Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has even more swearing than usual, so if you’re in a car with your kids, this is a standard warning about that.

[applause]

Craig Mazin: Hi. Hello.

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

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is the holiday live show of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are–

Audience: Interesting to screenwriters.

Craig: Every time they do it, they get more and more bored.

John: Yes.

Craig: Interesting to screen–

John: I know. It feels like an obligation. It feels like a chore, but it’s never a chore.

Craig: It’s a little bit like Christmas.

John: Aww. Do you enjoy Christmas? Do you enjoy the holidays?

Craig: I actually love Christmas.

John: I know you like cooking. You like baking.

Craig: I do, but also, I love Christmas because when I was a kid I wasn’t allowed to have Christmas, because Jew.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That was a real thing when I was growing up. Yes, sure. I wanted a Christmas tree and I just thought, “Oh, we can at least get a Christmas tree.” No.

John: No Christmas tree?

Craig: No, because that meant you were “giving in.”

John: See, last night, I was over at Aline’s house, Aline Brosh McKenna from — you know, our Joan Rivers — and she was having a Christmas tree decorating party. It was really, really fun, so I thought maybe you got to have that joy, but no?

Craig: Does it look like I’ve ever had any joy? That’s not what happens, but I do, I love Christmas time. I love Christmas stuff. I love Christmas music. I love the time of year. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m like a little elf.

John: Yes, and you’ve got some red socks on. One thing I always love about this show is this show is a benefit for Hollywood HEART. Let’s remember what Hollywood HEART is. They are a great charity that provides summer camping experiences for kids who otherwise would not be able to go to summer camp. We want to support them every year, so this is a benefit for them. Thank you everybody who bought a ticket tonight. Thank you for great charity. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Thank you, Hollywood HEART for having us.

Craig: It’s great to do this each year, and we give how much? Half of the money to them?

John: We give every single penny out of tonight goes to them, plus we are chipping in on top of that, so we’re matching dollar for dollar. Everything raised here is going to Hollywood HEART. Sorry. Sorry, Craig.

Craig: Okay. Fine.

John: All right. You’re going to have to sell another show or something to make up for what we’re giving up tonight.

Craig: Fine.

John: Let’s talk about tonight. Tonight we have three very special guests. Oh, here’s the thing. The people who are listening to this at home who are clicking through their podcast player, they know who’s on the show, but you in the audience, I don’t think you do. Do you?

Audience: No.

John: Oh, this is pretty exciting.

Craig: Or, they’re like, they just get up and walk out.

John: Like, oh, my God, they’re storming the doors. First off, we have Jac Schaefer, creator of WandaVision and Agatha All Along. She is here to walk us down that Witches’ road. We’ll ask her all sorts of questions about how she put that show together and also why it kind of made me want to become a lesbian. There’s something about that show that just pulled me over in that strange direction.

Craig: How’s it going?

John: It’s going pretty well.

Craig: Great.

John: Looking at Aubrey Plaza and I’m like, yeah, I see that.

Craig: Same. Then we’ll sit down with Brian Jordan Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig of English Teacher. That’s right. To talk about their hit series and how to work with your bestie without killing each other, which I think you and I have done a really good job of.

John: I think we’ve done a pretty good job. We can always get some more help. We can always get some more hints from the experts there. And not intentionally, Craig, but somehow we booked the creators of the gayest shows of the season.

Craig: I’m going to give them a run for their money, I’ve got to be honest with you.

John: All right. Season two, right?

Craig: Yes.

John: All right, and Craig, you have a special game that we’re going to play.

Craig: Yes, we’re going to do a special little Christmas song game in the middle of the show. I’m very excited about it. It’s got a little twist.

John: Craig put it all in the workflow, but he’s like, “Don’t look at it,” so I didn’t look at it. It’s a surprise to me as well.

Craig: You will be a contestant.

John: I’ll be a contestant.

Craig: There will be two exciting guest contestants.

John: Yes. Who just found out they’re going to be a guest contestant. We’re so excited for that. We’re also going to have a raffle, which is raising more money for this incredible charity of Hollywood HEART. Now, there’s three things you can win in this raffle. One of them is a guaranteed audience question.

Craig: Otherwise known as a GAQ.

John: Yes. If you put your name in for the– I hear Megana’s voice laughing. I’m so excited.

Craig: She’s the only one that really loves me.

John: If you put in a thing for raffle, you could get a chance to ask a question of us and this amazing panel. So it’s time to be thinking about what question would you want to ask?

Craig: Yes. you certainly don’t want to flop on the Christmas show.

John: No, you better ask a good fucking question.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yes.

Craig: Whoa.

John: Yes, I just swore. That’s how serious I am about this.

Craig: Oh, my.

John: I know, the vapors. We should not waste any more time. Let’s bring out Jac Schaefer, is a writer, director, and a showrunner who created two very witchy series. Jac Schaefer.

[applause]

[Music: The Ballad of the Witches’ Road]

Jac Shaeffer: Oh, I got a little lost on my witches’ road to the stage.

John: Yes, you got to go follow the arrows.

Jac: There were arrows, it couldn’t have been easier.

John: So we played you out to the Witches’ Road song. I want to start with that question. How early in the creation of Agatha All Along, which is so spectacular, but how early did that you know that okay, we need a song, and the song is not going to be theme music, but it’s actually be a fundamental part of the narrative of the series.

Jac: We always knew there would be music because it was so central to WandaVision. I had sort of a checklist for when we decided to do the Agatha show. Here are the things we need. We need another bop, or bops, plural. We need hair, makeup, wardrobe. We need opportunities to see her conning. We needed a meta piece. We needed to examine some form of tropes. The music piece sort of dovetailed with a larger mantra that I had, which is I wanted the show to be a spell. That was my sort of guiding light. As we sort of worked it in the room, I think it was probably three weeks in that it became that the song is the spell. It started as like, it’s the thing that opens the road. It’s the spell that opens the road. Then as we worked it more, it became it’s actually– I’m spoiling everything if you haven’t watched it.

John: I was just going to say that.

Jac: Sorry. Have you seen the show?

John: If you have not seen WandaVision, leave right now and go home and watch it, then listen to the episode afterwards.

Jac: Yes. It became it’s actually the con. It’s Agatha’s con. It’s the spell she is placing on the characters around her, on witches globally and, this was my big aspiration, on the audience. That it’s, she’s pulling one over on the audience with this centuries-long con that is the song.

Craig: In listening to you talk about it, it just sort of reinforces this question I’m dying to ask you. Because in your show and the way your narrative is structured, there seemingly is infinite possibilities. You could do almost anything. I love that you put these interesting restrictions on yourself. I’m really interested when you said work it, right? You guys can go down so many different witches’ roads. How do which ones feel consistent with some sort of, I don’t want to say rules, but a consistency when the nature of supernatural narrative is that you can kind of do whatever you want.

Jac: It takes so much discipline. And it’s something that I learned on WandaVision. Because Wanda’s power is that she can make anything happen, and that’s too much and too big. So in order for it to hold together and be satisfying for the audience, we have to put restrictions on that kind of in every way. One of the early discoveries on WandaVision was we knew we were going to do Wanda and Vision and sitcoms. It was actually Kevin Feige who early on helped us realize that we needed to limit the sitcoms we were doing. Because there’s workplace sitcoms. We were looking at Cheers. We were looking at Seinfeld. We were looking at Golden Girls. We were looking at all kinds of stuff, but it didn’t have any rigor. There wasn’t any reason.

John: Rigor. Great word.

Jac: Because it was like, what is Wanda after? Wanda is after the perfect nuclear family. That actually then pushed to the side All in the Family. It even pushed Roseanne to the side, because any sort of like larger social commentary or reflection, any political element, we were only entertaining aspirational family sitcoms. That was a revelation to me, what that did for us, because it meant that the themes were so supported and her journey was so supported. Then we applied that same ethos and that same sort of restriction in Agatha All Along. It was all about Agatha’s journey and supporting these characters and truly what is a witch? That’s what we came back to every time.

Craig: Got it.

John: That question of what is a witch is what you went into this writer’s room with. As you assembled your team, one thing I really like about how you set up Agatha All Along, is that it is sort of a heist. You’re putting together a team in order to perform a heist, which is to sort of get down this witches’ road. You were assembling a team of writers for this writer’s room. How much did you know on that first day? What could you tell them about, this is what the show is going to be about, let’s work a way to get there.

Jac: Yes. I like to have a very robust document going in that says, here’s what we have, here’s what we’re missing, here is what I desperately want to achieve. With the Agatha document, at the top, it said, “The show is a spell.” Then it was sort of explaining conceptually what I meant by that. For me, it was like The NeverEnding Story, it was The Usual Suspects. It was these pieces where at the end, there is a twist that feels right, but you realize you have been duped, and it’s expansive.

With The NeverEnding Story, it’s like, the whole thing unfolds and you realize you’ve been a part of it the whole time. That’s a children’s movie, but it turned my head around. It was an ecstatic feeling. That was the aspiration, is how do we pull the audience into our coven? One of the ways you do that is you hire the Lopez’s to write an earworm. The song really did cast a spell, and that is a trick of a lot of really talented people. The document is also very brass tacks of like, here are the characters we’re looking at, here is who– Like the Marvel rules to things, it’s like here’s who’s on deck for us. Should we partake? Here’s who we have to stay away from.

I was desperate to have them do a Fleetwood Mac style performance. I didn’t know how it fit. I didn’t know what it was, but I was like, I have this bee in my bonnet and it’s never going to go away. That ended up leading to, has everyone seen the live performance of Fleetwood Mac in their reunions?

Craig: Silver Springs.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: The greatest moment of all time.

Jac: The greatest moment of all time.

Craig: When she screams her anger in his face. Stevie Nicks is singing this song and she’s just singing it right into Lindsay Buckingham’s face.

Jac: Into his face.

Craig: Because it’s about him. I’ll follow you down and I’ll haunt you.

Jac: I will haunt you.

Craig: I will haunt you.

Jac: The sound of my voice will haunt you–

Craig: Forever. He’s like-

[laughter]

and she’s like, no, no, I’m going to say it again.

Jac: She’s like, “I am currently casting a hex on your face-

Craig: It’s incredible, you’ve got to google it.

Jac: -with my talent, with my anger.” I made the room watch it. I talked to the Lopezes about it. I was like, “This is what we’re doing because I believe I saw a witch.” Every time I watch that clip, I’m like, “That’s a fucking witch.”

Craig: She was known as the white witch. That’s what I think they called her, the white witch. Is that right?

Jac: She’s what– she is still on the planet. She’s somewhere.

John: Oh, no, she’s still here.

Jac: Praise Stevie, don’t come at me. That was in the document, was like a thing that I’m like, this is a dream. If we can integrate this in a way that makes sense, let’s do that. We didn’t know the Witches’ road, that was a missing piece. That’s something I call the container, like I need a container and–

Craig: Go into that a little more like as a practical tip.

Jac: I’m relatively new to television, I’m more of a feature person. What I find like enchanting about TV and also terrifying is that it can go in a million directions. How do you organize your episodes? What makes sense to me, and I also love non-linear storytelling, but like, what do you hang on to? The container for me is the thing that holds it all together. In WandaVision, the container is the hex. She created this hex. We made all the rules to the hex. We made sort of like all the sort of limitations of it and how it works and how she sort of has to understand it.

We had a vocabulary for what the different things were. We called them weirdnesses when something odd would happen. On the page, when we were in sitcom mode, the page would look normal. Then when we were stepping out, it would be italicized and have some bold in it. It needed to be organized in that way. That was my first time working with what I call the container.

Then for Agatha, I knew her character inside and out. I knew this was a story of a liar and that the point A to point B was, she’s a liar, we get to see her truth. I knew we were doing her and Billy and what that journey was and what it meant, but I didn’t know where were they going to be. How do we justify–

Craig: What are we supposed to write?

Jac: Yes. What’s the world and how do we make it big enough for the show, but contained enough where it doesn’t fly off into outer space? The road became that thing.

John: Now, one of the challenges you’re facing as you’re coming up on Agatha, which is after WandaVision, we sort of have an expectation of what Agatha All Along is going to be like.

Jac: Yes.

John: You know that each episode has to do certain things, but that the audience is going to have a discussion and an expectation of like, oh, this is this thing, this is this thing. How much, as you were putting together episodes, were you trying to anticipate this is what the internet is going to think is happening next and here’s how we honor that, stay ahead of that, use that to our advantage.

Jac: I don’t really think about it like the internet. I think about it– I’m constantly thinking about an audience’s experience, because what I want more than anything is I want that gasp. That like the moment where your brain starts to anticipate, “Oh my God, is that what’s happening?” That it is and you were right. Oh my God, and that thrill of that. Then, I also want everyone to laugh and it’s great when people cry and it’s great when people sing, but like that sort of thrill that makes you lean forward. What I wanted with this one, like it was so exciting when we hatched– Megan McDonnell is here, and she was one of the writers on episode four in WandaVision. Episode four where we stepped out of the sitcom.

One of the things that I loved about– I’m talking a lot about WandaVision because they’re–

Craig: You worked on it, that’s fine.

Jac: I did. I sort of diagnosed for myself that a sitcom lulls you, that you get into this place of comfort. I can count on one hand the times when a sitcom deviated and how distressing that was and how it made me– Like in Growing Pains when Carol Seaver’s boyfriend died, played by Matthew Perry. I was like, I’m going to throw up. This is not supposed to happen in this world. The idea that we could lull the audience three episodes of like, we’re moving through time and we’re going to episode style each time. Right? This feels good. This feels good.

Craig: Get people in a rut, get them leaning.

Jac: Yes. Then episode four would be like, just kidding. We’re back in the MCU with a different character. We’re like back in time. I wanted to do that again, but I was like, well, we can’t do it in episode four, so we did it in episode six. I tried to bundle it with the mystery of this team. This time when we get our step out bottle episode and we’re backfilling, we’re getting so much more information that the audience has been craving. It’s sort of– If that answers your question.

John: Absolutely. You’re really thinking about how do you make episode by episode so rewarding for the audience that they’re desperate to see the next episode. You and Craig both have the luxury or not like the way TV should be made, which is that week by week, there’s that weekly anticipation of the next episode. Now somebody can stream it all at once, but if they’re watching it in the real time, they’re part of a cultural moment, like trying to figure out what’s happening next.

Jac: Right. I love the theories. They make me really sick and keep me up at night, but like that audience engagement, it’s incredible.

Craig: Do you ever have that moment where you’re looking through some stuff and it’s–

Jac: It’s a better idea than I had?

Craig: No.

Jac: It happens a lot.

Craig: That’s actually never happened to me.

[laughter]

But people are trying to figure out like, this is what’s going to happen, this is what’s going to happen. The more sure they are, the wronger they are. Then one sort of random person says literally everything correct.

Jac: Tiny little voice.

Craig: They don’t even get told no, they’re just ignored.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: Yes, I’m like, you, a screenwriter.

Jac: I know. I wish I could think of an example of when that happened-

Craig: I want to rescue them, you know.

Jac: -a couple of time. I know. I want to be like, oh, I see you.

Craig: Yes, you got it.

Jac: You’re so smart.

Craig: There was like a guy that was like, here’s how I think every episode is going to start and finish in season one of The Last of Us. Nailed it. Nailed it. I was like, gah.

Jac: Yes.

Craig: Everyone’s like, shut up.

Jac: There’s this incredible TikToker and it’s terrible that I don’t know her name. If anyone knows who I’m talking about, please shout her name, she’s really great. She did a hilarious video. I can swear and say–

John: Yes, we understand.

Craig: You fucking can.

Jac: Great.

Craig: It’s fucking Christmas.

Jac: She did this hilarious fucking thing, where she was talking about like– She was like, “What kind of like cunty theater kid queen made The Witches’ Road? Like, ooh, the trial is we got to down a bottle of Merlot. We’ve got to like all like perform like Fleetwood Mac. We got to get together and be a band.” She was like, “Who’s the queen doing this?” And then it’s Billy Maximoff.

Craig: Yes.

Jac: Yes. I sent it to the room and I was like, “This is too delicious. I hope she feels rad when she realizes that she was right all along.”

Craig: That’s gorgeous.

John: Let’s talk about your room. Let’s talk about the room and who you assembled and why you pick the writers you pick. Obviously, you had that first session where they’re getting this document and your goals and plans for it. How do you like to run a room? What does a room look like to you?

Jac: I love assembling a room. I love running a room. I had no idea that this was– I wanted to direct and it turns out I wanted to be a showrunner. The working with a team of brains who are also awesome, fun, smart, funny, great people. It’s just the best. It’s so great. Don’t tell my children. I’m like the greatest joy of my life is working in a writers room. When I was doing WandaVision, I was terrified and I got some really good advice. One of them was my friend, Chris Addison, told me that it’s not my job to have the best idea in the room. It’s my job to be the keeper of the vision. I was like, I can totally do that.

I look for idea machines. I look for people who just think crazy thoughts, but I have of slots. On Agatha, first of all, there were some POVs that I needed to service that I could not do myself. That was crucial. I had chairs for those perspectives. That was going to be vital. Then there were people that I knew from WandaVision who were really suited to this spinoff show that was quite different from WandaVision. It had a different sensibility. It was about sort of bringing the people that I already knew who had the right dimensions to them.

When I look at a room, the first thing is that the people need to be kind and respectful. That’s always where I start, because I personally can’t work if there’s tension or disrespect or anything unpleasant like that, and it also has to be fun. When I read scripts, what I look for like specs and stuff is I look for audacious ideas. I don’t care if people can stick the landing. I don’t care if the end comes apart as long as you gave a shot. It’s really the like, what is the weirdest thing that someone tried really hard to have it hold water on the page?

Craig: Bravery.

Jac: Yes. I hired Giovanna Sarquis on Agatha because she had a character in her spec who was a mother and I believed the mother. Giovanna is a younger woman. She doesn’t have children. I was like, how did she write this middle-aged mom in a way that felt raw? It’s about that. It’s like once I have– Like I hired Jason Rostovsky and he is like a goth horror guy. I was like, I’ve nailed that piece. Then when I’m looking at the other chairs, like that’s covered, so what do I need over here? It’s a toolbox. It’s so fun.

John: Awesome.

Craig: Do we have time for one more question?

John: One more question.

Craig: One real fast one. Just talk a little bit about the challenges of protagonizing someone, because Agatha wasn’t the protagonist and now she’s sort of. Well clearly.

Jac: She’s a protagonist of her own story. That’s for sure.

John: Anti-hero.

Craig: How do you protagonize a character in such a way that doesn’t negate what came before, because side characters are fun and villains are fun and they’re not accountable the way that protagonists are?

Jac: First of all, thank you for not asking how do you make a character like Agatha likable?

Craig: Fuck that. It’s the worst note in history.

Jac: It’s the worst.

Craig: We’ve talked about that before.

Jac: Of course, as a writer you would never say that. Protagonize someone. It wasn’t hard because Kathryn had brought so much to the role of Agatha, so much more than was on the page for WandaVision. We were like, okay, she’s Mrs. Roper and she’s Rhoda and she’s all these other things. Kathryn can do that in her sleep. Then we wanted her to be this like scenery chewing centuries old witch. We’re like, Kathryn can do that as well. Kathryn brought all this texture about what she really wanted, what Agatha wanted. To protagonize, to use your awesome word, this character into her own show, it was following those threads.

Craig: It was already like raring to get out and do it.

Jac: Also, in film school, the like want versus need, I always had a hard time with that. But Agatha, it’s like so clear. She wants power, she needs community. End of story. That’s really what led to the thrust of the show or the kickoff, is like the most hated witch has to form a coven. You have the longest runway.

Craig: Great. Love that. Love that. All right. Interesting.

John: I think it’s time for your game, Craig. Talk us through what we want to do here.

Craig: Oh boy, here we go. Okay.

John: First off, we need to bring up two very special guests.

Craig: Yes, we got to get some guests going.

John: Holidays are a time for family. Let’s bring back some Scriptnotes family here. Two former producers of the Script Notes podcast, Megan McDonnell and Megana Rao. Can you guys come up?

Craig: Megan and Megana.

[applause]

Craig: Megana, is it true that you just flew back from India literally just to be in this game?

Megana Rao: I was in India.

Craig: Did you literally just got on a plane to be here.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: Thank you.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: For my game?

Megana: Yes.

Craig: Clearly not the case.

Megana: I am hours off of a plane. I also want to put that out there.

Craig: Excellent.

John: Absolutely. All right. Do you guys enjoy– These are Christmas songs we’re doing?

Craig: Yes.

John: Do you guys enjoy Christmas songs?

Craig: Oh, apparently not.

John: Megan MacDonnell, did you grow up with Christmas songs?

Megan MacDonnell: I love a Christmas song.

Jac: Megan MacDonnell is Christmas.

Craig: She’s Christmas.

Jac: Let’s be clear.

Craig: She’s Christmas.

Megana: Do we get to be on the same team?

John: You’re all on one team?

Craig: You can be on the team too.

John: All right.

Craig: Here, let’s switch seats.

Megana: Okay. Fantastic.

Craig: As you guys know, every now and again, John and I like to do a three-page challenge. Today, we’re going to be doing a little Christmas song game. Of course, because we’re writers, I like to concentrate on lyrics. We’re going to be doing a Christmas song three word challenge. Here’s how it goes. I have picked the strangest three words I could find in a Christmas song. They’re in a row, they’re not random. For instance if they were Deck the Halls, it might be “boughs of holly,” and then you go, oh it’s Deck the Halls. That’s it.

I’m just going to give you three words, you have to tell me the Christmas song. If you know it out there, don’t shout it out, just raise you hand.

Megana: Do we shout it out, or we have–?

Craig: You can confer, you can shout. You guys can shout. You guys can do anything you want. You can shout. You can confer. Let’s start with this one: Every mother’s child. Here we go.

Megan: Every mother’s child. Oh, that’s wrong.

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: This is awesome.

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: Does anyone out there know?

Megan: I’ll be home for Christmas? No that’s–

Craig: No.

Megan: No, I’m not saying. That wasn’t an official guess. That wasn’t an official guess.

Craig: Oh.

Megan: What about–

John: Every mother’s child.

Craig: Someone’s ready to go in the front row it looks like.

Megana: Silent Night? Sorry, that was my answer.

Craig: No, this show is only like– It’s not five days long.

Megan: So we’re not qualified.

Jac: I can almost hear it.

Audience: The Christmas Song?

Craig: Yes. The Christmas song, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. Every mother’s child is going to spy to see if reindeer really know how to fly.

John: All right.

Megana: Oh, wow.

Craig: All right. See. It’s hard.

John: It’s hard.

Megan: Stop with this game.

Craig: Ready? How about this one, you ding-dongs. I love this one, because this one really speaks to me. How you’ll hate.

John: How you’ll hate.

Craig: How you’ll hate.

Jac: Can we do Christmas movies?

Craig: No.

Jac: I don’t know, Wheelhouse.

Craig: I love saying no like Hannibal Lecter. No.

Megan: How you’ll hate to come in from the snow or something like that?

Craig: Yes, you’re very close. How you’ll hate going out in the storm–

John: Baby it’s cold outside.

Craig: Well, that’s part– No, it’s not. It’s, but if you really hold me tight, all the way home, you’ll be warm.

Audience: Let it Snow.

Craig: Yes. Are you from Australia? Oh, great. I thought I heard let it snorr.

John: Let is snow, all right.

Craig: It is. It was let it snow.

A platinum mine.

Megan: Santa Baby?

Craig: Yes. Santa Baby.

John: That’s a dime.

Craig: Yes.

Megana: You’re so good at this.

Megan: No I’m not, that’s my first win.

Craig: Okay, we’re cooking now. All right, this one is weird. I don’t know why this is in a Christmas song at all. This one speaks to you Jaq: Scary ghost stories.

Megan: [humming] Long ago.

John: Scary ghost stories.

Megana: Is that it?

Megan: Tales of the glories of Christmas. What is the song?

Craig: Yes. [humming]

John: It’s not my favorite things, it’s–

Craig: [humming]

Megan: It’s the most wonderful time–

Craig: Yes, it’s the most wonderful time of the year.

John: It’s the most wonderful time of the year.

Craig: This turned into name that tune, but with so many notes.

The kids bunch.

John: The kids bunch?

Craig: The kids bunch.

John: The kids bunch uo, I assume. Is it a verb?

Megana: The kids would like to bunch up.

John: The kids bunch.

Craig: I like the analysis. Anyone?

Audience: Silver Bells.

Craig: Yes, it’s Silver bells.

Megan: Nice.

Craig: See the kids bunch. This is Santa’s big scene. I told the three words. This one you’ll get: The tree tops glisten.

John: [humming]

Craig: Oh, my God.

Megana: When the tree tops glisten.

Craig: You just said she was the– Yes.

John: Tree tops glisten.

Craig: Keep going. And children listen. To hear sleigh bells in the snow.

John: I’m dreaming of a White Christmas.

Craig: Yes, you are. White Christmas.

Jac: Apparently this is not how my brain works.

Craig: If you don’t get this one, I’m going to lose my mind.

Megana: Me neither.

Craig: Do you recall?

John: Frosty the snowman.

Jac: Rudolph the red nosed reindeer. I got it. I got one.

Craig: Yes. All right: Some pumpkin pie. It’s hard.

Megana: You got it. You got it.

Megan: I’m this close. It’s close. Nope.

Craig: Nope.

Megan: Is it rocking around…?

Craig: Yes it is. Rocking around the Christmas tree.

John: All right.

Craig: All right. Two more: You didn’t hear.

Jac: I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.

Craig: Oh, God. We’re going to turn to the audience?

Megan: What’s the lyric?

Craig: You didn’t hear.

John: You didn’t hear.

Craig: I case you didn’t hear.

Megan: Oh, by golly [crosstalk]

Craig: Yes, of a Holly Jolly Christmas.

Jac: These are all the same song. Right?

Craig: They are not. Last one. Then I’m going to ask a trivia question that connects them all. I know: a circus clown.

Megan: Yes, then we’ll pretend that he’s Parson Brown, it’s Frosted Snowman.

Craig: No. No. No.

Megan: Yes it is.

Craig: No, it’s not Parson brown…

Megan: We’ll pretend that he’s a circus clown.

Craig: Yes.

Megan: It’s not called Frosty the Snowman?

Craig: We’ll have lots of fun with Mister Snowman. Until the other kids come and knock him down. Does that sound like Frosty the Snowman to you? No.

John: Winter Wonderland.

Craig: Yes, you’re walking in a Winter Wonderland.

Megan: Wow, you’re so right. It wasn’t Snowman. Snowman is the clown.

Megana: So certain.

Megan: I was so certain.

Craig: No. All of these are linked by one commonality that isn’t that they’re about Christmas. I’m going to read the names again, see if you can tell. If you know in the audience raise your hand. You’re ready? Maybe they already know. The Christmas song, Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire. Let It Snow, Santa Baby, It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, Silver Bells, White Christmas, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree, Holly Jolly Christmas, Walking in a Winter Wonderland.

John: They were all written for movies.

Craig: No.

John: All right.

Craig: That was a great guess. I’ll give you a hint. The answer begins with they were all written.

John: Same composer.

Craig: No.

Megana: Same year.

Craig: No. We have a guess.

Audience: They were all written by Jews.

Craig: Yes.

[applause]

They were all written by Jews. You’re welcome. Great job. Great job.

John: Well done.

Craig: Front row crushing it out here.

Jac: I feel like you deserve a prize.

Craig: Thanks for playing.

Megana: Because that was really good. You guys did great.

John: We did, yes.

Megan: Yes, yes.

John: Phenomenal.

Craig: You did great.

Megana: All contributed equally.

Craig: Yes.

John: Megana, Megan, Jac. Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, guys. Thank you.

[applause]

I love how scared you were. They were all written by Jews. Because if you’re wrong, that’s, what?

John: What?

Craig: Jeez.

John: Oh, my God.

Craig: What the fuck, man. Who are we letting in?

John: I will say as a non-Jewish person, saying the word Jew just by itself is always still a little terrifying to me.

