Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/reviving-a-dormant-project).

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

Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 633 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Any screenwriter who’s been working for a few years likely has projects that have stalled out or otherwise gone dormant. Today on the show, what happens when you revive one of those projects and actually get it made 20 years later. We’ll talk with a writer who’s done just that.

John Gatins is a screenwriter and producer whose credits include Coach Carter, Dreamer, Real Steel, Power Rangers, and Flight, for which he received the Academy Award nomination. He’s also an actor you can see in movies including The Nines. Welcome, John Gatins.

**John Gatins:** Thank you.

**John August:** This is not your first time on Scriptnotes. We often see you and hear you at our live shows, because you are the person who is introducing us to Hollywood Heart, a fantastic charity.

**John Gatins:** I thank you both, all of you. You’ve done such great things for us and that really cool, cool, cool organization.

**John August:** We love doing our live shows with you guys, so thank you for that.

**John Gatins:** Of course.

**John August:** We’re not here to talk about those organizations today. We’re going to instead talk about your new movie, Little Wing, which kind of falls into a general genre I’d also love to talk with you about, which is sports movies or sports competition kinds of movies, because you have quite a few of those on your resume. I want to talk about how we construct and execute sports movies. Then we’ll also answer some listener questions about compartmentalization, mid-credit scenes, work ethics.

And in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, kind of a grab bag. After a long solo career, you’re starting to work with a partner now, so I want to talk about the shift of partners. You’re also one of the people I think who is smartest and savviest about figuring out credits. When there’s a bunch of writers who have worked on a movie together, you are the person who figures out, “Hey, can we all figure out a good deal on this?” I want to talk through that process with you.

**John Gatins:** Sure.

**John August:** Cool.

**John Gatins:** Great.

**John August:** We’ll start with some news. John Gatins, have you ever heard this term? This came to me in an email I got from one of my agents, talking about what this one studio was looking for. One of the terms was “bro soaps.” What do you think a bro soap is?

**John Gatins:** A bro soap?

**John August:** Uh-huh.

**John Gatins:** I don’t know. It’s a two-handed movie with two guys who are endeavoring to do something. I failed, right?

**John August:** It’s a series. They’re looking at it like a soap opera. The definition in this email was, “A muscular drama that appeals to men.” Sons of Anarchy.

**John Gatins:** Would Suits be a bro soap?

**John August:** Yeah, exactly.

**John Gatins:** Because those two guys are kind of in love with each other.

**John August:** Yeah, I think that would be a bro soap. I think it’s not so specifically broey. Sons of Anarchy is broey.

**John Gatins:** That show I don’t know.

**John August:** Or Ray Donovan. It’s very masculine energy. Drew, we have some follow-up.

**Drew Marquardt:** We do. Last week, John, you had the flu. You were saying we don’t have flu tests in the U.S. Travis wrote in to say at-home flu tests are available in the USA. Lucira by Pfizer is the one that is available. They’re about $50 each.

**John August:** I looked at this one. John, do you remember early on in the pandemic, we had those at-home tests, and some of them were electronic, or sort of electronic, where you’d put the little sample, and you’d put it into a base, and then it gave a red or a green light? Do you remember any of those? Did you ever do any of those?

**John Gatins:** I don’t. I don’t remember.

**John August:** It was a thing that was happening for a while. This looks like one of those. It’s great that it exists. It’s 50 bucks, which is really expensive for an at-home test. It also just feels like so much extra waste to do this electronic thing, because it should just be… We know how to do a test now. You just stick the little thing in. You look for the little lines. Apparently, these electronic ones, they really are just creating a line. They have a little sensor that reads whether the line is there or not. I’m glad this exists, I guess, but I want those cheap European tests that you swab and you see, do I have the flu, do I have COVID, do I have RSV. That’s what I want.

**John Gatins:** Look. I had COVID before anybody.

**John August:** You’ve always been a pioneer.

**John Gatins:** I had COVID, didn’t know it. Nobody knew what COVID was. It was the sickest I’ve ever been. I had a night in my kitchen by myself at 4:00 in the morning where I had a 105 fever. I was like, “I might need to call 911. I just don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Then I recovered slowly. Then I started reading about the symptoms when it was finally a thing. Then my doc said, “Does anybody want a test for the antibodies?” I said, “I do.” Ling was like, “You’re nuts.” I was like, “I’m telling you I had this.” He was like, “I’ve tested so many people. You’re the one guy with antibodies, so you’ve had it.”

**John August:** I’d never had the flu as an adult until this last week, and it was the sickest I’ve been.

**John Gatins:** The flu is no joke. Flu kills lots of people, friends.

**John August:** It does kill a lot of people. It was bad. I had, again, a 105 fever. It was like, “Do I go to the emergency room?”

**John Gatins:** I know. I was literally googling “dangerous fever for old men.”

**John August:** We’re both alive to talk about it, so that’s the real victory. More follow-up on the Tiffany Problem. Explanation, Tiffany Problem is that Tiffany was actually a pretty common old name, but if you’d name a character in a period movie Tiffany, everyone’s like, “That feels wrong.”

**John Gatins:** Really?

**John August:** Yeah.

**John Gatins:** Why? Because they think of the pop star?

**John August:** It seems like a modern name, but it’s actually an old name.

**Drew:** It goes back to the medieval times. Jake from Pandora wrote in to say, “I’m a VFX artist on the Avatar sequels over at Lightstorm Entertainment, which P.S., we just voted to unionize.”

**John August:** Congratulations.

**Drew:** “A major problem we face is that on Pandora, gravity is two thirds of Earth’s gravity. Presumably, this was decided to make an 8 to 10-foot-tall Na’vi seemingly move as a human does, so our perception of physics would be similar to that on Earth. But the Tiffany Problem of it all is that if we show someone jumping, it looks like they’re floating, if we multiply gravity times 0.667, which is the correct math according to Jim and the Oscar winners. Also, fires, water, and basically all physics simulations look fake at two thirds gravity. This would make absolutely everything we perceive to be so different, more so than a casual moviegoer would realize.”

**John August:** That’s a great point. You want to be realistic and truthful as much as you can in a movie and follow the rules of the world that you’re setting, but sometimes you have to bend those rules, because otherwise it just doesn’t seem plausible.

**John Gatins:** I remember working on Behind Enemy Lines, and we had a retired admiral. We kept trying to do things in the script that were like, “The master sergeant comes in and says this to the… ” It’s like, “He would never say… That just doesn’t happen.” We’re like, “It has to happen, because we need a problem in the movie.” It’s like, “No, that just doesn’t… They would never say that to that guy.” He was like, “That’s so disrespectful.” It’s like, “We’re going to have to though.”

**John August:** I remember calling Jack Warner, the dinosaur expert for the Jurassic Park movies. I needed to say, “Could this thing plausibly do this?” This point, it’s a couple of movies. It’s like, “I’d say that’s plausible. I think it’s defensible that this thing could happen.” You reach a point where it’s like, okay, I can understand that this feels right within the context of this movie, whether it’s actually supported by-

**John Gatins:** Berloff and I are working on a black hole movie, and we talked to this black hole scientist, and we pitched them a bunch of things, until we got to, “But you’re saying there’s a… I mean, you could.” He was like, “I guess.” You just look for one kernel of some sort of scientist tiny little something to hang onto and be like, “That’s the thing.”

**John August:** Going back to Pandora and the Avatar movies, literally, they’re after unobtainium. There are moments there which are clearly fantasy moments, which give them latitude to do some things that are useful for what they need to do. Finally, my favorite kind of follow-up is Arlo Finch follow-up.

**Drew:** Yes. Ethan wrote, “Couldn’t help but write in when I heard you and Craig talking about Arlo Finch the dog. My dear cat and erstwhile writing companion is named Arlo after Arlo Finch. His shelter name was Largo, which is not his personality, so that had to go. We adopted him in October 2017, and at that time, John had mentioned working on the Arlo Finch novels, and I loved the name. Something about it is adventurous and a touch anachronistic. As you mentioned, it’s also an easy name to howl across the apartment to get his attention.”

**John August:** We have a picture here of Arlo Finch the cat. So handsome. Look at this cat.

**John Gatins:** That’s a handsome cat.

**John August:** That’s a handsome cat. I’m not even a huge cat person, but I would say that’s a handsome cat. Then we were also talking about two-syllable dog names, because the best dog names are two syllables, and for reasons we’re going to get into in this email.

**Drew:** Chris writes, “Listening to you mention dog names generally being two syllables struck a chord. When I was a child, my father was a breeder of German shepherds. I always remember him saying that whether you were naming a dog or a child, the name had to yell good. English wasn’t his first language. I definitely took that into consideration when naming my kids Marcus and Ian.”

**John Gatins:** We have two dogs, named Riri and Farley.

**John August:** Exactly, you can yell.

**John Gatins:** We can yell those. They get that.

**John August:** Arlo. It yells out well. It’s a good dog name, a good kid name. John Gatins, talk to us about why you’re here. I want to get into a general sense of reviving old projects and what that’s like. Before we get into yours specifically, Drew has been doing research here. A bunch of recent movies are actually really old scripts that have been rejuvenated. Drive Away Dolls, the new Ethan Cohen movie, is an old script. Mad Max: Fury Road sat around for a long time. Unforgiven notoriously sat around for 20 years. Dallas Buyers Club. Beau is Afraid. A lot of times, things will sit around.

**John Gatins:** I’m going to ask you this question, but I’ll share this first. I can’t think of a movie that I’ve worked on, that got made, that didn’t take… I can’t even think of the fastest one, because I don’t think it’s inside five years, to be honest.

**John August:** The rare exceptions would be things where it felt like there was just huge movement towards… The Charlie’s Angels movies happened pretty quickly. But yeah, in most cases, stuff did take a long-

**John Gatins:** Stuff takes a long time.

**John August:** Yeah, but there’s a difference between stuff takes a long time, it’s slowly churning along, to there was no movement and then you came in with EMT paddles and zapped it back into life, which sounds like what happened to Little Wing. Can you give us the backstory on Little Wing?

**John Gatins:** Yeah. In around 2004, I wrote and directed a movie for Dreamworks called Dreamer. Dakota Fanning, Kurt Russell horse-racing movie. I had a great experience at Dreamworks. They were so cool and collaborative. It was great to have a studio run by Stacy Snyder and Steven Spielberg, who’s a filmmaker. It’s like a different thing, because when he says things to you, what he’s saying, it’s like, “Hey, I’d do this,” and so it’s a little bit different. It was interesting, because I really liked working there. It’s a cool little campus. You know it. They have lunch every day in a courtyard. It’s just collegial and kind of fun.

I got this call from my agent that said, “Steven wants to send you this article that he bought, that he loves, called Little Wing.” Susan Orlean wrote this really beautiful piece for the New Yorker. As you know, she wrote The Orchid Thief, which became adaptation, which is famously about someone trying to adapt a book that they don’t know how to adapt. They wrote a script about how, “I don’t know how to adapt this movie,” which was brilliant. And it’s such a cool movie. I thought that was kind of funny.

I read the article. It was great. It was about her when she was spending time in Boston and walking her dog at this dog park. She encountered this girl, who was a 12-year-old girl who had racing pigeons, which she just thought was fascinating. So she befriended the girl and her mom and had this relationship, and she wrote this really elegant piece about it. Steven, it just really struck him. So I get called to Steven’s office. I’m like, “Oh, cool.” I go up there. It’s so cool to sit in his office.

**John August:** I have been in his office. Yeah, for sure.

**John Gatins:** He has the Rosebud sled in a Lucite box on his wall. There’s a Norman Rockwell painting. It’s incredible. You’re just mesmerized. You’re in this thing. Steven was so chatty and fun. Dakota Fanning was in my movie, but I had to go to five-day weeks with her, to get her out in time to go do War of the Worlds. We were sharing this actor, and it was just kind of interesting. He was watching all my dailies and everything else. We talked about his movie. We talked about my movie.

**John August:** That’s so great.

**John Gatins:** They’re both kind of 9/11 movies. We had this whole connective, great, soulful chat. Then he starts talking about the article. I was like, “Yeah, so I was thinking, the article’s amazing, but I don’t know what a movie is based on this. I have no idea.” I left the meeting feeling like, oh my god, I had this great time I got to spend with Steven Spielberg, and I’ll tell this story forever, and blah blah blah, and that’s that.

I get to my car. My agent calls and says, “Look, they’re making this deal.” I was like, “What deal?” She was like, “Steven really wants you to write the movie.” I was like, “What is the movie? I don’t know what the… ” But then how do you say no to the guy and his partner, Stacy, who let me make this movie there, my first movie as a first-time director, on a script that I’d wrote? I was like, “Okay,” but I was terrified, that sweat of like, I have to figure out how to create something around this thing of this girl and whatever. I agreed, and I was in such a panic about it.

I met Susan Orlean, who was super cool. We chatted a bit, and she said, “You should really meet the girl.” I flew to Boston, and I met the girl and her mom, who worked in police. They were super nice. We spent a couple hours chatting in this hotel lobby. Then I went to the Red Sox-Yankees game. I’m a huge Yankees fan. The Yankees destroyed the Red Sox. It was super fun. Then I still was totally off the planet with like, “What do I do?”

**John August:** Let me stop you there, because I can anticipate what you were going through, because you have maybe a protagonist. You have a central character, but there’s not an arc there. There’s not a confrontation. There’s not an obstacle in the face of her. There’s no villain. There’s no urgency for why does the story start and end.

**John Gatins:** The other thing that was in this young person’s life was that her parents had gone through a divorce. There was a little bit of that. So I was like, “Maybe it’s a divorce movie. Maybe it’s like whatever.” I just started, as we do as a writer, just making shit up and just trying to figure some things out and adding characters to it and having this girl go through this moment. Then it became about, maybe they’re losing their house, and they have to move, and she’s upset about that, and she doesn’t want to leave.

Then I started researching racing pigeons, which I knew nothing about. I was like, “Wow, that’s a really fascinating world.” I was like, “Some of these pigeons are worth a lot of money. Who knew that racing pigeons brought all this money?” Then I think that’s where the thread of the idea of, what if she, in an attempt to save her house, goes and steals some racing pigeon from some famous old racing pigeon guy. It becomes a heist. There’s a little heist in the middle.

There’s a boy across the street who was her friend, but now they’re of an age where it’s like that coming-of-age story of, like, are we friends, or is there more? Is there something to it? How is school? Is school hard? How do people treat you? How do you see yourself? I love writing about teenagers, because they’re such curious characters. You kind of love them, but I always say teenagers have been sneaking out of their window since the dawn of time.

**John August:** Romeo and Juliet, yeah.

**John Gatins:** It’s just to make bad decisions. We love them, and we forgive them, but they really can be unpredictable and fun as movie characters.

**John August:** You’re starting to figure out the pieces of this. Are you going back to pitch Steven and Stacy, or are you just writing a script and delivering?

**John Gatins:** Literally, they left me alone, which was the great and awful news at the same time, because it was like, “I need some help.” I was terrified. Honestly, it’s one of those experiences where I wrote the script and I turned it in and I flew to New York. I have family in New York, and we were on a family vacation. We went there. I was just terrified. Clicking send was like, “This is the end. They’re going to look at this and say, ‘What the fuck did you do? What is it?'”

Steven Spielberg called me, and he was like, “I love this. I want to make this movie.” I was like, “Okay. Sure. What do you need from me?” kind of thing. It was such a small movie too that I was like, “Why would Steven Spielberg-”

**John August:** Because this was made for Universal?

**John Gatins:** I think, yeah, their output was Universal at that time, I think. But Steven was really enthralled with the movie. It’s funny, because I feel like some of the only other Irish guys in the movie business are the Burns brothers. Brian was a good friend of my brother’s. He called my brother, and he said, “Eddie,” – his brother, Ed Burns – he said, “was with Steven Spielberg this weekend. Steven kept talking about this bird script that your brother wrote,” and blah blah blah. I was like, “Wow, it’s genuine. It’s really on Steven’s mind.”

Steven was so supportive of it, because it was just kind of unique. It was just kind of this strange, unique coming-of-age story of this girl and has a heist and a little bit of a love story. She meets this older character guy, and they smash into each other. Y’all have seen the movie.

