowers die.

Craig: Like, oh, happy? No, no, scary.

John: Which reminds me, I think my daughter has a bouquet of flowers up in her room, which is she’s probably-

Craig: Oh dear God.

John: -going to get rid of because she’s just gone.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: I’ll smell it, so yes.

Craig: That needs to go.

John: Quickly.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: Right. Thanks, Craig.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Thanks, Drew.

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