Craig: I’ll give you a pass.

John: All right. Let’s move on with our show. Our next guests have been working together as writers, directors, and actors for almost a decade, making dozens of shorts, web series, three feature films for YouTube. Now they are in one of my favorite shows of the whole year, English Teacher. Please welcome its creator, Brian Jordan Alvarez, and its co-writer and co-star, Stephanie Koenig.

[music]

Stephanie: Thanks for bringing the chairs and couches from my living room.

Brian: Thanks for bringing the chairs and couches in general. We didn’t want to have to bring these ourselves.

John: We try to keep our guests comfortable if possible. Could you hear backstage? Could you identify any of the lyrics in that song?

Stephanie: Yes.

Craig: All right.

Stephanie: What song? Wait, no. The Christmas songs?

Craig: The Christmas songs. Did you do it?

Brian: She was guessing them backstage. Yes.

Stephanie: I understand a couple.

John: You should have said you got them all. Yes. You had an opportunity.

Stephanie: No, I think I really only got one.

Craig: Oh.

Stephanie: I was singing it, and then I had to sing the whole thing to get to the refrain.

Craig: It’s hard because every Christmas song does have three weird fucking words in there, all just for no reason. Yes, and I went right for them.

Brian: Wait, what was the common thread between all of them?

Craig: They were all written by Jews.

Stephanie: Wow.

Craig: No, you didn’t believe me.

Brian: I don’t know whether– I don’t know how to react to this.

John: See, I didn’t either Brian.

Craig: Are you angry?

Brian: No, I just don’t want to have the– I don’t know if you’re kidding.

Craig: I’m not kidding.

Brian: Okay, you’re not kidding. Great.

Craig: I swear to God, I’m not kidding.

Brian: That’s very amazing.

Craig: They were all written by Jews.

Stephanie: Wow, that’s great.

Craig: Apparently John gets nervous when I say Jew.

John: No. When you say Jew, it’s great.

Craig: Oh.

John: It’s when I say it that I feel so bad.

Craig: Well, because you yell it.

[laughter]

Craig: Let’s talk about English Teacher for a moment.

John: Brian and Stephanie, so in this award season, we’re seeing a lot of co-stars who will come on and do interviews for things. They’re just the best of friends when they’re on camera and the cameras are rolling, and you’re always like, do they actually like each other whatsoever? Now, the two of you are genuinely friends in real life. Is that true? You guys have known each other for a minute.

Brian: A long time. 11 years going on 12, I think.

Stephanie: It’s 11 years now. That’s crazy. We hang out all the time.

Brian: We hang out all the time.

Craig: That’s not convincing. We hang out all the time. We’re best friends.

John: Because we hang out some, too-

Craig: We do.

John: -but we also work together, then we have to do stuff together. How do you guys manage a relationship of being friends, but also co-workers who are doing stuff together? Are there tensions? What are things you guys have learned over the years making so many things together about keeping your friendship, but also a professional relationship?

Brian: I don’t think it’s been very hard. We focus on, making sure the friendship is primary. I think that’s the only– If ever we need a reminder, it’s just like, well, the friendship is more important.

Stephanie: Correct.

Brian: The work is– It’s like a privilege.

Stephanie: It’s all the same. It feels all the same.

Brian: It’s all the same thing, yes.

Stephanie: Because when we first met, we met at a student short film.

Brian: Student film.

Stephanie: Student film, we were like the adults in a UC Santa Barbara.

Brian: Yes, we were like the sort of lame hired actors in a student film.

Stephanie: Yes, we really had not much happening.

Brian: We didn’t have anything going on.

Craig: It sounds great.

Brian: Her commercial agent was in the process of dropping her.

Stephanie: Just dropped me, yes.

Craig: Oh, God.

Stephanie: I think she had just sent the email out.

Brian: I don’t think I had representation at all.

Stephanie: I remember the first day on set, we were making jokes about getting dropped. What was the joke? It was something like–

Brian: You were doing the–

Stephanie: Listen, we think you’re great. If at any point you get funnier or you know, if you’re getting prettier, reach back out.

Brian: You were pretending that you were your agent talking to you and I was being you. You were saying, “We’re dropping you because we just have so many people who are better and better looking.”

Stephanie: Yes. You had said the only way we’re going to actually– Because you meet friends when you’re an adult. It’s like you have to really try.

Brian: You have to find an excuse to keep getting together.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. He was like, we should make something to keep hanging out.

Brian: Then we worked on a short that then we didn’t end up finishing.

Stephanie: Never went anywhere. We didn’t make–

Brian: Then we started making sketches. The first night I met her, I was like, so this is the funniest person in the known universe.

Stephanie: That’s what I thought about you.

Brian: Thank you.

John: Aaaw.

Brian: We’ve gotten less funny over time and we’re still supporting each other as–

Craig: On the slow–

Stephanie: I’m now the funniest person in Sherman Oaks.

Craig: Still, that’s legit.

Stephanie: It’s big. It’s big.

John: A thing we talk about on the podcast a lot is, we’ll have listeners write in saying, oh, what should I do? I need to break in. We tell people, make stuff. You guys just made stuff. You’ve made so many things.

Brian: I know.

John: If you look through, your YouTube, you guys have been working–

Craig: You made a song about sitting.

Brian: I know. I did. I’m doing it right now. Crushing it.

Stephanie: Oh, my God.

Craig: Crushing it.

Brian: This thing of telling people, just go out and make your own thing. I keep wondering if there’s ever going to be some new answer to how to break– Because that’s been the real answer for the last 15 years. I think we got lucky because– Maybe we weren’t even at the very beginning of this, but there was a time when you had to spend $100,000 to get a movie made yourself in 1990 or whatever. Then there was the time when you were like, people have these cameras that they thought were good digital cameras. I think they were Panasonics, because it’s big. They’d be like, oh, yes, we’re shooting an indie on this thing. I’d be like, that looks like shit. It looked like a handy cam, I was like, that’s not– I don’t know.

We ended up coming to, into being able to make stuff at a time when– Even very specifically camera-wise, we were shooting our sketches on the Blackmagic Pocket that had a really cinematic look. I had an eye for this stuff, but, the tech was just– It was also when YouTube was just a few years old. You could post something that really looked a bit like a movie on your YouTube channel and then that’s global for anybody who wants to watch it. I guess whenever you come up, you’re finding how to make it work. We would have done that in any era, I think. I think we were lucky in some ways.

Stephanie: What was great was your YouTube channel was sort of like a network of your stuff. I would put– Because I didn’t have a–

Brian: Yes, later when it started gaining steam.

Stephanie: Yes, later. It was just nice to go, okay, well, I’m going to make something for us and put it on your channel, and I know that there’s going to be an audience there.

Brian: Because you made this amazing movie, Spy Movie, that was us as spies, and it was a full feature and then we put it on the YouTube channel and people loved it.

John: That’s great. Talk to us about, the transition between you’re making stuff for yourself versus making stuff for other people, because you both as actors, went off and did other things. You managed to steal so many scenes on Will & Grace in ways that were just absolutely criminal.

Brian: I still have them in my house.

John: Yes, that’s great, you took the scenes with you.

Brian: I’m very grateful to Max Mutchnick and [crosstalk]

John: Stephanie, you were doing other stuff too, but was it hard to think about, okay, we also need to do some stuff together. How do you? As you’re going off and doing your own things and having your own successes, you still want to do stuff together. Is that hard to find those balance?

Brian: It’s so organic.

Stephanie: Yes. It’s just coming out of, how much fun it is to make stuff. Spy Movie was just like, oh, wouldn’t that be so funny if we were two dumb spies? Dumb.

Craig: In terms of that sense of this feels natural, I’m curious, when it comes to your show, were you guys just feeling like, hey, we’re adults now, and who are these children, and what are they about? Because what I find so fascinating about the show is that normally high school shows are about the kids, and this one is not. This is fascinating to me.

Brian: Right. We needed to be the leads. We needed the lead roles, yes.

Craig: That’s actually a great fucking answer. Ask a fancy question, you’re like, idiot, we need to be leads.

Brian: No, this show, maybe it’s more organic. I unfortunately don’t put a ton of analytical thought into most of the things I’m making before I make them. Then as they grow, they end up becoming smarter and deeper, maybe. Really, I was like, this felt like an environment that would make sense. It was also just, Paul Sims, who’s a genius and is TV royalty and has made so many amazing things. He essentially cold called me through my agent because he had seen my stuff online. He was like, “We need to make a TV show together. I did Atlanta with Donald Glover. I’m doing What We Do in the Shadows.” He’s done a million things, he’s amazing.

It was also a little bit fortunately in a moment, or I don’t know if it was fortunate, but it was in a moment when I had given up on making things in the system. I was really focused on acting. I was saying, look, I just came off Will & Grace. I’m doing this movie, Megan, coming up. At that time I had booked the role of Megan, then they changed the part to– I’m just kidding.

Megan, you guys know Megan?

Craig: That would have been better.

Brian: Paul was like, “We need to make a show.” I was like, “Oh, I don’t think I can. I’ve tried before. I don’t know how to get through that TV system.” He was like, “I’m going to show you. You’re coming out of retirement. We’re making a television show.” It was like this moment when someone comes down from heaven and is like, I believe in you. Then it’s literally like, oh my God, I got to go write something. Then I just was like, I don’t know, I’m like a teacher at a high school, and Stephanie’s there and we’re at lunch– Really, it was like that.

Craig: What did he show you in terms of– Well, okay, so you had some experiences as a writer, you mean, trying to work the system.

Brian: We’d had a few developments deals.

Stephanie: Yes, exactly. It was like a lot of shows that we were both in. We were like trying to make a show specifically where we were always including each other.

Brian: Yes, able to do our thing.

Craig: Yes, you were getting frustrated as you went through.

Brian: I mean, they just didn’t end up getting made. It wasn’t any more frustrating than anything.

John: Talk to us about it. What did Paul Sims bring into the process that was new to you, that was different to you, that got it passing?

Brian: Every part of it was completely foreign to me. I was just like used to doing everything by myself and just with my friends. Any time there was any somebody being like, we think you should do this instead. I was like, this feels insane. Then like, Paul’s like, it’s okay, you’re going to survive, basically. It’s like, why don’t you just try doing it and maybe it’ll work. Then I would be like, all right. Then the show gets better. Then eventually you’re like, this show is way better than anything I could have made by myself. What the hell happened here?

I got lucky because it’s like, it’s not just anybody who’s giving you, it’s like Paul Sims, it’s like really intelligent people.

Stephanie: Jonathan Krisel.

Brian: Krisel, John Landgraf. These are the best of the best. They’re changing your show very gently. They’re still preserving the whole DNA, golden fiber at the center of your show. This is what people say to me when they see it now, having known my work for years, they go, “Oh my God, your voice survived. Your voice actually got on TV.” That is to their credit, because they know how to make it better and better, but to not break that spirit at the center of it. What I’m saying is like, some places would have made my show worse, but this show I look at it and I go, this is infinitely better than what I started with. It’s John Landgraf, Kate Lambert, Jonathan Frank, Paul Sims, Jonathan Krisel, even our line producer, Kate Dean, Dave King. There’s just high level help of people that have made 20 shows and they just know what’s good.

Especially Paul, I was with him the other day. I was just realizing, I was like, this guy can see story. I once heard of a DP who could just see light in a different way. He can just see what light is doing and Paul can just see story through everything.

Stephanie: Yes. This is like a separate thing, but to see Brian, because I had, worked with him so much on our little sets where we’re putting iPhones in our bras and strapping these bandages around our belly to record sound.

Brian: Yes, for lavalier mics, we would use iPhones with these bandages.

Stephanie: To save on not hiring any sound guy because we didn’t have any money.

Brian: Save the money we didn’t have.

Stephanie: Just like rigging the lights and bringing all the gear and setting up the camera, all that stuff. It was so cool to watch a hundred people do all of that especially on the stuff that Brian was directing, because he’s also showrunning as well. It wasn’t weird. It wasn’t like a different– It felt exactly the same, but he wasn’t having to carry anything.

Brian: Right. That was the thing about making stuff ourselves for so long. It’s hauling the equipment gear.

Craig: It’s the worst thing, and the food is a little better.

Stephanie: The food is great, yes. You don’t have to remember what and be like, I got to go feed them. I got to go feed everybody.

John: We talked about your voice surviving through the process. One of the things about the Evan character, which is so wonderful, is that we see him taking a stand and then realizing that his stand is sort of indefensible or he doesn’t actually– He wants to be the person who fully believes what he’s doing.

Brian: Are you just talking about a specific episode or in general?

John: The gun episode is one of the examples. Also, when a kid comes in and says– Comes out to you, it’s like, what should I do? It’s like, fuck you, yes, talk to someone your age, this is not my experience.

Craig: Go be gay out there. Everybody else is gay. Yes, it’s pretty awesome.

Brian: Thanks. I love that scene.

John: Talk to us about like, those moments and figuring them out on the page, figuring them out on the pitch to the page to how they go through, because it’s your voice. You have to say like, well, no, this will work in my voice. Talk to us about that.

Brian: We have a great writer’s room. It’s a really specific group, and it came together very slowly. I even remember saying to Paul, there are these two guys that write on Shadows and I keep seeing their tweets and it’s Zach Dunn and Jake Bender. Paul was like, “Oh, that’s funny. They were asking about if they would maybe be able to come write on English Teacher with you.” It just came together really organically over time. Essentially we have a great writer’s room and we build these stories that I love and that have this real funny bone. Then beyond that, with the execution, and this comes to Krisel, Jonathan Kreisel too, the execution is where it gets all that flavor, but it’s in the writing too.

I talk a lot about texture, what’s special, one thing that we’re good at is this texture of the show, the way people talk over each other and the way people are reacting to each other. I just think it’s all of that. It’s like we’re writing the best stories we can, but then when we’re on set, we’re trying to figure out right then how to make it funnier. We do it a lot of different ways. We trust our editors, Antonia de Barros and Mike Giambra. They love us sending as many options as we can.

So I’ll do a take where I’m going huge and I’ll do a take where I barely move my face and I’ll do a take that’s like somewhere in the middle. Then we’ll do a take that’s almost– I’ll tell them, okay, now say anything you want, do one that’s like– Doesn’t have to be all improv, but just anything you want to say, like we’ve got the camera on you, so just go for it. Then some that are perfectly descript.

Stephanie: To talk about that scene where the kid is asking for his advice on being gay and he thinks he wants to come out and stuff. I think he’s really good at this, which I’ve noticed in like our sketches.

Brian: Spelling everything correctly.

Stephanie: He knows how to use the apostrophes. There’s a lot of apostrophes in that monologue.

Brian: Unnecessary.

Stephanie: No, it’s like the surprising turns, the left turns that he takes really well in comedies and what makes us laugh so hard.

Brian: Yes, because that’s what we were doing in our sketches too, was sort of being like, you expect this joke and then boom, it does this other thing.

Stephanie: Yes, so I think that’s what the show does so well, is you’re like, you’re getting led into something and then it like takes a left turn.

Craig: I think to do that as well as you guys do, you do need to be in touch with the world around you in a very real way, because that can go on, right? The same concept could be incredibly not funny and sort of upsetting, and then in that case–

Brian: You know what I think the secret sauce is to that? To this exact thing you’re talking about?

Craig: Yes.

Brian: I think it’s the acting.

Craig: Oh.

John: Oh, yes.

Brian: Maybe I shouldn’t say that.

Craig: But you’re saying you’re a good actor.

Brian: Me and everybody else on the show. No, I mean, playing things hyper real.

Craig: Grounded.

Brian: It’s amazing writing, and then you have to have really good, not just good acting, like Oscar winning acting, just acting that knows how to make that joke ripe. I say this because I’m not talking about my own performance. I’m saying like, we really care about the acting on our show.

Craig: It’s serious business.

Brian: We talk about it and we direct it and we need the performances to be a certain way to sell that joke. That moment specifically, when the kid says, “I’m gay,” and then the camera spins around, “I’m like, what? Just go talk to somebody in the hall about this. I can’t help you with this.” Yes, it’s an acting thing and the kid performing it really real. There’s this character in this field trip episode, Sharon, like we call her like stone-faced mom, right?

John: Yes, incredible.

Stephanie: Yes, she was stone faced mom.

Brian: She’s obsessed with these games that these kids are playing. Her acting is so brilliant. We saw all these different tapes for it and everybody was being funny and playing the joke. Then we got her tape and she was playing it like it was like an Oscar movie. We’re like, this was the most serious thing that’s ever happened. She’s like, have you heard about these games that these kids are playing?

Stephanie: We were all like obsessed, obsessively watching the tape.

Brian: it’s only the final piece on an amazing joke, but it’s another critical piece and I think it’s something. Jonathan Krisel also really cares about acting. If you watch Baskets, the acting in that is just hyper natural.

John: Very much so.

Brian: What’s the name of the person who played the mom in the–

Craig: Oh, Louie Anderson.

Brian: Yes. It’s so natural and that’s what we’re going for. Even telling the editors–

Stephanie: It’s the editing, yes.

Brian: -leave the little things where people say things wrong-

Stephanie: The mistakes, yes.

Brian: -or stumble on their words and make people talk over each other.

Stephanie: Like in reality, yes.

Craig: Yes. It’s a testament to you guys how technically good you are. I know that you’re saying you sort of almost stumbled into this situation and somebody plucks you out from the things you do. You have to be very, very smart to come– It needs the smartest people. The attention to detail and how serious you have to be about being funny, it’s incredible and it really shows.

Stephanie: It is also just in the writer’s room. We are like dying laughing.

Brian: Dying laughing, yes.

Stephanie: It’s probably most writer’s rooms for comedies, it’s like the joke that keeps making us laugh will stick in the episode. We’re like, “God, that still makes us laugh so hard.”

John: Talk us through the process of getting a half-hour script out of this. In that writer’s room, you’re coming up with the outline, you’re coming up with the beat, so this is what’s basically going to happen, these are the scenes. One person goes off and writes and brings back a script and then you’re workshopping it or what happens?

Brian: Oh, we’re in the nitty-gritty.

John: Oh, yeah, this is the podcast where we talk about the nitty-gritty.

Stephanie: Scriptnotes.

Brian: Okay. Yes, do we tell you? Do we tell you our process? We’re beating out the story as a group and then generally we’re sending somebody off to outline, and the outline is an outline, but it’s relatively detailed and then somebody goes off to script.

John: Is the outline funny or is the outline just-?

Stephanie: Yes.

Brian: Ideally, yes. Like Stephanie’s outline was fucking funny. [crosstalk]

Stephanie: I thought my outline was so funny.

Brian: Yes. I would say the outline is not as funny as the final script.

John: I would hope. Yes.

Brian: The outline’s not full of dialogue and the dialogue is a large part of also what’s funny, so.

Stephanie: Very true.

Brian: Yes, each part being as funny as possible is certainly ideal.

Stephanie: What I loved so much was it felt so– I felt going off and writing Powderpuff, I was like so taken care of by the story because we had really broken it. We do that with each episode. We would like really all together like break the funniest thing in the scene.

Brian: Yes, I often think going off to script is one of the least labor intensive parts because the outline is so– then you’re just dancing on the outline, but yeah.

Stephanie: It’s like it feels all easy. Isn’t that?

John: Making a TV show is easy is what I’m taking from this. Yes, so easy. Everyone can do it. Why aren’t we all doing it?

Brian: Why aren’t you guys doing it?

John: [crosstalk] We? Come on.

Brian: We have all the best writers.

Stephanie: Actually, only easy because it’s like the funniest people in there.

Brian: Yes. Dave King, Zach Dunn, Jake Bender, Emmy Blotnick. Shanna. You guys know Jeremy and Rajat?

Audience Member: Yes.

Stephanie: So funny.

John: Some people do.

Brian: You got [unintelligible 00:52:50] heading the house.

Craig: These guys know literally everything, by the way.

John: They do. They answer the questions.

Craig: These guys know everything about everything. Geniuses.

John: They should be hosting a podcast.

Brian: Geniuses.

John: Congratulations on your show.

Brian: Thank you.

John: We cannot wait to see what you guys do next.

Brian: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Stephanie: Thank you for having us.

Craig: My pleasure. Thank you.

John: All right. This is the time of the podcast where we do one cool things. Things we want to recommend to our listeners at home, to our audience here tonight. Jac, start us off because you warned that you might have two one cool things.

Jac: Oh, I’ve been sweating this for the 24 hours that I knew we had to do this. I already feel like I’m failing. The thing I am recommending to everybody is the English Teacher. In lieu of that, because everybody here’s a fan, I really loved My Old Ass. I don’t know if anyone has seen that. I think that movie is spectacular. I think it’s a Thanksgiving movie. I think it’s about gratitude. I saw it over Thanksgiving. I did a lot of crying. Aubrey is fantastic in it. Then just to be weird, I’m also going to do a song that is an obsession of mine from Billy Joel’s lesser worshipped era, Downeaster ‘Alexa’. Does anybody know that song?

Craig: Of course. Of course.

Jac: It is a song that really inspires me to write because I feel it’s very atmospheric and it’s very rousing and it conjures a place and a person and it’s very salty. Yes, it’s an inspiring piece of pop music.

Craig: It is Billy Joel’s finest nautical theme song.

Jac: That is correct.

Craig: No question. No question.

Jac: A little weird fact for y’all.

Craig: Excellent. Fantastic.

John: Hey, Brian, do you have one cool thing to share with us?

Brian: I started watching the Netflix reality show about people over 50 dating each other called Later Daters.

John: That’s a very good title.

Brian: It was excellent. I recommend it. There’s one woman in it who’s a total star.

John: Excellent. Nice.

Stephanie: You love reality TV so much.

Craig: I don’t like that we’re in a category that’s called later.

[laughter]

Craig: That’s fucked up.

John: We’re married. We’re good.

Craig: I might be over 55– We’re married, but if we did date, it would be like we should make a reality show out of you.
[laughter]

Brian: That’s freaky.

John: Stephanie, what do you have to recommend?

Stephanie: Wait, can I do two too?

John: Of course, you can do two.

Stephanie: Okay. One’s a quick one. It’s like get yourself a sun lamp. It’s one of those lamps that kind of that same warm lighting that was glazed over you guys.

Brian: You mean like a full spectrum?

Stephanie: It’s a yellow– that. You can have that in your room. At night, you’re like, “Oh God.” It just takes you to a good place. Then real quick, I would say I suggest escape rooms for dating.

Brian: Yes.

John: Sure.

Stephanie: Just a couple– Take one other person that you’re dating to an escape room.

Brian: Especially if you’re over 50.

[laughter]

Craig: We got to book. Hell yes.

John: Stephanie, that is such a good idea. Tell us more because it feels like it reveals something about a person that we’d like–

Craig: Because we love escape rooms.

Stephanie: Do you?

John: We love it. We do escape rooms all the time.

Craig: Obsessed.

John: We’re going some escape rooms things after this.

Stephanie: Okay. Really?

John: Oh, yes. [crosstalk]

Stephanie: The reason I got the idea is because me and my husband will do that. It’s like, “Do you want to go out to dinner?” “No. We’re going to go to an escape room.”

Craig: How many have you guys done, you think?

Brian: 25?

Craig: Oh my God. 25?

Stephanie: 60.

Craig: 60?

John: I’m sure.

Craig: I don’t even think they have that many.

Brian: We’re in triple digits for sure.

Jac: Do you do it with strangers? That sounds weird.

Stephanie: No.

Craig: In the early days, you did.

Stephanie: If they’re open.

Craig: That was like an issue. In the early days, they were like, “We’ve got shove 12 people in.” No one does that anymore.
Stephanie: No.

Jac: You can do it just you and a date?

Stephanie: Yes. With a friend or someone you love or somebody you might love. It does tell a lot about a person.

Craig: Are they dumb, for instance?

Stephanie: That. That. If you’re a really competitive person, it’s like you may want another competitive person who’s like, “This is serious. I don’t want any hints,” and that’ll be for you. You could really suss somebody out if they’re really upset about you not getting something right. If there was a fight in the escape room, it’s like you’re done.

Craig: Wouldn’t the worst person be somebody that is just like, “Why does this even matter?”

Stephanie: Yes.

[laughter]

Craig: Date over. Over.

Stephanie: Yes. I’d be like, “Get out. Let me finish it.”

Craig: Yes. Exactly. Go home. I need to escape.

Stephanie: I need to do Welcome To Jumanji alone.

John: That’s a good one.

Stephanie: That’s one of them.

Craig: That’s a good one. Amazing.

John: Craig, what you got?

Craig: My one cool thing, Thin Mint Bites. Have you had these?

John: No. Tell us.

Craig: Oh my God. Thin Mints.

John: Yes, it’s delicious.

Craig: Girl Scouts in combination with Satan. I always thought that the thing about Thin Mints that are so good is the crunchy bit, but there’s just not enough crunchy bit. Then these bastards came up with a way to turn it into this little tiny ball. It’s all crunch with just a little bit of the chocolate on the outside. You feel like, “Oh, I’m just eating one little bit.” Then it’s like bla, bla, bla. They’ve perfected something that I thought was perfect. Christmas time, guys. Thin Mint Bites.

John: Treat yourself.

Craig: Thin Mint Bites. Fantastic.

John: Excellent. My recommendation, one cool thing that’s also very good for Christmas time, it is a show, it’s like number two on Netflix. I’m not the first person to discover the show. It is A Man on the Inside. It is a show by Mike Schur, who’s been on the podcast. He did Parks and Rec, he did The Good Place. You’ll see our own Megan Amram on the show, in a small part.

The star is Ted Danson. He is a retired professor who’s being sent undercover into a retirement home. It is really light and it’s just delightful. Then because it’s so light, it’s like a sitcom, it’s able to hit some surprisingly serious themes of mortality and just losing your sense of autonomy. Really well done. I say Christmas time because it’s actually a show you can put on with your extended family who don’t like each other and you can all watch the same thing and no one will object to it. It’s nice to have TV that is just a common experience for everyone. A Man on the Inside on Netflix.

Craig: Amazing.

Stephanie: Great rec.

John: All right. It is time for our thank yous. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Drew Marquardt, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, Drew.

John: It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also wrote our music tonight. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at JohnAugust.com. That’s also where you find all the transcripts going back 12 years. We’ll have lots of links to things that we talked about tonight, including your shorts and all the other stuff that you guys have done. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They make great Christmas presents. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments. Thank you to all our premium members. Do we have any premium members in the house tonight?

Craig: Oh, amazing.

John: Oh, my God. Look at that, so good.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Premium members also get first notice about live events like we’re doing tonight. Thank you to Brian Jordan Alvarez, to Stephanie Koenig, to Jac Schaeffer.

Craig: Thank you, guys.

John: Do you want to do stuff?

Craig: Sure. Thank you to Kasey Anderson and everyone at Hollywood HEART. Remember, you can learn more about their programs at HollywoodHEART.org. Also thank you to Dax Jordan and everyone in the booth. Thank you to Missy Steele, Mary Sadler, and everyone at Dynasty Typewriter. Thank you to all of you. It is so much fun to get to do this live. Thank you guys for showing up and making us feel welcome.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Appreciate it.

John: Have a great night.

Craig: Have a great night.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, it is time for our audience questions. If we can bring up the house lights a little bit, and if we can bring our producer, Drew Marquardt here.

Craig: Yay, Drew.

John: Sometimes, Craig, in the past, you’ve run into situations where people seem confused about the idea of a question, and you try to give them instructions, and yet still it doesn’t quite work.

Craig: It’s amazing. Every time there’s one.

John: I thought this time we might do some modeling of behavior. Drew, this is an actual question that came in to ask at JohnAugust.com, a legit question, but maybe you could be an audience member asking a question.

Drew Marquardt: Hi, guys. Big fan.

Craig: Get to the question.

Drew: A writer friend of mine recently asked me what I’ll be getting my reps for Christmas, and my answer was I didn’t know that was a thing. Is that a thing? If so, what should I get them?

Craig: That was in the form of a question. It was concise. Loved it.