Steven was a really supporter of it. But the business changes all the time. We’re talking about scripts that die. Part of the reason the script dies is because these producers’ deals ended, and the studio owns the movie, so then it moves on, and then someone finds it, or a new executive comes in and says, “Hey, there’s this John August script on the shelf. Let’s take a look at that. Maybe we should breathe some life into this,” get the paddles, as you say. And maybe another writer has an approach. It’s like, “Read it. You read it. See what you think.” It went to Paramount, because they had this split, so it was dead, basically, for Dreamworks.

But what was cool about it was that Steven, I think, really lobbied for me to work on Real Steel. Now it’s 2007, and I get brought into the Peter Berg world of, they’re going to make this movie, Real Steel, which is one of the properties they kept. And I went on the whole ride with that movie for two years or whatever. Little Wing was dead and gone.

**John August:** Dead and gone after a draft? Had you gotten a draft set and polished?

**John Gatins:** I probably had done a rewrite based on some notes, because when it went to Paramount, they pulled it out and said, “Hey, we should make this for Nick.” It was Nickelodeon. It was like, “This could fit for them. It could be a small movie,” whatever. I think I did a draft with them. The Nickelodeon movie people there were cool. I think there was a moment of trying to make it whatever, and then it went quiet.

Then it was years and years later. I don’t even remember. Donald DeLine called me. He was at Warner Bros. He said, “Susan and these guys came in, and they wanted to do an animated version of this Little Wing story.” He said, “I started looking through the rights and realized you’d written a script, so then I went and got the script. I think the script is great. Let’s make this movie.” I was like, “Okay. I don’t know how to do that.”

Paramount Players was in existence then. They took a shot. We talked about it. We met some directors and whatever else. But we’re trying to make the movie for literally $5 million or less. It was like, “I don’t really know how to do… I’m here to help you guys, whatever.” It kind of died again.

Then I think the next thing along the line was, I had worked on Power Rangers with Dean Israelite, and I sent it to him. I said, “What do you think of this?” He was like, “I love this. I want to help make this movie.” Brian Robbins, who’d been a collaborator who I’d written movies for way in the past-

**John August:** And was running Paramount.

**John Gatins:** And now had just came in to run Paramount. And he started working with Dean. We said to him, “We want to do this.” He said, “I love this script. If you guys can get Brian Cox to play Jaan Vari,” who was my high school health teacher, by the way, who I worked for over the summer. He was a Vietnam vet. I worked for him as a lifeguard over the summer. I had a long relationship with Jaan, who was a really cool guy. Suddenly, he’s like, “If you guys can get this to happen, we’ll make the movie.” Through a lot of craziness, we got Brian Cox to agree to do the movie, so it made the movie kind of go.

**John August:** This was a few years into Succession?

**John Gatins:** It was right towards the tail end. I think they were working the last season or something. We were like, “Great.” Then they were like, “Can you get Kelly Reilly?” I’m like, “How do I get Kelly?” Yes, I knew her from Flight, loved her. She’s amazing. We actually lived next door to each other in the hotel that we were all staying in when we were making that movie in Georgia. I sent her an email. I was just like, “Hey, do you remember me?” I said, “Would you look at this script and whatever?” I also knew her agent, so I reached out to him as well, and we texted back and forth and whatever. She texted me, like, “I love this script.” I said, “Meet Dean.” Then Dean, the director, and she had a Zoom and whatever, and suddenly she wanted to do the movie.

**John August:** At what point were you actually producing? Functionally, what you’re doing is producing, but at what point were you actually a producer on this?

**John Gatins:** I think what was cool is that my partners in that were Donald, because it had come to him, and he breathed life into it. And then I had been working with Karen Rosenfelt on something else, and I said, “Hey,” I said, “Will you look at this?” She read it. She was like, “I’ll help you.” I said, “Okay.” I pulled Karen in. Then Karen and Donald know each other. Then the three of us were exchanging info to say, “I know so-and-so. I’ll call them,” whatever. It was a little bit like, “I got a washboard. I have a drum set. Let’s make a band.” It’s like, “Here we go.” I knew Dean. We just put this little thing together. Brian kept saying to us, “Okay.” Brian Robbins kept saying, “I trust you guys. Okay.”

**John August:** There was also a unique opportunity at a new channel to put it towards, because you could put it towards Paramount Plus, and so you didn’t have the expectation of like, this is a movie that has to open at a certain amount on a weekend. It doesn’t have to hit this metric or that metric. It can be its own thing.

**John Gatins:** We didn’t know what a streaming movie was. They have all these labels under Paramount. It’s Awesomeness and Nickelodeon, all these different things. I think, what I can tell from the birth of the streaming moment is that they need content. So what is a streaming movie? It’s like, “I don’t know. I guess this is a streaming movie.” So that’s what we did, basically.

**John August:** Looking at the final film, it’s the kind of thing that could’ve been made with outside money and sold at a festival. It’s one of those kind of things that could’ve happened.”

**John Gatins:** I kept saying that to Dean. I was like, “This is a movie from the 1990s.” I was like, “This is a movie that could’ve been a… ” I said exactly that, John. I was like, “This could’ve been one of those movies that people say, ‘I really like that movie. That movie’s got some soul. This is cool.'” I kept saying to Dean, “We don’t really make these movies anymore.” I was like, “This is kind of a rare thing.”

Interestingly, Dean really wanted to set it in 2007 with the mortgage crisis about to blow up and everything else. The studio was a little bit like, “We don’t really want to date the movie that way.” We were like, “We don’t want cellphones in the movie. We don’t want all this texting with teenagers and stuff.” We had to find the right middle ground where we make it a little bit just, you don’t really know. We’re not saying it’s this time or that time or whatever. We’re not trying to give timestamps of what moment you’re in.

The movie we would’ve liked to set in Boston, because that’s where this young person was from, but it ended up being Portland for budget reasons and lots of things. Portland was a perfect town.

**John August:** It feels right.

**John Gatins:** It’s such an interesting place, Portland, and is a little bit worn out in areas, and it felt right for this kind of story.

**John August:** Cool. In a very broad sense, this fits into, I would say, a sports competition movie, because even though we’re not seeing them racing per se, it’s not about the birds themselves racing, it fits into your general oeuvre of sports competitions. You did Summer Catch, Hardball, Coach Carter, Dreamer, Real Steel. I want to talk a little bit about the broad shapes of sports movies, because in some cases, the sport is the focus, and we’re literally watching, like, “Will they win the game?” And sometimes sports is just the background. Summer Catch, I would say it’s a movie with baseball, but it’s not a movie about baseball. Is that fair?

**John Gatins:** Yeah, that’s fair. That’s fair.

**John August:** In all these kind of movies, we’re really talking about what is the POV? Is the POV of the player? Is it the coach? Is it the parents, like in The Blind Side? You can make a zillion different football movies. It really ultimately comes down to whose POV you’re trying to tell the story from.

**John Gatins:** Look. Sports culture in America is a really specific thing. We use those catchphrases all the time. People in the office are like, “Come on, guys. Bottom of the ninth. We got to hit it out of the park.” It’s part of who we are. Look how many people watch the Super Bowl. This year we had Taylor Swift. It’s crazy. I think that those stories are endlessly fascinating, like all the cool documentary series now about sports guys. And the Jordan documentary, that series that we watched, was incredible, that Mike Tollin made. I think that we’re enthralled by that because it’s dramatic. Are you going to win or lose? It’s personal.

Ling is my wife. John knows. I’m saying that, Drew, my wife’s name’s Ling. Ling always says to me she’ll watch sports with me because I do the background commentary. I’m like, “Oh, this guy actually had broken his leg. He’s on the comeback. He’s late 30s. He shouldn’t be this good. This is really amazing that this guy is able to do this thing.” Now she’s really interested. You hear the personal story, and it’s like, “Oh, now I’m in. Now I’m in.”

**John August:** The idea of the sports commentary behind the scenes, you’ll provide context in the room, but often one of the things you’re wrestling with in writing the movie is how much commentary are you providing, and are you actually providing a commentary character to help explain things.

I was talking to a friend with his script about esports. I said, “One of the things I really missed in this final competition sequence was the sense of live commentary happening to provide context for what I’m seeing, because that way it’s not beholden on my character’s doing it.” It’s nice to have some authoritative voice explaining what it is we’re actually watching.

**John Gatins:** Look. Remember Rocky, which created everything for sports movies in a way? There’s one crucial scene in Rocky that I try to put in every sports movie I’ve ever done, and I’ve done a few. He says to her, “I can’t win.” The guy is like, “I can’t win. That’s the problem here.” Guess what, guys? He doesn’t win. That’s not what the movie’s about, honestly. It’s that he did it. I think that that’s what we relate to as humans. I’d love to do a lot of things. There’s a lot of things I’m not ever going to do. I’m not going to win at things that I think that I would like to try to do. But I think we get inspired by those things, to say, “Wow, that’s heroic that this person is trying to do this thing.”

Guys, the Olympics are coming. We’re all going to get invested in the Olympics, about sports and people in that sport that I know nothing about. There’s some young female athlete that’s going to do some incredible thing that I don’t know anything about right now. But you catch me after the summer, I’m going to tell you everything there is to know about that person, because I’ve watched the journey, and I’ve seen the backstory now. It’s like, “Oh, she lived with her mom,” and this and that. It’s going to be some incredible, inspiring story. We just as humans have that kind of emotional connection to those things, because we put ourselves in those situations, like, “Oh my god, what would I do if I had one run left on the ski hill?” It’s like, “I got to go full out. I have to risk my life to try to win this medal.”

**John August:** We’re putting ourselves in their place. We’re performing this relationship with them. But equally crucial is the relationships happening inside the context of the movie and figuring out what those are early on, which is obviously a problem for Little Wing. It’s figuring what is the relationship here, who you’re going to try to follow.

Let’s talk about coach movies, so Hardball versus Coach Carter, figuring out who is the central relationship. Obviously, one part of that’s going to be the coach. But is it with a single player? Is it with multiple players? How do you work that through?

**John Gatins:** It’s tough, because – you know this from writing movies – you write a great scene, and you’re like, “That scene, along with every other scene, is going to fight for its life to get to the screen.” Sometimes you shoot, you write, they shoot, they perform amazing scenes, and they die, because it just doesn’t fit the ultimate quilt that is the movie.

When you have a sports movie, you’ve got five guys in the basketball team, but who are the ones who are going to pop? You try to give everybody a moment and everybody a story and a little bit of an arc and something that you’re rooting for for that specific character. You hope that you get it right enough that everybody is able to shine through in the movie and have their movie inside your movie.

**John August:** Exactly.

**John Gatins:** That’s really the idea is like, “Oh, it’s a story about this guy who played short stop.” That’s not really what the movie’s about, but he has a movie in the movie. Yeah, it’s tough.

**John August:** It’s tough, tough. Did you see Nyad?

**John Gatins:** I haven’t seen it yet.

**John August:** Nyad is fantastic. One of the things I really liked about the model of it is, the same filmmakers did a bunch of rock climbing movies, which are a similar dynamic, which is it’s one person against an obstacle. Within that context, you have, will they achieve the thing? Will she swim from Cuba to Florida? Will this guy ascend this impossible mountain face? You still have to find relationships. You still have to find moments of emotional stakes that are not just the will they or won’t they. I thought Nyad did a fantastic job doing that.

**John Gatins:** That’s cool. That’s on my list. I’m going to see that.

**John August:** Again, making a choice of what is the central relationship, which is, of course, in this one, her friendship with Jodie Foster’s character and all the permutations and struggles they’re in.

**John Gatins:** Plus, I love those actors. That’s the thing too is you’re going to see it because of them.

**John August:** Let’s answer some listener questions. Let’s start with David here.

**Drew:** David in London sent in an audio question. We’ll play that now.

**David:** I’m a few weeks away from being on set for my first production as a writer, feature film. And I’ve put in a lot of prep and spade work over the years. I know I’m the right person for this job right here and right now. But what I’m not prepared for is being public facing. You guys both demonstrate an incredible ability to talk about your work, to talk about your relationships in a proper and correct way. You never badmouth anyone, but you also feel very open and authentic as you speak to us. How? When I speak, I’m always telling anecdotes about people I work with and things that have happened. And I bet you guys have got great stories you share privately about Pedro Pascal or Guy Ritchie or whatever. I’m scared that I am going to make a terrible cockup on social media or in person when I’m speaking as a professional. So I guess my question is, how do you guys compartmentalize?

**John August:** Let’s talk about how you talk about the things you worked on, because you just brought up Steven Spielberg. In talking about Spielberg, you said all the positive things. You said how supportive he was and didn’t go into any frustrations there, which is I think part of the advice we have for David. You have to talk openly and honestly, but just talking about the good things.

**John Gatins:** Look, it’s funny, because before you started to roll, we were talking about credit stuff, which I think we’ll talk about later. I don’t know. It’s interesting, because y’all have done this podcast for a long time. I get texts sometimes. People say, “Mazin talked about you on him and John’s podcast today,” or whatever, which I always think is kind of funny. It’s hard, because screenwriters, we work really closely, we work right next to Pedro Pascal. We’re not Pedro Pascal. People want to talk to Pedro Pascal. They don’t really want to talk to the guy who wrote the thing that he’s going to say. But you guys have proven that a little bit wrong, because how many people listen to this podcast?

**John August:** Tens of thousands.

**John Gatins:** That’s a lot of people who are very fascinated by how the soup gets made. I’m going to use sports metaphors again.

**John August:** It’s fine.

**John Gatins:** [Crosstalk 00:31:07].

**John August:** Stick on theme.

**John Gatins:** Patrick Mahomes wins the Super Bowl. What does he say? He’s like, “The defense was amazing today.” He didn’t say, “I did that 40-yard run that basically won the Super Bowl,” which I watched. I was like, “Dude, you did that.” It’s a thing of, take less credit. People like people who take less credit. Bring people along. There’s a lot of people.

Naomi Despres made this movie, Little Wing. I invited her in. I said, “Can you help us? Because I can’t go to Portland and be on the ground every day.” She moved her world around to do it. She has so much hand in making this movie, even creatively. There’s a moment in the movie where she talks about Bikini Kill and Kathleen Hanna. That’s Naomi, who said to me, “There’s a band.” I’d heard of Bikini Kill, but I didn’t really know them. The woman’s story and the song and everything else really fit. I had written Tupac Shakur 15 years ago. This was a really relevant, local to Portland thing. It was genius. That was amazing. She doesn’t have writing credit on the movie. But she’s such an integral part of us making that movie that that’s an incredible thing.

Maybe an advice to this guy is to say, listen, remember how you got there. We don’t make this movie by ourselves. You’re God when you’re sitting by your computer by yourself and you’re creating a world. You’re on your own. You are the god and creator of that universe. As soon as I say to you, John, my friend, “Hey, can you read this for me? Can you help me? Do you want to produce this movie?” now I’m sharing godship. By the time you’re sitting on the set, there’s 200 people there doing all kinds of things. Now everybody’s a little bit God in their own piece of universe.

Realize that it is a collaborative thing. There is somebody who says, that’s the director, that’s that title, producer, executive producer, script supervisor. Everybody has a role in this thing. Just bear that in mind that we did this. Somebody gave us the opportunity to do this. Without Steven Spielberg, this movie doesn’t exist. That was the inception. Without Susan Orlean, who wrote this thing, that got Steven to do a thing, that got him to make me do this thing. You’re a piece of a really big thing I think is maybe the takeaway.

**John August:** I would also say, David, you’re asking about speaking professionally, and it really is the context that matters. If you’re doing the literal press junket for the movie, you’re going to have a very narrow list of things you’re going to say and talk about. You’re going to talk about what a great experience it was. What John is saying in terms of, be really generous giving credit out there. You can contextualize your part of the process. Always make sure that you speak up for the existence of the writer. That is so important.

**John Gatins:** Of course.

**John August:** But you’re giving full credit. As you get into narrower groups, you can be a little bit more forthright about the pros and the cons and the ups and the downs, and you can avoid shitting on somebody, but also say this was a struggle for these reasons.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, exactly.

**John August:** I will talk about a filmmaker I’ve worked with and say, “Listen, he has this reputation,” and you’d go into it knowing that this is the kinds of things you’re going to be doing or not doing. That’s also fair. When you get into really small conversations, when it’s you and an executive, you can be much more open about, “These are the pros and the cons. This was the real struggle we had.” That bonds you a little bit closer, because you’re telling the truth there.

**John Gatins:** Look, I think I’ve had a unique experience, because as you know, I’m a failed actor who started trying to do that. I became a writer. I’ve produced. I’ve directed. I’ve now done a little bit of all of it. I’m very comfortable on a movie set. I think he’s asking a question about, he’s feeling a little bit like, “I don’t know that this is my world.” You have your place in that world. You’ll see how comfortable you are or aren’t vis a vis that. Those conversations, like you said, he may get specific questions that are like, “Why did you write this movie? What inspired you to do it? Did you write it every day? How many hours a day can you work? Do you outline?” All this stuff that people want to ask, specific questions about being a writer.

**John August:** Totally.

**John Gatins:** You’re going to answer those questions really honestly. They may also put a mic in his face and say, “What was it like meeting Pedro Pascal?”

**John August:** They will ask that, yeah.

**John Gatins:** They’ll ask that, and you’ll be like, “It’s amazing. He’s great. In my mind, I wrote for him. The whole time, I had his voice in my head.” Maybe that’s true; maybe it’s not. Maybe you say, “I wrote it for George Clooney, but Pedro Pascal is better.” I don’t know. It depends on the question and the situation.

It can be kind of overwhelming, because I’ve sat on stages with movie stars, and they ask me questions about specific script stuff. You’re always a little bit like, “Is this the forum to have this conversation?” because you realize you have these people here who people really want to hear from. I don’t know. That’s why I appreciate what y’all do. It’s talking to writers about writing. It’s really interesting.

**John August:** Great. Another question.

**Drew:** Leann from Burbank writes, “I’m writing a comedic feature script which has a proper ending, but after cutting to black, then has a couple scenes that play alongside the rolling end credits, like Principal Rooney getting on the school bus during the credits of Ferris Bueller. Have you seen a mid-credit roll sequence dictated in a script before? Any thoughts on best practices?”

**John August:** I absolutely have seen those. I think I might’ve put them in some of my scripts too. You do a cut to black, you do a fade out, and then a page break, and then mid-credits or a mid-credit roll or after credits, it’s an extra scene.

**John Gatins:** I’m trying to think. I’ve been asked to do things where it’s like, “Give us written summations of what happened to people a little bit.” The movie ends, but it’s like, “By the way, in 2010, this happened.” Seeing additional scenes, I don’t know, a lot of times they feel like they’re stuff that was shot in the movie that you kind of want to see, but it didn’t fit into the quilt. It’s like, this is cool stuff that didn’t get in there. That’s a square that didn’t make the quilt, but it’s cool, and I think you guys might ask about, “Whatever happened when he got on that bus? Did he get on the bus?”

**John August:** Remember the script is meant to encapsulate the experience of watching the movie. If part of watching the movie is those mid-credit scenes or after-credit scenes, they should be in the script.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, I guess so. I guess the task a lot of times is you’re trying to jam a bunch of shit inside a 120-page box, so good luck with that. The stuff that spills out the top, either you find a place and jam it in or take something out and jam it in.

**John August:** Would it be fair to mark those as pages 119A and 119B? Sure, maybe. They’re part of the running time, but other stuff’s happening at the same time. You’re not responsible for the credits in your script. I would say if they’re important to your story, then they should be in the script, because your script is the movie. Another question.

**Drew:** Old Bruce writes, “Have I officially become the old guy looking at all these youngsters who seem to struggle with the reality of what work is? Is there a universal and generational confusion that success is not a right but earned? And have people’s threshold of try become much lower than it used to be?”

**John August:** Old Bruce, you’re completely correct on every level.

**John Gatins:** The two Old Johns will collude with you, Old Bruce.

**John August:** These young people today have no idea. Of course, if you were to slide this conversation back 30 years, the equivalent of Bruce would say, “These young people have no sense of what it is to work.” You’ve reached a point where you are generationally appropriately complaining about the generation behind you.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, and I think that’s a rite of passage.

**John August:** I would say that a thing I notice about this younger generation is there can be that hustle and grindy culture. I guess we had some of that when we started in our 20s, but it’s more deliberate. It feels more calculated, more planned. People are willing to put themselves in uncomfortable, long situations to do stuff that I don’t know I necessarily was. But also, there’s the internet. Stuff is also just different.

**John Gatins:** I know. They just need to get off my lawn. Believe me. But it’s different. We’ve been doing it so long. It changes. You become a different writer along the way, because trust me, if we could go back in time, there’s moments that I would pick that would be embarrassing, where I would literally be the guy who’d be like, “I’m going to tell you why water’s wet, guys. I got this. I know all the answers, man. You want to talk about screenwriting? I know everything. I can do anything.” I don’t feel that way anymore. I feel like I’ve earned it. I’ve earned the idea that I don’t know or I’m going to learn more or remain teachable and be like, “Let me see something else. A streaming movie? What television has become?” Television used to be like, we were screenwriters [unintelligible 00:39:30] TV. Now it’s like TV’s the greatest shit there is.

**John August:** One of the things I’m aware of increasingly is that I expect young writers today to actually understand the references that I had when I was in my 20s, but that’s not realistic. It’s not accurate. Why have you not seen Point Break? Of course you should’ve seen Point Break. Or a bunch of stuff where it’s like, of course it’s just my part of film history canon.

**John Gatins:** I know.

**John August:** They cannot have caught up on all of that stuff.

**John Gatins:** I know.

**John August:** That’s a thing I just have to get past and remind myself, of course you’re not going to see that, because that is the equivalent of Casablanca or something to them. It’s very far in the past.

**John Gatins:** I think the other thing too is there’s an immediacy to culture now because of cellphones. When I first started as a screenwriter, I remember faxing pages.

**John August:** Oh yeah, we faxed pages.

**John Gatins:** From Austin, Texas, when I was working on Varsity Blues, faxing pages. Being on location doing Behind Enemy Lines. There was only three hours a day where we could talk to the people at Fox. So we would just hide. We’d just be like, “If they don’t call us in this hour, we’re just going to keep shooting.”

**John August:** Yeah, totally.

**John Gatins:** “We’re going to just do what we’re doing.” But I think everything is so immediate. Good writing is rewriting. You don’t write a script and like, “That’s it. I’m done.” There’s a thousand drafts you’re going to do. I think that’s a little bit baked into that question. You got to realize, I know you think that’s the finish line. It really isn’t. There’s so much work to do beyond that finish line. You have no idea. In this world of boom, boom, the phone, click click click click, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not as immediate as you want it to be, because what we talked about before is movies take forever to get there. Movies don’t get made. They fight. They fight their way to life. Sometimes it takes 17 years. It’s just the truth.

**John August:** Could I challenge you on something you said about Little Wing? You said you clicked send to Steven Spielberg for the script, but you probably didn’t click send. You probably sent an actual script.

**John Gatins:** That’s a really good question.

**John August:** I remember distinctly, and you’ll have this memory too, you’d call the agent or the executive for them to send a messenger.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, to pick it up.

**John August:** You’d still be printing the script. Then you’d catch a typo and like, “Oh, no, I have to reprint that page.”

**John Gatins:** I had this stamp that my wife Ling’s parents had given me. It’s this jade thing that had the characters of my name, John, and then it had J-O-H-N underneath it, and it had a little ink pad. It was in red. I would put a stamp when I was done and I’d printed it. I’d stamp it. It was so silly. But I was superstitious then too. I was like, “That went well the first time, so I got to stamp it every time.”

**John August:** Absolutely.

**John Gatins:** It’s printing the script and doing the stamp and the whole thing. It’s like, “I don’t have my stamp!” It was this whole crazy thing, printing the script and sending it. I think that that was email, but I still was in the world of printing it. I don’t know.

**John August:** The reason why I bring that up is because we talked about faxing pages, and I have this very distinct memory of being bunkered in this really bad hotel room in Kauai and having to fax pages from the front desk to Kathy Kennedy. That was the only way to get pages to her. It was crazy.

**John Gatins:** They were those thin, weird pages that after two days they were dust. You couldn’t even see what was-

**John August:** I had flown with my StyleWriter printer so I could print out my pages and then fax them through to Kathy Kennedy. It’s wild. These younger generations, they have no idea how we suffered to get them to where we are right now, now that it’s-

**John Gatins:** It’s true.

**John August:** … typing away and-

**John Gatins:** Oh my god.

**John August:** … emailing stuff through. Let’s answer one more question.

**Drew:** Under Wraps writes, “Right before the pandemic, I signed an option agreement with a production company. About a week or two after we signed, the strike was officially called. I assumed since we finalized everything before that, that it wouldn’t affect my getting paid. However, the producer let me know that he was instructed to hold all payments until after the strike was over.

“Fast-forward to the strike ending, and after not hearing anything from the producer for a few weeks, I shot him a message. I didn’t specifically bring up the money, but just asked about plans now that the strike was over. He informs me that he’s moving forward with production and is optimistic.

“Jump to now, months later, we haven’t spoken since. I know these things move slowly, but the difference here was that I was actually supposed to be getting a nice little chunk of cash. I don’t want to sound money-focused, just messaging the producer, ‘Yo, where my money at?’ But I really could use it right now. I don’t have any reps to handle this for me, and I’m at a loss for how to word this kind of message. How do I get what I’m owed without coming off like a money-hungry jerk writer who doesn’t care about the art of film development?”

**John August:** This could be a generational issue. I think I was much more direct about, “Need money. Need check now.” A couple things, Under Wraps. First off, if you sign an option agreement, the strike had nothing to do with that, and so you still needed to get paid. You get paid. They owe you the money. They’re shopping this thing around that they’ve optioned from you, but they haven’t actually really done the option, because they’ve not paid you the money. You need to be much more direct about, like, “You may have forgotten, but you never actually paid me for this thing.”

**John Gatins:** The not having reps thing is tough in that situation, because there’s somebody whose job it is, hopefully, to be the one that says, “We need the money,” because it is show business. So there is a business side to it. And it’s good to have partners, be they lawyers, agents, managers, that can have that conversation on your behalf.

**John August:** Absolutely. We had Aline on the show a couple weeks ago. We talked about being agentic, taking agency in your life. This is a situation where this guy needs to take agency and to say, “Oh, this thing needs to happen. I’m going to make it happen.” Pretend you are your own best friend and you’re going to go in and just do this thing for your friend, which is get your friend paid.

**John Gatins:** I would get the guy on the phone too. Email’s a little bit removed. Just say, “Hey, call me quick.”

**John August:** In that conversation you had about what was happening next, segueing from that into like, “Oh, it’s so great this is happening. Also, you haven’t paid me. You may have forgotten that you haven’t paid me.” You can [unintelligible 00:45:28] they forgot, but they have to pay you. Got to get paid.

It is time for our One Cool Things. John Gatins, what is your One Cool Thing?

**John Gatins:** It’s interesting. Ling’s uncle and aunt came to visit recently from Arkansas. They’re retired. They’re the coolest people. They were like, “We just have to tell you,” because they were staying in our guest area, and they said, “You have this kind of finch. You’ve got this kind of woodpecker,” and whatever. I was like, “What?” They were like, “There’s this app called Merlin, which you can download for free, and you can literally record singing birds, and it will tell you what the bird is, and it shows you a picture and this whole thing.” They showed us all of these pictures of these birds. They were excited, because they don’t live in this part of the world. They were like, “Check it out. You’ve got this short, blah blah blah woodpecker thing.” I was like, “Oh my god.” Pearl used to be so annoyed by this woodpecker outside her window. She’s like, “There’s this bird.” It’s this really beautiful looking bird. I just thought that was the coolest thing. I was like, “Oh my god.” Who knew there’s an app that can identify birds?

**John August:** That’s awesome. Just this morning, there was a bird who I remember hearing from before. It was a morning bird that can be really annoying. But we sleep with the white noise machine turned so high that I don’t hear it anymore. Sometimes in the bathroom early in the night I hear it.

**John Gatins:** Just download Merlin, and you can maybe understand where that bird’s coming from a little bit.

**John August:** Absolutely. 100 percent.

**John Gatins:** That bird’s trying to tell you something, John.

**John August:** Absolutely.

**John Gatins:** It’s like, “Listen.”

**John August:** It’s like when you have noisy neighbors, and you’re like, “I hate them,” and then you meet them, it’s like, “Oh, it’s actually not so bad.”

**John Gatins:** That bird might have notes on your scripts that you need.

**John August:** It might have notes.

**John Gatins:** You don’t know.

**John August:** My One Cool Thing is sort of a strange one. We were having a conversation a week or two ago about spinoffs and what is the longest show that’s been on the air if you include the spinoffs from the original show.

**John Gatins:** Whoa.

**John August:** That led me down a rabbit hole towards The Facts of Life. I loved the show The Facts of Life, which for people who are not familiar with it, it is about this girls’ school. You follow these four or five girls who get in trouble and they live in their own little part of the girls’ school with Mrs. Garrett, who’s the cook, and they often work for Mrs. Garrett. It was a shrunk down version of a bigger school. It was a strange situation where the first situation is actually very different than later seasons.

Anyway, they kept trying to spin shows off of The Facts of Life, which I think is great. They would do backdoor pilots. A backdoor pilot is one of the normal 22 episodes of a season, they would introduce new characters and set them up and see whether they would work right, and then the hope would be to spin them off of the original show into a new thing. The Facts of Life was a spin-off of Diff’rent Strokes, and so this is trying to spin off other things.

Here are some of the backdoor pilots attempted to come out of The Facts of Life: Brian and Sylvia, a Season Two episode in which Tootie and Natalie go to Buffalo, New York to visit Tootie’s Aunt Sylvia, who has recently married a white man. It’s about Brian and Sylvia, these other people. The situation, you’re bringing your protagonist to a new place and trying to spin off these characters.

The Academy was a Season Three episode set at Stone Academy, the all-boys military school that was located near the existing school, so basically a boys version of Facts of Life. Jo’s Cousin, another Season Three episode. Jo visits her family in the Bronx, including her cousin Terry, a 14-year-old girl going through adolescence in a family full of men, so just a completely different family show.

The Big Fight was a Season Four episode set at Stone Academy, that boys’ military school, so it was another attempt to get that going there. One called Graduation. They’re trying to spin off a show about Blair and Jo and their life in college.

There was a Big Apple Blues, a Season Nine episode in which Natalie spends the night with a group of eccentric young people living in a SoHo loft, so trying to create that show.

**John Gatins:** Oh my god.

**John August:** Then The Beginning of the End/The Beginning of the Beginning, which is the two-part series finale, which they were trying to set up these two characters taking over Mrs. Garrett’s role at the school. It’s remarkable over the course of all these years, they just kept trying to spin other things out of it. It’s not a thing we get these days.

**John Gatins:** Wasn’t Clooney a recurring character?

**John August:** That feels right, yes.

**John Gatins:** As you were going through, I’m like, weren’t any of them trying to launch Clooney as a guy who was featured in one of those?

**John August:** You feel like he should. That was pre-ER. I was saying we don’t have spinoffs. I guess we do have spinoffs, because we have all those Yellowstone spinoffs.

**Drew:** There’s also Blackish. It has Brownish and all those.

**John August:** Blackish, yeah.

**John Gatins:** The Walking Dead has-

**John August:** You’re absolutely right.

**John Gatins:** … 15 million. Whatever. I got into watching The Walking Dead when I was on location in Georgia, and it used to freak me out, because it’s shot there.

**John August:** It’s Georgia.

**John Gatins:** I’m like, “That looks like the woods where the walkers are.” Now I just watched the first episode of Those That Lived or I don’t know what. When I was looking for it, 10 other spinoffs, the Daryl Dixon show and then this one and that one. I’m like, “Holy cow.” Fear the Walking Dead. The Walking Dead will never-

**John August:** They will never stop.

**John Gatins:** The zombies, they will never stop. The zombies will never go away.

**John August:** You’re completely right. I guess I’ve been thinking of a very specific, very deliberate, like, “Okay, we’re going to introduce new characters and try to spin them off in a new thing.” But franchisization of shows is really clear now. It’s not just the Cheers to Frasier to Frasier. There’s other ways to do it now. Sell a universe.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Alee Karim. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send your questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great. You’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. I’m wearing both a T-shirt and a hoodie right at the moment. 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 John Gatins’s mastery of credits and partnership, I guess. John Gatins, congratulations on your movie, and thank you for coming on Scriptnotes.