John: Loved it. Let’s talk about getting your reps, your managers, your publicists, the folks who work for you on your behalf, getting them holiday presents. What do we think? Suggestions?

Craig: Their publicists are here, so they got to lie about that.

John: All right. Let’s think about other folks.

Craig: Like the agents.

John: The agents. Agents or agents assistants.

Craig: Agents assistants, yes.

John: All right. Talk to us about this, because back in the day, I used to know my agents assistants because I would talk to them on the phone all the time, and we don’t talk on the phone that much. I’m just emailing people now.

Craig: Right. Also, back in the day, we were probably sort of their age and we were all sweating it out. Now, it is a nice thing if you can remember and so just make the list of– and it’s a good old fashioned Amazon gift card or an Apple gift card or something like that, so that you don’t have to like use brain power and, “Oh, I wonder what John would like,” whatever. It’s a nice thing to do. The agents deserve nothing. Nothing. They get 10%. That’s enough. It’s enough.

John: Craig’s gift to a manager is not firing them.

Craig: What manager?

John: What manager? Jac, do you have any guidance? What do you think about gifts for your reps?

Jac: This is tricky. It’s making me real nervous. What I do think, like for up and coming writers, I would say you do not need to get anything of monetary value for your representation. I think that holiday gifting in the industry is something that happens when you cross that invisible line into some form of success. I started noticing I was getting gifts from people I wouldn’t have expected to get gifts from after WandaVision.

I am sort of just getting my gifting together because I feel like a puppy that’s learning from like the bigger dogs. I would say, early in your career, absolutely not. Later, you’re sort of indicated. I think the types of gifts that the people who are making money in the industry, it’s like I do think always, always acknowledging a person is the thing. Calling someone by name, wishing them well, sending them an email, giving some lip service to what they have done for you is you can never go wrong with that.

Craig: Great answer.

Brian: I keep it simple. I get each member of my team a brand new car.

John: Okay. Good. Do you let them pick the color?

Brian: No, I pick the color.

John: Drew, thank you for that question. That was a great question.

Craig: Thank you, Drew.

[applause]

John: All right. Now, if you are an audience member who would like to ask a question of us, of our panel up here, this is the time you can line up. Now, John, remember you can ask the first question if you choose to ask the question, but there’s no pressure.

Audience Member: All right. Just for the younger, like the up and coming, just breaking in and are about to spend 8 to 10 years grinding and probably overthinking as you are, like you’re in it though, but you’re at the very beginning. What is the advice? The one thing that sort of, and it’s usually I feel like something simple you would tell yourself.
Craig: What is the advice that we would give our younger selves?

John: Yes.

Brian: Do less, more often.

Craig: Oh. I like that.

Brian: I got that from somebody else, but I’ve been doing that my whole life. Do less, more often.

Stephanie: Like a brick a day is going to build a house?

Brian: Yes. You can build a house by putting one brick down a day.

Stephanie: I would add to that and say, whatever energy you’re putting into something, like energy in will match out. It might not be what you’re expecting, but it always– it’s like if you’re putting it in every day, something will happen.

Brian: Right. There’s no wasted energy. You could spend four years working on a project that doesn’t work out, but that energy will be the thing that made your next project work.

Craig: I like that. What about you? Do you have anything?

Jac: I would say the feeling that you get when you’re like at a bar telling a friend a story and you’re loving telling them the story and they’re loving hearing it and they’re hanging on your every word, channel that into your work.

Craig: Yes. Nice. Ooh.

Brian: Nobody’s ever hung on my every word.

Craig: Lots of snapping. Love that. John, you got any?

John: I do. I will say that too often you’re looking for who is the person who is a few steps ahead of me who could help me out. That’s the mistake. Look for people who are at your level who are trying to do the things you’re trying to do. Make friends with them. Help on their short films. They’ll help on your short films. Rise together with a group.

Jac: So good.

Craig: I love that. I’ll leave you with this very simple one. Do the work. Work. So much calculating, so much guessing, so much thinking, planning, wondering, blah-blah-blah. Do the work. Just do the work. That’ll get you there.

John: John, thank you for your question.

Audience: Good copy.

[applause]

John: Nicely done. Hello. What is your name and what is your question?

Brandt: Hello, my name is Brandt. My question is mainly for Craig, so ‘70s and ‘80s, Airplane, Naked Gun, huge movies, spoof movies. Then ‘90s, early 2000s, Scary Movie and Austin Powers. Today, from 2010s to today, there’s really no spoof movies around. I’m just questioning why you think that is.

Craig: An opportunity first to say rest in peace to Jim Abrahams, who is one of the three members of Zucker, Abrahams, Zucker, and a wonderful man. I think the reason is actually a lot to do with what you were talking about earlier with the way timing and technology works. Back then, a movie would come out and people would talk about it amongst themselves. No one would be talking to each other across the country or the world. Then somebody would say, “Here’s a funny version of that.”

Everything is parodied instantly and publicly, second by second. A parody or spoof is ancient by the time next week rolls around. There’s just no way. When Jerry and Jim and David made Airplane, they were spoofing a movie called Zero Hour that no one had seen from the 1950s. No one lets you do that anymore. No one’s interested in that. It turned into this weird pop culture machine. They are remaking Naked Gun and Seth MacFarlane making it with Liam Neeson, which that’s fucking exciting.

Brandt: Definitely.

Craig: I don’t know if you’ve seen his thing on Ricky Gervais’ Show where he’s, “Let’s do some improvisational comedy.” It’s fucking incredible.

Jac: Even as the Lego cop. He’s so funny.

Craig: Yes, that Lego cop. He’s just like that when he was like the deadpan– that’s my hope, but it’s unfortunately technology.

John: Stephanie, you were about to say something?

Stephanie: I made a spoof and you should watch it if you’re craving.

Craig: Oh, okay.

John: What’s the spoof?

Stephanie: It’s called A Spy Movie. You can watch it on YouTube.

Brandt: Yes. I definitely will.

Craig: How about that?

Stephanie: It works.

Brian: It works. It’s amazing.

Stephanie: It’s because it’s not specifically-

Brian: It’s not topical.

Stephanie: Yes. It’s not parodying– like it’s not doing the exact copy of the scene and remaking it. It’s actually just going–

Brian: The genre?

Stephanie: Yes. Yes, so you have to be less specific about it.

Craig: I think that’s exactly right.

John: Great. Brant, thank you so much.

Brandt: Awesome. Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

Stephanie: I’m like shameless plug.

John: Hello. What is your name? What is your question?

Ken: Hi. My name is Ken. It’s for everyone on the panel. When you have a story idea, whether it’s for like an original feature or an episode of something or even just a scene, when you have that first spark, what do you immediately do to get that sort of seed to sprout to become something other than a passing notion? Then, by the same token, when you get further on in that idea and you hit what Aline Brosh McKenna calls the Rocky Shoals and you slow down. What do you do to remember what really sparked you about it in the first place?

John: For me, my first instinct is I do just write it down just so I don’t completely lose it, so I have like a stack of next cards and just like write down the idea so I don’t lose it. There’s something that resonates with me that’ll keep me thinking back about it. If it’s an idea that I do forget about next week, it was never that good of an idea. It’s the ones that keep demanding brain time like, “Oh, that’s a really good idea. I have to remember what that is.” I see some nodding.

Jac: Yes, I agree with that. For me, this is very specific to me, so this isn’t necessarily advice. I find that if I have something I’m excited about, if I tell someone about it, the magic goes away. The longer I keep something secret, the more I nurture it because I am thirsting for the day that I share it. The more sacred– and I can tell when something is very sacred because I have the discipline not to be like, “I had this really cool idea,” Even to my husband, like I just protect it, protect it, protect it.

For me, that works. That’s sort of like hoarding, “It’s my secret treasure,” spurs me on. Then later, when it gets bad, there are people in my life who they’re light helps me. Megan McDonald is one of them, like truly. There are personalities that if I talk to them about the thing, they have a natural energy that reminds me what I love and I can continue.

Stephanie: I follow that. The magic, it going away, is so huge.

Jac: Leaves the building, it’s so sad.

Stephanie: My husband gets so mad at me when I tell somebody an idea that I’ve had. He’s like, “It’s gone, girl. It’s gone.” It’s like 80% of the time I’m like, “Yes, I don’t like that idea anymore.”

John: Great. Thank you very much for your question.

Craig: Thank you.

Christy: Hi, I’m Christy and I’m an actor who’s dabbling in screenwriting. I was wondering if you had any specific, especially because we have some actresses who are like obviously doing more than dabbling.

Brian: What is that can in your hand?

Christy: Oh, it’s wine.

Brian: Oh, nice. You were kind of holding it out.

Jac: I thought you were filming us or something.

Craig: I thought it was a phone.

Christy: It was like a cheers, like top of the morning.

Craig: Okay, cheers. Yes.

Brian: Yes. I’ve been drinking. Yes. I love it. Do you remember your question?

Craig: You’re saying you’re an actor and–?

Brian: Some advice on being an actor and then transitioning to writing.

Stephanie: Yes. Okay. I strongly suggest it’s similar to what John was saying is like finding people that are in a similar position as you that make you laugh or you trust their creativity and you make stuff with them. I don’t know. I just think it’s easier with community as an actor when you’re specifically writing something for you to be into. You usually want to make it. You want to show that it’s just– and it was so helpful to– I swear to God, I would not be up here if I wasn’t also writing stuff for myself. The auditions, the endless auditions that people are like, “Next, next, next. They are not interested,” which is insane.

Brian: Because she’s so fucking good.

Stephanie: It’s just crazy to me. Yes, there’s been so many rejections. Actually, it was so nice. It was so nice. I remember like being like I would come home after like an audition or like a casting director being like– Oh, whatever. I’m not going to say anything. The rejection actually like fueled the writing. It was like you can do something, you can actively do something about it when you are inspired to write.

Brian: I support this. My only question is do you want to make things? Are you more like, “I should do that because people say I’ve got to break in that way.” I don’t know that I have an answer either way. I do think there’s a lot of pressure when you are an actor to figure out how to make something. I was always making things and so were you. We were making movies as kids, like on our handy cam. It’s also like an old muscle.

I don’t know. I would say you can you can also just be an actor and stay on the grind and you will get a part that will get you another part that will get you another. I many times was pursuing that trajectory and had some success that way, and also had more success also making things, so I don’t know. Do you have a natural instinct to write something and film something, or it’s more you’re doing it because people are telling you that that’s the only way to break in?

Christy: I have made things. I feel the same as you where it’s like I did it, it was so hard and I got it made and it got some recognition and people said it was good. Then it’s like, “I guess I’ll make another one.”

Craig: Welcome to writing. Yes, it never ends. “I guess I got to go make another one.” Here we go. That’s what it is. That’s the gig. It never ends. That’s how you know you’re a writer. When you go look– When you hit the end, you’re so proud of yourself for whatever. Give yourself a week… Fade in. Here we go again.

Christy: God damn it.

Craig: I know. I know.

John: Thanks so much.

Brian: Good question.

John: Hello. Can you tell us your name?

Katie: Hi, I’m Katie. In a previous episode, you guys mentioned that it can be helpful to let your representatives pigeonhole you in a genre as a writer so that they know where to put you. You guys have a myriad of different genres that you’ve written for. I’m curious how you navigate transitioning out of that once you have solidified your foundation.

John: Great. That’s a great question. I think what we said on the podcast before is like sometimes it’s useful for people to know what box to put you in just so they have some sense of how to send you out into the world. Yet it can be really frustrating. For a while before Go, I was only getting sent family movies. Things about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. With Go, I was able to say like, “No, I can really write a lot of other things.” Jac, I’m curious for you, as a feature writer, were you pigeonholed originally? Was there a thing that like, “Oh, we’d think about Jac for this, but not for other things.”?

Jac: Yes. I made a feature called Timer. Referring to the previous question.

Brian: I made a one called Oppenheimer so, people watched that too.

Jac: I wrote because I wanted to be a director. I’m not a good actor, so that really resonated with me, the like do you have the creator piece? Because I think that’s really what it is. I made it, this feature called Timer that’s about a device that counts down to the moment that you meet your soulmate. I was going for like an eternal sunshine, kind of a vibe. When people looked at it, all they saw was the rom-com. For a long time, I was the rom-com girl.

John: You’re also a woman. Could that be a part of it?

Jac: Yes.

John: Maybe.

Jac: It was a little bit of a part of it. It was really frustrating. Then I wrote– I was very angry. That’s another thing you said that I feel like when you write out of frustration, it can be really fantastic, like when you’re sick of something. I wrote the spec out of frustration and it was to sort of break out of the box. It got on the Black List. It’s called The Shower. It’s about a baby shower that gets interrupted by an apocalyptic alien invasion.

I was like I can do action. I had no idea how to do action, but I was like– so I sort of burst out of the box with a spec script. In fact, my agents didn’t get it. My manager, bless her, was like, “It’s time for you to leave,” so I left with like no career and a spec script that nobody got that was totally just all about vagina panic. It was me being like every horror movie is just a big, scary vagina and I need to address that in the script.

The script, then it got on the Black List, then I got representation. For my journey, I had to be like I’m going to write the thing. I didn’t feel like it was helpful at all to be in the rom-com box. I do think it is about what a kind of a creator you want to be. Do you want to be a writer for hire who can do any genre, any thing, like whatever? Then you need material that demonstrates that. If you want to have a singular voice, you got to write that singular voice. I think the real answer is what do you envision for yourself and write that.

John: We can stop there. That’s great.

Craig: Terrific.

John: Thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

John: All right. Our last two questions of the night.

Thomas: Hi, I’m Thomas. This one’s aimed at Brian and Stephanie, but open to whoever.

Craig: I’ll take this.

Thomas: When you’re making your own stuff and you’re excited about it, how do you strike that balance of wanting to show your friends and your contacts and stuff, but also not wanting to seem annoying or needy?

Brian: Wanting to show your friends and your–?

Thomas: When you make something and you’re really excited about it and you want to send it to everyone, but you don’t want to annoy them.

Brian: Oh. That’s a great question.

Craig: Early on when you’re like, “Look, I made another short,” and everyone’s like, “We really don’t care.”

Brian: I have a gift where I’m not afraid to be annoying. My mom, when I was like five, she was like, “When you go to school, don’t care what people think of you.” Obviously, I care what people think of me. It’s also not just that I’m not afraid to be annoying. It’s that just being annoying– I had an older sister, so I just am kind of annoying. Then that’s like– it’s just not all the time, but it’s just a part of my personality where I’m like, even, I don’t know, it’s like part of something I’m comfortable within my relationships. I’m like, “Oh, I’m being a little annoying right now.” I can’t believe I’m saying this publicly. This is crazy.

Stephanie: It’s very endearing.

Craig: You brought your publicist. We will strike it from the record. “I’m annoying.”

Brian: Anyway, hopefully it’s endearing or something.

Stephanie: You’re saying don’t worry about it.

Brian: I’m just saying, yes, I would make something that I thought was funny. I would post it on YouTube, but I would also like send it around to people and be like, whatever. J. Crew is spamming me every day. I can spam my friends.

Craig: He’s got a point there.

Brian: You’re a business. You got to get your stuff out there. What I do say a bit more earnestly is, at first, if the stuff you’re making is good, which I’m sure it is. At first, maybe you’re sort of spamming people or you’re being annoying about sharing it. Eventually, people are sort of thanking you. “Oh my God. I love your stuff.” It’s almost like the same people that were ignoring it at first are like just complimenting it later. I don’t know. It’s like the– and the world will thank you for being willing to give it something that’s cool, that it didn’t have before. Then eventually you won’t be annoyingly spamming people on Facebook. You’ll be here talking about your TV show. That’s cool.

Craig: Yes. If it’s good, it’s not annoying.

Brian: Yes. Yes.

Stephanie: That’s great. That’s amazing.

Brian: It’s okay to be annoying, basically. I think.

Stephanie: Yes. What’s the point? You might–

Brian: Any business is annoying. It’s trying to–

Stephanie: Yes. No, but there’s also just no loss in spamming people your stuff that you made, and you made it. It’s like, “Watch it, damn it.”

Brian: Yes. Exactly.

Stephanie: Send it away.

Craig: I like this.

John: I will tell you that I feel your insecurity there because I’ll post one thing. I posted the one thing that’s all [unintelligible 01:20:16] and then I do it, but then I have friends who are 15 stories in a row for the next two weeks that are proposing another thing. It’s like, “I clicked through and it’s fine.” I’m not angry with them. I would say err on the side of showing too much because you don’t know who’s going to see it, and then when they’re going to see it. People are not going to get annoyed by you. They’re not going to unfollow you, it’s fine.

Craig: I wish that all our emails had the thing that the texts have that says, “Reply ‘stop’ to end,” so that I could respond to a friend with just the word stop.

Brian: But if you think about it, what you are trying to do is make something that the whole world sees. It’s like why would you be afraid of trying to get a bunch of people to see your thing. Isn’t that why you made it? Maybe it’s not why you made it, maybe it’s also you make it because it comes of you and is art and needs to exist, but it’s both, you want people to see it. Don’t be afraid of showing it to people.

Thomas: Thank you so much.

Brian: Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

John: Our final question, and I don’t want to jinx you, but these have been the best questions we’ve had on a live show.

Craig: Oh, that is such a jinx. Oh my God. I would be drenched in sweat if I were you right now.

[laughter]

John: Let’s see if you can hold up to the standard here.

Ben: Oh, no.

John: Oh no. First off, what’s your name?

Ben: Hello, my name is Ben.

John: Hi, Ben.

Ben: I have a question about how writers’ rooms are scheduled and structured. I’m wondering-

Jac: I love this topic, so I’m already in on this question.

Ben: -Is it like a 9:00 to 5:00, a 10:00 to 6:00? Is it every Saturday and Sunday? I just have this irrational fear that if I get staffed, I’ll never see my wife again. I’m just curious how that works.

John: What a good question. Well done, Ben.

Jac: Such a good question. Such a good question.

Ben: Thank you.

John: What an audience. What an incredible audience.

[cheers]

Craig: I think we made it. I think we made it. This is a great audience.

John: Maybe the best audience we’ve ever had.

Craig: I think it might be.

John: It is a Christmas miracle. Jac Schaeffer, we’ve talked about writers rooms a lot.

Jac: We have. I love this question. I stumbled into TV with WandaVision because I was writing features at Marvel. When I got the job, I won the job, they were like, “How do you want to do this?” I was like, “How do I want to do this?” I asked all the smart people I knew who had TV experience and Micah Fitzerman-Blue said to me, “It is possible to have a civilized writers room that is 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, and that you get your work done. You have to be focused. You give them 15 minutes to shoot the shit in the morning. You are clear about what time your lunches are.” He broke it out for me.

My children were two and four. I was like, “This is going to blow up everything.” Also, I was doing TM at the time. I was like, “When does the TM happen?” Transcendental meditation, it’s 20 minutes, twice a day. I don’t do it anymore, which is maybe why WandaVision is probably the best thing I’ll ever make, because I was tapped into something. I’m a kind person and I’m a warm maternal person.

So I was warm, but I was real clear. I was like, “Go to the bathroom when you need to go to the bathroom.” Another thing I was told is let everyone know what the expectations are, and how they can reach you, when they can reach you, when you’re on the clock, when you’re not. I was told to give homework because I was like, “I don’t want to sit here,” like, “We’re not going to stare at each other until it gets funny or cool.” We end, everybody leaves.

I also had an hour-long commute. I was on the West side. We were at Marvel. It was, like, I’m still married and good job me. It’s because of what I did in this room. That’s not every showrunner, that’s not every show, but there are rooms out there that function in a way that support a life outside of the room and also support your creative mind outside the room.

Not everybody is fast in the room. Some of the greatest ideas on both my shows were born of homework, were born of people reflecting. Sometimes they would do it in pairs. They were allowed to stay as long as they wanted to stay. The childless people were there all the time. I promised them we wouldn’t have any overnight work sessions. We ended up doing that on WandaVision, and everyone loved it because it felt like we were kids in a candy store. This is the longest answer forever.

Brian: This is so good. Amazing. I’m learning.

Jac: I believe that we are currently in a moment where people can advocate for their personal lives and for their mental health, and I hope that we stay there. I think it’s about people in charge modelling that, and I think everyone has a right to that. You just have to do your job well. That’s the end of it.

Ben: That’s a big relief, thank you.

[applause]

Stephanie: Are there writers rooms Saturday, Sunday that you guys– Other than Saturday Night Live? That’s not even Saturday.

Jac: No.

Stephanie: I think Saturday and Sunday, you got-

Brian: I think the other thing is they vary wildly.

Jac: Production is totally different.

John: Production’s crazy.

Craig: You need to get a job on one of her shows. [crosstalk]

John: I was going to say.

Craig: You’ve got to get a job first.

Brian: We all want to work for Jac.

Craig: Step one, get a job.

Ben: It’s funny, you mentioned mental health. My wife is a therapist, which is why I’m asking this question for my own mental health. Thank you.

Craig: That’s great.

John: Great question.

Jac: Bless her.

Ben: Thank you.

Links:

• Hollywood HEART
• Jac Schaeffer
• Brian Jordan Alvarez and Stephanie Koenig
• Agatha All Along
• Fleetwood Mac – Silver Springs (Live)
• English Teacher
• A Spy Movie on YouTube
• Sitting
• My Old Ass
• The Downeaster “Alexa”
• The Later Daters on Netflix
• Sun lamps
• Thin Mint bites
• A Man on the Inside on Netflix
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on BlueSky, Threads, Instagram, and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

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 667 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Most screenwriters dream of getting their first movie produced. Today on the show, we are joined by a guest who just had his first two movies produced and released this year. Justin Kuritzkes is a screenwriter behind both Challengers and the upcoming Queer. He’s also a novelist, a YouTuber, a playwright. Welcome, Justin.

Justin Kuritzkes: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a real honor to be on here.

John: It’s so nice to have you here. I want to talk about this past year because a bunch of stuff has happened this last year, but clearly, the last year is only the tip of the iceberg and there was a bunch of work that went behind that. So I want to get into the work that got you here. I also want to talk about working with a director, sex on screen because both of your movies are very sexy and notably more sexy than a lot of things we’ve seen recently, and get a little granular with what’s on the page, if that’s okay.

Justin: Great, yes.

John: In our bonus for premium members, I want to talk about your videos because, in addition to this screenwriter in front of us, you were an early YouTube personality person. You had a character you played. I want to talk about sort of how that tied into the rest of what you’re doing or if it even does tie into what you’re doing.

Justin: Amazing.

John: Cool. Let’s do it. Let’s get the back story on you because I’m just meeting you for the very first time. You grew up here in Los Angeles?

Justin: Yes, I grew up in the valley partially. The first couple years of my life, I was in Encino and then my parents split up and my dad moved to Santa Clarita. So I spent a lot of time there. Then my mom moved all around the West Side.

John: Parents not in the industry, what was your sense of the industry growing up in town?

Justin: No. It was kind of a weird thing in that my immediate family, like my nuclear family, is very square, which I say lovingly. It’s a family of doctors and lawyers from Queens on both sides. But I have an uncle who’s a screenwriter and a producer in features. Probably the thing that caught on the most was this movie called 3000 Miles to Graceland with Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner. It was like about Elvis impersonators doing a heist in Vegas.

John: All right. Nice.

Justin: I kind of, through him, saw that a creative life was possible from an early age. But then also just growing up in LA, even though my parents weren’t in the industry, I knew a lot of kids whose parents were. So the industry was not something that felt abstract. It was very clear to me early on that movies were made by like actual people who went to Ralphs and bought their groceries.

John: Definitely. It feels like if you’d grown up in DC, you’d be surrounded by politics all the time.

Justin: Exactly.

John: If you grew up in Nashville, you’d be surrounded by country music. Even if it wasn’t your family’s business, it was part of the atmosphere that you are in.

Justin: Exactly. Yes.

John: So when did you first get a sense that movies or writing for movies was a possibility because you were writing other things, but when did movies enter into the equation?

Justin: Movies were kind of my first love. The first thing I was a fan of was movies. I was a cinephile before it was anything. Then in high school, I started writing plays because my school had like a one-act play festival with student-written stuff that other students would direct and act in. Through that, I all of a sudden became a playwright and then was just doing that all through college and for 10 years afterwards.

Then accidentally found myself writing a novel, which I thought was like a monologue at first, because that’s the way I would start a lot of my plays are just have somebody start talking and follow the thread of their voice until I wanted to have somebody else interrupt them. This guy just kept talking for 60 pages and nothing had happened. There was no story yet, but I liked the guy. So I wrote that as a novel.

Then I was in the middle of writing what I thought was going to be my second book when I got the idea for Challengers. That’s kind of how I started writing screenplays.

John: Before we get into Challengers, I want to put together some pieces that are along the way. You mentioned writing plays in high school. You went to school here, that was Harvard-Westlake.

Justin: Yes, I did.

John: Which is a good, very– I don’t want to say aggressive. Very academic. A top school.

Justin: I think aggressive is an accurate description. Yeah. In every way.

John: The reputation I always hear about Harvard-Westlake is if you don’t have one thing you excel in, you’re going to get sort of lost in the system, and the churn of Harvard-Westlake. Is that fair?

Justin: I don’t know. I really found dramatic art there. I found performance there. I don’t think I would have necessarily gravitated towards it if I’d gone somewhere else. But I think really through that, one-act play festival, and through the teachers in the drama department, who really became early mentors for me, yeah. For me, I had that, and that was what pulled me through it.

John: That’s great. Now you’re applying to colleges where you’re applying specifically to the thing. I’m like, “I’m going to go write plays,” were those the programs you were looking into?

Justin: I knew I wanted to write plays, but I wasn’t applying to theater school, or film school, or anything like that. I went to Brown, just as a liberal arts degree. I think I majored in philosophy. I was doing a lot of theater while I was there because I knew that that was the life I wanted to live.

John: We haven’t had a lot of people on the podcast talking about theater through college. We have a lot of people who like went, “I know I’m going to write movies. I know I’m going to write books,” those kinds of things. What is it like to be writing plays in college? Are you put into little groups to put on your one acts? What stuff are you doing as a person doing plays in college?

Justin: At Brown, there was this real tradition of student-run theater. There’s this place called Production Workshop at Brown, which has had people like Laura Linney and Richard Foreman and a lot of these iconic people in film and theater move through it. I was on the board of Production Workshop. And we were really left to our own devices. We had our own building on campus. They gave us a really small budget that we had to fight for every year. Then we just could do whatever we wanted, basically. So that was a real early view into producing too. The scrappiness of that was definitely something that got ingrained in me.

John: Now, someone who’s curious about studying film or studying television, they can just go out and see all the movies that are made, all the TV series that are made. How are you learning about plays? How are you learning about other plays that were happening out there? How are you learning about the form?

Justin: That’s such an incisive question because it is this really weird thing when you’re studying theater. You’re studying it all on the page, for the most part. Most of the plays that were inspiring to me or that I was taking my cues from artistically were things that I had never seen. They were things that I was just reading. I think something that stuck with me from those years of reading a lot of plays was that, in theater, there’s a standard formatting that you get taught at some point about how a play is supposed to look, but you realize when you read a lot of plays that nobody follows that.

John: No, nobody.

Justin: Every play has an instruction manual on how to read that play. Every play is developing its own vocabulary and is almost operating as a way to evoke an idea in you about how to stage something rather than a step-by-step guide. That was something that originally really daunted me about screenwriting because the form can feel so rigid and official. There’s something very strict about it. But I realized that part of the work of learning, for me how to write screenplays, was learning how to find my own language in it, and like treat each screenplay like I have to teach the reader how to read this one.

John: We had a Greta Gerwig on the podcast talking about her coming out of the mumblecore movement, which was a very under-scripted way of making a movie, of telling a story where like the improv and the figuring out as you go along was part of the process. When she actually got to write in screenplay format and realize like, “Oh, actually, I’m responsible for all these things, but I also get– it’s cool for me to actually describe in full detail what these things are like and what a character is wearing,” and kind of what the point is. Put the boundaries on things in a way that plays sort of don’t.