**John Gatins:** Of course. Thank you guys for having me. I appreciate it.

[Bonus Segment]

**John August:** John Gatins, as long as I’ve known you, you’ve been a solo writer. You’re a person who comes in and brings your own pen. You do your work. Then you take off. But recently started working with Andrea Berloff, another friend of the show, and you guys have been writing as partners. Talk to us about that transition. How’d it all come about?

**John Gatins:** It was interesting, because Andrea and I knew of each other, and then we really met in the strike of 2008.

**John August:** We should say that you were a strike captain in 2008 and were always out there with your black parka, a big cheerleader.

**John Gatins:** It’s funny too, because I don’t know that I was ever officially penciled as such, but I think I emailed people and said, “I’m going to be at Universal,” and then friends of mine just started showing up. Then you were there. There was a lot of people that we knew there. I had the acapella group from UCLA come. We had fun. Whatever. Strikes are not fun. That’s not the idea.

But Andrea showed up there. She was like, “Hey.” She always tells the story, she’s like, “You’re the first person besides my husband to know that I was pregnant.” I was like, “Oh, okay,” because she was like, “Look, I’m going to be a little intermittent.” I was like, “Andrea, I’m not in charge.” I was like, “You do whatever. Trust me.” We were like the MASH unit of Strikeville. We became friendly there.

Then I can’t even remember the year it was. It was 2014. I don’t know. I’m making it up. But we both got invited to be in a room, quote unquote, for Activision Blizzard. Stacey Sher invited us to be writers in this room, because they were trying to figure out Call of Duty movies.

**John August:** Why has there not been a Call of Duty movie?

**John Gatins:** Why has there not been?

**John August:** Yeah.

**John Gatins:** I’ll give my own opinion.

**John August:** Please.

**John Gatins:** Again, it’s going to be very uneducated. But it was an incredible room. We heard so many military experts who came in. It was incredible. Guys who had really done… Will Staples was really integral in facilitating the intros to these people in the military world and politicians. It was incredible. I learned so much, because I really don’t know that much about the military.

I think at the end of the day, you realize when they release a Call of Duty, it makes hundreds of millions of dollars in a weekend. To try to say that you would make a movie that would help that event, it would really have to be a movie that would be on a level that I think ultimately they never saw anything that led them to believe that this is going to in fact help their brand in a way.

That’s just, again, my take, because it was really a big aspirational attempt to try to launch three different series of movies, because there was Call of Duty, there was Modern Warfare, there was Black Ops. There was a bunch of different segments in the game world from that umbrella, and they tried to attack all fronts at the same time with lots of really smart people in a room. And there was lots of good ideas, but it just never full came together, I think.

**John August:** My hunch is they should’ve found the best military spec they could’ve found and called it Call of Duty.

**John Gatins:** That’s a really smart thing. Who knows? They may actually ultimately do that. But in that room, Andrea and I, we partnered up as producers, because they took six writers and made three teams of two to be producers that were assigned a screenwriter. Then we helped that person form an idea based on the franchise we were working on kind of thing.

Andrea and I were together every day for a month. Somewhere in the middle of it, we said, “We should write a movie together,” which as you said, I’ve never done that before. Neither had she, by the way. She has a great, thriving career all on her own. It was this weird thing of like, “Maybe.” We talked to our agents about it a little bit and whatever and said, “We’ll just try.” We didn’t think it was going to be like, “We’re going to do this forever.” It was this odd thing of like, “Oh my god, I’m actually going to write with another writer.”

We called Phil and Matt actually and said to them, “Hey, guys, how do you do it?” They gave us their thing of cards on a board of this scene, this scene, this scene, and then saying, “I want to write that one. Why don’t you do that? No, I want to do this one.” You divvy up the work and you do it and then you share and you back and forth and whatever.

We figured it out. It was interesting, because we’re at a point now where we don’t… I don’t think, anyway. She can speak for herself if you ask her. We joke all the time. It’s like, “You wrote that.” She’s like, “No, you wrote that.” I’m like, “Oh, I did?” It’s like, “No.” It’s a little bit seamless at this point, which I think is a good place to be. It’s great to have a lab partner. It’s such a solemn, weird thing that we do. Humans are social creatures. I don’t know. It’s been good. It’s actually been really fun.

**John August:** You’re the only writer I can think of who, at this stage in their career, partnered up, because it’s just much more generally people are splitting apart at this age. You guys, you’re holding each other accountable, but also you’re showing up to work in a way that is important.

**John Gatins:** We take meetings. We work for Netflix now, and have for over a year, in an exclusive kind of deal with them, which has been really fun and great. It’s just really nice. I think we were both at the perfect time in our lives that it was like, “This would be a cool thing to try to do together.” It’s been really awesome, honestly.

**John August:** The other thing I would love to talk to you about on mic a little bit is, of all the writers I’ve met over my career, you are the most savvy when it comes to, “Okay, six of us worked on a movie, and it’s now time to figure out credits.” It will go to arbitration or we can decide amongst ourselves and all agree on what the credits should be. You are very good at starting those conversations and figuring out ways to get everyone to agree on credits. Can you talk me through how that started and what your approach is for it?

**John Gatins:** To be honest, I don’t remember exactly how it started, but I’ve come to the place where a lot of times when I think back on the… There was a very long run in my career where I was a guy who would come in towards the end, and I’d do production rewrite work. I’ve also been fortunate that I am comfortable on a set, and directors I’ve been paired with, I’ve gotten along well with, who were like, “Hey, come help me.” I worked with a couple of first-time directors or younger directors, and it was great. It was like the Bull Durham relationship of like, I’m the old guy, and here’s a young person trying to do something. The studio liked me and felt like I could help. So I’d be on set and that kind of thing.

When it would come down to the credit thing, at some point maybe I knew one of the other writers initially and just reached out and said, “What are you thinking? They’re going to make a recommendation, and then we’re all going to go to our corners and try to write a manifesto that says, ‘This is what I think I deserve.’ Maybe we can have a conversation.”

I got to know the Guild people enough, having been through enough arbitrations and been an arbiter, that I would have a conversation with them. I would immediately come out and say, “Hey, can I have so-and-so’s number, or can you tell them here’s my number? If they want to chat with me, great, call me. If they don’t, that’s okay too.”

I would always start the conversation the same way and say, “Hey, listen. You worked on this, and I worked on this. If you’re open to a conversation, we can have it. I fully understand that there’s a really good chance this is going to arbitration, which is okay. We’ve all been through it. But because we’re in the soup together, is there anything you want to share?” or, “I feel this,” or, “I feel that,” or, “Maybe there’s a way that we can work it out.”

The Guild, I think that they would appreciate that, because it’s pitting writers against writers, which is never great, because as we said, it’s about resume, and there’s money and residuals, bonus residual. There’s all kinds of things about ownership of things and movie posters that don’t have your name on it that you feel like, “I deserve to have my name on it.” It’s very difficult.

Of course, the credits thing came up with additional writers at the end of the thing. It’s such a ballyhoo kind of thing that it’s difficult. It’s never perfect. It’s the best system we have. I know Craig’s worked hard on the manual, to try to say, listen, let’s revisit some of these things about what are the percentages and how do we mete this all out to make it make sense?

Look. My experiences vary. I’ve met some really cool writers that way. There’s been some things that have really gotten sorted, and it felt really fair and cool, and everyone walked away being like, “Hey, I appreciate you did that. This is cool,” and that kind of thing. Other times, it’s been not as good. It’s been like, “Look, we’ll just go to arbitration and see how it works out.”

**John August:** I’ve had both situations. I think, inspired by your example, I’ve reached out to writers on projects to see whether there’s a useful way for us to think about what the credits should be. Also, if I’ve come onto a project, I try to reach out to the original writer or writers to see where the bodies are buried. That almost starts the relationship a little bit earlier before it becomes figuring out the credits. Important to remember is that these writers can figure it out amongst themselves unless one of them is a production executive.

**John Gatins:** Yeah, that’s a little different.

**John August:** If someone’s a director or a producer.

**John Gatins:** That’s different.

**John August:** Increasingly, if a director is going for credit, that’s off the table, because-

**John Gatins:** It’s an automatic arbitration.

**John August:** Automatic arbitration. And same if someone’s a producer. It makes sense why, because that person would have undue power and control over the situation and might have their fingers on the scale. Now, one of the things I’ve heard you talk about is that there is the credit you see on screen and the list of credits, but behind the scenes there’s also math about what percentages go to which writers. Those things don’t have to line up precisely. Is that accurate?

**John Gatins:** I think so. It’s such a difficult thing.

**John August:** Here’s what I’m getting to. You will actually have the conversation about, “Let’s talk about money,” because one of the reasons why you want to talk about money is that different writers would have different box office bonuses based on what credit they get.

**John Gatins:** That’s a conversation that people have. That can get into lawyer land, where you say, “Listen. I appreciate what they’ve done. I was in a different situation. I was on a weekly. I don’t have a bonus on this movie. But I’m probably going to get credit. You may have been diminished enough that you’re not going to get credit.” That person says, “Then let me inspire you to invite me in, because I think I deserve credit on the movie.” At times, there’s a financial deal to be made as well. Different things mean different things to different people.

If you asked me this question 15 years ago, I might’ve given you a different answer, because having my names on movies was going to change the trajectory of my career or my opportunities. I’m old now. I wish that maybe there was executives out there who haven’t met me or don’t have a preformed opinion of what I do or how I can do or what I’m right for or where I fit on any kind of list on any given day. But I think that there is a little bit of, I don’t know, I am who I am. I’m going to try to do what I do. It’s a fairly difficult thing to apply math to a creative event.

**John August:** 100 percent.

**John Gatins:** That’s I think what you’re asking is to say, “Okay. Look at the script and tell me who did 33 percent of these four or five elements.”

**John August:** We’ve both been arbiters. It’s really tough.

**John Gatins:** It’s a really tough thing.

**John August:** Luckily, there’s the 33 percent math, but it’s really basically, did this person do so much work that they’ve crossed a threshold into getting this. It only gets down to 33 percents of stuff when there’s just too many names and too many people could be jockeying for that thing.

**John Gatins:** It’s hard. Derek Haas has been an arbiter, and he says his approach is he reads the shooting script and then he reads backwards. You try to figure, how do we get to this thing?

**John August:** [Crosstalk 01:03:17].

**John Gatins:** I was like, that’s a really smart way to say, because you may have written an amazing script, but it was set in 1914. The movie’s actually set in the 1980s now. You go, “What does that 1914 script have to do with the movie that actually got shot?”

**John August:** You may find that there’s a lot, but it may be-

**John Gatins:** It’s like, look, that 1914 script may be the reason the movie got made, but it doesn’t factor into the document that was actually filmed.

**John August:** That’s the crucial thing to remember about the credits process. It’s not about the process of making the movie. It’s literally about the final document. That’s why it can be so crucial, what is the final document? Does the final document actually reflect the movie? We’ve gotten into this before too, where this is the, quote unquote, final shooting script, but that’s not the movie that’s on the screen at all, so you have to go through that stuff too. It’s a challenging situation.

**John Gatins:** It’s a really challenging situation.

**John August:** I do feel like one of the changes from when we first started the business is if I worked really hard on a movie and didn’t get one of those top credits, I just disappeared, and it was like a year of my life just vanished. Additional literary material at least acknowledges, oh, that person, you existed. It’s a change for writers who otherwise might be completely forgotten. It’s proof that you did some work. There’s pros and cons to it.

**John Gatins:** It’s a tough one. It’s difficult. I’m not sure about the additional writing credit thing. I think I’ve probably been in that situation a little bit, because maybe I’ve done work on things where that was an opportunity.

**John August:** I can think of one movie you worked your ass off on, and I was so surprised that your name is not on that movie. You know what I’m talking about.

**John Gatins:** That’s where I learned a lot of lessons, because the statement that I wrote on my behalf was a ridiculous, embarrassing, emotional love letter to a college girlfriend, basically. It was like, “I gave my T-shirt on the day that Van Der Beek wore, and he wore it. I was there.” I’m like, no, you write a comparative literature paper that’s like, “Hey, I did these things,” and whatever. That one didn’t go my way for a lot of reasons. I didn’t help my cause on that one.

**John August:** I’m thinking of a different movie. That’s how many movies there are.

**John Gatins:** Oh my god.

**John August:** I’m thinking of a much more recent movie, a sci-fi movie that you-

**John Gatins:** Look. That was a situation that was really difficult, because I got to know the other writers and had a conversation, because that was one that was very confusing. It was a little bit like, how did we actually get here? Look. We tried. That was one where it was a failure, and it was a little bit like, huh. It was heartbreaking. But it was what it was.

**John August:** You got paid the money during production.

**John Gatins:** I did, I did. I did have a sizable win on the other side that I was feeling like was going to come through and did not. That was not a great moment. It’s a little bit of the peril of doing what I do, which has been a guy who, “Look, I was the fourth writer,” or something. That’s not a very advantageous position to be in. You just said to me, knowing nothing, “John, come on. You’re this guy who came in.” I’m like, “Yeah, but I went through all this.” It’s like calling other writers and saying, “Dude, I know you wrote a great script, but guess what? I’m the one who had to listen to all the nuts-ness of all the craziness and deal with blah blah blah.”

**John August:** Yeah, you had to shoulder and bear so much. You had to body a lot of the problems.

**John Gatins:** It was what it was. Time helps. You get some distance from it and everything. I thought you were talking about Varsity Blues. My thing is, I owe everything to Varsity Blues. That movie did everything for me. My name appears nowhere in that universe, but they paid my bonus anyway. They felt that. How about that?

**John August:** Nice.

**John Gatins:** That executive, Don Granger, was like… My agent called and said, “There’s something here for him.” He goes, “I don’t know anything about that.” It was one of those great movie moment inside the movie business.

**John August:** Love it.

**John Gatins:** It was a really gracious thing that they did. It was very nice. It led to me doing Hardball for them and doing so much work at that studio. I can’t fault that movie. I didn’t help myself in the process. I really didn’t know. That’s the thing I think that upset me most as a really young writer in that moment, the first movie, was that there was nobody in the Writers Guild… I didn’t know a lot of screenwriters. If I’d met somebody who’d said to me, “Hey, listen, man. Why don’t you let me look at that statement?” That’s the point, John. If I’d been an arbiter and I’d gotten that statement…

You’ve read plenty of arbiter statements where you want to say, “Don’t ever write a statement like that. This is no help. Trust me. I know you think you’re going to appeal to some emotional whatever. No, no. That’s not an emotional document. This is a document that compares the work you did, compares to the shooting script and to the other documents. That’s what it is.” I shot myself in the foot in that situation. Like I said, that experience and that movie and the success of that movie, I owe so much to.

**John August:** I owe a lot of my success to movies that my names are not on. That’s the reality of this career. John Gatins, so great to talk with you.

**John Gatins:** Great to talk to you, man. Thank you. I really appreciate you guys let me coming on.

Links:

* [Little Wing – On Paramount+ March 13th](https://youtu.be/kZeaCkIgN3o?si=JWbnJrw1ATTayZcR)
* John Gatins on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gatins) and [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0309691/?ref_=tt_ov_wr)
* [Little Wing by Susan Orlean](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/02/13/little-wing) for the New Yorker
* [LUCIRA by Pfizer COVID-19 & Flu Home Test](https://www.lucirabypfizer.com/)
* [Merlin Bird ID](https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/)
* [The Facts of Life – Attempted Spin-offs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Facts_of_Life_(TV_series)#Attempted_spin-offs)
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* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Alee Karim ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/633standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/mystery-and-suspense).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 632 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode is about mystery and suspense. It’s also a best of episode. To explain why we’re airing material from the vaults, I need to tell you a little story. So sit back, get comfortable.

Now, longtime listeners will recognize that in no fewer than three episodes of Scriptnotes, we have urged our listeners to get their flu shots. In fact, in the opening moments of Episode 5, back in 2011, Craig and I talked about it. Drew, let’s play a clip from that episode, right from the very start, because this is before we even had bloops as a (sings). Back then, I used to pick different theme music from the shows. Let’s play that now.

[Episode 5 clip]

**John:** Hello and welcome to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters. My name is John August.

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

**John:** Hello, Craig. How are you doing today?

**Craig:** Doing great, John. How about yourself?

**John:** I am doing pretty well. It’s been a day of many small errands and things to take care of. I got my flu shot today, for example.

**Craig:** You know I’m a huge pro-vaccination guy, but I always feel like the flu shot is the one vaccine that’s kind of a waste of time, just because of the whole thing where there are so many different strains, and they’re kind of guessing.