As I read through plays right now, I do just feel lost in terms of where are people in this space. I’m having to imagine this all myself because it’s just basically the dialogue in so many classic plays.

Justin: Yeah. A lot of my plays wouldn’t even have stage directions. They would just have characters start talking. You can’t do that in a screenplay or else people will just put it in the trash bin.

John: Absolutely. Talk to us about your first attempts to write in screenplay format. Challengers was your first attempt to write a script?

Justin: Challengers was the first script that I finished that I felt good enough about showing to anybody.

John: Let’s talk about what you’re lighting there. There you had other experiments with a form. What was it about the form that you found challenging, interesting? What broke your brain about it at first?

Justin: Maybe a really concrete example is I wrote this book called Famous People, which is my novel. That book is all written in the first person through the language and the voice of this young pop star who’s never named because he just he’s writing his memoir and we’re reading the first draft and he just assumes everybody knows his name so he never says it. And then I was turning that into a television pilot. That was one of the first attempts at writing screenplays as an adult.

John: I can imagine that’s a really daunting process because all the stuff that worked about that on the page as a book can’t translate directly.

Justin: No. You realize really quickly that so much of the experience of being famous, which is this character’s life, is that people are screaming your name at you all the time. I didn’t want to give him a name because that was thematically important to me that he’d be this every man, that he was like this idea of a pop star. I had to figure out ways in that pilot to plausibly move him through the world that he would inhabit without having people scream some name at him. That was a challenge. Often those kinds of unreasonable challenges end up forcing you to write in an interesting way.

John: We often say that it’s the restrictions that provide the shape and the boundaries for what the specific story is you’re trying to tell.

Justin: Yes. You have to give him a name for his dialogue. I ended up just calling him “the kid.” But even doing that felt like a betrayal.

John: Absolutely.

Justin: It felt wrong to me, but I had to compromise on that level.

John: Yes, absolutely. You had that experiment. Was that something you were just doing for your own kicks and giggles or had someone asked you to try to write this as a pilot?

Justin: A little bit of both. I was writing it on spec, but it was a producer was interested and I was trying to put it together. It was mostly for myself. It ended up being something that was really useful and just getting in the rhythm of writing screenplays.

John: You said you were starting to work on your second novel and when you decided you got this notion for Challengers and you put the book aside and started working on that, is that accurate?

Justin: Yes.

John: What was the spark idea in Challengers? What was the thing, like, “Oh, this is the central idea. This is a movie rather than a book,” shat was it about it that caught your attention?

Justin: It was 2018 and I just happened to turn on the US Open. It was in the middle of it. There was this match between Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams in the final. There was this very controversial call from the umpire where he accused Serena Williams of receiving coaching from the sidelines. Up to that point, I had not been a massive tennis fan or a sports fan even. Tennis wasn’t a big part of my life. I just happened to turn this on.

Immediately that struck me as this intensely cinematic situation, that you’re alone on the court and there’s this one other person in this massive stadium who cares as much about what happens to you out there as you do and that’s the person you can’t talk to.

John: Wow.

Justin: Immediately it just clicked for me, “Well, what if you really needed to talk about something, and what if it was something beyond tennis? What if it was about the two of you and what if somehow it involved the person on the other side of the court?” That all came like right away, but I didn’t sit down to write the movie for a long time. For a couple of years, I was doing other stuff. In that time, I became a legitimate obsessive tennis fan.

Originally I thought I was doing research, but then it morphed into just a new fandom. There’s a lot of exciting energy about being a fan of something for the first time. It felt like discovering movies for the first time.

John: Yes.

Justin: Just like when you meet a young cinephile and they’re like, “Have you heard of this movie, The Godfather?” or something. I was watching Roger Federer and Djokovic matches from Wimbledon and being like, “This shit is amazing.” I was doing a lot of research that didn’t even feel like research. It just felt like fandom, to the point that I almost didn’t even want to write the script because I knew it would ruin it.

John: Did it ruin it?

Justin: Of course. Yes, it did. I still watch the Grand Slams, but my love for tennis is not as pure as it once was.

John: For sure. When did you start writing the script for Challengers and how did you start writing it? Did you outline it? Did you know what the movie was and just sat down to create scenes?

Justin: I knew a lot about the movie. I didn’t know exactly how it was going to move. But I knew the structure because– The impulse to write the movie in the first place was that I was watching a lot of tennis and I started asking myself this question, which was, “What could I write that would be as good as tennis?” Because tennis was so good.

Then next to that, there was this question of, “What would make tennis even better?” For me, the answer to that question was, “It would be better if I could know at every moment exactly what was at stake for everybody.” If I could have somebody whispering into my ear, “Here’s why this point matters so much.” From that, the structure of dropping people into a tennis match and then gradually revealing why these people were looking at each other like this was so serious, even though it was this low-stakes thing, technically. That all felt like a natural outgrowth of my desire to write the thing in the first place.

John: You’re focusing on that moment between Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams. What was actually really happening in that moment? You couldn’t know, but as the storyteller, you could figure out motivations behind what was really happening in that match.

Justin: Yes. Of course, what happens in Challengers is nothing to do with Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams. The more I read about actual athletes, the more I’m convinced that they’re very boring people, in the most part, just like writers are very boring people for the most part.

John: Yes, absolutely. But from when you first started, you knew that there was going to be a central match that we would be pinging back and forth into.

Justin: Yes.

John: Did you have a grid outline of, “This is how we’re moving forward in time,” or did that all evolve organically?

Justin: Yes and no. I knew the container of the time period. I knew that it would be roughly from 18 to mid-30s because that’s the lifespan of an athlete. If you think of an athletic career as a mini life, it starts when you’re born, when you’re 18 and you’re dead when you’re useless, when you’re 35, or 40 if you’re lucky. So I knew that would be the timeframe of the movie, but I didn’t know when I started writing exactly where I would jump back to when.

John: Let’s take a look at some stuff on the page. This is from the very first page of the script. We’ll start with this one. This is a script we found. It’s labeled 2021, but this could have been earlier than that. This is the one that ultimately ended up on the blacklist.

Justin: Yes, this is the first draft.

John: First draft. When you say first draft, this is probably the first draft of something you would actually show to a person.

Justin: Yes. This movie was weird, in that I wrote the first draft of it towards the end of 2021. Then the distance between that and us being in pre-production was five or six months, which is crazy. That’s because I sent it to a bunch of producers and eventually decided to work with Amy Pascal and Rachel O’Connor. They quickly sent it to Zendaya because they had made all the Spider-Man movies together. She said she wanted to do it. She needed to make a Dune: Part Two in June so we had to make it before then.

John: Little window there.

Justin: There was no development process. We went into pre-production with this first draft and then ended up having what would have been the development process during pre-production.

John: Well, great because we’re going to talk about some scenes later on that changed a lot.

Justin: Great.

John: I really want to get into this. Let’s start with, we often do a three-page challenge on the podcast where we talk about the first three pages of listener scripts and talk through what’s working and what’s not working on the page.
Yours, it starts with Set 1 at the very top. Donaldson 0-0, Zweig 0-0. Exterior, a tennis court in New Rochelle late afternoon. Would you read us through the character descriptions for these three main people we’re going to be here?

Justin: Sure. Yes. Tashi Donaldson, 33, Black, a former player, sits looking out at the court where two men stand across the net from one another, looking like they are about to fight to the death. Patrick Zweig, 32, Jewish, scrappy, ranked 201 in the world, has the face of a man who’s been beaten down by this sport one too many times. He wears a mishmash of clothes from different companies. He’s got no sponsorship deal, though he has somewhat haphazardly ironed to his shirt the name and logo of a random Italian company, Impatto. Art Donaldson, 33, Wasp, good-looking, is the biggest star in men’s tennis that the US has seen in a generation. His shocking presence at this rinky-dink tournament is the sole reason why the modest venue is packed with locals, tourists, and anyone living in the vicinity of New Rochelle who is even remotely interested in tennis. He wears a pristine Nike outfit that practically glistens in the hot summer sun.

John: Great. We’ll put a link in the show notes to this page that we’re talking through. These three character names, they’re all bold-faced. People can see right now, these are our three main characters. I think it’s the only bold-facing you’re doing of characters in the script, basically.

Justin: Yes.

John: This is your trio. This is who you’re following here. These are chunky descriptions, and there’s a lot of stuff in here that’s not filmable, and yet feels really crucial. We often talk on the podcast about what’s cheating and what’s not cheating. There’s stuff here that we can’t quite know. We can’t know that he’s the biggest star in men’s tennis that the US has seen in a generation. We can’t know that as an audience watching this but we’re going to find it out soon enough. It’s going to become clear as we go through stuff.

You’re also giving us physical details that do help us see the difference. We can see Patrick’s scrappiness. We can see the difference in clothing level here. We get some sense of what this is.

Let’s jump ahead to the For Your Consideration script because you’ve made some tweaks to this. You were talking with Amy Pascal, Luca, and other folks here, and you maybe made some adjustments about what you’re really going to see.

The first description of Tashi is she’s two years younger. She’s wearing sunglasses now, which became iconic, became very, very important. The description of Patrick is a little bit different between the two. He’s now ranked 271 in the world. We’ve gotten rid of the, “Beaten down by the sport too many times.” We still have this idea that his clothes have no sponsorship deal. In both cases, he’s ironed on this logo for Impatto.

What else do we notice the difference between? Art is pretty much the same here. You’re still giving us this story of why people are here that’s not quite filmable, but we’re going to figure that out over time. Looking at these two pages, do you remember typing any of these changes?

Justin: Every one of them. Yes, of course. It’s the difference between– I think a screenplay is always two things. It’s always supposed to be a meaningful and exciting reading experience, but then it also becomes this very practical document that serves as an invitation for hundreds of different people to do their jobs.

John: Yes.

Justin: When you get into pre-production with a script, you’re really starting to realize that you have to put everything in there that someone’s going to create. Then that gets informed by the knowledge and the artistry that everybody else is bringing to it. For example, the sunglasses. By the time I had done these changes, we had already done the costume fittings. Jonathan Anderson, our costume designer, and Luca had put Zendaya in these amazing sunglasses for this opening scene. So I wanted to put that in the script to make sure we didn’t forget that those were going to be there because she was also going to have business with them and take them off and signal where she was at emotionally through what she was doing with her sunglasses. In a way, it was like this armor that she had.

John: Yes, 100%.

Justin: I made them all the same age for a number of reasons. I think it’s a tricky movie to cast in that the characters have to go from teenager to 30, and we didn’t want to cast two sets of actors. That idea was floated for a second before even Luca came aboard, Amy and I talked about it. We quickly realized we shouldn’t go down that road. Making the ages slightly lower made it so that we could cast people plausibly.

What else changed? 271 in the world, that’s a note from our tennis consultant, Brad Gilbert. If you follow tennis, he’s a legend in the tennis world. He used to be Andre Agassi’s coach. Most recently, he coached Coco Gauff when she won the US Open. When I explained to him and when he read the script, the position of Patrick in the world of tennis and how down on his luck he was, Brad was like, “Well, 201’s not that bad, but 271, then you’re getting into the territory that you want this guy to be in, where it costs more to drive to the tournaments than it does to win the tournament.” That was really the scrappy world of the lowest rungs of professional tennis that I wanted to show with Patrick.

John: Talk to us about your tennis expert here, because reading through the Blacklist script, the tennis is good. I totally believe the tennis. It’s probably written as a person who’s been watching a lot of tennis, but what were some of the things that the tennis expert could say about the 201 versus 271? What are some other things along the way that became important?

Justin: There’s countless things, but I’ll tell you some of the ones that are at the top of my mind. For example, I had in the Black List script, the first draft, that two weeks before the US Open, Art was at the Winston-Salem Open, and Brad read the script and went, “The schedule wouldn’t work out. It’s too close. Atlanta would work, but Winston-Salem, he wouldn’t be able to drop out and get a wild card in this other tournament.” Stuff like that is big.

Then probably the most useful thing that I did with Brad is that before we went into pre-production, Brad and me, and this guy, Mickey Singh from ESPN, went through every point that gets played in the script. Mickey’s job is to notate highlight reels. He breaks down points as a script, basically, so that the editors for the highlight reels know what to do. Mickey went through the script with me and broke all my points. Brad would critique them and go, “He wouldn’t go inside in there, he would go inside out,” or, “He’d go down the line,” or stuff like that.

John: Now, were these people also involved on set in terms of figuring out the tennis that was being played and the simulation of the actual matches?

Justin: Brad was essential for all of that because Brad was also the person who found us our tennis doubles. He was the person who brought those guys to Boston and then had real tennis pros play through the points so that Luca, our DP, and me could go around and Luca could shot list. We really treated the tennis in the movie like we were shooting fight sequences, like an action film. When you watch the movie and Luca’s doing 100 setups for a tennis point, that’s all storyboarded. That was only possible because we had these real tennis pros playing through everything. Brad was amazing for that.

Then also connecting us with real lines people and umpires. Everybody you see in the movie who’s working the match, that’s their job.

John: Great. That helps. Let’s go to a scene that didn’t change as much between the two drafts, but it also, I think gives a good example of you have a scene on the page, but then actually as you shoot it, things just drift and change a bit.

Justin: Great.

John: Here we actually have audio that we can play.

Justin: Amazing.

John: This is a scene early on in the movie. Patrick Zweig is trying to check into a hotel and his credit card is being declined. Let’s take a listen.

Patrick Zweig: I’ve been driving all day. I’m exhausted.

Motel Receptionist: If we gave out a bed to every tired person who walked in here asking for one, we’d be a homeless shelter, not a business.

Patrick Zweig: Listen, I’m a tennis player. You know the tournament down the road?

Motel Receptionist: Oh, that thing at the country club.

Patrick Zweig: Right, you get $7,000 if you win and you get money just for qualifying. I need a place to stay tonight so I can rest before my first match.

Motel Receptionist: I’m sorry. I need a card on file.

Patrick Zweig: What if I signed a racket and gave it to you?

Motel Receptionist: Sir? Sir, I don’t know who you are.

Customer 1: Look at this guy. He’s a disaster.

Customer 2: I don’t know. I think he’s kind of cute.

Customer 1: Carl. He smells.

Patrick Zweig: The racket alone is worth like $300.

Motel Receptionist: We need a card that works.

John: All right. We’re looking at a scene. It’s on page 10 of the original script in the blacklist version. Could you read just this Scene 13, give us a setup for where we are?

Justin: Yes. The actual–?

John: Yes.

Justin: Interior roadside motel, New Rochelle, same time. Patrick is standing at the reception desk in a soul-crushingly sad motel lobby, the kind of place you pass on the highway and wonder who stays there. It’s about as far as you can get from the fancy hotel room we just left. His card has just been declined.

John: Fantastic. Really great descriptions of what this feels like. You’ve, of course, broken the cardinal sin. You said the word “we” in the scene description, which we fully applaud. People will say that you should never say “we”.

Justin: Yeah, I never got that memo.

John: “We” is fully appropriate. We as an audience, as a movie, we’re just at a place and now we’re here. Craig and I both strongly believe in saying we here, we see, we are.

Justin: Me too.

John: Yes. It makes sense. The scene that is in the Blacklist, it’s the same basic content, but it’s not the same lines. Things are in some different orders. Why I picked the scene is because it’s clear that this is– Is your film a comedy?

Justin: I think it’s funny, yes.

John: It’s funny but it’s not hilariously ha-ha funny. It’s not joke funny but it’s funny. This is an example of the movie is funny. You’re putting people in situations that are familiar and uncomfortable. Getting your card declined, we understand what he’s trying to do and we also see the comedy around it.

Justin: Right.

John: This is the original version. Now let’s take a look at the for consideration, which is not quite the scene that we just heard either. There’s some changes that must have happened after that point.

The addition of the guys who come in,–

Justin: The couple.

John: The couple who come in later on, which in the for consideration, they don’t have dialogue, also they got some dialogue on the day.

Justin: It’s insert dialogue. It was stuff that I had written for them on the day or before the day. I don’t know what your philosophy is with putting that stuff in a script. I think for the flow of reading a script, it often doesn’t feel right to put that stuff in there because it’s not the main drive.

John: What’s so interesting is that because we’re pulling this out of the For Your Consideration script, it’s a question of should the For Your Consideration script accurately reflect the actual movie that’s on the screen-

Justin: Totally.

John: -or what the intention was? There’s no clear consensus on what it’s supposed to be.

Justin: It’s a very particular fake document, right?

John: Yes.

Justin: Because a shooting script is a script. It’s a practical document in some way, but that doesn’t often translate to the best reading experience.

John: 100% because there were scenes that were added or omitted. There’s all these blank little pieces.

Justin: Yes, there’s stars all over the place. It’s gross.

John: Yes. But then if you think of the ideal sort of For Your Consideration script would reflect– If scenes moved around, those scenes should move around in the script too so it reflects that. In this case, that couple that was added in or the other changes that happened, what do you remember about why those things shifted and how they shifted?

Justin: The couple was something that– Luca is always trying to give texture to everything. Even in a relatively straightforward scene in any of his movies, there’s always five things going on. He shoots a lot of inserts of a prop or of a piece of set dressing that you wouldn’t think should be highlighted. Then because it is, it all of a sudden puts the whole scene into this different context. Those guys, when we were building the world of that motel, we were talking about who could be populated in there. He offhandedly said there should be a gay couple road-tripping across America. I took that and wrote those lines for those guys with it.

Then, I think I had COVID when they shot that scene so I wasn’t on set. Then when they were editing it, I wrote some more like ADR lines for them for when they’re off-screen where they’re complaining about, “This place doesn’t look like the description online,” and all of that. It’s like a little pocket of a movie where you remind yourself that there’s a world going on that doesn’t care about these characters. For somebody like Patrick, that stuff is especially important because so much of his experience of moving through the tennis world is that nobody gives a shit. He’s always inconveniencing people with his existence because that’s what it’s like to be ranked 271.

John: Let’s talk about the scene and its importance overall in understanding Patrick and his motivation. It feels like it’s a scene you could cut. But if you did cut it, I would understand less about him. What’s nice about the scene is he has a clear motivation. He’s trying to get a room for the night and it ties into his bigger motivation, which is basically, “I need to be part of this tournament. I need to win.” He’s already envisioning himself winning this thing, or at least placing high enough that he’s going to have the money to do this thing. It tells us a lot about him in a short as a one page, and change scene.

Justin: If it’s a movie about two sides of a rivalry or two sides of a match, where those people are coming from is really important in establishing what’s at stake for each of them, and the texture of them ending up facing each other. I think also with Patrick, at this point, you don’t know that he comes from wealth either, it’s a bait-and-switch in some way in that you think, “Oh, this is a really down-on-his-luck broke guy.” Then you learn later on that, actually, he could end this misery in a second if he just called Mom and Dad.

Maybe this is true for you too, that you get inspiration from unexpected places and the genres that you wouldn’t think about when you’re– With this movie, even though it’s a sports movie, with Patrick’s story, I was thinking a lot about Inside Llewyn Davis.

John: Oh, yes.

Justin: I was thinking of Patrick as Inside Llewyn Davis of tennis.

John: First time I saw Oscar Isaac was in that movie. Yes, so good.

Justin: There’s something about that guy because he has so little of a handle on his own life, he’s always like pissing off everybody who shows him kindness.

John: You mentioned Inside Llewyn Davis, but what other movies resonated for you with this? Because I was thinking Broadcast News in the sense of there aren’t a lot of movies I can point to that are three-handers where it’s not just this main couple, but it’s the interplay of the three of them. What were the other things that were touchstones for you?

Justin: Carnal Knowledge and just Mike Nichols’ work in general was a real touchstone for me with this, Closer to some extent. Then there’s the great history of movies about love triangles like Y Tu Mamá También or The Dreamers or Band of Outsiders, or Jules and Jim, which came in to some extent.

In terms of sports movies, I think the ones that ended up meaning the most to me when I was thinking about this movie were movies like He Got Game, where, if you think about the final game of that movie, it’s a game between two guys who, if somebody was walking by on the street and they saw them playing, they would think this was just a pickup game between a father and son, if they even knew that much. They would have no idea that their whole lives were at stake.

I think for me, that’s always so much more interesting and dramatic than a movie about the NBA Finals. If I wanted to experience the drama of the NBA Finals, I would just watch the NBA Finals and it’s going to be better than a movie about the NBA Finals. Stuff like that. Bull Durham.

John: Bull Durham, another great reference because you have–

Justin: And another great three-way triangle movie.

John: Absolutely, there’s a sexual component to it that feels specific. Let’s talk about three-way sexual encounters. A scene that’s not in your Black List script, but it’s sort of iconic in the movie itself, which is the teenagers all get together in the boys’ hotel room and they have their kiss. What is the origin of that scene?

Justin: So Luca read this script. Amy was on board, Zendaya was on board. Luca was like this dream director for us. We sent it to him and he read it and we talked on the phone towards the end of 2021. Then like a week later I was on a plane to Milan to just spend some time with Luca and see if we could be in the trenches together right away because we knew that was how we were going to have to make this movie. We were going to have to really be comrades right away.

During those first days in Milan, we were talking about the script and one of the first conversations we had was that Luca said this thing that was really phrased beautifully, which is that, in a love triangle, all the corners should touch. When I heard that initially, I thought, “Well yeah, they do. These people are all very involved in each other’s erotic, emotional, and psychological lives. They’re really deep in each other’s shit, all these people, so they’re touching.”

John: But literally touching.

Justin: Yes, exactly. Luca was like, “No, no, no, literally.” The moment I heard that, I was electrified by it, I thought it was an incredibly exciting idea. My task then became finding a way for that to happen that felt organic and earned and that felt like it was coming out of the characters and the situation that was already there and not like something that I was imposing on them, for sensationalist sake or something. Then it became a process of figuring out where, how, and what kind of runway I would need to give that so that it felt like it had always been in the movie.

John: I thought it had always been in the movie. As I was reading through the blacklist script, I kept waiting for, “They had this scene at the party and this, and why did they omit that?” It felt missing. It felt like you already had the runway there. You just hadn’t put the plane on there to take off.

Justin: That came out of lots of conversations with me and Luca and then with our producers. Eventually, when I landed on putting the scene there and having it be an outgrowth of when they first met each other when they were kids, it felt so natural. It was a 20-page addition to the script.

John: It’s about seven pages is the actual scene-

Justin: The actual scene.

John: -but it becomes a hugely important part of a big chunk of the early section of the movie. We should note that your blacklist script is 128 pages, but the final shooting script is quite a lot shorter. Obviously some stuff got cut, but this was a huge addition. Let’s talk through this addition. Did you just go off and write up a scene and send it through and say this is the plan? What was the conversation?

Justin: when I was in Milan, I wrote a first pass at that scene in a different place and Luca and I were both really excited about the scene, but the more we looked at it, the more we realized that where I had put it, it’s like a bomb that you’re dropping in the movie and it can really throw into a disarray the delicate structure of the rest of it. We knew we didn’t want to change that. We wanted to keep the structure of the movie as it was. I needed to find a place to put this that didn’t throw everything out of balance. This finally felt like the right place for that.

John: Great. Had you tried to put it earlier or later? Where were you trying to slide it?

Justin: Later.

John: I could see why that wouldn’t work. It feels like what’s good about the scene is that it has that teenage energy. It has that each of them on the time, be an energy, which is they’re very horned up. There’s a woman here who’s willing to be there with them.

Justin: What’s important about it being where it is that they don’t know, or they don’t have the tools to know the consequences of what they’re doing. They don’t know the implications of what this is going to do to their lives together. Because it’s coming from this place of innocence and from this place of genuine excitement and curiosity about each other. They don’t have a sort of adult judgment of each other or of themselves.

It was also exciting realizing if I put the scene here, because part of my hesitation with having the scene in the movie, even though I was excited by the idea of it, part of my hesitation with it for people who’ve seen the film is that I always thought of the ending as the consummation of their relationship. That that was finally the moment when they all come together. I didn’t want to take the wind out of that. I didn’t want to zap the energy out of that. Every other place I thought about putting this scene felt like it did, but somehow putting it at the very beginning made that feel like a return.

John: It makes it feel foundational, like part of the journey that they’re going on.

Justin: Yes, exactly.

John: They had this thing. The scene itself feels like a play. It feels like you could actually stage this as a little one-act, one-scene thing because it’s just the three characters in a room. They’re having a conversation. There’s builds, there’s developments, there’s things that happen along the way. At any point, someone could pull the rip cord, but they don’t pull the rip cord. It feels like your playwriting background kicks in there. It’s also just a really long scene. Did you get any pushback from movie people or from the Amy Pascals of the world of, “This is a really long scene”?

Justin: No, Amy was amazing in that respect. She really wanted the scene to be as whatever it had to be. Strangely we had no pushback. Then I think the way that Luca ended up shooting the scene, it’s still intensely cinematic.

John: Oh yes. This is your first collaboration with Luca, but then you ended up going on into doing Queer. Talk to me about the transition between Challengers and Queer and how those two things came to be.

Justin: We were on set for Challengers and working very closely together, me as the writer and him as the director. One day Luca gave me the book for Queer and just said, “Read this tonight and tell me if you’ll adapt it for me.”

John: It’s a novella. It’s a short and it’s–

Justin: It’s about 100 pages, the book.

John: It’s a Burroughs book that was published much later than it was actually written. It’s set in 1950s Mexico, but came out in 1985?

Justin: Yes, exactly. He wrote it in the ‘50s, it got published in the ‘80s and Luca had read it in the ‘80s when it came out in Italy, as a teenager and he had been wanting to make this book into a movie since then. I felt this tremendous honor, but also this tremendous responsibility to write him the movie he had been dreaming about. Which was heavy.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Justin: I read the book that night and immediately said yes. Then after saying yes, figured out how I was going to do it.

John: Those are good experiences when you know you have to do a thing and then you figure out as you’re doing it, you’re building the plane to do it. What was the writing process for that? He loved it. He must have come in with some ideas of what was important for him, but he also needs to give you the space to actually write a movie, movie. What was the process?

Justin: It was really different from Challengers, obviously, because that was a movie I wrote on spec before I knew Luca and before I knew any of the people who made it with me. Queer before I even started putting pen to paper, Luca and I got to talk about it a lot because we were on set together, we were hanging out a lot and we would just talk about Queer and the cinematic possibility of the book. We got to work out a lot of the vision for how this was going to be different from the book and how it was going to honor the book before I even started writing. Then I started writing the bulk of the scenes while we were on set for Challengers and then really finished it right after we wrapped.

John: Like Challengers, it had a lot more on-screen sex than we’re used to in movies these days. I want to talk about that because in both cases we’re sort of used to seeing sex on streaming series. We’re used to seeing sex on our own TV screens. We’re not used to seeing it in a public place. Seeing Challengers on the big screen with an audience, it was fun because people are gasping like, “Oh my God, I can’t believe that this thing, this thing is happening.” There’s that nervousness of like, “Oh my God, sexy things are happening on this big screen while I’m around all these other people.”

It’d be so uncomfortable to see it like with your mom sitting next to you.

Justin: I was at the premiere next to my stepmom.

John: Absolutely. It’s good stuff. It’s perfect. Was your stepmom also at Queer, the screen–

Justin: She was, yes, but I didn’t sit through.

John: That’s a challenging one. Talk to us about like what your, what your instincts are about terms of showing sex on screen and, in both cases, there’s– what I liked about what you’ve done in both movies is that you’re showing us the awkwardness and the transition moments between we’re all in our clothes and now we’re actually doing this thing. It’s not cut two and now we’re underneath the sheet.

Justin: I grew up starting to really watch movies in the ‘90s when there was a tradition in action movies of the sex scene would happen and the music would start to play and it would have no dramatic point.

John: A little saxophone.

Justin: A little saxophone, or take my breath away or whatever. It’s sexy and almost just felt like it was a montage that was a placeholder. That feels completely cinematically dead to me. In the case of both Challengers and Queer it was really important to me that any intimacy that was on screen was always revealing of character. That drama was happening there. There was something at stake for people there because then it feels essential, it feels like the movie is still going on, you’re not watching a break from the movie. As long as that’s the case, then anything is worth taking the time to show, but otherwise, it’s not.

John: Some of my movies have sexual content on the go, have some sexual content and that’s fun. It’s always so awkward to write and discuss and have the conversation about this is what I see happening here. This is how it’s all going to go into play. Then you have to have a conversation with the director about it and then with the actors about it, how this is going to play. What I think is so important about what you’re describing is the characters have agency within the scenes. The characters are making choices within the scenes. It feels like it’s a natural thing that would have happened next, and yet they’re still alive. They’re not these robots going through it. That’s tough.

Justin: In terms of writing the description of it, I agree. It’s completely embarrassing to write that, but at a certain point, you have to feel like, “I’m going to ask people to perform this, and I’m going to ask people to light this and there’s going to be a guy holding a boom mic for this, and Luca’s going to have to shot list this.” So if I’m asking all of those people to very practically make this happen, I can’t take comfort in being vague on the page. It’s not just cowardly, but it’s irresponsible.

John: It is.

Justin: It’s really irresponsible to give people a vague sex scene and go, “Have at it.”

John: There was a script I was handed early in my career to do a rewrite on and it was a movie that had cars throughout it. There was a bunch of car racing and car chases in it. At a certain point, halfway down a page, the screenwriter of that script would say, “Now it’s the coolest car chase you’ve ever seen. I won’t bother describing it because it wouldn’t do it justice, but it’s really, really awesome.” I’m like, “You have abdicated your fundamental responsibility here.”

Justin: Yes. It’s like, “Fuck you, man. What do you want us to do? We have to go into production with this.”

John: Yes, absolutely. We need to know what is actually happening here. I think both in your tennis and in your sex scenes, I respect that they’re telling you what’s really going to happen. Obviously, everyone can bring their own expertise to it, but you get to see what is actually going to be happening on screen.

Justin: Yes, but that’s the dance you always have to walk in a screenplay, which is give enough information that people can see the movie in their minds when they read the script because the movie is happening visually. If you don’t put that information in, you’re not writing the script. But also leave it open enough that people can bring themselves to it and their own artistry. That’s a thing that took a while for me to figure out. It is something I’m always negotiating every time I’m writing something.

John: We have one question from our listeners, which I thought was especially appropriate for you. Drew, could you help us out here?

Drew: Yeah, of course. Jeremy writes, “A frequent conundrum in my writing is when I need characters to talk through a conflict. I’m decent at knowing my character’s objective and having their actions work towards those objectives, but I struggle having them navigate towards those objectives via dialogue. I’m not an elegant debater or salesman, and it makes sense that my characters, by extension, are not either. My absolute worst-case scenario would be writing a character trying to seduce someone. How do you get your characters to employ social graces or charms that you yourself don’t have?”

John: I can think of both in Challengers, there’s a lot of discussion debate, and trying to pull persons to one side or the other. Then also in Queer, Daniel Craig’s character is trying to seduce Drew Starkey’s character and fumbling at it and really having a hard time knowing where he’s at with that. Think about what are the challenges of figuring out that negotiation from inside a character’s point of view. How are we doing that?

Justin: With Challengers, I think it’s a movie that essentially only has three characters, which I think was a carryover from my experience being a playwright for so many years. You get it ingrained in yourself that you should only write parts that you feel really great about asking somebody to show up 100 times to perform, which is why there are so many plays with only three or four characters. So when there’s a movie with only three characters, the whole movie operates on the different ideology and philosophy and way of moving through the world of those people and how they rush up against each other, and sometimes, sympathetically and sometimes antagonistically.

I think ideally before you even start writing dialogue, you know enough and the audience knows enough about where everybody’s coming from so that by the time they open their mouths, we already know their point of view. We already know what’s at stake. We already know why they’re in opposition. For me, that’s why I spend a lot of time describing what somebody’s wearing in the opening page of a script, because you get a lot of visual information for free in a movie, right at the top that sets you up so that when a character opens their mouth, even if they’re saying something as banal as the kind of things you have to say in tennis like, “Let’s go,” or “Come on,” because that’s the limit of sports vocabulary because you’ve done all this work that’s not about dialogue, that dialogue means something and you know where they’re coming from when they say that.

I think it’s really tough in a movie to work through who somebody is through dialogue as a starting place because you just don’t have the space for it. Ideally in every scene, by the time somebody is talking, that’s the last piece of information we’ve gotten about who they are.

John: I think you’re exactly right. It’s that you can’t know what the dialogue is until you actually really know what’s happening behind the scenes. What are those inner gears that are turning?

Way back when, when I did my very first TV show, which was a disaster, mind you, but an exercise I did for myself, that was really helpful was, of the five main characters, I would write paragraphs about how they thought about a certain topic. I would give a topic and I’d just write in their voice how they thought about that topic. It gave me a sense of how their brain works, what their priorities are, what their intentions are when discussing a thing, and got me closer to what their voices are, what their speaking voices were like because I understood what their philosophy was like behind the scenes.

Then when I have the characters in scenes together, it felt natural for them to be going back to their principles and how their brains work that’s creating that dialogue. The challenge is you both want it to feel completely understandable how they got there and still surprise your audience. You still need them to say things that are interesting and provocative and surprising. It’s making sure that people don’t just feel like they’re on their rails, but they really are live in that moment, and that that’s the balance that Jeremy, I think, is struggling to find.

Justin: That’s what’s difficult about screenwriting.

John: That’s the hard thing about screenwriting.

Justin: I feel that’s something I think every screenwriter is always dealing with. You don’t get to choose which parts of it come easily to you. I think screenwriting is one of those forms where it’s all right if some part of it is really difficult for you because everybody has one part of it that’s really difficult for them and they’re all equally important. I think dialogue is actually less than 10% of a screenplay. For me, I’m thinking a lot more about structure than I am about dialogue. Maybe that’s because structure is harder for me and dialogue is easier.

John: We’ve had a lot of people in your seat who are in the same situation or they can write dialogue all day, but they really struggle to figure out how stories fit together. Other people have got really good puzzle pieces fit together, but it’s harder for them to individualize different characters’ voices. It sounds like Jeremy’s in that second bucket, but that doesn’t make you a bad screenwriter. It just means that some stuff’s harder for you than others.

Justin: Not at all. There are moments writing where I would trade a great dialogue scene for being able to figure out a structural problem that’s been plaguing me for three weeks. We don’t get to choose our fate in that way.

John: It’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing is a really unimportant, but this is something you may have noticed as you were driving around Los Angeles this week is, sometimes you pass by a strip mall or mini-mall and the signs look like they were on fire. It looks like they’ve been burned. They’re brown and yellowed and like, “What happened?” I got curious, and so I Googled and it was actually hard to find the answer, but I actually now know what’s happening is that it’s not the lighting behind it. It’s the actual, the vinyl, and the plastic that they’re printing on. They’re printing on a cheap plastic.

I’m going to put a link in the show notes to this Australian article that’s talking about what’s actually happening to the signs. Basically, it’s just sunlight damage that is breaking them apart. Now that I’ve mentioned it, if you were in Los Angeles or some other sunny environment, you’re going to see this constantly. Where it’s cheap signs and it’s actually a fairly recent phenomenon. If you, like, signs that have been up there for 10 years–

Justin: The way they used to make signs was more craftsmanship.

John: Absolutely. They swapped out to sometimes a cheaper plastic and it’s just disintegrating. Now you know what’s happening with all the weird burnt-brown signs in Los Angeles.

Justin: I feel like that’s a really real thing that the way things used to be built was better. I think that’s been true forever, but that’s just a product of globalization.

John: Yes, absolutely. I think somebody found a cheaper way to make those signs. It was like, “Oh great, it looks really good,” not realizing like, “Oh, it’s going to fall apart in a year.”

Justin: Of course. But then they’ll have to order more signs. Keep the gravy train going.

John: Justin, what do you have for us?

Justin: My one cool thing is a podcast that’s run by some friends of mine called Know Your Enemy. They’re pretty left-leaning journalists guys. They do deep dives on conservative thinkers throughout the years. Sometimes it’s very contemporary people who are a part of making really major decisions that will have big ramifications for people right now. Sometimes it’s really far in the past and doing a deep dive on the theory of some important conservative thinker. I’ve found that really useful for myself.

John: Know Your Enemy, a podcast.

Justin: Know Your Enemy.

John: Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Descriptions is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli, who also did our outro this week. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. It’s also where you find transcripts and sign up for a weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and such. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on YouTube and other video things. Justin, thank you so much for coming in.

Justin: Thank you for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, Justin, so one thing we allotted in your description of all the work that you were doing before this time is in addition to all your writing, you were also doing these little YouTube videos. The first one was Potion Seller. Talk to us about this character and what the idea was behind these.

Justin: Those I started making when I was in college, I was in the middle of writing my senior thesis, which ended up being the first play that I did off-Broadway. I was working really hard on this thing and treating it very seriously. Then at night when I was exhausted from that, as a way to blow off steam, I started playing around with the photo booth app on my Mac. And I noticed that if you use the facial distortion thing, you could do more than just one goofy face. You could actually create multiple characters. Coming from the world of theater, that felt to me like it had some relationship with mask work or improv.

I just started messing around on it and then was uploading the videos to YouTube because that was the easiest way to share them with my friends. Then–

John: What year would this have been?

Justin: This would have been 2011 is when I started and I was doing it all throughout that year and then would keep doing it every once in a while. They caught on in a very small way among my group of friends and their satellite of friends. Then a year after I posted one video called Potion Seller, it ended up on a Reddit forum or something. It all of a sudden went semi-viral. Then all of a sudden, millions of people were watching these videos. At that time when that was happening, I had just moved to New York and I was an off-Broadway playwright who was working for months or years on things that if I was lucky, a couple hundred people would see.

The dream that– you’re doing great if 100 people see your work as a playwright. Then I was making these things in five minutes and uploading them that night and they were being watched by millions of people.

John: Was it inspiring or dispiriting?

Justin: No, it was really freeing. It was really amazing because it put everything into perspective for me and made it also simultaneously impossible for me to take myself seriously as a writer or an artist or something because there was this stuff online that was going to be there forever, that completely threw a wrench into that. I really embraced that and made a decision very early on that I was never going to make those videos on any schedule or I was never going to make that into work. That that was never going to be a job. I was never going to cultivate my online content.

John: You were coming into online content manufacturing at a time before there was the TikTok, before there was all those things before it became really possible to commercialize what you were doing. Therefore you’d never had to think of it as work. It was just this thing that you were doing off-on. It was just a side project and a way to blow off steam and just do your own thing. If you were starting now, do you think it’d be easier or harder to put those characters out there in the world, and what would be different?

Justin: What’s funny about those videos now is that sometimes people will reach out to me about them and they’ll talk about when I started making those as the golden age of YouTube. For me, I’m like, “That was only 10 years ago. It’s not that long ago,” but the life of the internet is really fast.

John: It is.

Justin: I think part of the freedom that I felt in making those was that YouTube at that time was like the Wild West, kind of. It felt like the early days of the internet.

John: People didn’t know what to do with it. The first YouTube video is a visit to the zoo.

Justin: There were plenty of people who were doing really interesting things with video online since the beginning of streaming video online.

John: I know Ze Frank, Ze Frank was doing those very early explainer things in the pre-BuzzFeed era. It was himself, but it as a character talking about things. But it was all new.

Justin: It felt like there was no expectation and there was no standard of professionalism. Now there’s a sort of sheen that a lot of the content has. There’s conventions of how those forward-facing videos-

John: Absolutely.

Justin: -work and look and how they’re edited. None of those conventions mattered at that time.

John: Absolutely. Your Potion Seller, it would be a vertical video now. It’s just horizontal because that’s what it was on your laptop.

Justin: It would be vertical. You would keep it under one minute so it can get in TikTok and be on the algorithm or be a YouTube short or whatever.

John: What I do find fascinating is I think there’s– you talk about the conventions, there’s storytelling genres that exist only in an online video and that sense of the space within this one video, but how it pertains to everything else in your grid and how it pertains to this ongoing character is really interesting or reaction videos where it’s like, this is my reaction to what this other thing is or me building upon this other thing. It’s fascinating to watch all those things grow. We have this instinct that we want to tie them back into what we make in film and television. And I think that’s probably the wrong instinct.

Justin: There was a moment when like in a very well-meaning way, my reps would be like, “Make a pilot about the world of Potion Seller or something.” I would like, think about it or try and then quickly realize that’s exactly not the point. The point of this thing is that it’s doing nothing for me professionally, and the point of this thing is that it’s not polished. It exists only in the space that it occupies.

John: Two friends from very different parts of my world. One of whom works with a bunch of online creators who are so good at being able to talk to their audiences and make really amazing things super cheap. They just have all this vocabulary for doing what they do and another friend who has made classic big film and television and the guy who does the online videos, his creators want to bridge over into that space and to tell more sophisticated stories, longer stories, and all that stuff. I’m trying to get them to talk and interface with each other so that they can learn from each other.

But I had to warn both of them, you have completely different words for the same thing. Just make sure you’re defining everything clearly at the start because your instincts, while it’s both telling stories with a camera, everything about it is different. The nature of how you’re approaching this stuff is different. They’re not used to having any gatekeepers at all. It’s so challenging to get them to be on the same page about what it is that they’re trying to do. Yet the online people have a ton of money and so they can do a bunch of stuff.

Justin: For me, it’s all part of the same impulse, I really try not to think of them as separate categories of a creative life. I think they’re all– I enjoy being that confusing to people and to myself. I think it’s a good antidote to a lot of the dark possibilities for the heaviness of this kind of work.

John: For sure. Cool. Justin, thanks so much.

Justin: Thanks for having me.

Links:

• Justin Kuritzkes on Instagram and YouTube
• Challengers and Queer
• Justin’s novel, Famous People
• Challengers – Production Draft
• Challengers – First Draft
• Queer by William S. Burroughs
• Potion Seller
• 3000 Miles to Graceland
• Why does my sign look like it has been burned? by Perth Graphics Centre
• Know Your Enemy podcast
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

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 666 of Scriptnotes a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to Satan.

Craig: We will eat your soul.

John: Probably not, but today on the show it is a deep dive into the unholy trinity of films that established the genre of movies about Satanism. We are going to discuss how we got here how these films work and the future of the devil on screen.

Craig: The future of Satan. It’s like the worst deadline article ever.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Like Satan ankles hell.

John: Totally. 100%. Our bonus segment, we’re premium members. We will pontificate on our best candidates for the Antichrist.

Craig: Oh.

John: Yes. Who would it be? Who should it be?

Craig: Think of a couple of people.

John: I can think of a few. Let’s start off by talking about Satan. We don’t talk about Satan very much, Craig, at all. I don’t think we ever even discuss him.

Craig: Weirdly, it doesn’t come up.

John: It doesn’t come up that much.

Craig: I know that some people in certain parts of our country probably presume that here in Hollywood, we talk about Satan all the time. While we’re drinking the blood of children or whatever it is that they think we do, when in fact, mostly what we do are things like, figure out why there are all these fingerprints on the refrigerator door and take the dog out for a walk. So it doesn’t come up.

John: Quotidian life just doesn’t involve nearly as much Satan as one would guess.

Craig: Also, Satan’s not real.

John: That is true. Let’s talk about Satan, at least the modern conception of Satan. Because when we talk about Satan as an idea, I think we have an image in our head for who Satan is. Satan, in modern conception, is an individual who was thrown out of heaven-

Craig: Fallen angel.

John: -fallen angel, yes. Very, very powerful.

Craig: Yes.

John: The nemesis of God.

Craig: Right, so Satan occupies a very difficult narrative space because he is the antagonist in the Bible, or if you– the Old Testament doesn’t really talk much about Satan, but–

John: Also, we’ll get into that, the New Testament doesn’t really talk about it.

Craig: The church love to talk about Satan. They set up Satan as this rival. Then when you get into Revelations, and then here’s the narrative problem for Satan: Currently, the theory is he’s down there in hell, ruling over a lake of fire, where people burn for eternity but he’s going to come back through his form as the Antichrist or I guess that’s his avatar.

John: Yes, that’s one of the ways he could do it. He could be the equivalent of Jesus where he’s like is incarnate through the Antichrist.

Craig: Yes, he creates his Satan incarnate and son of Satan, whatever you want to call it. And that brings him back to earth where he gets into a huge battle with God and Jesus and all of God’s forces and it’s an actual battle that takes place in a place called Armageddon, I believe, or it’s Megiddo and it becomes Armageddon something, and Satan loses.

Now the narrative part here, that’s rough for Satan, said apparently he knows he loses. It’s already like. What’s he getting ready for? That big fight that he’s going to lose one day?

John: I would say often in our cinematic stories we have heroes who know they’re going to lose and yet they carry on the valiant fight anyway.

Craig: The heroes do.

John: The villains–

Craig: The villains never do.

John: Well, you know what? We’ve just had Wicked. We’ve just reformed the Wicked Witch of the West.

Craig: Yes, but that’s not–

John: That’s not what we’re talking about here.

Craig: No. This devil, this Satan doesn’t seem to be– he’s like he missed those pages. I assume everybody else has read it and then no one wants to tell him. It’s a preordained loss. That’s Satan for you.

John: We also have like the South Park incarnation of Satan, which is basically packaging up all these things and then making him a sad, lonely figure.

Craig: Also a musical theater figure, which is like the best.

John: Absolutely the best.

Craig: Yes, he just wants love.

John: Importantly, we should say that our modern conception of Satanism, and really Satan, is that there are cults who are there who are trying to bring about the end times, hell on earth. He has his minions on earth, which is, without that, there’s really no story to tell.

Craig: Satan is constantly using us to try and get his way and there are the versions where we never actually meet Satan. There are versions where we do, so for instance in Constantine, we meet Lucifer and he’s quite annoyed actually that his son is trying to get back because his son is going to take over his throne or something. Then there are versions where Satan is walking around among us and just by lying and manipulating gets us to just be evil and that would be The Devil’s Advocate where, “I’m a fan of man.” God is an absentee landlord. That is a great line.

John: It’s a great line.

Craig: Yes, it’s a great line.

John: Let’s go back into the roots of Satan and Satanism. This idea of an existential cosmic evil makes sense. It’s always sort of been there and so there’s always been some embodiment, some agent behind misfortune, it’s useful to believe that. It’s useful to believe that there’s some force that created the universe, some fatherly figure or motherly figure who is shepherding us all, but also that there’s a villain out there who is responsible for all the bad things that happen to us. You see that across all ancient mythologies.

Craig: Absolutely. Nyx was the Greek goddess of shadow, I believe, and she gave birth to a bunch of children, discord, war, disease, famine, all the baddies.

John: Then we have Hades who rules over the underworld, so the idea of like ruling over the land of the dead, you sort of combine and conflate these things.

Craig: Hades is a little bit more management than the traditional Judeo-Christian sower of evil. In American tradition, because we go all the way back to our Puritans who came over and Puritans, a lot of people think the Puritans left England because the English wouldn’t let them be freely religious. The problem was that Puritans were too religious. The discrimination was, “You guys are way too religious.” They were like, “Well, we want to be as insanely religious as we want.”

John: As hardcore as we want.

Craig: As hardcore as we want. “We’re going to go.” They really, really had a thing about Satan. They were very much convinced that he walks around. Today we indeed have churches who refer to Satan all the time.

John: Go back to the ancient roots of things too. You have, other religions like Zoroastrianism, had the sense of there’s an evil, there’s a balancing force of evil that’s out there. The idea of a duality between the good and the bad makes sense. You can understand why it’s naturally there. When you have a monotheistic religion like our Abrahamic traditions, it’s understandable that they would feel like, okay, well, what’s the counterbalancing force there?

Craig: Especially if you start to organize yourself, then you need something to scare people with. Jesus was like, “Here’s all this wonderful positive stuff. It’s really difficult to do. You have to be poor, you have to put everybody else first, you have to allow them to hit you and not hit back.” And everybody that came after him was like, “Great. Also, you have to give the church your money and you have to follow our rules or you will be sent to hell. If we don’t like you and you’re saying things we don’t enjoy, like for instance, the earth revolves around the sun, for instance-

John: Yes, heresy.

Craig: -clearly, Satan is working through you.” That’s a nice way to dehumanize somebody and burn them alive.

John: Yes, it’s good. Now, before we get to Christianity, we of course have Judaism, and we have the Old Testament, and we have all the other things that didn’t make it into the official Old Testament. Going back to your Bar Mitzvah days.

Craig: My Hebrew school days.

John: Your Hebrew school days. There’s not a lot of Satan there. There’s the idea of a Satan, which is any sort of adversary, it’s like an obstacle there, and they would use Satan as a verb, like to oppose. It’s not the same thing.

Craig: It was not a thing. I remember asking my rabbi about it because we grew up, everybody watches cartoons, you see the red devil with the pitchfork. Why a pitchfork? I don’t know.

John: Actually pulled from Poseidon is what they’re thinking.

Craig: Maybe. I don’t know why.

John: Maybe the trident of Poseidon.

Craig: Barbed tail, not sure why. I remember him saying, “We don’t even really have a hell.” There’s like a theory of a place you go if you’re really really bad, where it’s just like cold and empty and it’s a wasteland and you’re lonely. We didn’t have that personified guy, the guy who sits there and laughs as you burn and burn and burn, it was just more like, you’re going to be disconnected from other people and you’ll be miserable. Which is enough for me.

John: Yes, we had bad people and bad forces in the Old Testament. The snake in the Garden of Eden is often matched up to Satan, but there’s no direct connection there.

Craig: No, that was– he was not. Yes, it was just more temptation.

John: Temptation. Throughout the Middle Ages, you don’t see a lot of the devil, you don’t see a lot of Satan. If you see him it’s as a comic character, like a pathetic character, and just the same way we have a devil versus the Devil, it’s sort of a blurry line between the two of them. Book of Revelations, you mentioned before, is where we first start to really get into this notion of this capital S Satan of Armageddon. He’s this big third-act villain. It’s important to sort of put the Book of Revelations in context because I think the movies we’re going to be talking about will reference it.

Craig: All the time. It’s the worst book.

John: It is referring to specifically the Roman Empire, which it was written in. Even 666 is actually probably referenced to Nero rather than to any other sort of thing.

Craig: Likely was written by somebody who was mentally ill. It has all the hallmarks of somebody who experiences schizophrenic breaks, is hallucinatory, or I don’t know, it was John of something who was writing Revelations. Maybe that he was just snacking on shrooms because it sure feels shroomy to me. It feels altered. The imagery does correspond a lot to the way people experience hallucinatory images when they take drugs. It’s an incredibly unreliable book, even more so than all the other ones that are also ridiculous in their own way.

John: One of the things that’s different is though, like the rest of the Bible is a history and this is a prognostication of things to come.

Craig: It’s not gospel. A bunch of people kept telling the same story about what happened with Jesus and disagreed slightly from time to time.

John: Sure. That’s why you have four copies.

Craig: Then this guy was like, “Yes, yes, great.”

John: Let’s say what’s going to come.

Craig: I’ve seen, yes, I see the whore of Babylon.

John: He’s mapping out the future seasons.

Craig: Then she’s riding with a host of lions screaming and I’m like, “Get off the drugs, buddy.”

John: Early modern church starts to personify in the season. It’s increasingly powerful. It’s really with John Calvin, Martin Luther. It’s less of a metaphor of like, of temptation or wickedness, but actually an individual. Then of course we have John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is sort of mapping that out. It’s important to understand Paradise Lost is literature. It’s not actually canonical Bible anything.

Craig: No. It’s a story. Calvin was definitely– Look, here in the United States, we’re all still living in the shadow of John Calvin and his crazy ideas.

John: Yes. 2013, a YouGov poll found that 57% of Americans believe in the literal devil compared to 18% of British people, which is just such a shocking difference.

Craig: The answer is again, Britain said, “Go away.”

John: That’s true.

Craig: “Leave. Please leave. Stop saying things like babies are evil because they were simply predetermined to be predestined to be evil. Stop it. Just go. Go away.” I’m not surprised. I’m fascinated by the 18% of British people who are like, “Yeah, I do believe the devil is real.” It seems like such an unpopular thing to talk about in the UK.

John: Also, the British people are also living in popular culture. They’re living in a global popular culture that’s often dominated by American stuff. They’re seeing the three movies we’re going to be talking about.

Craig: True.

John: It’s possible that that’s the influence.

Craig: They’re movies.

John: They are movies.

Craig: They’re movies.

John: Milton’s Paradise Lost is a book.

Craig: I know. I know. Ghostbusters also is a movie. Do you think more Americans believe in– It seems like more Americans probably believe in angels than in Satan.

John: Probably so. I want the polls. I want the polls. People love angels.

Craig: People love angels.

John: They love angels. They love ghosts.

Craig: They do.

John: They do.

Craig: It’s like the idea of children flitting around on wings, just saving them from stuff or I don’t know, making sure Starbucks opens up on time, whatever people pray for.

John: It’s a lot. I think we also, as we get into this, there’s a weird connection to the Catholic church and the Catholic church, not that the modern Catholic church has done a lot of talking about Satan or Satanism, but I think there’s some sense in like the Catholic church being organized and like that it’s a secret conspiracy that they’re hiding from you. The movies we’re going to be talking about often have Catholic priests who are, “I shouldn’t be telling you this, but–“

Craig: Yes. What we find when we’re telling this story is that the Catholic church is incredibly useful if you’re a screenwriter because A, it is powerful and it is wealthy. Also, it’s the oldest of the traditions, particularly in the United States. It feels like it goes back to the beginning. The Holy Roman Empire essentially was Catholic. That was what it was. They speak Latin. It has this ancient vibe. It’s almost like they’re as old as the devil himself. Therefore, we need to go into these old scrolls and talk about these things that only the Catholic priests would have access to.

John: I wonder if there’s also an aspect of racism there because you look at the Protestant foundations of the United States and the Puritans and all this stuff, and you had this influx of immigrants who were largely bringing in Catholic traditions, which were also Christian, but not the same kind of Christian. It’s a way of differentiating. We obviously have anti-Catholic leagues. We have this sense of anti-Catholicism. I wonder if some of that gets folded into why we’re thinking about them as being involved with all this.

Craig: Yes. There could be some catholiphobia going on there. I’m not sure it’s racism, per se, because in the United States, there was tremendous fear of white Catholics. John Kennedy, the big thing about him was like, no one’s going to vote for a Catholic. As if that were a thing, it used to be.

What’s interesting is that in our country, we’re predominantly not a Catholic country. Satan is talked about constantly in our Protestant churches, in our Southern Baptist churches. Satan is a massive thing. It’s sort of their big selling point, and yet it feels like a different Satan than the Catholic Satan, which is like older, creepier, more in the shadows. The Protestant Satan comes up to you and offers you a weed.

John: Yes, absolutely. Before we get into our actual movies, let’s talk about the Antichrist because that’s a thing that’s sort of come up in, I think, all three of these, which is the Antichrist is mentioned four times in the New Testament as sort of a false prophet to take the role of Jesus. Again, it’s sort of like a lowercase antichrist, it’s not sort of an individual, it’s like sort of anybody who’s standing in the way of the prophecy of Jesus. According to my Wikipedia research, the first big reference to all this is 400 CE, which is Martin of Tours saying, “There is no doubt that the Antichrist, has already been born, firmly established already in his early years. He will, after reaching maturity, achieve supreme power.”

Craig: I think it was a running theme. Every generation is like, “This is it.”

John: This is it. It’s always the end times.

Craig: There has to be a term for generational narcissism. Maybe that is the term.

John: Sure.

Craig: We always think that we’re the ones living at the end of the world or in end times because we’re the special ones. No, we’re not. Ever.

John: Ever. And yet, even as we’re saying this, it does feel like it.

Craig: Yes, like probably it is happening.