**John:** They are guessing. They have to figure out which flu they think is going to be the biggest strain to hit American shores at the time. My gambler’s aspect of it is that having the flu completely sucks.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so, if I can spend $20 and take 20 minutes to have a very good chance of avoiding a terrible flu, I’ll gladly spend that money and take that time.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And that’s why I’ll get a flu shot, also. And I always get my kids flu shots. I just always feel a little silly about it as opposed to proper vaccinations, which, of course, are life savers.

The other thing about the flu is, I feel like people misuse the word “flu,” because flu is a very specific virus. And usually, when people say they have the flu, what they mean is they have the common cold.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You really have to be pretty sick for it to be the flu.

**John:** If you’re knocked on your back and really, really hating life, that could very well be the flu.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’ve got, like, a serious fever, muscle pains, that’s… Flu’s bad stuff.

[End of clip]

**Drew Marquardt:** Oh my gosh, you sound like babies.

**John:** We were so young, so naïve.

**Drew:** The 10 years of cigars hadn’t lowered your voice or anything like that.

**John:** The Trump administration, the bourbon, everything else that has happened. Here we have our first clue about what may be going on here. Craig and I were talking about the flu, so either one of the two of us or someone in our orb must have gotten the flu. And in fact, that has already happened on the show.

So back in Episode 434, January 2020, Craig talks about how he got the flu. He describes going to Urgent Care. And Craig asks me, “John, do you know how they test for the flu? They put a swab up your nose and swirl it around,” which is wild. That used to be a new thing. This is January 2020 he’s telling me this. We were just about to have COVID. We were just about to all have our noses swabbed endlessly for the rest of our lives, but this was a new thing for Craig.

**Drew:** No idea what was coming.

**John:** Nope, no idea, which brings us to 2024. Last week, it’s a Saturday evening. I am feeling a little bit achy, but I was just at the gym that morning. It’s nothing too big, nothing too pressing. We’re having friends over to play board games, so as a responsible host, I take a COVID test. I swab my nose, just as Craig had done back in 434. COVID test turns out negative, so hooray. Friends come over. We play Spyfall. We play Poetry for Neanderthals. We play Celebrity. A great time is had by all.

The guests leave, and suddenly I just feel awful. Everything comes crashing down. I’m guessing that what I was experiencing during that game night was essentially stage health, where you can feel good when you’re actually out on stage, when you’re actually performing, and then it all comes crashing down. Drew, you were an actor. You may have seen something like that in your orbit.

**Drew:** I’ve absolutely had that happen several times. Usually, the times when I was the lead, I would have full-blown laryngitis backstage and then get on and be able to project out and not know how I did it.

**John:** We were doing Big Fish in London. There was this cold that went through the entire cast. These people, they were basically invalids. They were so sick. Then you just shove them up on stage, and they could somehow do it. They’re belting, and then they can’t talk off stage. I think it was some bit of that. I just did not feel how bad I felt while people were there. But I am now so cold, I am shaking. I have a fever of 101. I take some Advil. I go to bed. I don’t sleep too well. I get too hot, too cold. I start sweating. I feel gross. I take my temperature throughout the night, and it gets up to 105.5.

**Drew:** Oh my god.

**John:** At that point, I genuinely don’t know what to do, because if I Google now, I see that over 105, you’re supposed to go to the emergency room, but it’s not like it was staying over 105. I don’t have any of the other emergency symptoms like that. I’m not convulsing. I’m not confused or delirious.

Anyway, first thing in the morning, Mike takes me to Urgent Care. I say, “I think I have the flu.” They swab my nose. They say, “You have the flu.” They send me home with Tamiflu. The doctor says, “Listen, you’re going to have three bad days, and then you’ll be okay.” The doctor was accurate, but I don’t know, he didn’t fully describe the experience. It was just horrible. I have friends who’ve had much more serious illnesses. I don’t want to downplay that. But for whatever reason and good fortune, I’ve never been this sick as an adult. I don’t want to just downplay how awful the flu was for me. It was just bad. Have you had the flu as a grown-up?

**Drew:** I don’t think I’ve had it as an adult. I’m sure I’ve had it as a kid, because kids get everything.

**John:** I’m sure I had it as a kid too. I remember things that felt like this as a kid. But your kid body is just so different. I felt like everything was just down and broken. I had fever, body aches, chills, diarrhea, but that’s it. I had none of the respiratory things. But what I had was enough. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t really sleep. I just laid there in this fugue state envisioning boxes being assembled. I couldn’t think any organized thoughts, other than just repetitive, simple thoughts. I felt like a video game that had crashed, and the screen was half pixelated, sort of broken. It was bad.

I eventually came back online. I’d have these moments where I’d say, “Oh, this is the best I’ve felt so far,” and I still felt terrible, but it was better than I’d felt two hours before. Then a few hours later, I’d say, “Oh, this is the best I’ve felt so far.” That was the gradual coming out of it. Now, we’re on the fifth day. Flu-wise, I feel like I’m basically through it. The last couple days I’ve been able to do some phone calls. For reasons we’ll get into, I’ve had so many phone calls. The flu sucks. That’s my takeaway from the flu.

To answer the mystery and suspense question I posed at the very start of this, the reason why this is a best of episode is because we had a bigger episode planned. We were going to have a guest host on. We had a menu of things we were going to go through. That’s going to be pushed back a week. But we have a lot of other things to talk through. This is a hybrid of old stuff and new stuff in one episode.

Takeaways, I guess, flu shot. Get your flu shot. It didn’t protect me this time. It’s protected me many other years, I’m sure. Tamiflu, sure, great. It’s not the magic bullet I hoped it would be. You see people who get the COVID drug, and they’re like, “Oh my god, I suddenly feel great.” It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t just like, oh, suddenly, the lights came on. It is crazy that we don’t have an at-home test in the U.S. for flu. They exist in Europe. They exist in Asia.

**Drew:** Really?

**John:** Yeah, they have these tests where you can swab. It’s one test that swabs for flu, RSV, and COVID. If I’d had a test like that, I would’ve swabbed my nose, and I would’ve tested positive for flu. I would’ve not had friends come over. I probably could’ve gotten Tamiflu 12 hours earlier. It’s really frustrating we don’t have those here.

**Drew:** That feels so obvious that we would have them. Now I’m very frustrated.

**John:** Apparently, the reason why we don’t have them is it was proposed years ago, and they said, “Americans aren’t ready to handle at-home testing of things,” but we are now. So just get over it. We can do it. Of my board game party group, no one is sick yet, which is great. Some of them took Tamiflu, which is smart and great. Hopefully, they’ll all stay healthy.

**Drew:** Terrible for you, but it sounds like it worked out okay.

**John:** Drew, tell us about the mystery and suspense portions you have picked out for us this episode.

**Drew:** This is an episode about mystery and suspense, but it’s not just detectives and thrillers. This is how to use mystery and suspense techniques in every story, including comedies, so really helpful. We’re going to start with Episode 269. That’s Mystery Versus Confusion. It’s about using mystery to capture an audience’s curiosity, but making sure that doesn’t tip over into confusion or frustration or just making sure it’s all very deliberate. Then we’ll go to Episode 332, which is called Wait For It. It’s about suspense and the different types of suspense and how to craft it on the page.

**John:** Great. In our Bonus Segment for Premium members, you and I are going to talk about the Apple Vision Pro, which we had in the office and got a chance to test out and play around with. But before we get into any of that, we have some news. We actually had a busy news week. First, we need to start with all the agent stuff that happened this week. Agencies are always going through changes. Agents move from one firm to another. Sometimes they take their clients with them. Sometimes they shutter, and that happened this past week with one of the smaller agencies.

**Drew:** That’s right. The first one was A3, which used to be Abrams Artists Agency. An email went out on Friday, February 9th, that the agency was shutting down on Monday. It sounds like the decision to pull the trigger was made completely by the chairman, Adam Bold. Bold has that power to make that unilateral move because of an operating agreement they signed last year, which the CEO Robert Attermann and President Brian Cho have been suing Bold over. It sounds like there’s quite a lot of drama here. They did that reportedly in attempt to block Bold from selling off A3’s digital and unscripted departments to Gersh, which happened in January. And now that agency’s completely dissolved.

**John:** My recollection is that A3 represented both… I know they represented some writers, because back in the WGA agency campaign, I remember them being one of the agencies that we had to negotiate with. But they also represented other talent as well.

It’s frustrating when your agency melts away, because then you don’t know, as a piece of talent, what are you supposed to do, where are you supposed to go. I also feel bad, of course, for the agents who are suddenly without a job. Those changes do happen. That is an agency shutting down. What’s more common to happen in Hollywood is that an agent will leave an agency either taking his or her clients to a different firm or setting up a new agency. That’s what happened this past week.

So the big news in my friend group this past week has been about Verve. On Tuesday, it was announced that Bill Weinstein, who’s one of the founders, partners, and the CEO of Verve Talent, had left the firm. And as longtime listeners will know, I actually moved to Verve during the WGA agency campaign, and Bill was my primary agent. The trades are reporting that three other agents are joining him on this new venture. There could be more.

We’re recording this on Thursday, so by the time this episode comes out on Tuesday, a lot more may have developed. But Drew, it’s fair to say that a ton of phone calls have happened in the office here over the last two or three days.

**Drew:** Yes, I would absolutely say that.

**John:** It’s weird. The phone doesn’t ring nearly as much as it used to, because everything is now emails or text messages. But when you need real-time information, you just pick up the phone and call a person, especially when they want to talk about advice. The reason why people were calling me were mostly friends of mine who were at Verve, and just to think about, “Do I stay at Verve? Do I go to this new place? Do I go to a third place?”

One of the things I tried to talk everybody through is not to fall into the false dichotomy of only two options. There’s a sense of you either have to choose A or B. You can choose A or B or neither of those and go to a different situation, different solution.

For some people, if they have a primary relationship with an agent who is staying at Verve, it probably makes sense to stay at Verse. If they have a primary relationship with an agent who’s moving to this new firm, it may make sense to move to the new firm. But in other cases, it may make sense to look around and see where is the right place to end up. That could be at a different agency. It could be with a manager.

For me personally, as we’re recording this, I don’t know where I’m going to go. I don’t know if I’m staying at Verve or going to the new agency or going someplace else. It will be a busy couple weeks as this all sorts itself out.

**Drew:** It’s mystery and suspense.

**John:** It is mystery and suspense, Drew.

**Drew:** It is.

**John:** The second bit of business we have not covered yet on the program is OpenAI announced Sora. Sora is this new video generation tool. We’ve seen tools before that do what Dall-E did for images that created videos, but they were terrible. They were just awful. You would not believe them to be real at all. Drew, you saw these demos. What’d you think?

**Drew:** I was blown away. The physics of it is amazing. Seeing things underwater videos are incredible. There’s one I was telling you about. It’s a drone shot from 1850s California or something like that. It’s both incredible and awe-inspiring and a little bit terrifying.

**John:** The first text message I got from a friend was, quote, “How petrified should I be?” I told them, don’t be petrified. It’s a long way from these little demo clips to typing a prompt in for, “Make me a biopic about Janis Joplin in the style of Baz Luhrmann. There’s a reason why writers and other film professionals are involved to get you from that notion to an actual film that people see.

All of that said, there are important things to consider with these technologies and the impact they could have on our business. First off, the demos they showed were largely about someone typing something into a box and it coming up with a little clip. But it can also take video’s input.

So you can feed it video of a film and say, “Replace Kevin Spacey,” because Kevin Spacey’s a problematic person right now, and it could probably do a very good job of replacing Kevin Spacey in a film. And so suddenly, you don’t have to re-shoot or do anything else. If you are the copyright holder on this film, and you want to make money off this, you might replace Kevin Spacey in a film, and it can do it pretty simply.

Likewise, if you are the holder of copyright on something in your vault, and you want to refresh it and make it more palatable to modern audiences, you could do certain things like up-ressing it or you could change the aspect ratio of it. If it’s shot more square and you want it to be more widescreen, you could fill in the edges there much better with AI. You can really figure out… It’s like the Photoshop’s generative fill. It’ll have a good sense of what should actually be in the spaces that are missing. That is really useful for that.

Is it transformative enough that it is covered by copyright? That’s an open question, and that’s a thing that’s going to be wrestled with. But it raises the question of, what is a refresh of an existing film versus what is a remake, because writers and directors and other folks, we get paid for when our material is remade. If someone wants to remake Go, I get paid for that, because that’s my original thing. But if you’re just constantly rejuvenating an existing property, that gets to be a little bit murkier.

I guess, what do we call the stuff that comes out of these engines? Because some of it can look like animation; some of it can look like live action, but it’s not really either of the above. There were no actors being filmed, so it’s not live action as we think of, but it’s also not animation and the animation process. It’s just a thing that’s being generated.

As WGA writers, we want to make sure that material that comes out of a process like this isn’t defaulted into animation, because the WGA does represent animation, but not exclusively. It could be a way for studios to run around protections that we have put in place for writers. We want to make sure that there’s no loophole here where using this technology gets them out of hiring WGA writers.

Finally, you talked about the physics of the stuff that you saw. The knock-on effect that these things have had is that they have become these reality engines. They’ve ingested so much material, so much video, that they create these pretty compelling drone shots. They have a sense of how things move in space. If a character was in front of another character and it clues it, there’s persistence of vision.

**Drew:** It has object permanence almost.

**John:** Object permanence, yeah, like a baby learns object permanence. It’s just much more sophisticated than things we’re used to coming out of this. Because of it, it can actually do things like, by watching a bunch of Minecraft videos, it gets Minecraft, and it can simulate Minecraft so well that it becomes basically just Minecraft. If you can do that with Minecraft, to what degree are you going to be able to simulate off of real-world video what reality is? That has troubling implications for – not troubling, but fascinating implications for the nature of reality and how it understands the world around it.

I think it’s just really interesting to watch this space. Obviously, we’re concerned about it, because it looks like it could replace the jobs of Hollywood workers, but it could actually have broader implications even beyond that. I think it’s nothing to panic about right now, but it’s something we should be mindful of, because as of this moment in 2024, it’s just interesting. It could be much more than interesting in a few years.

**Drew:** Do you feel like there’s a next step from it almost? Do you anticipate any of that or is it all just an unknown?

**John:** Right now, they’re showing the demos, but they’re not releasing the tool for people to use. That’s because there are obvious applications of this for disinformation, for deep fakes. All of that’s really troubling. Figuring out how you would even put this in the public’s hands is a big concern.

Some people pushed back against my blog post on it – we’ll put a link in the show notes to the blog post I put up about it – saying, like, “John, you ignored the fact that AI material can’t be copyrighted.” I think that’s naïve. It is a fact that right now, existing U.S. law suggests that material generated by AI by itself cannot be copyrighted, but there’s really no clear gradations there.

My example of using AI to do some film enhancements… The Zone of Interest, there are these really cool sequences which I originally thought were animation, but they turn out they were shot with this night vision camera that looked really surreal. Those cameras are not high enough resolution to create a good image on screen, but they could take that and then use AI to fix the issues in it. That’s still going to be copyrightable. You still were starting with something.

I think the degree to which you can use AI to do stuff in your film does not make it un-copyrightable. That’s all going to need to be figured out. We don’t know what the line is right now. I think, as people who are working in guilds, we need to be thinking about how do we make sure that we help draw the line, and it’s not just the studios who are drawing the line.

**Drew:** Cool.

**John:** Before we get to the new stuff, Drew, some things we need from our listeners. First off, we’re trying to do an episode that includes some counterfactual Hollywood history. I’ve been reading this great book on counterfactual military history, so like, what happens if this battle back in ancient times had gone differently and the other side had won? Would we be speaking Roman right now? Sometimes in history, small changes can lead to giant differences of outcome.

We’d love to do that for Hollywood, if we could, for a future episode. If you have suggestions for, if this one event had gone differently, what would the impact be. For example, if the movie Titanic had tanked and was a disaster, what would be the knock-on impacts of that? Or if Iron Man had failed, would we have the Marvel Cinematic Universe?

We’d love your questions about that. It doesn’t just have to be about movies. It could be about television. It could be about some other impact of technology or if another country had gotten to a certain thing first. But what we’d love is not too sci-fi-ish. It’s not about what if aliens had invaded at this point. It’s about flip of a coin, a thing that could’ve gone either way, could’ve gone the other way. It’s always fun to think about that. If you have suggestions for counterfactual Hollywood history, we’d love to hear those.