John: All right. Before we get into our movies, because we’re going to focus on three movies and obviously they’re not the first movies or only movies to talk about Satan or Satanism, we should talk first about Faust, because right from the start of cinema, there were a bunch of movies about Faust. Let’s talk about the Faust story, which is really the devil’s bargain. It’s the idea of a pact with the devil.

Craig: Selling your soul becomes this big thing. The soul itself, the concept of the soul is a very murky one that, at least in Christianity, it’s murky until it becomes part of this bargain story where it’s now this thing you can give away. Again, it’s one of those stories where everyone knows the ending and yet somehow people keep falling for it over and over and over.

This goes to even in the American Black tradition, blues. it was always, thought like this blues man sells his soul to the devil and so that he could play this well. I’m like, but you know how that’s going to end and then lo and behold, you get movies like Angel Heart where it’s how it ends. Every time.

John: Every time.

Craig: Every single time. No matter what. I can’t understand why anyone makes that deal.

John: No.

Craig: Bad deal.

John: Bad deal. Bad deal.

Craig: Totally.

John: We can understand where that story comes from because if you look back at like Rumpelstiltskin or sort of the classic fable myth kind of things, there’s that sense of like, we’re going to make a deal and that person is going to come collect on that deal. Always there.

Craig: Well, what’s interesting is like the Rumpelstiltskin story is a good devil’s bargain story, except in the end he loses. That story is sort of like, this guy took advantage of this poor woman who wanted a child and made the deal and she spun the straw into gold and — oh, that was it, because she just wanted to stay alive.

John: How dare she.

Craig: Right? He lets her turn straw into gold, but his price is, “I’m going to take your baby,” which is crazy. Also, what are you going to do with it? Then she figures out a way to beat him. The whole point of the devil’s story is you lose, every time.

John: That is a whole different class of devil stories. For this episode, I really want to talk about the Satan that is Satanism and how that all fits together.

Craig: I need a chorus going while we talk. [hums] There’s always a chorus. [hums]

John: Latin, you couldn’t understand, but it’s just creepy because it’s there.

Craig: Exactly.

John: The three movies I want to talk about are Rosemary’s Baby from 1968.

Craig: So good.

John: The Exorcist from 1973.

Craig: My favorite.

John: And The Omen from 1976.

Craig: Also a movie.

John: Also a movie. The commonalities, I should say, we’re going to put links to the scripts we found for these three things. You can take a look through those. One thing I’m struck by is they’re all about the horror of parenthood. It’s interesting that our window into these stories of Satanism and satanic cults is about parenthood, which is specific. I guess there’s an aspect of like Antichrist being born. Parents are just a natural thing. If you were to even take out the Satanism of it all, they’re all unified about stories of how scary it is to be a parent.

Craig: Even though they shift gears and sort of concentrate on the father in The Omen, they are all about the conception and then how to deal with the fact that this symbol of innocence, a child, is in fact evil. That contrast is horrifying to us. Even though in Rosemary’s Baby, there is no child until the very, very end and you never get to see him. But, “he has his father’s eyes.”

John: He does.

Craig: It is the year one.

John: We’re starting in 1968, which I’m going to count as the ‘70s because it’s really more– By that point, we’re in the ‘70s.

Craig: It’s ‘70s vibe.

John: Let’s talk about the ‘70s vibe because looking at these movies, they do feel like they’re responding to a thing that’s happening in American culture. We’re starting to realize like, oh, the year 2000 is not that far off. That feels like a marker. That millennial change feels like, oh, 2000 years ago, we had Christ being born, and so there’s that aspect. We have Ouija boards. We have that sense of like, there’s a spiritual outside world there that feels different. We have changing social structures. We have the women’s liberation movement. It’s a different time, so it’s not surprising that we feel like there’s some end-of-times angst going in here. What else about the ‘70s strikes you?

Craig: Well, that was pretty much America’s low point. The late ‘60s, early ‘70s, our cities were suffused by riots, racism. Even though the Civil Rights Act had been passed, the echo of what occurred after that was violent and long and led to multiple assassinations. Presidents were being assassinated. Civil rights leaders were being assassinated. Candidates for president were being assassinated. Cities were on fire. Crime was very high, and there was a sense that America had fallen into, you remember when we were kids in the ‘70s, pollution.

There were ads that were just basically begging people to stop throwing garbage out of their car window as they drove. There were also ads that said, “It’s 10:00 PM, do you know where your children are?” What the hell was going on where parents had to be reminded by television? Maybe it was five o’clock. I can’t remember what the time was. Like, “Hey, by the way, remember? You also have kids. Find them.” Everything was falling apart, and the notion that there was some explanation to this, that there was evil in the air made sense.

You had the Night Stalker, and you had Son of Sam, and serial killers-

John: I agree, yes.

Craig: -they were always there, but I think in the ‘60s and ‘70s, we suddenly became very aware of them.

John: I think we were also aware of conspiracies and things happening behind the scenes, and we had investigative journalism that was uncovering things. The idea that there is a group of people, a cabal, who has secret plans feels like a very natural fit for the time.

Craig: Nixon.

John: Nixon, yes.

Craig: It was happening. So it feels like a smart thing to do. America was still quite religious, and also, you were starting to see shifts in the politics of motherhood. The birth control pill was available. The idea of being a mother was now difficult. People were looking–

John: The idea of choosing when to become a mother.

Craig: That’s right. Single parenthood was now– single parenthood prior to the ‘60s and ‘70s was– and you and I both remember how, even in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Murphy Brown, the sitcom–

John: A woman who chose to have a baby by herself.

Craig: She was yelled at by a vice presidential candidate.

John: Yeah, she was the Antichrist, though. All right, let’s talk about Rosemary’s Baby. Written and directed by Roman Polanski, based on Ira Levin’s novel. I’ve not read the novel. Apparently, it’s a very faithful adaptation.

Craig: It’s a really good book.

John: Development-wise, we know that Polanski wrote a 272-page screenplay for the film in approximately three weeks. I guess it got cut down.

Craig: I’m going to go with cocaine on that one.

John: I think it’s a safe bet that some cocaine was involved. It apparently was very faithful, and it lifted dialogue and stuff directly out of the source material. In our story, we’re following Rosemary Woodhouse, who’s played by Mia Farrow, and her husband, Guy, played by John Cassavetes moving into a new apartment in New York City, they meet their neighbors, Ruth Gordon among them-

Craig: The best.

John: -iconically. It doesn’t start out being about a woman wanting to have a baby.

Craig: No.

John: Talk to us about your experience of Rosemary’s Baby.

Craig: It feels at first like a story about a little bit of a fish out of water, because Rosemary, as Mia Farrow plays her, she almost has that mid-Atlantic accent. She’s very refined, and she’s very delicate. Her husband feels urbane. She is not so much, and she’s trying to figure out how to be a good wife, and she’s trying to figure out how to fit into this world which is–

John: A young wife.

Craig: A young wife, which is very metropolitan, and there are the weirdos down the hall. It’s a pretty good start. We would never be able to get away with it now. The length of time you have to just feel the discomfort of feeling out of place. It also allows the film to zero in on her perspective. Much of the movie, you’re with her, feeling how she feels. Then some things start to go wrong.

John: Notably so, husband is an actor, so he goes off, he’s cast, and things are sort of percolating for him. She’s being left alone more, and the neighbors are starting to intercede. I didn’t go back to him when we watched this, but at what point does she have the chocolate mousse that sends her into slumber?

Craig: The mouse.

John: The mouse.

Craig: The mouse.

John: That sends her into slumber.

Craig: I think it’s middle-ish because there’s someone who dies. I can’t remember. There’s like an early death in the movie that’s very suspicious. It does strike me, we talked about agency recently, and so much of this movie is about somebody trying to find their agency, and everybody keeps taking it away. Ruth Gordon is concerned that she’s not– “Oh, you’re not feeling well, you’re not eating enough, I made this special mouse for you,” which is a mousse. Everybody then begins the gaslighting process. That is followed by one of the most terrifying sex scenes I’ve ever put on.

John: Yeah, it’s a rape.

Craig: Oh, definitely a rape. Also a monster rape. We should probably talk about Roman Polanski for a second because Roman Polanski raped a girl. He raped a child and fled the country, and has never returned. Is he still alive?

John: He’s still alive.

Craig: He’s still alive. And this town only seemed to acknowledge that recently, but even, it was like maybe 10 years ago or so, he got like an honorary Oscar or something, and everybody stood up and applauded, and you’re like, ”The hell is going on here?” Roman Polanski definitely falls into the, okay, person who did very bad things, person who made very good movies.

And that scene in particular is disturbing because it’s oddly restrained. There’s not nudity. There’s just this sudden flash of this thing. Then there’s a delirium that follows and paranoia.

John: Yes. The Satanism of the movie comes from this sense that this pregnancy that comes out of this rape, that there’s something wrong about it, that she’s not being told everything.

Again, we’re locked into a very limited POV, which is really helpful for our storytelling here. It sort of leads to the paranoia here. And yet the edges of the conspiracy are nebulous, which is actually a case with all these things. You never quite know, how big is this? Who’s behind this? Whose plan really was this? How far back did it go? I think that’s one of the hallmarks of these movies is that by being vague, they’re sort of more sinister.

Craig: Sure. The less the more scared you are. There is this entire genre of, I’ll just shorthand call lifetime movies, where a wife or a girlfriend is being gaslit by her husband. Other people join in but she’s like, “No, I know it’s–“ and then there are movies like, was it Flightplan? Is that the one where Jodie Foster is in a plane with her daughter and then her daughter disappears and they’re like, “You never had a daughter on the plane. What are you talking about?”

That’s this thing that echoes how people treat women in society. We now create this wonderful allegory and then you discover how mundane it all is. It’s the mundanity of Rosemary’s Baby that’s so brilliant. When she finally comes to understand what’s happened, everybody’s weirdly relaxed. They’re also so normal. You not only have Ruth Gordon playing the lovely old lady who lives down the hall, but you have just like, there’s this guy from Asia who’s taking photographs and he’s just like a tourist almost. You have Ruth Gordon’s husband, who’s just an old goof. Then there’s like women that look like from the steno pool. The evil, it says, is everywhere you look.

John: Let’s move on to The Exorcist. The Exorcist is 1973 and by that expression, you love The Exorcist. My recollection of The Exorcist is having watched it in like little small segments when it was broadcast on TV because I was too scared and my parents would be out of town. The Exorcist again is a story of the terror of parenthood and the terror of this child being possessed, literally possessed by the devil. What are the responsibilities of a parent?

Craig: Even worse, she’s possessed by a demon.

John: I’m sorry.

Craig: So it’s worse because the devil–

John: Yes, sure.

Craig: One of the things that they did that was so smart, it comes from the book, William Peter Blatty.

John: Yeah, so Blatty wrote the novel and the screenplay.

Craig: Right, brilliant. William Friedkin, of course, directing it. The entity that has occupied her is very powerful and not even close to being the devil, which makes it sort of worse. What you immediately note in the small amount of time between Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, the gulf between how vulgar and how shocking things are in The Exorcist. Mia Farrow’s got this like, “What is happening? I don’t believe you. What?”

John: Meanwhile, Reagan is vomiting.

Craig: And masturbating with a crucifix, and using the most foul language possible, and just doing these things. She’s a child. The thought that we could, some of the scenes in The Exorcist now, you simply would not– you wouldn’t even be able to get past the script. People would be like, “We’re going to– No.” Are you going to have your intimacy coordinator come in and talk about how this is going to work? But it also was graphic, deeply graphic in ways that Rosemary’s Baby wouldn’t have even thought of.

John: Because I remember even long before I’d actually seen any clips of The Exorcist, I was aware of the tropes. I was aware of the spinning heads and the vomits and the crawling on the ceilings, because it was just part of popular culture. It was a meme before we had a word for memes.

Craig: I watched The Exorcist in the most ill-advised fashion. I was 9 or 10, which is the perfect age to be deeply traumatized by The Exorcist. I was staying at my friend Eric Freeman’s house, and he had a basement. This was 1980. There was a service in– that’s right, 1980, there was a service in New York called WHT. New York infamously did not have cable for a long time, because of like–

John: It was hard to plug wires and stuff in.

Craig: It was laws. It was just laws and the mob or something, I don’t know, for some ridiculous reason. Then there was a service, WHT, that you would pay for, and it would basically send an over-the-air, scrambled signal, and then you had a little de-scrambler. They would run movies. They would also run some soft-core porn after hours that’s when I also saw porn for the first time. Eric Freeman’s basement was like– it was the hottest club in town.

I knew nothing about what I was in for, and it was so impactful upon me. To this day, it still scares me. I know it shouldn’t, but just seeing her face sometimes scares me.

John: Let’s jump ahead, then, to The Omen. We’ll talk about this for all three of them, and sort of their financial success, and why that’s cemented their place here. Let’s talk about The Omen, because I’d never seen The Omen, so I watched it last night. Written by David Seltzer, directed by Richard Donner. This is where we get the popular culture or knowledge of 666 because they’ve mentioned it a lot in the course of the movie because it wasn’t known at that point. People didn’t know Book of Revelations 666, so they had to explain it a lot in the movie.

Story follows Gregory Peck, who is an ambassador, first we see him in Rome, then he’s coming into London. He and his wife have a young child. Only he knows that it’s actually adopted, because their child died when it was born. This is Damien, which is such a great name. It became iconic in terms of the demon child.

Craig: Basically, we were like, let’s take the word demon, and change it to Damien.

John: Perfect.

Craig: Yes, that sort of goes to why, to me, The Omen feels like somebody said, “Get me Rosemary’s Baby, get me The Exorcist, blend them, and let’s see what comes out the tube.”

John: I’ll try to find a link to it, but I was looking through one article, blog post that was arguing that the movie was deeply impacted by one episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which actually, an episode that had many of the same beats in terms of like politician raising the child, who is the Antichrist. This child, Damien, sinister things happen around them, a nanny hangs herself in a really graphic fashion.

Craig: That’s the best scene.

John: It’s the best scene.

Craig: “It’s all for you.”

John: It’s all for you. There’s a photographer who is tracking the family, who keeps noticing, funny that all these images are showing up in photos they’re taking of you.

Craig: Then he dies.

John: Then he dies. My frustration in watching it is that I really enjoyed how it started, I loved the filmmaking, and that ‘70s feel, it’s like this handheld–

Craig: Real grimy.

John: Yes, it was great to see, and then the movie gets dumber as it goes along.

Craig: Unfortunately, it does, because there’s nowhere for it to go. In the end, Rosemary’s Baby is about Rosemary. It’s not about the baby. The ending of Rosemary’s Baby is so horrifying, because all it is a mother who can’t help but be in love with her child, even though her child is the Antichrist. Because it is about motherhood, and it is about lack of agency.

Rosemary’s Baby is almost like, love is so powerful here that it doesn’t matter what happens, you’re going to love your child. The Exorcist is about saving a child. It’s about a priest who’s started to lose faith, and who feels like he hasn’t been able to help anyone, including his own mother, finally being able to do what Jesus did, give his life to save an innocent. The Omen is just sort of, just the kid is the problem.

John: The kid is the problem, and Gregory Peck ultimately doesn’t have to wrestle that much with it. He’s like, “Oh, I can’t kill my son,” but he can take those daggers. He’s ready to do it.

Craig: Yes, that’s the problem is, you’re just waiting, and then it’s just sort of the same thing of, okay, I can’t do it, I can’t kill him, and so then you end up, everybody dies, and Damien’s the devil who runs everything. That’s the thing. I just think it’s so much more remarkable that the ending of a movie like that, be the parent chooses to pick the child up and love it.

John: Yes.

Craig: That movie just got a little goofy.

John: Yes.

Craig: I don’t like saying bad things.

John: No, not a bit. We should stress that all three of these movies were giant hits.

Craig: Huge.

John: Phenomenons, and they were lines around the block, which is the reason why they’re so anchored into place in popular culture in terms of establishing what we mean by Satanism. I would posit that we would not have our understanding of Satan and Satanism without these movies, in the same way, we didn’t used to be so afraid of going into the water until Jaws. It created a thing that is actually not really a thing. The moral panic over Dungeons and Dragons and heavy metal music and all that stuff wouldn’t have happened without these three movies.

Craig: It would not. Just as our understanding of who Santa Claus is because Coca-Cola drew a picture of a guy, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was a song written by an advertising firm for a department store in Chicago, I believe. We think these things have been there forever. They have not. We think that there’s been this concept, and it hasn’t. It came out of those movies. It came out of that time.

Then you’re absolutely right. What happened almost immediately, in terms of speed of a nation moving, was something called the Satanic Panic. These movies presented a situation where there was, not in the case of The Exorcist, but in the other two, a kind of conspiracy of people to bring about Satan in our world, who would then do bad things.

Very shortly thereafter, people started to say, I think that there’s a conspiracy to bring Satan out in our world. Just as they did with Galileo and everybody else, it became a great way to take people that no one liked and accuse them. It was Salem Witch Trials writ large. America got so stupid. We think of America now as stupid. No, no, we have been stupider than we are now.

John: Let’s jump forward to where we’re at now and the sequels to these movies. There were other movies that were in their same place. We saw Satanism in our television shows to some degree. Our serial killers that we would put in our stories, might sometimes be satanic. Right now, we’re not actually doing a lot with Satan or Satanism in our movies. Longlegs, head nods in that direction. We have a movie like Hereditary, isn’t Satanism, but it’s adjacent to it.

Craig: It’s adjacent but that feels more like possessory. Again, The Exorcist was about a possession, and the whole concept of exorcism, which is a very Latin word, is connected deeply to the Catholic Church, and it’s the idea that you can be possessed by something. There have been so many possession movies, all of which, ultimately for me, I just wonder, I wouldn’t know, it just feels so weird. It’s like making a movie about two young people falling in love on an enormous boat that’s going to hit an iceberg and sink. Now, do something original, and you’re like, I can’t. It’s done, as good as it can be done.

You’re right, Satan has gotten goofier now because we sort of, again, like The Devil’s Advocate, it’s broad, and it’s very winky, and sort of like, “Satan,” come on. When you see Peter Stormare’s depiction of Satan in Constantine, it’s almost like they said, “All right, you saw how big Pacino got, go bigger.” So Satan becomes broad because he presumes we’ve all heard of it, we all know it, and then it’s almost like he’s rolling his eyes about 666. It’s old-fashioned, it’s hokey.

John: It’s hokey, and I also wonder whether we’re reaching for other forms of cosmic horror. It’s not like we’re making Cthulhu movies all the time, but there’s other senses of just existential dread out there that don’t have to be so tied into one specific mythology there. Maybe we should be reaching for other ways of acknowledging the horror of the unknowable darkness.

Craig: Yes, and it may be that because we’re American, our tradition is so steeped in Satanism, going back to Salem and all the rest. It’s hard for us to feel the same things that we would feel about, say, Cthulhu, even though, of course, also a creation of an American.

John: Yes, 100%. I think we should also maybe wrap this up by saying, of course, this is all based on our very sort of Western views of what Satan is just because it comes out of that tradition. I’d love to hear what the Asian equivalent of this is. I guess we have The Ring.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: Yes, some of those movies. Again, so we’re talking about this otherworldly horror that is unknowable and unstoppable.

Craig: Which, again, draws a lot of it, it seems to me, from The Exorcist. We are all people. We are all scared of the dark. It doesn’t matter where we grow up. We’re scared of the dark, we’re scared of the unknown, and we’re scared of ghosts. Japanese horror does a particularly good job of figuring out how to make ghosts really scary as well. Korean cinema does a beautiful job with this as well. Every culture has its nightmare creatures.

John: Absolutely, a way of showing those primal fears in a cinematic form.

Craig: Lord of the Rings. Sauron. That’s Sauron, Satan, nightmare. That’s on–

John: Absolutely. I say it as opposed to like a Voldemort who is a character who has a full, rich backstory and does it like, even though there’s a cabal trying to bring him back to life, there’s a little of that, but it’s not the same thing.

Craig: No, because Voldemort has not always been. The idea is that Satan was here before man. Before God made man, and Satan makes a bet with God about Job, and there’s all this stuff where it’s quite clear he’s floating above all of us or underneath all of us, I suppose.

John: All right, we have a couple of listener questions that are on topic.

Craig: Great.

John: Eric writes, “As you said, in a good screenplay, the protagonist goes from ignorance of the theme to embodiment of the theme through action. It seems to me that in most movies, that involves a process of gradually embracing a positive truth that the protagonist needs to live a better life. What about movies with tragic endings, in particular horror films, where the protagonists end up dead, or at least much worse off than how they started the movie? Are they also still gradually learning to accept and embody a theme? It just happens to be a theme that destroys them instead of making them better. How does the journey from anti-theme to theme play out in The Exorcist for the protagonist, Father Damien, as he approaches his tragic ending?”

Craig: That one’s pretty easy. It is just a straight-up guy who’s questioning his faith. He has doubts. He is not sure how he is supposed to be an effective priest to anyone. He’s certainly not the person that the Catholic Church is thrilled about to go help this girl. They send– the exorcist is somebody else. It’s not him, it’s Max von Sydow. He’s the exorcist, but he dies. It’s really there so that Father Karras, at some point, can decide, “I’m going to commit myself to saving somebody at any cost, even if it’s my own life.”

And so in his final words, he says, “Take me, take me, take me.” It happens. Then he throws himself out the window and goes down those amazing stairs. That is about as clear of a going from anti-theme because in the beginning, he’s like, “I’m not very good at being a priest.”

John: I think other sort of horror films. the first Alien is a horror film. Ripley’s journey is great, to get singled out and actually rise to the occasion in ways that embody a lot of the themes we’re supposed to be doing here. In a lot of other horror films, especially slasher films, you can say that, yes, it’s actually tougher to chart the journey of that character. They’re surviving, but are they growing and changing in a way that is meaningful? Sometimes, yes, but a lot of very successful movies in that genre, you’re not seeing those same dynamics.

Craig: No. Myself, I’m not a big student of those films. Sometimes, when you look at how people describe the mechanics of screenwriting, you should also ask, what kind of movies do they make? I talked about the mechanics of screenwriting all the time, but there are kinds of movies that I’m not that into. I’m not that into– I was never a big fan of the Halloween films or the Friday the 13th films, because it didn’t really do anything for me, mostly for this reason. Didn’t seem like there was much there other than, “I’m not going to let you kill me.”

John: Absolutely, the final girl, “I will survive.”

Craig: The final girl.

John: I’ll see essays that really talk about the dynamics of that, and it’s great. I’m so glad you’re finding meaning in that. It just doesn’t resonate with me.

Craig: Right, and so what I would say to Eric is, you might not see this applying to some of these movies, and that’s okay because that is not really a skeleton key for everything. I think I pretty clearly said this is for mainstream storytelling of a certain sort.

John: I can imagine a better version of The Omen that has a lot more of that character arching, too. It’s not like the father’s desperate for a child and then to have to decide to kill the child.

Craig: It could be better.

John: It could be better.

Craig: It could be better.

John: Emily asks, “What’s the difference really between thriller and horror?”

Craig: Well, it’s whatever we want to say it is. Ultimately, it’s terminology.

John: There’s overlap between the two, but there’s a lot of thrillers that are horrifying, and there’s horror things that actually aren’t thrillers in the sense there’s not suspense. They’re just dark.

Craig: Thrillers, in my mind, are designed to quicken your pulse and get you chewing on your fingernails because you’re nervous. Horror movies are supposed to make you look away because you’re scared. Those are the two–

John: Sure.

Craig: Those are supposed to scare.

John: Absolutely, because there are political thrillers. I guess you could imagine a political horror movie, but it’s like it’s not the, it’d be very different. Michael, our final question. “I wanted to get your opinion on horror films never doing well during awards season. It seems like regardless of the quality of horror films or the performances in them, there’s never any Oscar buzz around them. Does Hollywood hate horror?”

Craig: Does Hollywood hate horror? Hollywood loves horror.

John: Loves horror.

Craig: That’s why they keep making horror films. What you’re asking is-

John: It’s so much money. It’s so cheap.

Craig: -do Oscar voters hate horror? I don’t know if they hate it. They just don’t seem to be that into it, but again–

John: If you look at the films that have incredible quality, they still do get singled out. The Silence of the Lambs, horror film. Well, horror film, thriller, both.

Craig: Thriller. It’s a thriller-

John: It’s scary.

Craig: -with scary moments. Look, the genre films, yes, of course, like comedies, they are generally overlooked in favor of the Oscars to some extent become about these smaller movies a lot. They’ve expanded it to make it a little bit better. Repeatedly, we end up in a situation where, yes, big movies that are very scary and have really lasting, deep impact on culture aren’t even considered.

John: No.

Craig: Because they’re genre and the Oscars are snobby.

John: Also, let’s be realistic that the makers of those horror films aren’t trying to win those Oscars and they’re not doing the work that it would take to win those Oscars.

Craig: Because they know it won’t work.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s a trick of the day problem, yes.

Craig: I think it would be fair to say like, “Look, you make a big comedy and everybody laughs and they have a good time. You also know, we’re not going to spend money on an Oscar campaign, it’s just not happening.” The Oscars are for dramas and they’re for a certain drama that appeals to a certain age of people.

John: It’s time for our one cool things. My one cool thing, I’m reaching back, I’ve probably, this has been my one cool thing, maybe three times, but it’s so topical that I need to do it, which is the short story Gifted by Simon Rich, which is about these parents who discover their child– the child is born with horns. It is the Antichrist. They are so obsessed with getting it into Dalton to get it into a really good private school and to make sure their son’s life is as awesome as it can be. It is just hilarious. It’s just a great reminder of, for all the tropes you set up in a genre, the antitropes can be just hilarious.

Craig: So funny. My one cool thing this week is a television series. You know me, I don’t watch a lot of things. I’m two-thirds of the way through, it’s called Say Nothing or in the parlance of the show, Say Nothin’. It is a series about a woman named Dolours Price, who was a member of the IRA and most infamously perpetrated car bombings in London and was imprisoned and went on a hunger strike and was force-fed and tortured and then sent back.

It’s also about Gerry Adams, who, and this is fascinating. I’ve never seen this before. At the end, so Gerry Adams, this show is based on a book, and Gerry Adams runs the IRA, he’s going through all this stuff, and at the end of every episode, it comes up and it says, “To this day, Gerry Adams denies ever being a member of the IRA or participating in any violent activities.” That disclaimer, I’m sure Gerry Adams’ lawyers thought would be real good for him. It is the most damning disclaimer I’ve– and the fact that they repeat it at the end of every episode is so brutal. I think it’s just beautifully done.

John: Great.

Craig: It’s gorgeously performed and filmed, and the writing is excellent. Josh Zetumer is the showrunner here. Just beautiful work. My kind of show. Congratulations to everybody that clearly worked so hard on Say Nothing. Oh, and also now, because I’ve been watching it, I think I can do this, and if you’re from Northern Ireland, please go ahead and write in and tell me I blew it. This is the phrase I’ve been working on, is do it now. Okay, ready? “Do it nye.” How is it?

John: Nice.

Craig: Well, it may not be nice. We’re going to hear from some folks from Belfast. I want to hear how bad I did, or how good.

John: How good, How good. Where do we see that show?

Craig: That’s on Hulu.

John: Hulu.

Craig: On Hulu.

John: Hulu.

Craig: Hulu.

John: Hulu. That is our show for this week. Scripnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, and edited by Matthew Chilelli, who did our very special outro this week. Matthew, thank you for this.

[music]

John: If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnaugust.com. It’s also the place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkware. You’ll find them all at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net. We get all those back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on The Antichrist.

Craig: Oh, there’s more Antichrist?

John: Yes.

Craig: Good.

John: Good.

Craig: Excellent.

John: Craig, thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, the Antichrist today. Let’s figure out who we should– Who’s a good candidate for the Antichrist? Because, and we should also specify, which aspect, is it just supposed to be the son of Satan, or is it supposed to be the false prophet who leads us away from the true teachings of Jesus Christ? Do we need the person who seems evil, or the person who seems really good? There’s lots of ways we can go here, so what are some of your instincts?