**Drew:** Email those to ask@johnaugust.com, and I’ll look at them all.

**John:** Fantastic. Drew, let’s get started with our mystery and suspense. Which episode are we hearing first, and which one’s number two?

**Drew:** It’s Episode 269 first, and then Episode 332.

**John:** Great. We will be back here after that with some One Cool Things and to wrap stuff up.

[Episode 269 clip]

**John:** Craig, get it started. Why should we care about mystery?

**Craig Mazin:** Well, we should care about it because we care about confusion. You and I talk about this all the time. We get confused so easily. But part of the reason that we can get confused easily is because, clearly, as writers, we’re trying to do something, and if we do too much of it, it ends up confusing. But why not be completely non-confusing? Well, that seems like a stupid question, but it’s worth asking. You know, why not just be obvious about everything? Well, because, oh, the audience doesn’t want that. Well then what is it that they want? What they want is mystery. They want mystery in all things.

And we get maybe a little distracted by the word “mystery,” because it implies a genre like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie. But in fact, mystery is a dramatic concept that is in just about every good story you ever hear or see. Mystery essentially creates curiosity, and curiosity is what draws the audience in. It weaves them into the narrative.

The idea is even though you’re not telling a detective story, you’re telling a story in such a way that the audience now becomes a detective of your story, because the desire to know is essentially the strongest non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It actually is, I think, the only non-emotional effect that you can create in the audience. It’s the only intellectual thing that you can inspire in them, but it’s very, very powerful when you do.

**John:** So as you’re talking about curiosity, it’s that sense of asking a question and having a hope and an expectation that that question can be answered. And so, obviously, as we’re watching a story, we’re wondering, “Well, what happens next?”

Mystery comes when we’re asking questions like, “Wait, who is that character and why don’t I know more information about that character?” or “Why did she say that?” or, “What’s inside that box?” And those are compelling things that get us to lean into the screen a little bit more, because we want to see what’s happening. And so often, they can be effective if we are at the same general place as our lead hero in trying to get the answers to these questions. If we see that hero attempting to answer these questions, we’ll be right there with him or her.

**Craig:** Yeah, and even if we create small moments where perhaps the hero does know more than we do, what we’re tweaking is this thing that is very human. It’s built into our DNA. When we walk into a situation, we are naturally curious. We insist upon knowing certain things.

If you walk down the street, and you see suddenly 50 people lined up in front of a small storefront that has blacked out windows and a man in the front just patiently keeping people from entering, there’s no decision to want to know. What’s in there? Why are those people standing there? Who is that man? You begin to do this, right?

So as screenwriters, let us constantly exploit this. But exploit it in a way that doesn’t get us into trouble, because if we’re going to go ahead and tap them on their knee to make that little reflex happen, we have to reward them.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And we also have to figure out when to reward them. And this is where the craft comes in.

**John:** Let’s go back to your example of the crowd outside the store and its blacked-out windows. If our characters walked past that and didn’t comment on it, didn’t acknowledge it, if we saw it as an audience but nothing was ever done with it, that would be frustrating. We would have ascribed a weight to whatever that mystery was, and we’d be waiting for the answer. And we might honestly miss other crucial things about your story because we keep waiting for an answer to that thing, which is part of the reason why I think it’s an overall cognitive load that you can expect an audience to keep. And if you have too many open loops, too many things that are not answered or don’t feel like they can be answered, the audience grows impatient and sort of frustrated and can’t focus on new things. They’re trying to juggle too much.

That’s a thing you have to be very aware of especially as you’re going through your story, as you’re putting all those balls in the air in the first act. Sometimes you’re going to have to take some of them out before you get into the meat of your story. Otherwise, the audience just can’t follow along with you.

**Craig:** That’s right. I always think of mystery as the intellectual version of nudity in films. Nudity is distracting, right? So in comedies, when there’s nudity, you can rest assured that the jokes will be somewhat diminished, in general, because people are too busy staring at boobs, and it’s hitting a different part of their brain than the haha, funny part. So you can do a little bit of boobs, but you can’t do too much boobs, because then it’s like, “I’m confused. I’m distracted.”

So when you engage in this very powerful technique of mini mysteries all the time about things, you are creating a contract with the audience. And you’re saying in exchange for this distraction – and I know you’re distracted – I promise that an answer will be given. I also hopefully promise that it’s probably something you could have figured out maybe if you’d really thought it true. It’s not just going to be totally random. Otherwise, it’s not a mystery; it’s just random. I promise you that the answer will be relevant, it will be logical, and it will add value to the story and value to your experience of the story. And I also promise that someone in the movie knows the answer. Someone, not no one, right? Because then it’s not really mystery; then it’s just an absurdity that everyone’s finding out together. Somebody knows.

This is all contrasted with what I think sometimes happens – and we see this when we do our Three Page Challenges – with confusion. Confusion, generally, this is how I experience it. I’m kind of interested how you do. I experience confusion in the following ways.

I feel like I’m supposed to know something but I don’t. So did I miss it? Was I eating popcorn when someone said something? Because I don’t know who that is and I don’t know why they’re talking.

I feel a mounting sense of confusion when things that are relying on the thing I’m supposed to know keep happening, and I don’t know why they’re happening, so now I’m getting really worried and distracted.

And generally speaking, I am confused when I sense that I’m not supposed to be confused. If I’m watching a David Lynch film and suddenly there’s a dwarf talking backwards in a dream, I understand I’m supposed to be… This is abstract. Okay, go ahead. Confuse me. But I only get confused when I think, “I’m not supposed to be confused right now, and I am so confused.”

**John:** Yeah, so if you were in a Melissa McCarthy comedy and suddenly there was a dwarf talking backwards, that would be unsettling. You would start to question the rules of the world in that movie and your own trust in the filmmakers, because that’s not the contract you signed when you sat down to start watching that movie. That can be a real thing. That can be a real burden. I agree with you on these points of confusion.

And my frustration honestly is that sometimes in the effort to eliminate confusion, we end up sort of scraping too hard and getting rid of important mysteries that are actually keeping the audience involved.

And so I remember when I was doing my first test screenings for my movie The Nines, I asked in my little survey form, What moments were you confused in a bad way?” Because what I didn’t want to do is to get rid of all the confusions, because you were supposed to be confused for parts of the movie. But when were you confused in a way that pulled you out of the movie? And those were important things for me to be able to understand for, like, “This wasn’t intriguing; this was annoying that I didn’t know what was actually happening here.”

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. There is confusion in a good way and confusion in a bad way. And when we are confused in a good way, we have an expectation that the pain will go away and that answers will be revealed, and that’s exciting. That makes us want to keep watching. That’s the most important part of mystery. It makes you want to turn the page of the movie. That’s why mysteries sell more copies than any other kind of book, because you want to know. It’s inescapable. Every Harry Potter book is a mystery. Every single one.

**John:** Well, it also stimulates that basic puzzle-solving nature. It’s like you feel like, “Okay, I have all these facts. They’re going to have to add up to something useful.” And what you said before about you feel like, “If I could think about this logically and really figure this out, I would come to the right conclusion.”

And also in the case of Harry Potter, you see characters talking about the central mystery and trying to solve the central mystery. And after you’ve seen one of these movies, you recognize, in the third act, they will confront the mystery, and there’ll be little tiny mysteries, but it will get resolved. There’s an implicit deal you’re making when you sign in for one of those books or one of those movies that the third act will be about resolving what’s going on in the course of this thing. And not all of the bigger issues of Voldemort and everything, but what’s been set up in this movie will get resolved by the end of this movie.

The same thing happens in a one-hour procedural, is that by the end of the hour, you’re going to know who the killer is, and the killer will be brought to justice, or the person who set the fire will be caught. Where the frustration comes in sometimes the big, epic, long arc stories of an Alias or a Lost, where sometimes those mysteries were so big and so spiraling that you had a sense of, like, “Are we ever to get the answer to these mysteries, or are there even answers to these mysteries? Are they meant to be just philosophical questions?”

**Craig:** And we just aren’t as curious about philosophical questions. We don’t need to know the answers to philosophical questions. And it’s important, I think, to say that even though it’s easy to talk about mysteries in the context of actual mystery movies, that non-mystery movies feature little mini mysteries all the time. Sometimes a scene is just who’s that and why are they doing that? And then we get the answer.

**John:** So let’s talk about the different types of mysteries we encounter.

**Craig:** Sure. Now, we’re talking about little specific crafty things of how we can create or impart mystery in any genre, any scene, any moment, and so very broad, writerly ways of approaching mystery. First, very, very simple mystery: pronoun. So two characters are talking and one of them says, “Well, what are we going to do about her?” And the other one says, “I don’t know.” And we go, “Okay, who’s her? Who’s her? Why are they worried about her? What is her going to do” Very simple, very easy, and then your choice is when to reveal who she is. Similarly, you can, “It.” “Did you do it?” “I did it.” “And?” “It was hard.” What’s it? Oh, I have to know. What is it? What is it?

**John:** Yeah, so essentially you’re omitting one piece of a crucial information by putting in a generic pronoun, and we are desperate to fill in that blank and find out what is that X that he’s talking about.

**Craig:** And it is absolutely the simplest form of magic trick that we do. And yet it is so powerful. It is our “pick a card, any card.” People are still talking to this day about what is in the briefcase. What is the “it” in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction? You know what it is? Nothing. It’s a flashbulb. It’s a light bulb, right? And the point is that he literally is saying, when the movie’s over and you don’t find out, the point is that’s it. It was just a mystery that I will never solve for you.

Just like what does Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Lost In Translation? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because you will never know, and yet we will talk about that because of our insatiable need to resolve this simplest kind of mystery.

**John:** So one caveat here is sometimes you can accidentally introduce this kind of mystery that you completely didn’t mean to. And the situations where I see it is, you enter into two characters having a conversation, and sometimes it’s just in how it’s cut or how the actors actually changed some words, but it makes it seem like… They’ll drop out a pronoun, or they’ll drop out the name of somebody, and so they’ll talk about her or she but not actually say who that person is. And then we’re like, “Wait. Are we supposed to be confused? Is that a mystery? Should we be looking for what that is?”

So you have to be mindful as a writer and as a person who’s watching cuts of films that you’re not accidentally introducing this kind of mystery that’s actually just going to be confusion because it’s not there intentionally.

**Craig:** Correct. And so there’s the treacherous navigation between confusion and mystery. But if you can figure out how to put these little ambiguities in that are intentional, that’s great. If you can figure out how to put in a secret between two people… When you see two people looking at you and whispering, you don’t have to decide to be curious. Right? You are now involved. And that’s exactly what we want our audience need to be. We want them to be involved.

There’s an interesting subtle way of creating a mystery that, personally, I love this version when I see it. And every now and then, I’ll pull it myself. And it’s what I call the obvious lie. We know what the facts are at this point in the movie. We have a bunch of facts at our disposal. And then someone asks a character something, and the character lies. And we know they’re lying, because we’ve seen the truth, but we don’t know why. Why are they lying?

Or we don’t know the facts, somebody says something, we believe it’s true, and then we find out that they were lying. And now we want to know why did they lie and what is the truth? Those tweak us immediately. We begin to light up when these things happen.

**John:** Because we want to understand the whys behind a character’s actions, and so to see a lie or to have somebody reveal his lie, it’s like, “Wait, do I not understand that character well enough? Is there something else happening here? I’m curious what that is.”

Now, on the page, sometimes I think you have to be really careful doing this, because the first time you’re reading a script, you’re reading it really carefully. You’re getting it all. It’s experiencing just like the movie. The 19th time you read through a script, sometimes you just look at the lines and you’re like, “Oh, wait, he says this on this page but this and the other page.” If you don’t somehow single out that this is a lie on a time where you’re putting the lie, that can be kind of a trap.

I’ve actually encountered this in places where actors or directors will forget, like, “Oh, no, she’s not telling the truth there. That’s a lie there.” And it sounds so obvious for me to say it, but like they’re just looking at the individual pages or like looking at like the sides, and they’re about to shoot something. And they’re not remembering like, “Oh, that’s right. This is not actually the truth.”

So this is a case where the slyly worded parenthetical or the little action line that sort of underscores that she’s a terrific liar, something in there to indicate to the reader and the filmmakers that, “Remember, this is not actually the truth here.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s a great idea. I mean, early on, that’s not necessary. It’s later on when you want to think, “Okay, maybe somebody has forgotten.” Or you don’t have to worry about it so much if the lie and the reveal that it’s a lie are really close together.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So if someone says, “Anyway, I got to go. I got a meeting. I got to jump in my car. I got a meeting in like five minutes.” And someone goes, “Great.” And then they walk outside and they don’t have a car.

**John:** Yeah, perfect.

**Craig:** And they just sit down on the bench and wait. Then you go, “Okay, you’re a liar. Why? I need to know.” Right? So this is a good little mini mystery. Similarly, you can have mysteries that don’t involve people talking at all. Sometimes it’s just an object, like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. Or you got a camera looking. Here’s a little mystery.

At the end of Inglourious Basterds, it’s not much of mystery, because you can pretty much see it coming, but he sets it up as little mini mystery. You’re looking up at Brad Pitt and I think it’s B.J. Novak, actually. I think it’s a friend of the podcast, B.J. Novak. Looking up at them looking down at what they’ve done to Hans Landa, and they’re talking about it. And we are the perspective, so we don’t know what it is, but they’re talking about it, and then we reveal the answer to the mystery. Listen. It may seem inevitable to you, because that’s how you saw the movie. It was not. It didn’t have to be done that way at all. It was a good choice.

There’s also another kind of simple mystery to do, and it’s what I’ll call no-so-innocuous-information. So in this idea, someone asks someone a question, and they get an answer, and it’s very meaningful to them. It’s just not meaningful to us. And that disparity between what the character thinks of it and what we think of it creates a mystery. So someone says, “Hey, did George come in today?” And the person goes, “Yeah.” And the person asking the question says, “Thank you,” walks outside, and starts crying. Why? Why are they crying that George came in? Nobody else seems to care that George came in. Who’s George? Mystery.

**John:** Mystery, again, we’re trying to figure out a character’s motivations, and they’re not matching up with their expectations, so therefore we’re leaning in and we are curious. And so as long as you’re going to be able to pay that off at some point, that could be a terrific thing. It’s when we don’t see that payoff that things get really strange.

Again, on the page, if that reaction is happening in the moment, like it’s just a subtle reaction in the moment, like a concerned stare or like a look of sudden panic, you’re going to have to script that, because the lines of dialogue are not matching our expectations. So you got to script in what that reaction is. And sometimes people feel like, “Oh, you’re directing the page.” No. You’re saying what is actually happening in the movie. You’re giving the experience of watching the movie on the page.

**Craig:** This whole directing on the page thing doesn’t even exist. My new thing now is forget not not doing it. It isn’t a thing. There is no such thing as directing on the page. I don’t even know what that means. We’re creating a movie with text. So we will do, we should do and must do everything we can to create that movie. And if that means that we are directing on the page, in fact, that’s the only job we have. We should only be directing on the page.

I think people think that, you know, directing on the page means camera moves this way, camera pushes in, switch to this lens, do the angle, angle, angle, angle. No. Directing on the page means you are creating a movie in someone’s mind. Use every tool you can.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, is there an elephant outside your window?

**Craig:** It’s a bus.

**John:** It’s a very loud bus.

**Craig:** With an elephant on it.

**John:** Fantastic. All right, let’s talk about some resolutions, because there are different scales at which a mystery can happen. So the short-term mystery. So there’s those little things that happen within a scene that keeps us wondering about like, “Oh, what are they talking about?” and then the camera finally reveals like, “Oh, he’s married the whole time.” Or “Why do they have that object in their hand?” Those are great ways to just provide a little tension and conflict within a scene. They provide just a little extra spark of energy and get us to pay attention to the things we may not otherwise pay attention to.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a great way, for instance, to pull people through exposition. So you can have a character explaining a bunch of information to another person, which is okay, or have the character explaining that same information to another person, but while they’re explaining it, they are, for some reason, slowly pouring gasoline around the room that they’re in. Well, okay. Why are they doing that? And obviously, they’re going to light it up. But why are they going to light it on fire? And what does that have to do with what he’s saying? I am now interested in the exposition. Short-term mysteries are a great way to make something out of nothing.

Then we have our kind of mid-length mysteries. So mid-length mysteries, I kind of think of those as middle-of-the-movie reveals. You have people that you’re meeting early on, and there are some characters with relationships, who seem to know something about the circumstances of the movie that you don’t. They know secret motivations. They know secret pasts of each other. Someone isn’t telling us something. It’s clearly important to them. We will need it.

This is the kind of thing we’ll need by the middle of the movie, to appreciate it and then understand how that impacts the character moving forward. It’s not so much fun when two people have a little secret in the beginning of the movie and then at the very end of the movie we’re like, “Oh and by the way that secret is this,” because the movie has resolved itself by then. So these are good little middle-of-the-movie things.

The bad versions of these are, “I lost my brother in an ice skating accident.” But typically they are slightly more interesting than that, and they help people engage with the character on an emotional level separate and apart from the details of the plot.

**John:** Yeah. These are the things where Jane Espenson uses the term “hang a lantern on things” and I’ve seen other people use it as well. It’s like it’s an important enough detail that when you first introduce it, you want to sort of call it out and make sure that the audience is really going to notice, I’m doing something here, so yes, you’re right to be noticing it. I am doing something here, and I’m going to be doing something with it later on. You are marking this for follow-up. And so it’s going to show up not at the end of the movie but at some key point during the movie, at an important time. And you’ll be rewarded for having remembered it from before.

So sometimes it’s that character who got introduced who you never really knew his name. But then he shows up and he’s actually a hit man midway through the movie. Great. You’ve done the right job there, because you have established somebody and then you’re using them in the course of the story for an important reason. That feels useful, and that’s a great way of… The mystery of who that person is is paying off within the scope of the movie, right at the time we want these things to pay off.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Or your main character has a scar, and someone says, “Where did you get that?” And he says, “Mm.” And then maybe somebody else asks, “Where did you get that?” If I’m going to answer the scar question, it’s going to have to happen by the middle of the movie. I will not give a damn by the end of the movie how he got his scar. It won’t matter anymore. If the scar is important to who he is, then I need to know who he is by the middle. Because here’s the thing. If I have a character, she’s gone through half a movie with some big secret that is relevant to who she is, I must know it by the middle. This is a protagonist now. I must know it in order to appreciate how she changes from that point forward.

So these are mysteries that actually can’t survive, you know, much more than half a movie. But there are mysteries that must survive the entire movie. But these, I think, usually come down to what is the big central mystery of the story. It’s harder to pull off the character-based mystery that lasts the whole time.

**John:** So, you’re saying that these long-term mysteries are really like the mystery genre? They are the classically sort of like Agatha Christie, like, we’re going to wait until the very end for all the reveals. That’s what you’re talking about?

**Craig:** Kind of, because if you have a long-term mystery that isn’t about a plot mystery, and you only get the answer at the end or right before the end, it’s a little bit of a cheat. It’s like, “Well, I’ll solve a mystery right in time to save the day.” That just feels a little meh.

**John:** So this last week I saw a movie that actually I think does have that long-term mystery, and it worked really well for having that long-term mystery. It’s Hell or High Water, which in France is Comancheria. So it’s a Chris Pine, Ben Foster movie with Jeff Daniels. And I really quite liked it, but there’s a long-term mystery in it, which I’m not spoiling anything to tell you that you’re watching Chris Pine and his brother rob these banks, and you’re really not quite sure why they’re doing it. Yes, they’re doing it to get money but there’s clearly a specific reason and there’s a plan, but you’re not quite sure what the plan is. And they withhold that information from the audience for a really long time, much longer than you think would be possible.

And I think it works in that movie because the movie is otherwise really simple. It’s a very straightforward Texas pickup truck western kind of genre movie. And because it’s so simple, holding off all the reveal on what their actual plan is is very rewarding. And so it felt like it was finally revealed at just the right moment.

So it’s definitely possible, but I agree with you that it’s really rare to see movies that hold off all that stuff for so long throughout the course of a story.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s tricky to do. Very tricky to do, unless, you know, it’s your mystery-mystery. So anyway, hopefully this is helpful to people. Just examples, practical examples of how to tweak this and exploit this natural instinct in the audience. This is the thing that makes them want to lean in. So if you can make them want to lean in, why not?

[Episode 332 clip]

**John:** All right, let’s get to our feature marquee topic of this first episode of 2018, which is suspense.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Ooh, wait for it.

**Craig:** Wait for it.

**John:** So, suspense, actually, the word itself is fascinating. So, it’s from a French word “suspendre,” which is “pendre,” which is to hang, and “sus,” above. So, to hang above. What a great image that is. It’s like something is dangling above you and you’re waiting for it to fall. That is suspense. And that’s mostly what we’re talking about when we talk about suspense as a narrative device. It is that sense of there is something that is going to happen. You see it’s going to happen. And you are waiting for it. And attention builds because of that.

I would define it in a very general sense, suspense is any technique that involves prolonged anticipation. There is a thing that is going to happen. You see it. And you are waiting for it to happen.

**Craig:** The waiting.

**John:** Waiting for it. You usually think about suspense in a bad way, like there’s a bomb ticking under the table. But suspense can also be a good thing. If you are waiting for a surprise party, there’s a good suspense, too. So it’s not just thrillers. It’s not just sort of the big action movies that have suspense. It’s a technique that we can use in all of our scripts. And so I thought we’d dig in on that today.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a great idea. I believe this topic was proposed by somebody on Twitter, so thank you for that. And it’s a very crafty thing, and I like talking about these. You know, a lot of times when we discuss writing, and I think a lot of times when we go through Three Page Challenges, we’re looking for truth. We’re looking for verisimilitude. We’re talking about how as writers we can create these moments, these people, their words and their actions that ring true to us. This is not that.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** In general, life does not have suspense at all. This is a very artificial thing. It’s as artificial in my mind as a montage, which simply does not exist in life. And yet we find it incredibly gratifying when we experience it. And because it is this technique, a craft, it’s good for us to talk I think about how the nuts and bolts of it actually work, because it’s one of the few times as writers we get to be mathematicians. And I like that.

**John:** I think it’s also important to focus on this as a writing technique, because so often you see Hitchcock is a master of suspense, and you think about it as being a director’s tool. And it’s absolutely true that the way a director is choosing to frame shots, to edit a sequence, to build out the world of the film or the TV show, there’s a lot of craft and technique that is a director’s focus in building suspense. But none of it would be there unless the writer had planned for that sequence to be suspenseful and really laid out the structure that’s going to create a sequence that is suspenseful.

And suspense, I should point out, really is generally a sequence kind of technique. Within a scene maybe there will be some suspense, but generally it’s a course of a couple of scenes together that build a rising sense of suspense. And so that’s going to happen on the page. So, let’s dig into how you might do it.

**Craig:** Great. Well, I guess to start with, I divide suspense roughly into two categories. Suspense of the unknown and suspense of the known. Because they’re very different kinds of suspense. When I think about suspense of the unknown, I think about information that is being withheld either from the audience or from a character. Do you know what I mean by those distinctions?

**John:** I think I do. So, the unknown is like we are curious. We’re leaning in to see what is going to happen. Or in some cases, we have more information than the character who we’re watching has. So, we know there’s something dangerous in that room, and so we’re yelling at the screen like, “Don’t go in that room.”

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** But the other broad category you’re leaving out there is suspense of the known. Because of the nature of the genre, because of the nature of the kind of story that you’re setting up, we kind of know where it’s going to go. We just don’t know how we’re going to get there. We don’t know what the actual mechanics are. And that is what has us leaning in, has us curious. It’s a question we want answered. And I think almost all cases of suspense, there is that question that we want to see answered.

**Craig:** Exactly. And I think suspense of the known is far more common, and it’s also applicable across every genre, comedy, romance, everything. When we hear suspense, at least initially, we think of that Hitchcockian mode, which is more of the suspense of the unknown. Or it’s a kind of a whodunit suspense. The key for me when you look inside, for instance, there is information that you, the writer…

And by the way, let me just take a step back for a second. You’re so right in saying that this is something that is important for writers to understand. We think suspense, like we think all technical aspects of cinema, like for instance, montage, is from the director. And I argue, as I often do, that that is not true. It’s not that it’s not from them. It’s that it’s from us.

The writer must lay out the montage so that it has a purpose, that it has a beginning and an end, that it makes sense for the characters. It’s there for a reason. You don’t just haphazardly decide one day on set, “I think, you know what, let’s have a montage.” It doesn’t work that way. It is intentional. And it is from the script.

Similarly, we must plan our suspense. Otherwise, there’s no opportunity for it. How the director creates it visually, we can even put some clues ourselves into the script. But, yes, certainly directors have an enormous role to play in that. So let’s talk a little bit about that situation where there is information that you, the writer, have, the director has, but the audience doesn’t have, and also the characters don’t have.

**John:** Absolutely. So, the most classic example of this is the whodunit, where the character is trying to figure out who killed the person, who is the villain in this situation. There’s a fundamental thing which you as the writer know and the audience and the lead character does not know.

So, in order to build that suspense, you’re probably laying out some clues that will help that person get closer. You will have some misdirects. You’ll have some sort of near misses. You are trying to lead the character and the audience on a path that will take them towards it, but a really fascinating path that will take them towards the answer, with a lot of frustrations and delays that are ultimately gratifying.

I mean, the best kind of suspenses are kind of like beautiful agony. It’s that moment of delayed gratificatio,n and so when you finally get there, aha, it’s there. Other cases, you know, the suspense might be you’re trying to get away from that thing, and will you get away from that villain. In those situations, you as the audience might have more information about how close the other person is than the character does.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s also another classic kind of suspense of the unknown, what I’ll call, for lack of a better phrase, mystery of circumstance. For instance, Lost. Or I don’t know if you ever saw that old show from the ‘60s, The Prisoner.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Which Lost is basically riffing on.

**John:** Yeah. What is the nature of this world? What the hell is going on? And you’re waiting for that.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so now everyone is confused and you’re confused, and you’re confused with them. But they’re making discoveries. And episodic television has this wonderful tool of suspense, which is, “Show’s over. What will happen next week?” That’s the cliffhanger. I mean, when you talk about cliffhangers, that is literal suspense. I am suspended over a chasm.

But figuratively, these sorts of moments of suspense are happening all the time, and all of it is creating this ache to understand, because what suspense is playing on is a human fact. And the human fact is that we naturally seek to make sense of and order the world around us. So suspense is playing with that natural desire that every human… Babies have it. So, this is something that’s going right to this primal need that the audience has.

Then on the other hand, we have the other kind of suspense, which I think is more common and very useful, even if it’s not always thought of as suspense, which is suspense of the known.

**John:** So these are situations where because of the nature of the genre, because of the kind of story that you’re telling, we have a sense of where things are going. We just don’t know how. We don’t know what the path is that is going to lead them there. And we are looking for clues that will get us to that conclusion.

I don’t know if you’ve seen Call Me By Your Name yet. But you start watching Call Me By Your Name and you have a good sense of some of the things that are going to happen, but you just have no idea how you’re going to get those things to connect. And that is the thrill of the movie is watching those things happen.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a bit of a paradox, isn’t it? I mean, you’d think that the point of suspense is not knowing. And yet when we sit down and someone says, “Oh, here’s a movie from 1998. It stars Matthew McConaughey and Jennifer Lopez. And they bump into each other on the street. And he’s getting married and she’s the wedding planner for the marriage.” And you’re like, “Well, I know how that ends.” And you do. You know exactly how it ends. In fact, you know roughly how the whole movie is going to go, don’t you? Yes. And yet if you sit down and watch it, you will begin to feel great suspense.

And this kind of suspense to me is really anticipation more than suspense. It’s a slightly different feeling. It’s the feeling from the old ketchup commercials. Well, the ketchup is going to come out of the bottle. Don’t know when. Don’t know how. Is it going to come out in a big blob? Right? So, this is like watching somebody continually pulling a slingshot back. You know they’re going to let it go, but when? When? And you start to need it. You start to need it.

So, even though we know inside of these movies, like for instance, friend of the podcast Tess Morris’s Man Up. Is she going to get him in time? Is he going to get to her in time? Is she going to believe him? Is he going to believe her? Of course. Of course. But how? And will they? And is it going to go the way that we think?

This all creates this enormous suspense. And all of it really – I think you hit upon it earlier in a beautiful way – is kind of sweetly torturing the audience. That’s the point.

**John:** Yes. And so I will say that even the examples of the rom-coms where we as the audience know they’re going to eventually connect at the end – we can see what the template basically is that’s going to take us to that place – within those beats there will be moments in which we as the audience have more information than the characters do. And that is part of the joy. Within sequences, we might know something about the other guy that she doesn’t know yet, and that is important. Or we know that there’s a secret that’s going to come out and we’re wondering when will that secret come out.

So it’s not just one kind of suspense. There’s going to be little moments of suspense during the whole time. And even in action sequences, you know, will he get past that part of the cliff before the boulder falls? There’s always going to be little small moments of suspense within the bigger moments of suspense.

**Craig:** Correct. And this kind of suspense fuels genres that we don’t necessarily think of as suspenseful, but definitely are, and in fact require suspense. For instance, comedies of error. A comedy of errors is entirely based on suspense. Someone overhears something, misinterprets it, and then what ensues is a comedy that really is about us going, “Oh my god, would you just ask him the right question? Would you just say what you want to say and then it will… Oh, do it, do it, do it.” And then they finally do it. Every episode of Three’s Company was a suspenseful episode in its own way.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s take a look at some of the techniques a writer uses in order to build suspense, both on a scene or a sequence level, but also on a more macro level for the entire course of the story.

The thing I think we’re talking about sort of fundamentally is delay. And in most of these cases, the ball could drop immediately. The bomb under the table could just go off. But suspense is the ticking. Suspense is delaying the bomb going off, or having some other obstacle get in the way that is keeping the thing from happening, which you know is going to have to happen next. So those two characters finally meeting. The explosion finally happening. The asteroid blowing up. There’s going to be something that has to happen, and you’re delaying that. And you’re finding good reasons to delay that, that are reasonable for the course of the story that you’re telling, but also provide a jolt of energy for the narrative and for the audience.

**Craig:** That’s right. And in order to create delay, we have to do things purposefully. We have to use our story and find circumstances to frustrate the characters. And we have to use our craft to obstruct. And there are different ways of doing this.

The most common way and perhaps the easiest way, but oftentimes the least satisfying way, is coincidence. Coincidence is used all the time to frustrate and obstruct people. Instead of walking into the room and seeing somebody do something, they do it, walk out just as you’re walking in, and you just miss seeing them do it. And the audience goes, “Oh!” Well, that’s coincidence.

There’s a classic axiom. You’re allowed to use coincidence to get your characters into trouble or make things harder for them. You’re not allowed to use it to make things easier for them. And that’s true. But when we’re creating suspense and we’re trying to delay things, the less you can use coincidence, the better. Because no matter how you employ coincidence, the audience will always subconsciously understand you moved pieces on the chessboard in order to achieve an effect. It didn’t happen sort of naturally or for reasons that were human or understandable. And therefore, we’re just a little less excited by the outcome.

**John:** Absolutely. If we’re talking about two events, if it’s A and then B, if A causes B, we’re generally going to be happier. If we can see that there is a causal relationship between those two things, we’re going to be happier. But coincidence, I agree, can be really, really helpful. And the coincidences that get in the way of your character achieving the thing he wants, that’s great.

And it’s always nice when the bad guy catches a lucky break, because that’s just great. And so we’re used to having our hero suddenly have this big stroke of luck. So having the hero not get that stroke, or having the villain who you despise just really be lucky, or start to tumble but then save himself, that’s great. It’s surprising. And so it’s not what we expect. It’s going to be a helpful kind of way to keep that suspense going, to keep the sequence running along.

**Craig:** Yeah. And if you can subvert your coincidences, all the better. For instance, there’s a famous and wonderful moment in Die Hard where our hero coincidentally catches the bad guy. He just catches him. He doesn’t know he’s the bad guy, but he catches him. And we’re like, “Oh my god, the coincidence of that just made life so much easier for our hero.” And then the bad guy pretends, in a way that is very surprising and shocking to us, to not be the bad guy at all, but to be a hostage. And our hero believes him. And now a terrible suspense is created because now we don’t know what will happen. We know the bad guy is going to use this to his benefit. And we know that our hero is now in terrible danger. We know it. The hero doesn’t know it.