Craig: Well, the way that people tend to treat this is somebody shows up who is really slick and appealing.

John: Up-facing the crowd, yes.

Craig: Everybody wants to vote for this person, this person seems great, but then casually starts to convert us all to a one-world government, which is the worst possible thing.

John: Yes, of course.

Craig: Like a one-town government or a one-state government. Why would everybody just– what? Okay, so one-world government’s the worst possible thing, and then they start doing horrible things, and of course, it’s over. The person who would be the most hysterical Antichrist to me would be Kirk Cameron.

John: Oh yes, that’d be great.

Craig: Kirk Cameron was a child actor on sitcoms in the ‘80s.

John: Growing Pains.

Craig: Became very, very religious, and then has dedicated his time since to a lot of evangelical Christianity, but also making these movies about the Antichrist. In those movies, he’s the hero who’s trying to stop everybody from believing in the Antichrist. That is what the Antichrist– that is the movie the Antichrist would be making to get the lens off of him.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: It’s very clever, see? That said, Elon Musk is a pretty decent candidate.

John: Mr. Beast. Name is right there.

Craig: Wow.

John: Mr. Beast, he’s doing all this good in the world.

Craig: What a put.

John: He’s helping blind people see. He’s giving away all this money.

Craig: Mr. Beast.

John: He’s obviously the most generous person on Earth.

Craig: You’re right. It’s sort of like in Angel Heart, Robert De Niro plays the devil, and he introduces himself as Louis Cypher.

John: Yes, can’t figure that out.

Craig: Lucifer.

John: Wow. Mind is blown.

Craig: Jeez Louise, come on devil, do better.

John: All right, so if we’re starting with somebody who’s already powerful, then Elon Musk or some other billionaire feels like a good choice. Taylor Swift in terms of her influence, in terms of her ability to get the young people motivated to do terrible things like vote.

Craig: This is why I think people get real keyed up about the UN. If you know anything about the United Nations, you know that the one thing you never have to worry about is the United Nations doing anything-

John: Oh, 100%.

Craig: -in a particularly effective, quick–

John: People want to think of the UN as like a government. Does it govern anything? No.

Craig: It’s the biggest Zoom meeting where nothing happens ever. Yet, because it smells of one world government, yes, the person, whoever’s running the UN, the Secretary General of the UN is always looked at as a possibility.

Then I think you’re right, in the modern times what’s happened is kids through rap culture and through hip hop culture have swung over to this idea of the Illuminati. They’re super into the Illuminati, when in fact, I don’t think there is– there seems to be some really screwed up parties going on.

John: I think we should talk about it because I didn’t know that was happening.

Craig: You and I, I think, we are on the outs, man. We have never been invited to anything like that, nor did we– We’re actually quite sweet in that, I’m sure you were like–

John: I’ve been invited to board game nights.

Craig: What? Yes, when you read that, you were like, “What? Really?” Yes, we play D&D and I do my puzzles. It turns out that some bad things are happening. That said, they aren’t satanic. That’s the whole point, they’re just people being jerks, and a jerk is a very mild term for the things that they were doing. They were being criminals and violent criminals. That’s always been a thing. Maybe people would think like Sean Combs, but he’s in prison now.

John: Sort of by definition, you want the Antichrist to have a lot of sway and power in popular culture and he at the moment does not.

Craig: Who are we all cheering for?

John: Obviously a president feels like a good candidate for an Antichrist because they have so much power. They can literally do a lot of things. They can start wars.

Craig: Donald Trump, it’s too obvious. He’s too clumsy, he’s like Mr. Magoo.

John: Yes, so like Hillary Clinton would be a better choice.

Craig: Well, Bill Clinton, really. The thing is–

John: Oh, he’s charming, yes.

Craig: That’s the thing. The devil is charming. When these charming– Justin Trudeau, there’s so much weird pretty privilege that turns into-

John: Oh, sure.

Craig: -pretty paranoia where we are terrified of these good-looking men, more so than women, it seems. Good-looking men who get a lot of power, you’re like, “Wait a second.”

John: Ryan Reynolds.

Craig: Ryan Reynolds. By the way, Ryan, the thing is, if we are going to have Satan, and it is Ryan Reynolds–

John: Satan or Antichrist, it could be a manifestation. It could be the son of the devil.

Craig: If it were, you want them to be Canadian and you want a nice– A nice Canadian Antichrist is going to be like, okay, it is one world and so we are going to– there are going to be more traffic lights and things. I’ve lived in Canada for a while now. We’re all going to drive the speed limit. We’re all going to drive like we have nowhere to go. This is my impression of a Vancouver driver. Just driving like I don’t need to get somewhere. That would be the worst of it. I think Ryan actually would be okay if he was in charge of the one world government. He does a really good job at the gin.

John: I think part of the challenge with the term Antichrist is that we think of it as being just like a polar opposite of Jesus Christ. Therefore it would have to be like, not humble, but like boasty and caring for only the rich and all this stuff. We can envision that, but it doesn’t actually– it’s unattractive. It doesn’t lead to power in any good way.

Craig: No. No. I wonder if Ryan’s going to hear this and just go, “What? I was just on the show.”

John: “I was just on the show.”

Craig: “I don’t need this. No.” Ryan Reynolds is not the Antichrist.

John: He’s not the Antichrist.

Craig: No, he’s not the Antichrist.

John: It would be, if you were the devil–

Craig: You would want to look like Ryan Reynolds.

John: Most men wouldn’t be upset with you.

Craig: I also want to look like Ryan. I don’t want to be the Antichrist. I just want to be able to do sit-ups.

John: Thanks, Craig.

Craig: Thank you, John.

Links:

• Rosemary’s Baby – Screenplay
• The Exorcist – Screenplay
• The Omen – Screenplay
• Gifted by Simon Rich
• Say Nothing
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• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

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

Craig Mazin: Well. My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to episode 665 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we often talk about characters needing agency, but what does that look like on the page? We’ll explore agency on the scene level and in the script overall. Then it’s listener questions on sign language, screenwriting while blind, and credits when something is written for television, but then goes theatrical.

In our bonus segment for premium members, Disneyland. Craig, I just went to Disneyland for the first time in many, many years. I want to talk about Disneyland and our experience of theme parks as folks who create entertainment for those giant corporations.

Craig: My wife loves Disneyland.

John: But I’m guessing you don’t so much.

Craig: I’m not against it.

John: I’m not against it either.

Craig: I like Disney World, but it’s so far away and I’m never going to Florida again. So I guess I should probably get back into Disneyland.

John: Mike and I are not Disney adults, but we went as adults on election day to avoid all the anxiety of election time.

Craig: How’d that work out?

John: It was actually a very good distraction for the period of time that we were at Disneyland. Then we just did not open up any social media on the phone. Then we got home and eventually we had to break the seal and the bottom fell out of the world.

Maybe we’ll start with that. Remember back in 2016, we actually did a bonus episode of Scriptnotes the day after the election saying the title was Everything Will Be Okay but I was genuinely freaked out then. I was also really upset this time, but not as astonished, I guess.

Craig: First, let’s try and find some vague silver lining here even though a lot of people have very good reason to be concerned. This was eight years ago and we said everything will be okay. Everything’s not okay but the world didn’t end.

John: Did not end.

Craig: So that’s something. That’s a data point. Things definitely didn’t go great. This time it doesn’t feel good again. We’re going to have to see what happens. The only weird psychological difference for me this time was A, I already knew what it was like to feel this. It wasn’t a new feeling.

And B, and this might feel counterintuitive, the first time it seemed like everybody just made a really crazy mistake. People were just goofing around and mistakenly elected a guy. This time, no, they fully chose. They fully chose. This is the country we live in. This is the choice they made, and now we live with it. It’s not going to be great, and who knows?

John: The who knows is a big factor here because it’s as we talked about on our last episode, the uncertainty and the anxiety that comes with uncertainty is big. In that episode, we were talking about waiting on a decision for a thing and the situation of knowing that we have x number of years ahead of us of this stuff and that it’s going to be remembering how exhausting 2016 through 2020 was and just getting through that. Yet we know we got through it.

We also know that people throughout history have gotten through things. A thing that I’ve talked about on the show before is that the Great Big Book of Horrible Things, which is this book I read every couple of years which recounts the hundred greatest losses of life over the course of human history. It sounds so depressing, but what you learn about when you look at those terrible events in history is yes, but we still got here. For all the suffering that happened in the moment, humanity did pull through.

Craig: I think it’s unlikely that we will vaporize. The other, I wouldn’t call this hope or silver lining as much as notably pragmatic, is that now everyone is prepared. We take care of the people that we love. We look out for people that aren’t living in States where the laws are good, and we take action to help the people we need to help as best we can. And we do whatever we can. Acknowledging that there are limitations to what we can do until such time as this democracy chooses otherwise. That’s the best we can do. Yes, 2016 to 2020 was exhausting. There was also this insane pandemic. He didn’t cause that pandemic as far as we know.

John: Here’s the thing is that there’s going to be a bunch of unexpected surprises logged our way. You want to have people in those positions who can best deal with those things. I don’t feel like we’re going to have a highly staffed, competent government to do those things and that is a concern for me. For example, I’m concerned about the safety of the AI systems that are being developed. I don’t feel like this is a group of decision-makers who are particularly well-suited for the task.

Craig: They don’t seem particularly well suited for any task. I don’t know how that will end up, but I’m very focused on a couple of realities. The most important of which is, I must be aware of the things that are within my control. I know I can vote, I know I can donate money, I know I can talk to people, but I also know that there are some things I cannot influence whatsoever. I am not able to influence legislation about AI. No.

John: I’m not able to influence this man’s relationship with Putin, which I think is incredibly alarming, but not. We talked last week about the circle of concern and circle of control, and that they don’t overlap very much. Yet what I have found very helpful in these days after this election result was to make a list of the things I’m actually worried about. Actually, just chart them, because sometimes it’s just as a amorphous blob but when you actually list them down, you’re like, “This is a long list, but I can see them.”

For each one of them, is there anything I can control or effect about this? In most cases, a lot of cases, no, but in some cases yes. For example, I’m really alarmed about the damage that can be done to our US healthcare system under this person. But the actual steps I’m going to take is I can make sure I got my flu shot, I got my COVID booster, make sure I’m up to date on other vaccinations. I can get extra copies of the prescription medicines that I actually need. I can have those. My daughter can get plan B which lasts for four years. There are some things like that you can do.

I’m really concerned about the economy just blowing up. An individual can save money, they can also just think about, “What are the plans you could take if things got bad. What are the roommate situations? What are the moving home situations? What are the things you could do?” Because at least that’s something you can think about that’s under your control versus these uncontrollable issues.

Craig: If you extend that too far, you end up a prepper. You have to find the balance, which is difficult but trying to reengage the neocortex and kick the lizard brain back a little bit is valuable. It does help put things in context and it does give you at least a sense that you’re not just running around in circles screaming. That’s pretty much about the best you can do.

John: The other thing you can remind yourself is that it’s okay to feel grief and upset and outrage, but it’s also okay to feel joy and happy. You don’t have to live inside a horror movie.

Craig: It’s actually critical. I was talking about this with my older kid, how living a joyous life is the best revenge. We will have to do things to try and make sure that we can live a joyous life, including choosing where we live. If it seems to me over the course of time, if I look around and I’m like, “Oh dear, this is sliding towards something horrible, even here in California,” I’ll leave. I will. I’ve always felt like you got to keep one eye on reality.

Now, generally, I’ve never actually thought about that as an American, really. I’ve never thought, “Oh, would I ever have to leave?” I don’t believe I would ever have to leave here because I don’t really think that there is an America. I think there are two Americas. I think there are in a cold civil wars, how I would call it. It’s not a shooting war, but it’s a cold civil war. There’s a really good article in Wired. I guess I’ll make it one of my cool things about California and how California, despite everyone else’s screaming and gnashing of teeth, is just dragging everybody toward the future.

It’s what we do but the other thing that isn’t within my control and that I’ve absolutely exercised is even though I had a very diminished footprint on social media, I’ve turned it off entirely. Because I think at this point, it is fair to say nobody knows what the hell they’re talking about. Everybody is under the delusion that they can influence other people. They can’t. They are simply talking to each other and reverberating. I am totally with you, John, that the most important thing is that we don’t let any person steal our joy. Even in the midst of other people’s suffering, we do what we can to help them.

John: You and I are in the business of hopefully making joy or hopefully we’re making entertainment. It feels so trivial to be doing that in time when things could be– Things aren’t awful right now. But they could get awful. How are you going to continue to work? I do remember in 2016, I was writing the second of the Arlo Finch books, which is the best of the Arlo Finch books. It actually was a terrific privilege to just be able to disappear into that work at that time. So I would say, yes, all of the stress outside stressors can be a negative impact on your work, but they can also invite you into your work to focus on those and create meaning in them.

Craig: We’re in post-production. I gathered everyone together and I don’t presume what people’s politics are. I don’t talk to them in any way about, oh, everyone here hates what happened. I don’t presume that but what I did say was I imagine that there are quite a few feelings right now. We talked through what options were for people. Then I just reminded them that making shows like the one we make, it’s one of the last things that Americans seem to enjoy doing together, are watching sporting events, watching certain television shows, going to certain movies. Everybody’s happy to just do that together. There’s not much left. We don’t watch the same news, we don’t live in the same states, we don’t believe the same things, we don’t listen to the same music.

It’s all over the place. Then there are these moments where we’re all like the way it used to be, where everybody just does things together and we’re something that people can do together. It matters. It actually matters. We’re not making vaccines, we know that. We’re not curing cancer. But it’s actually significant.

John: It feels like a natural segue into our main topic today, which is on agency. Back in episode 627, Aline was here and she and I were talking about this term agentic, which is related to main character energy. People describing themselves as wanted to be agentic.

Craig: I hate that word so much.

John: You were gone for that episode. Here’s what I do respect about it. It’s about taking the reins of your destiny to do things the way you want to do them. It’s being the protagonist in your story. It can relate to that grind in hustle culture, but also about taking risks socially and professionally and not being afraid to take space and demand attention, which are generally noble goals. Sometimes we have this instinct to hide back in the corner when we shouldn’t do that.

It’s about taking that step outside of yourself and saying, “What should this person who is me do in this situation to achieve those goals?” Let’s now turn this back to the actual work that we do, which is our characters and our stories. How do we think about agency and what does agency really mean for them? Craig, what’s your definition of agency? What does agency mean for a character and a story?

Craig: I always think of it as giving a character qualities that allows them to change the plot. Basically they can make choices that change the plot.

John: Absolutely. They have autonomy. They have the ability to make choices themselves. They’re self-driven rather than be directed by others. They’re not on rails that they really have to do a thing.

Craig: And there are choices to make.

John: There are choices to make. Absolutely, and that they’re making those choices with intentionality. There’s a reason why they’re making this choice versus that choice. Sometimes they can make the wrong choices, but they still had the ability to make that choice. I think that last point is so crucial that there’s the possibility of effectiveness. It’s plausible that the choices could have an impact on their situation and in a meta-level, change the story.

Craig: Sometimes when people write stories, they’ll have a character make a choice because they, the writer, need them to make that choice to make stuff work. We can feel it every time. That’s where you’ll start to hear, “We’re not sure this character has agency because they just made a choice for no reason. It’s not particularly consistent with what we know about them or how they’ve lived before. They’re just doing it and it worked out well for your plot.” That’s not ideal. Then we don’t really feel the illusion of a real person there, because, of course, it is all an illusion.

John: Absolutely. I think the Inside Out movies do a great job with a sense of characters who are making choices that are having a direct impact on the story overall. In both movies, Joy has a goal. In trying to achieve her goal, she’s creating the plot of the story and her misguided assumptions are changing what’s happening there. You see that reflected in the real world too, in terms of the real-world character who’s trying to do things that we can understand why she’s trying to do them, even though they’re the wrong choices she’s making.

Craig: We, as we write, have to basically be all of the emotions of our character. We are joy and we’re anger and we’re sadness and anxiety. We’re all those things. We just have to figure out in these moments which one of those things is going to be driving the character.

There are some characters that play as purely logical, very rational. They are almost never the hero because we are not interested in investing our emotions in somebody who is not driven by their emotions.

Spock is a great side character. In the team that’s breaking into, the Russian intelligence building, there’s always one character who has no emotions and is just incredibly dry and matter-of-fact, but that’s never your hero. Your hero has to get angry, your hero has to be scared, your hero has to have worries, and your hero has to love something.

John: Those emotions that we need to be able to see. We need to find ways to externalize these internal stakes so we can actually see what they’re doing. We need to believe that they are informing the choices that they make, that they’re actually contributing to, that the actions that we’re seeing them take, that next line of dialog comes out of what is underneath the surface there that we believe exists.

Craig: Choices are difficult. If it’s an easy choice, it’s not a choice.

John: You brought up the idea of like, we mostly hear about agency when we get the note. It feels like the character lacks agency. Let’s translate that. What is an executive really saying when they’re giving you that note?

Craig: Usually that everybody else in the story is laying out for that character what needs to be done and that character picks one of the options that they’ve laid out, or the character is stuck. Someone says, “We’ve got to go rescue this person. They’re here. We’ve got to do this and this.” You’re like, “Okay. I’m going.” Then really what you’re left with as a character is, “How well do I aim a gun?” That’s not agency. That’s just skill, which is cheap. You start to feel like there isn’t a person there who is in charge of their life. They’re just an NPC.

John: I can envision two different scenarios where you might hear the agency note. They’re different situations. There’s the, it feels like this person is giving these choices and they’re just doing this thing, but they’re on autopilot, and it’s almost like they’ve been assigned a mission. Like, you’re going to do these things in this order, and this is how you’re going to do it. That feels like a lack of agency. That feels like a lack of choice.

You also see characters who, because of the situation you’ve put them in, like it’s a depressed young mother in a small town who can’t get out of her thing. It’s like, she feels like she doesn’t have agency. I’ve not created a situation where that person can actually make a choice that can influence their life. Those are different things and require very different solutions.

Craig: We used to hear passive. That was really what we, then somebody came up with agency and our business loves a buzzword.

John: At the end of the day, our business loves a buzzword.

Craig: The business of it all loves a buzzword or buzzphrase. Agency took over from passive but it’s similar. It is similar. There’s nothing wrong to be clear with a character who you define as somebody who is trapped because they have no agency. And then they are forced by your plot hand to start to make difficult choices, which forces them to experience what it means to have agency. 40-year-old Virgin, there’s no agency there. He’s just going through life on autopilot and then he is forced to try and do stuff.

John: I think what’s comparing that like, here’s the mission you’ve been assigned versus kicking you out of your comfort zone. The work the writer needs to do is so very different. The passive character lacks agency because they have no choice put before them. Fundamentally your story is different. You need to find a reason why you’re telling this one-time story of this character who’s changed and has to undertake this quest to do a thing versus the “you’ve been assigned this mission.”

That’s the carpentry job that you and I are sometimes hired to do is like, “How do I get these beats to happen in a way where our character is actually making the choices to do these things?” That’s why Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible, he gets the self-destructing message, but then he’s making his– charting his own course.

Craig: This is our version of magicians forcing cards. They give you the impression that you have agency, that you get to pick a card, any card. That is what we’re doing too. You do not get to pick any card. This character actually doesn’t have agency. They don’t exist. But our job is to make it seem like they do.

John: A thing I’ve said often talking about character wants and motivations is the hero’s allowed to drive wherever they want to drive. We’re building the roads. Yes, you can drive anywhere you want. These are the roads you got. We are laying out the roads and it feels natural because there have to be roads, and so we built the roads for them.

Craig: It’s a weird job that we do.

John: It’s a very weird job.

Craig: It’s very strange.

John: Talking about the note about character slack agency, I think sometimes it’s a mismatch of character and story. You’ve created a character who doesn’t have the tools or expertise for this really interesting plot. You may have just picked the wrong hero for this plot or the wrong plot for this hero. And the gears don’t match, and so therefore the engine doesn’t work right.

Craig: None of my skills, abilities, desires, none of them have anything to do with the story that’s happening. The plot that we choose is designed specifically to test a certain human being who has certain limitations, needs, wants, or undiscovered strengths. If we don’t pick that plot for them, then it really doesn’t matter if we give them a choice because the choices don’t matter and it doesn’t feel like it’s purposeful.

John: The other problem I see sometimes is you have characters who feel like they are rats in a maze. It happens a lot in horror movies where they are just responding to the stimulus that’s being put there. Some of the very best horror movies, Alien is a great example of a scary movie that where the characters do have agency and are making choices and there are conflicts between characters because of the choices that they’re making. That is when it feels great. But when it’s just we have to get away from this madman and I can go through this door or through that door, that doesn’t really feel like agency.

Craig: No. That’s running. Now, usually, there is a character early on in horror films that has no agency on purpose who just gets chewed up. Poor woman swimming when the shark gets her. She has no agency. Usually, the first person that Jason or Freddy gets has no agency. That’s what NPCs are for, to demonstrate the formidable nature of the villain. Then our hero, they’re the ones who are like, and in horror movies, this does happen where you’re like, “Clearly plot armor has come into play.”

Plot armor exists specifically to protect characters who have agency. The reason we call plot armor is it’s not working well enough because the choices that they’re making in theory aren’t good enough to keep them alive based on the rules of what we know. You got to watch out for that one or else you just stop worrying about your characters.

John: Indeed. Let’s talk about what agency looks like on the page. In the course of a scene, how do you think about agency within a scene? You talked about it from your protagonist or from other characters in the scene. What does agency look like in a scene for you?

Craig: I always start with, what is the point of this scene? The point–

John: Your point as-

Craig: My point as the writer.

John: -as the writer.

Craig: The point is surely to change this character in some way, to express a need or want, or to fail. All of those things require the person to make choices. If they just walk outside and get walloped, it’s not interesting. They make a choice in every scene. No matter what, they must choose something. If they just walk outside and it’s like, “We’ve got to figure out how to get from here to here,” and there’s no choice, even if the choice is, “There’s only one way to get there, but it’s incredibly dangerous. Should we do it or not? We should do it.” I need to understand that choice and I need to know what the ramifications are of it.

John: They’re making a choice. They’re deciding to make a choice. They’re not being forced to make a choice. They’re deciding to make a choice. It’s plausible that the choice that they’re making is effective. You can believe that they think that that choice is effective.

Craig: That the choice is effective. It is also important to make sure that the choice is not irrevocable because if it is, then it doesn’t matter what they think. They can’t choose their way out of it. So running away is a great choice to always keep for your characters in whatever form running away would take, so that you know that you can back out of it. You don’t have to go through with it. Therefore when you do, it is either because of courage or folly. It’s a smart idea or it’s a bad idea, but the choice remains all the way.

John: Absolutely. If you’re designing your character as well, each different character would make us a different choice in that moment. Both in what they’re going to say and what they’re going to do, the choice that they’re making should reveal more about that character and more about why they are such a unique person in this situation but it has to be specific to who they are and what they’re doing.

Craig: You brought up the idea of arguing. Debating the choice is important. It underscores where each person is coming from. Arguing is a great instrument that we have, like sleigh of hand for magicians to create the illusion of agency because people are arguing for their points of view, which means they have a perspective that is individual and individuated from each other, which is also important. If everybody agrees, and everybody is like, it can either be A or B, and everybody votes B, we got a problem with the story.

John: I will agree. An argument or disagreement should reveal the differences, it should reveal power imbalances, it should reveal hidden things that are not being spoken about. If characters are disagreeing, it should be more than about A or B, it should really be about some other situation that’s behind the scenes.

Let’s talk about agency within a sequence. By this, I mean a collection of scenes that are driving towards one specific point. To me, even if you’re given a task, a mission of what to do, you want characters to have autonomy on how they do it. If we know that we need to blow up that bridge, great. If that’s the goal, fantastic, but let’s see our characters making the decisions about how to do that and then we as storytellers frustrate those decisions and force them to rethink their plans along the way.

Craig: Yes. There are also sequences that are defined by characters revealing, and this is a double negative, revealing that they really don’t have agency. Characters that are obsessive, that are losing the plot, so to speak, who convinced you they were being rational and then you realize they’re not. That’s a very uncomfortable feeling.

I love Star Trek: First Contact. That movie is great. A lot of it is basically lifted from Moby-Dick. Captain Ahab pretends he has agency. He makes you believe he has agency and then he exhibits this quality that we recognize in people, which is, okay now it’s a notable lack of agency. It’s not mistaken. It’s notable. They’re trying to hide it. That’s also fine. A lot of humans move through life without any real ability to shift the levers. They just keep doing what they do.

John: They keep pulling the slot machine and expecting the reward. Finally, let’s zoom all the way back out to a movie, an episode of that, a series, or the whole series in terms of what agency looks like in the course of those. Sometimes I’ve seen problems where it’s like, “You’ve made the wrong choices because you focused on characters who didn’t have agency or you had to make smart choices about who you were focusing on because of lack of agency. I was thinking about the movie Thirteen Lives, which focuses on the tie soccer team that’s trapped in the caves, the flooded caves. It’s important to see their perspective. Yet those characters, once they’re trapped, they have very little agency.

Craig: Correct. They’re trapped.

John: Exactly. Once we’re there and we have the means to get them out, then seeing that their decision making process about how they’re going to do it makes a lot of sense. They’re basically like Baby Jessica did down the well. It’s a story about them, but they’re not actually the central characters.

Craig: There are situations where we have an expectation that there won’t be agency. Let’s say for instance, you live in the Soviet Union and someone calls you and says, “We need you to do what the government is telling you to do.” You’re like, “Guess I’m filing that report.” Then the character’s expression of agency is underlined as some startling act that then has to be encouraged somehow, or else you, again take it away.

Or you have a story where you imply to somebody that they have agency and then you behave in a way that undermines them completely because only you deserved agency, not them. That’s also fun. Those arcs go across all the episodes or the whole movie, and you will find at the end of things, seasons or movies that you find out who really gets to choose and who doesn’t.

John: Looking at TV series, Lost is like– Let me talk about what you’re looking for overall. The audience has characters and wants to see those heroes accomplish a thing. You really can’t talk about agency without some goal or larger purpose. In Lost, it’s that you want those characters to get off the island. Severance of series you and I both like is a lot about agency and its characters deliberately severing their agency.

Craig: Then trying to get it back.

John: Exactly. We want them as an audience to be able to get that back and figure out just how to reconnect it. In Big Fish, we want to see the father and the son reconcile. They both have quite a lot of agency in trying to do that. But the mismatch of how they’re going about trying to do it is the frustration and ultimately hopefully the success of their story.

Craig: Every romance involves people who have a choice and we just keep waiting for them to make the choice and want them to make. If they just made it, there wouldn’t be a good story.

Then the question is, why aren’t you making the choice we want you to make? You got to give them a really good reason to not make the choice that you want them to make. It has to be compelling. Otherwise, you end up with a situation where you think you’ve given these characters agency and people who read your script will say it just seemed like they were not getting together for no good reason other than you needing to keep them apart until page 98. Now you’ve put your finger on a problem, you need to give them a reason.

John: Yes. Its tough. Let’s wrap up this agency conversation with, I’m trying to think if there’s any good general takeaways. Agency is one of those telescoping things. You see it on the very small scale. You see it on the very large scale. It’s not just for our heroes. We’ve mostly been talking about our protagonist.

Craig: Oh yes. The villains must have it.

John: Villains must have it. Yes, if you do a freeze frame and you’re looking at that third guard over there–

Craig: NPC.

John: NPC, we won’t care. Supporting characters too, we need to believe that they’re there for reasons beyond just the plot and to help out the protagonist.

Craig: Anybody that you want to foreground, needs to feel like they are not dancing on your string. If we can see the strings, it’s over.

John: I think you particularly notice that if a character who has been supporting character is allowed to drive scenes by themselves, if they actually can be a POV character on things, that it doesn’t feel like they have any agency. It doesn’t feel like they can make independent decisions. Oh shit, something’s wrong there.

Craig: You don’t want to follow what should be a day player. You have a scene between your hero and your villain are facing off at a diner. You don’t want to spend time with the waiter in the kitchen for any reason because they don’t have agency. They will be making no choices that impact the plot whatsoever.

John: I will never write this movie, so I’m fine to talk about it on the air. I’ve always wanted to do a romcom that was set inside the movie world of The Spy Who Loved Me. What I love about The Spy Who Loved Me is they’re inside this giant tanker ship, and we see all these other henchmen who are working for —

Craig: So many henchmen.

John: So many henchmen and I just want those henchmen to fall in love. I want to see their story, and I want basically a Rosencrantz and Guild’s turn in there. That’s a question of agency. They have no agency when it comes to doing their bosses deeds, or they have a lot of agency in terms of falling in love.

Craig: Mike Myers did this joke in Austin Powers where a henchman is killed, and then you just leave to go to his family, and they get the phone call to figure out what to do with that dad. It’s great and it’s funny because the notion that that person’s a real human being is hysterical to us because we just know they’re not. They’re just people dying in the background so that our heroes and villains can finally get to each other. It is amazing how we compartmentalize these things. We watch human beings literally murdered and we don’t feel their humanity whatsoever. None.

John: But if our guy get’s like, a cut on the arm, “Oh, no. Indiana Jones, you’re hurt.”

Craig: What will happen? This is important. Meanwhile, there’s guys in the background just dying. That’s Kevin Smith’s thing in Clerks, that Luke Skywalker is a war criminal because all the people on the Death Star were just doing their jobs.

John: Absolutely. They’re maintenance.

Craig: Literally. They don’t even know what the Death Star does. They certainly don’t know that it’s called the Death Star. Who would take that gig?

John: Let’s answer some listener questions. We’ll start with Seb in London.

Drew: Seb writes, I’m writing a pilot script where one of my characters is deaf and communicates through BSL. There are times when one other character in a group communicates with them through BSL, similarly to Sam and Henry in The Last of Us. How do I convey this when writing the script? Is it as simple as one line of action in the very first scene to give the reader the information, or do I have to preface every line of dialogue that’s signed?

Craig: Do not preface every line of dialogue.

John: No, that will be exhausting.

Craig: You can do a little indication early. I think, I’m pretty sure for that script, I just put that stuff in italics.

John: I have it in one of my scripts for a main character who’s deaf. The first time where it’s introduced, Garrett, who’s deaf, signs to Leyhill, parenthesis, we will always subtitle this so you know that it’s there. I boldface those lines just because it was a little easier to spot because there’s other languages that were sometimes in italics. To me, it’s important that I always show what that character is signing, even if other characters are translating the scene because there can be a difference in discrepancy there. I don’t just have the character who’s talking and doing the interpreting. I want to make sure that it’s actually clear that this person specifically had lines.

Craig: Sam would have dialogue.

John: Sam has dialogue in there.

Craig: It’s just in italics. We would understand he would be signing. By the way, that is how Keyvan understood what to perform. It was a little easier, I think, for us because so many of those scenes were really just between two brothers. It was quite clear how that conversation would go. But I think for the purposes of a page, even if you have 12 characters, 3 are deaf and 9 are not, just indicate how you’re doing it. Stick to some consistent method, whether it’s bolding or italicizing.

My personal opinion is don’t put too much garnish on the dialogue because you start to almost put something between you and that character. You don’t want to feel any difference there. Then step back and let the script be the script.

John: At a certain point, I remember I was listening to a podcast when they were talking about CODAs or how they did all the sign language in CODA. There’s a stage called glossing. Glossing, it’s specifically how are you going to sign that line because it’s not a one-to-one transition at all. That’s like when we had Justin Marks and Rachel Kondo talking about the Japanese in Shogun. You want the people who can really figure out exactly the best way for that character to express that.

Craig: That’s exactly how we did it. It’s not enough even to have a translator because as Justin and Rachel said, translators just translate, then you need somebody to understand the craft. So we had somebody whose job is to really understand from a literary point of view what was the context of this line, what’s the intention, what does it mean? Now let me figure out how that should be signed in a way that matches the intent here. Then the translator is really there just to facilitate communication between the filmmakers and the actors.

John: Absolutely. This thing that Seb is writing, if this gets produced, you would be working with the director, the actors, and some other person in there to help make sure that what is being signed accurately reflects what the intention is there. Let’s move on to Oren’s question.

Drew: Oren writes, my name is Oren, and I’m a blind scriptwriter living in Ireland. As a new writer who requires a screen reader to navigate programs on my computer, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to find a script-writing program or application that is accessible with industry-standard screen readers.

In case you don’t know, a screen reader is a text-to-voice software application used by blind or vision-impaired people, which will read aloud any information, including text, button controls, menu ribbons, form controls, edit boxes, et cetera.

I’ve tested most script writing software, including Fade In, Arc Studio, Celtx, and Final Draft. Ironically, I would say Final Draft is the most accessible so far, and by accessible, I mean about 2% of the application is usable for the screen reader.

Craig: That is definitely stretching the meaning of the word accessible.

Drew: I understand that you created your own screenwriting software called Highlands, John. However, as I work on Windows and your product seems to be only available for Mac, I can’t try it out. I would even consider purchasing a cheap Mac just to run your software if I knew it was accessible with Mac’s built in software VoiceOver.

Would you consider talking briefly about this accessibility issue on your podcast as it might help kick start a conversation with developers and persuade them to look more seriously at this problem? A lot of these screenwriting software applications claim to be the industry standard, but I fail to see how they can claim that right if they’re not making products that are inclusive for all.

John: Ryan Knighton has been on the show a couple times. He’s a blind screenwriter and a friend of mine. He had been using Final Draft on this Toshiba laptop for many, many years, and then it stopped working with Final Draft. He was in a panic situation so he came to us. Highland fortunately works really well for him. He first tried it on his iPhone to make sure the voice over worked. He had to learn how voice over worked with it. He now does it on his Mac. He wrote us this really lovely message about he’s spent his first year on a room writing entirely in Highland. One of the nice things about Highland is because it’s only an Apple ecosystem, it just actually works with all the Apple stuff, and so it can actually tie into all the stuff.

Craig: Because Apple’s already got a framework for how to be accessible for people who are blind.

John: It’s not like we created a special version for blind writers. We just did it properly and have proper labels on all the controls so he can hear what’s there. He will text me occasionally saying, “How do I do this one thing? How do I see what page number this is on?” It’s like, “We’ll fix that.”

Craig: We’ll figure that out. I think, Ken Testman, who makes Fade In listens to the show. I’m pretty sure that the way he wrote it is native for Mac.

John: It’s not.

Craig: Oh, it’s not.

John: That’s how he gets it to put on the PC too, because it’s it goes through Adobe Air. That’s the challenge. The web-based ones, in theory, should be relatively accessible because there are–

Craig: They’re agnostic?

John: It’s agnostic. What’s challenged is inside the browser window that these things are working. It’s like, can the reader actually figure out everything that’s inside there? But there is accessibility stuff for the web that should work. It’s a question of could Arc Studio or the other ones or Celtx, could they do better? Probably they should.

Craig: Let’s put this out there in the world and see if it’s something that these folks can do. He’s absolutely right. He could get, I guess, a “cheap” Mac.

John: Get a cheap Mac or iPad now because we work on that.

Craig: That’s the other thing. There may be something that is cost effective. It is a bummer to have to buy an entire computer just because the one piece of software that takes advantage of this stuff only works on that platform.

John: My guess is that Warren probably is using an iPhone because from every blind person I’ve spoken with they tend to go towards the Apple ecosystem when they can.

Craig: Because it works.

John: It works for them.

Craig: Then he could theoretically be working on iOS in Highland. That’s a possibility.

John: We’ll send him a code to the beta and see if it helps him out.

Craig: Sweet.

John: Cool. Last question here is from Dan.

Drew: I’ve been fascinated by Disney’s decision to turn the Moana TV series into a feature length movie. Do you know how writing credits would get determined in this situation? Assuming there was some writer’s room for the TV series, how do they decide who gets the screenplay writing credit, and how does this impact royalties?

John: Oh, boy.

Craig: What a spaghetti pile of trouble.

John: Let’s talk about this from a couple different levels. Writing credit is one thing. Let’s just talk about why you make the decision to originally do it as a series and make us a movie. I think it’s because this started in the pandemic, and they’re, like, “Oh, we need to make series for Disney Plus. We’ll do Moana.” Then it probably turned out– It was going to be really good and really expensive. They were, “We can make so much more money theatrically.”

Craig: If we make fewer episodes, like one big episode, and put it in theaters, it’ll– Because the animation’s expensive.

John: So in terms of credit, I will tell you that there’s other stuff behind the scenes, which is, you’re going to start seeing some teleplay body credits on theatrical movies, and it will drive me crazy. Craig is already shaking his head.

Craig: Jesus.

John: It’s because these things were contracted under TV contracts.

Craig: This is where I feel for our credits department because they are tasked with codifying a system that is routinely rocked by the insane things that happen in the industry. The employers have no concern whatsoever about it. Their whole thing is, “We hired you under a WGA deal. That was our responsibility. You guys handle credits. See ya. Just let us know what to put on the screen.” Then it’s up to the WGA to hash through this.

That is a very, very difficult question. If you have, let’s say, eight episodes and then you turn to another writer and you’re like, “Take all eight episodes. We’re hiring you to make a movie out of these. Pull stuff from all of them or none of them, whatever. Make a movie.” They’re all participating writers but they weren’t under the feature thing. How do you consider the contributions? It’s a mess and my heart goes out to the arbiters and the pre-arbiters who will have to deal with this. But that is what we do at the Writer’s Guild. We handle our own credits. It’s the best of the worst systems possible.

John: 100%. The answer is a lot of internal discussion and figuring out what is the best way to apply the rules as written to situations that are new.

Craig: I’ll say, I would rather that, I would rather deal with this rat’s nest than be like, say, another union in our town that’s just one person pick a name, that’s who did it. No, it isn’t. That’s not right, but that’s how they do it. Hint. It’s not SAG.

John: No.

Craig: It’s not IA.

John: Those IA credits is like “Cool. Which gaffer gets credit for this?”

Craig: Many gaffers.

John: Many gaffers.

Craig: Multiple gaffers.

John: All right, it’s time for one cool things. I have two, one cool things I want. First is a Netflix documentary by RJ Cutler on Martha Stewart called Martha. Some backstory here. Back when Dana Fox was my assistant, she and I would watch the original Martha Stewart show, the one-hour highly produced version almost every day. It was so good and so specifically Martha’s taste. You could tell she loved doing it and that she had absolute control over every little thing. Well, she went to prison for lying to the feds.

Craig: What a world we live in.

John: Then did a season of The Apprentice, and then did this talk show aversion, which you could tell she hated. I spoke to people who were guests on her show and she hated doing it. She really hated it.

Craig: Really?

John: Yes. In the documentary, she’s also clear she hates it. Anyway, this documentary is really delightful if you enjoy Martha Stewart. If you don’t like Martha Stewart, you might still find it fascinating.

Craig: You might still actually like it.

John: Because she is such a fascinating character because she’s very blunt and she has self-awareness, but not necessarily insight. You see-

Craig: It’s so weird.

John: – that she’s talking about these things like, well, you don’t understand that that’s not how any other person would respond to this situation.

Craig: Right. Well, she’s special.

John: She is special.

Craig: She’s special.

John: She had a very distant father who loved her very much, but loved her on very certain conditions. That tracks.

Craig: Definitely tracks.

John: I really recommend seeing this if, at all, interested in Martha Stewart on what she’s done. My other, it’s a good thing, it’s a one cool thing, is the replacement ear pads we got for our headphones. We use the very classic headphones that everybody uses, which is the Sony MDR-7506s, which are these great headphones. The covers are this pleather thing that just flakes away and it just leaves detritus everywhere.

Craig: It feels like the kind of thing where later, when we’re dead, they’ll pull us out of the ground to measure how much of the pleather was absorbed into our bones. Like, “Why did they both die on the same day under circumstances that are not really–“

John: Pleather.

Craig: It was the pleather. It’s just inhaling pleather flakes. What will we do when the podcast population is decimated by pleather flakes? We will all be happy.

John: Our new replacement pads for these headphones, but the headphones, they’re going to last forever, but the new pads have a mesh coating, which is not going to–

Craig: They’re very lovely.

John: We have two other small, tiny one cool things, which are two new babies born into the John August ecosystem. Stuart Friedel, our former Scriptnotes producer, welcomed his second child. Very excited for new baby on that front.

Craig: Weirdly, his second child was born and then it said, “Two weeks earlier.”

John: The Stuart special right there.

Craig: His child was born at two weeks of age, bizarrely.

John: That’s crazy.

Craig: Incredible.

John: Chad Creasey, who is also one of my former assistants who have been on the show also welcomed new baby. I love babies.

Craig: I do too and their world will be good and they will never know some things.

John: 100%.

Craig: They just won’t know.

John: They won’t know.

Craig: They won’t know. Lucky.

Well, I mentioned earlier an article in WIRED about California and setting the pace and we’ll dig that link up. There’s another WIRED article that I’m obsessed with right now. The title of it is the kind of title that generally I’m like, “Hungh.” The Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and Time. Now, usually, I go, “Ehh” because I’m like, “Either this is going to be some oversimplification bad science article like most of them are, or this will be impenetrable.”

There’s very little middle ground. This article actually appeared in Quantum Magazine and it has been, I guess, repurposed for WIRED and it’s outstanding. It does a great job of explaining what a big deal it is for how the mathematicians and physicists who think about the underpinnings of reality have started to reimagine it. It turns out that what was going on was we were stuck in a model. The model was all about what happens when collisions occur. The only way to figure it out was just to grind out like, “Here’s–“ oh my God, I think it was Feynman came up with the method, but it was the best we had.

Then through this combination of scientists, they’ve figured out like, “Oh no, no, this is a vastly simpler way to start to model how this works.” They reference it. They’re like, “It’s literally you could teach it to a fifth grader.” Which kind of makes sense. That when you really get down to it, what’s underneath, reality tends to weirdly be simple, like how weird is it that energy is mass times the speed of light squared? There’s three letters in that equation. What we keep finding when you really dig, dig, dig, dig, dig is it’s actually simple which is, of course, because we’re in a simulation, obviously.

Drew: No.

Craig: Of course, we are. We’re figuring it out right now. There’s no problem. It’s fine. Don’t let that upset you. Of course, it’s a simulation, but we’re figuring out how it works and we’re getting better at it, which I think is amazing.

John: It reminds me of you’ll see these formulas for weird things that don’t seem like they have anything to do with normal geometry and Pi is in there or E is in there.

Craig: Pi is a perfect example. Why does that keep showing up? Why would that be how circles work? Then when you look at it, you’re like, “Well, this totally makes sense.” They find that they can layer paths on polyhedrons in very simple ways to explain so much of what’s going on.

Now, I’m simplifying this because we don’t have the time for me to read this whole thing, but I would say if you are even a B-plus science student, and if you’re a B and lower, I’ll probably skip this one, but if you’re a B-plus science student–

Drew: You keep pointing at me when you say B or lower.

Craig: I don’t know how you were in school with this. I don’t know. See, I nailed it. B or lower.

John: He went to drama school.

Craig: Aww. Well, this isn’t for you. You take physics for poets.

John: Maybe have your wife explain it to you.

Craig: Yes. Have your wife explain this to you. Even if you have moderate scientific interest and capacity, this article really is mind-blowing and a great little, almost, like many science stories are, an exciting hunt with an awesome conclusion.

John: Oh, I love that. Very nice. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts and sign up for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re all great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau.

You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments. A reminder that we have a live show on December 6th. I thought we were sold out, but apparently, we still have some VIP tickets left. If you don’t have, come to that.

Craig: VIP tickets?

John: VIP tickets.

Craig: What do they get?

John: You get cool first-row things. What else?

Drew: You get a drink ticket, so free drink and you get to stick around for an after party where you get to meet John and Craig and me, and maybe some other guests.

Craig: I like that you slipped in you.

Drew: I’m important.

Craig: You’re like, “This is what’s going to move those VIP tickets, folks.” I agree with you. I think a lot of these people have already seen us. Megana is basically a celebrity.

John: If Megana is back, we’ll bring her too.

Craig: Ooh. Yes. Let’s bring Megana. Everybody. People love– When you graduate to Megana status, you too will be–

John: It’ll be a different, yes.

Craig: It’ll be a thing.

John: We had some great cast we got lined up.

Craig: Yes. We always do. Who will we be benefiting this time for this show?

John: This is Hollywood HEART. Hollywood HEART is a fantastic charity that helps kids who otherwise couldn’t go to summer camp, go to a special summer camp.

Craig: We’re doing what we can do to spread some joy and make things better.

John: That’s all we can do.

Craig: That’s all we can do. Craig, thank you so much.

John: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: So Craig, as I mentioned on the pre-show or the early part of the show, whatever you want to call the intro, we went to Disneyland, which I had not been to for five or six years. Since pre-pandemic. It was good. It was a good distraction for this and it was already on our– I’ve talked about like Mike and I have this list of 24 for 24. We made a list of 24 things we wanted to do in 2024.

Craig: God, you guys are organized.

John: Going to Disneyland was one of them.

Craig: It was one of them.

John: Scratched that off the list.

Craig: Take that right off. My wife is a big fan of Disneyland. We have an old college friend of ours named Andrew. He’s a Disney adult. I wouldn’t say that Melissa’s a Disney adult, but she’s a Disney aficionado and she and Andrew will go, oh, probably three times a year. She goes quite a lot and she loves it. I haven’t been in quite some time.

John: Have you been there without kids?

Craig: I don’t know if I– maybe. Yes. One time. I do remember this very specifically. There was one time Melissa and I went with a couple of friends of ours, another husband and wife. It was four of us. We went to Disneyland, we did adult Disneyland. We made a reservation to eat dinner at the Blue Bayou. Melissa got food poisoning. We had to leave early. I will tell you this about my wife. She can hold on to not throwing up longer than anyone in the world who needs to throw up. That ride is not short. It’s like an hour. We drove, she just sat there clenching her jaw and trying to not throw up for an hour. Succeeded. Stepped out of the car and barfed.

John: Oh God.

Craig: It was like she was just waiting the whole time. Me, I’m like, “Pull over right now.” That, I think, may have been the last time.

John: Not a good memory there.

Craig: No.

John: No.

Craig: No, but a fun one because it’s funny now. I’m telling you, it’s an amazing thing to see somebody sit there for an hour. The second they open the car, they’re like, “Oh, good. Finally.” Blah. I’m like, “How did she do that?”

John: Incredible.

Craig: Oh my God. The willpower on this woman.

John: Part of the reason we wanted to go is we’d not been there since the whole Star Wars land opened up. Man, they did a great job with the Star Wars land.

Craig: See, I haven’t been there.

John: That Imagineering is fantastic. Rise to the Resistance is a great well-constructed narrative story in there, which is fantastic.

Craig: The showcase ride is on the Millennium Falcon or something?

John: There is a Millennium Falcon ride as well, which I didn’t think was quite as good. The full Millennium Falcon there is incredibly impressive. I took some photo there, which you should. There’s a ride that goes there, which I didn’t think was actually as good. It’s a little bit motion simulator kind of, I don’t really care.

Craig: Sure. We’ve done that before.

John: There’s some really good surprises in Rise to the Resistance, you get the Storm Troopers, you get like surly like Imperial Guard or First Order. Disney people being mean to you is just like a such a nice-

Craig: That’s hot.

John: -change.

Craig: That’s pretty hot.

John: Absolutely. I know you always like the empire and sort of the–

Craig: That’s my love language is park employees abusing me. I love that.

John: Really enjoyed that. It’s also just nice to see the attention to detail where we got our Bontu garden wraps, our veggie wraps at the little shop there. I was tapping to pay, but they even changed the font on the little card reader was like the Star Wars font.

Craig: Oh, the Star Wars font.

John: It was all tracked.

Craig: Well, they’ve always been great with the attention to detail-thing. That’s their bread and butter. I should go. I haven’t seen Star Wars land. Also Disneyland’s little shop borne in spots, but there are some things that are nice to see just for old-time’s sake.

John: Yes, 100%. You go through Frontierland, it’s like, “I don’t really care,” but I’ll get– Sure.

Craig: Sure. Every time Melissa goes, she and Andrew will do the Haunted Mansion I think every time. You could recite the Haunted Mansion at this point.

John: I was sad that Small World, which is my sort of Haunted Mansion. I just loved Small World for sure no good reason. It was not open the day that we went there.

Craig: Oh darn.

John: Oh darn.

Craig: Worst ride in the park.

John: Then over in California Adventure, which they’ve also done a good job sort of, it wasn’t terrific when they opened it up and they’ve done a good job recognizing their mistakes and fixing them. I loved Tower of Terror and I was actually attached to do a Tower of Terror movie at Disney, which didn’t end up happening. I have deep affection for it, but I would say the risk they did for Guardians of the Galaxy, again, the Imagineers did go through and really found clever small things. Like if you’re standing in line and reading little signs like on that sink, it’s like spinal fluid must be washed off. They’re finding all this stuff. They really do find all this stuff.

Craig: I would never ever go on Tower of Terror because I do not like the feeling of falling at all. I hate it. I just don’t understand it. I don’t understand how you find joy. I’m glad you did.

John: Yes. I did like it. There were some frustrations and so there’s no comment form I can fill out. So I’m going to put this on the podcast.

Craig: Disney will be alerted.

John: Disney will be alerted. We were in the line for the Guardians ride and they only had one of the elevators open. We basically got stuck in a place where we hadn’t moved for 20 minutes and we’re like, “No, no, no. We need to leave.” It’s actually really hard to get out of a line at Disney, especially in this one. We try to walk our way back and they’re like, “Oh, no, no. You have to walk all the way to the front and then they can let you out.”

Craig: You have to constantly say, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m not cutting the line. I’m not cutting. I’m just trying to leave”?

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s terrible.

John: That’s not good design.

Craig: No, that’s not great.

John: Because people do need to leave people.

Craig: Sometimes they need to throw up.

John: Yes, exactly. If Melissa were there, she’d have to wait until-

Craig: She’s capable of it. She can do these things.

John: The other thing I would say is that there were situations where maybe they were training people or something, but we were waiting in line for five minutes to get a soda and they were like seven people at the counter–

Craig: That’s training.

John: That’s training. I felt like if I were the Disney executive, like Disney Park executive there, I would’ve had some strong words where whoever was letting guests wait around for five minutes.

Craig: Well, you went there on a Tuesday in the middle of the day.

John: That’s true.

Craig: That seems like that’s when they’re like, “Uuh.” They’re not training anyone on a Saturday.

John: The last thing I’ll say is, I fell down a little bit of a rabbit hole with– at California Adventure we went to where the Starbucks is and it’s this cafe thing. I could see there was branded stuff around it. Like, “What is this for?” It’s for the Silver Lake Sisters. It’s just like this weird imaginary story of this trio of sisters who were big singers in Los Angeles in the ‘20s who were inspired by Disney’s version of the Three Little Pigs. It was like this whole ouroboros like, and it was a fun, just brand essential because like no one would ever know or care. It felt like the way–

Craig: What a weird misfire. [chuckles]

John: Not actually misfire. I get it.

Craig: Really? It worked?

John: It kind of worked for me because I actually– I googled the fair like, “What is the deal with the Silver Lake Sisters? Were they a real thing?”

Craig: It would work if you’re a guy in your 50s doing adult Disney and like–

John: Who was supposed to write the Tower of Terror movie which they were actually– they tied into the Tower of Terror politics.

Craig: The Silver Lake Sisters.

John: Yes. They performed at the Hollywood Tower Hotel.

Craig: Got it. Inspired by Disney’s Three Little Pigs.

John: Inspired by Chateau Vermont.

Craig: It’s a big mess there.

John: It’s a big mess, but anyway, it made me think about sort of the stuff that we do in terms of storytelling. It’s about finding the story that will carry you through for two hours. The storytelling that Imagineers need to do is like, how do we make the experience of this place that you’re in rewarding for the time you’re there but feel like it actually has a bigger footprint than that? I think that’s a cool job.

Craig: Yes. It is a cool job. I never forgot when I was taking my kids to Disneyland or Disney World, because I took them there too. I never forgot how I felt when I went to Disney World as a kid, which was awe. I felt awe. I also remember how big it was because I was small. I think they do a really good job of that. There are things that I notice as an adult that I certainly didn’t notice as a kid. I didn’t notice the air vents in the ceiling of It’s a Small World.

John: Yes. Now you can’t help but see it. It’s just a black drop ceiling vents.

Craig: The first time I went on Pirates of the Caribbean, I honestly believed I was outside at night in the world. Now I’m like, that ceiling is not that far up. It really isn’t. Nice job painting it. You see everything because you’re grown and the scales have been lifted from your eyes. But the Imagineers do get how to create this for children. They know their audience. That’s why I actually love the whole adult Disneyland thing because it’s like we just love it now. We forgive it. It’s air vents.

John: I would say the Marvel Avengers area, it’s fine. The Cars Land, which I don’t like cars at all as a concept.

Craig: I’ve done the Cars Land, I believe.

John: Incredibly well-designed.

Craig: Yes, really well-designed. Because they know that’s where the kids are going. The experience of seeing the animated car people is really weird. It’s like the whole car thing is actually– I have so many questions. Do they have sex? Do they like–

John: Why does Mater have teeth?

Craig: Why does he have teeth? Why do cars race like cars even though they’re people and there are cars in the stands? I guess it’s like people watching people race, which we do, but with crashing. I have so many issues.

John: Drew, you were saying at lunch that the Marvel and Star Wars things were about the lifestyle of keeping people in the Disney ecosystem.

Drew: I heard that Disney basically has– They had for a long time too, a system that was like cradle-to-grave for women of like this is how you interact with the Disney ecosystem. When you’re a baby, it’s Mickey diapers through every phase of a woman’s life.

John: The Tinkerbell, the princesses.

Drew: You have your princess phase, you have all that stuff, through becoming a mother, and then, theoretically, the phase resets.

Craig: Resets.

Drew: That’s how you keep people in a loop. One of the reasons they bought Marvel and Star Wars was because they didn’t have that loop for boys.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting.

John: Because it does make sense, then dads want to take their kids to see– to the Star Wars and all.

Craig: I get it. They’re like, we’ve mentally dominated half of the population. How do we mentally dominate the rest of them?

John: I did see a couple of folks who were clearly had been just married at Disney, but I also saw– one of my favorite things I saw was this group of 16 cousins. I know they’re all cousins because it was Cousins Trip 2024. On their back, they said, were they the Lopez or the Alvarado or Cousins by Choice? It was all checkmarked on the back of their shirt. I loved it.

Craig: The organization there is, coming from a family that was super isolated because everybody was in a feud with everybody, I’m always fascinated by the families with their matching shirts.

John: It was one or two women in the cousins who organized that whole thing. Of course.

Craig: Of course. Melissa’s family is pretty big. Melissa’s mother was the all-time organizer. She woke up in the morning and was like, “What can I be in charge of and how can I organize stuff?” Now that she’s gone and it’s sort of like– it was almost like everybody just went, “We’re not doing this anymore, right?” Yes. Because there were… There were so many events and they were fun and they were great and it’s actually sad, you need that bossy pants. You need bossy pants. You need bossy pants. To make you go have fun. You will have fun. But then you do.

John: Yes, absolutely. You need somebody to sort of take away some of your agency and you’re just making things. It’s like, no, this is what we’re going to do now. Full circle, folks. Craig, thank you for a fun episode.

Craig: Thank you, John. Thank you.

Links:

• Scriptnotes LIVE! December 6th at Dynasty Typewriter
• Even Under Trump, California (Yes, That Hellscape) Will Keep Moving the World Forward by James Fallows for WIRED
• The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities by Matthew White
• And Yet It Moves by Ken White
• Martha on Netflix
• Replacement ear pads for Sony MDR-7506 headphones
• The Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and Time by Charlie Wood for WIRED
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