Oh, suspense of the unknown. Wonderful. So in that case, you’re actually taking coincidence and using it in your favor in a way that isn’t even coincidental. So I love that sort of thing.

**John:** Over the course of Die Hard, which is a suspenseful movie from the core, you have this moment of intense micro suspense. Because we know at some point the gig is going to be up and Bruce Willis is going to recognize what’s really going on. But will it be in time? There can even be moments with Ian, just really small, second-by-second suspense, like, does he still have a bullet left in his gun? That is a question that you don’t know, he doesn’t know. What is the choice going to be? And as long as you can sort of juggle all of those things, you are going to make a much tighter, stronger sequence.

**Craig:** As a writer, you are looking for opportunities. You are looking for targets in which to create suspense. All the time, in every genre, again, every single genre, don’t think of suspense only as when will the bomb go off or who shot Mrs. McGillicuddy. And when you find those opportunities, it’s really important for you to use them. Exploit them, because they’re little gifts.

When you have a moment of suspense – for instance, the hero doesn’t know that he’s even caught the villain, he thinks the villain is a victim – wonderful. Use it. And inside of that, now you have free rein to just torture the audience. Do not be afraid to torture the audience. Be afraid of not torturing them. This is where you want to tease them. You want to tantalize them. You want to almost have the hero figure it out and then take it away from the hero. You want to drive them crazy.

This is sort of the closest thing writers have to sexual interaction with an audience. Sorry, Sexy Craig. I’m going to be unsexy about this. But it is a bizarre, flirtatious, sweet kind of torture, all of which is designed to delay release. It is a bit like saying, “I’m going to give you an itch and I am not going to scratch it. I almost scratched it. Almost did. Oh, you thought I scratched it, but I didn’t,” until you finally do it. And in this way, something that is as expected an outcome as “itch is scratched” becomes remarkably satisfying. It is a release. And in that sense, it is a catharsis.

**John:** It is a catharsis. And so I think it’s also important to keep in mind – we talk about the victory lap, and we talk about sort of the success at the end of that – when you finally do let that person have their success, make sure you give them enough of a scene to celebrate that success. Because there’s nothing more frustrating to me when I see a movie where the character finally does it and then it immediately cuts away to the next thing. Let them actually enjoy it for a moment, because we as the audience need that moment of release as well. We need that moment of celebration, like okay, we finally got to that thing.

You know, throughout this whole sequence, maybe we’ve seen that door in the distance, or we’re running into it and we get there and it just shuts. And the thing we’ve been going to that whole time is no longer an option. Aliens is a movie of tremendous success, where there’s always a plan, and the plan is always getting frustrated. And it finally gives us those moments at the very, very end where like, okay, we’re safe, everything is down, and we can sort of go off, quote unquote, “safely into the distance.”

So, make sure that in those teases and all the misdirects, the red herrings, everything you’re doing to set that up, make sure that by the time you get them through that sequence, you do get that moment of release.

**Craig:** And to guide you on this journey, dear writer, is your best tool: your empathy with the audience. Suspense really needs to be a function of your empathy with an audience. You already know the movie. You’ve seen it. You know everything. Now put yourself in their shoes. Do it over and over and over. Weirdly, they’re the most important character in your movie, even though they’re not in the movie. You’re thinking about them all the time. And it is especially important to think about the audience when we are talking about these, let’s call them artifices, because that’s what these kinds of craft works are.

If you do, then you’ll know, okay, in the moment where you finally do the reveal and you release the tension and the ketchup comes out of the bottle, well, again, put yourself in their shoes and ask, “What do I want here?” And, of course, what you want to do is just wallow in the joy of it. Just let them wallow.

**John:** So let’s wrap this up by talking about what does this actually look like on the page. Because we say like, okay, obviously film and TV directors are responsible for a lot of the visuals we’re seeing on screen, but the choice of what we’re overall going to be seeing there is the writer’s choice. And so let’s look at what those techniques look like on the page, because so much of successful suspense really is the scene description. Those are the words that are going to give you the feeling of what it’s going to feel like when you see it visually.

And so it’s cross-cutting. We’re with this character, and then we cross-cut to the other person who is getting close. It’s finding honestly the adverbs and the short, clipped sentences that gives us a sense of like how close they are to each other. Or like, he’s almost at the door. But then, no, it slams shut.

These are the cases where you may want to break out that sort of heavy artillery of the underlines, the boldfaced words, the exclamation points. Maybe even double exclamation points when it really is a stopper. So that we as the reader get a real sense of what it’s going to feel like to be the audience in the seat watching that up on the screen.

And that’s also why I’m so conservative with using those big guns when I don’t need them in action and writing. Because when you really do need them, they need to be fresh. You got to have some dry powder for when you really need to sell those big moments. Like, hey, pay attention to this thing because this is what it’s going to feel like.

**Craig:** 100%. And I also think the great weapon in our arsenal when we are creating suspense on the page – and you’re absolutely right; it has to be done with action – well, if suspense is delay, and suspense is waiting, delay and waiting for us in terms of text and page is white space.

When I want people to feel as if it’s an agonizing wait, I use a lot of white space. Burn it up, because that’s what it tells you. Sometimes I’ll do three, four, five things in a row. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. Boom. It’s amazing how cinematic that can be when 99% of the script is just line, line, line, line, line, you know, double space, line, line, line, line.

So white space becomes essentially your timeline. It’s your way of expanding that moment to agony. And it’s not something that you can get away with more than I think once in a script. And you may not need to do it at all. But if you do have that moment where it’s the big reveal, burn up some space and let people feel it on the page.

[End of clips]

**John:** All right. That was nice to travel back in time for a moment. We’re here in 2024 with some recommendations. Earlier, I was talking about Sora, the new OpenAI thing and potential negative implications of that. My One Cool Thing is GOODY-2, which will not do anything bad for the world. Drew, I know you like GOODY-2 as well.

**Drew:** I love GOODY-2.

**John:** It is the world’s most responsible chat bot. If you haven’t played with it, it’s really fun. It looks like ChatGPT or any of the other ones. You can ask it a question. It understands what you’re asking. It will not help you out at all. It will find a way to avoid answering it. It’ll give you detailed reasons for why it’s not answering it. I think what impresses me is you could think that it would have a canned list of responses, but no. It’s clearly doing a lot of AI work to really parse what the meaning of the question is and why it’s not going to answer you. I just thought it was really, really smart.

**Drew:** I’m dying to know how they built that model, because it’s really adaptive to anything you can throw it at. That’s really fun.

**John:** My guess is that they did not have to train a whole new thing. I think they just were able to find the right parameters, so peeling under the hood here a little bit, because we’ve had to do some of this work in our own experiments. When you send in a query to OpenAI or any of the open-source models, you get the string that the user types, but you can of course change that string to be whatever you want to get the model to say back. It may be wrapping whatever you’re saying in a bunch of stuff around it that says, “But make sure that you’re not giving them anything useful or dangerous, and pad it in a lot of really protective language.” They may have found a way to do that without having to actually train their own model. It’s just really smart like that.

We’ll put a link in the show notes to a wider article about the chat bot and the reason why they made it, because they’re trying to point out the importance of safeties on chat bots, but also how difficult it is to do this and how you think locking this down would be the way to solve it. If you over-lock these things down, they become parodies of themselves, which is what this is.

**Drew:** There’s also something lovely about, at least feels like a different type of large language model. The way you’re interacting with it, it feels like it expands the possibilities of what these could be.

**John:** You were saying that you and Heather were playing around with it, trying to get it to do something.

**Drew:** Heather’s like, “What’s five steps towards world peace?” It won’t get you any of that. It’ll tell you why you’re in the wrong for even trying, basically.

**John:** Good stuff. What do you have for a One Cool Thing?

**Drew:** I have a much more old-school One Cool Thing. I have books. I have an author that I love. Her name is Claire Keegan. In the last probably six to eight months, I have just devoured everything she’s ever written. She writes mostly novellas, really quick books. They’re small. You can read them in an afternoon. She’s got Foster and Small Things Like These are both incredible. She’s got lots of short stories. I just love her. She’s an Irish author. A lot of it has to do with rural Ireland. It sounds like it could be a little too quaint or a little too maudlin, but they’re not. They’re perfect. Claire Keegan is my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Excellent. Wonderful. That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Drew:** Woo.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. Drew looks through all those questions, so please send them through. Send through your counterfactual Hollywood history scenarios. We’d love both your, what if this happened, and some things you think might be the outcomes of that.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. 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 the Apple Vision Pro. Drew, thank you so much for chatting through this with me.

**Drew:** Absolutely. John, I hope you feel better.

**John:** Thank you very much. Matthew Chilelli, god bless you for cutting this down to make me sound somewhat coherent.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** The Apple Vision Pro. As everybody on Earth knows, I’m sure, Apple came out with this new mixed-reality headset. It’s complete goggles that cover your face, but it still looks like you’re looking through, because it has cameras that let the video pass through. It’s super expensive. It’s indulgent. My company makes software that runs on it, so we bought one. We have it here at the house. Drew, I would love your honest first opinion of using it, not whether anyone should buy it, but what is the experience of using it like?

**Drew:** The eye tracking is pretty amazing. The way it works out is it has its primary user, which it perfectly calibrates to, and then it has a guest mode. I was in the guest mode. Even that, its eye tracking is outstanding. A lot of it feels intuitive. The clicking your fingers to click the buttons feels intuitive. I had trouble moving some stuff or figuring out placing windows and that kind of thing. But it just feels like a new language in a lot of ways.

I don’t know. It’s hard not to be optimistic when you put one of the headsets on. When you’re outside of people wearing those headsets, it looks ridiculous. But when you’re inside and you’re playing with it, I’m wrestling with whether it’s going to be useful immediately. But it’s hard not to be excited. I don’t know.

**John:** I’m excited and also temper my expectations, just because I think it’s going to be a ramp up, and we just don’t know how steep the ramp up is to get to widespread use of these kind of things or if it’ll even ever be widespread use. In terms of the UI and how they do stuff, it reminded me a lot of the first Macintoshes, because the metaphors were just so different. You had to learn how to use the mouse and the abstraction of doing this. Putting on the Vision Pro and then using your hand to do stuff, they really walk you through that quickly. I was surprised how quickly I got up to speed on doing a lot of things.

I think one of the challenges comparing it to early computers is that computers were clearly just so useful for doing things we had to do other ways before. If you needed to write a paper, man, it was so much better to write a paper on a computer than it was to write it by hand or write it on a typewriter. It was just a complete game changer. It’s not a game changer for doing a lot of the productivity stuff that we do right now on our computers or on our phones or iPads. It doesn’t change that. Some of the immersive stuff it does is really just incredible and has no parallel. It’s like being there, but it’s also like being there in a way you couldn’t possibly be there.

If you have a chance to go into an Apple Store, if they’re still doing demos, you can sign up for a half-hour demo, even if you have no intention of buying it, it’s worth seeing it, I think just because you get a sense, like, oh, this is where the puck is headed. We can do this stuff now. You have to think about what impacts does that have for you. How does it change the ways we write things?

Some of the immersive demos they have, Drew, you did the dinosaurs one, where it’s like Jurassic Park, but you’re inside Jurassic Park, and dinosaurs are coming over, butterflies are landing on your finger. It was really impressive, right?

**Drew:** It’s incredibly impressive. I think you can do that because it’s 3D models, because it’s CG, basically. They can place those around you so you’re interacting with it in a really immersive way. I guess that’s really the only word for it. I’m really curious to know what human beings and storytelling is going to be like with that on. I’m not sure what that’s going to be or how that would work, other than it just being a presentation.

**John:** I’ve gone through some of the other demos. They have Alicia Keys in the rehearsal room. They also have one where you’re at this rhino sanctuary. They’re both incredibly impressive, because there are cameras that are there, and it’s like having a wide angle lens, but you’re right up in there, and so these rhinos are eating out of your hands. You’re just much closer than you probably ever would even be as a human being to one of these things.

In the case of Alicia Keys, it’s really easy to envision a play where you’re watching it in this space, because it’s not just in 3D; it’s like it’s around you. It’s like being in a theater in the round. Amazing, but also it changes how you would write and stage something like that, because you can’t perform the same way to a camera when there’s multiple cameras, when the viewer can actually move inside the space with you.

It’s really fascinating. I think there will be incredible things built for this. We just don’t know what they’re going to look like. It may be the wrong assumption to think we’re going to adapt existing media to fit this. It may be a different kind of thing that only makes sense in these spaces.

**Drew:** That’s fair. I also think it’s got to be really hard to light for a 360 video. How do you hide that?

**John:** You put the lights up high. That’s what they clearly did for the Alicia Keys thing. Also, the cameras, they are in these white towers that feel kind of 2001. They look like maybe they’re humidifiers, and you ultimately figure out those were the cameras, because they’re in the space too, and you can see where the cameras are. For sporting events, it’s going to be incredible, because you could literally put the camera in places where you could never otherwise see, which feels great and real. That’s going to be fascinating.

All the entertainment parts of it are compelling. I’ve watched some television. I’ve watched parts of movies in there. It really is great when you want to just shut the whole world out and just focus on a thing. That’s really nice, because it’s increasingly difficult to do that in these times. I was watching an episode of television, and I wasn’t also looking at my phone or also doing something else. I was just focused on the episode. That can be really nice.

**Drew:** One thing I do really like about it, that it doesn’t have those hiccups, those visual hiccups that the other VR/AR headsets have, because I remember using the Quest for the first time and then taking that off, and even in my dreams, I was starting to have that visual latency. It was really strange. But this doesn’t do that at all, which really helps.

**John:** Also, I get super motion sick, and I’ve had no issues with that at all with this. Now, the essential reason why we bought this was because we make Highland and Weekend Read and other apps that can work on the Vision Pro.

We already have Weekend Read for the Vision Pro. It’s absurd but actually kind of cool on that. I can open up the script for Anatomy of a Fall, and it can be bigger than I am. I could scale that one to be bigger. You’re scrolling through, and the fonts scale perfectly. That letter G is as big as my hand, which doesn’t seem useful, but in a weird way, you can study a text closely, because you can literally come up closer to the text.

The version of Weekend Read we have for Apple Vision Pro is the iPad version, and so all the iPad stuff basically works in there. You can highlight stuff. You can have characters read stuff aloud. It’s amazing that it just works. Is it optimized for it? No, not at all. You can envision a better way to do it. But it’s fine for what it is.

What I’ll be curious to see is whether apps like Highland, whether it really makes sense to build special versions for Apple Vision Pro, because there could be something very nice about the sense of just, you have these on, just like you’re watching a movie. You can put all the distractions away, and it’s just you and the words. You’re in your writing space. You’re in your little writers’ room, and you’re writing the script. There’s something compelling about that, because it can use an external keyboard, so you’re not typing with the little weird, floaty keyboard. You can actually type real, full-speed stuff inside it.

**Drew:** We had a listener write in who shared an article about someone who has a whole setup in the Yosemite Valley setting of the Vision Pro and writes essentially in a little snowy cabin, but they’re in their chair at home.

**John:** That makes sense. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. That’s David Sparks, who does a Mac podcast I think I was on many, many years ago. It’s true, I can envision you build your own space, and that just becomes your writers’ room. When I was writing the first Arlo Finch, I needed to finish that first book while we were living in France. We moved to Paris during a heatwave. We had no air conditioning. I’m writing all these snowy scenes. I have to ponder this wintery valley. I would find these videos on YouTube that are just 12 hours of snowstorms and just the sound of snowstorms.

**Drew:** I love those.

**John:** Put those on my headphones, and that would be my space. Even though it was 100 degrees in the apartment, I would channel myself there. If I’d had the Apple Vision Pro at this point, it would’ve been really nice to just, again, pull up that snowy Yosemite Valley and write the scene in that place. There’s something nice about conjuring that. It could be really great.

Anyway, I’m not recommending listeners go out and buy one of these things, but if you have a chance to try it, it’s really worth trying it, because they really are some fascinating directions in which it can move us, thinking about the future. We’re definitely going to put some more stuff on it. People who do have it, we’ll announce when we’re putting out stuff that could be useful for it. I don’t know. It’s fun to see something new that’s really well designed and yet you also sense is going to change completely.

One of the things it reminded me about too was the Apple Watch was introduced. It looks like the Apple Watch of today. But if you actually go back and look at the features that were in it and what they thought was important, it was completely different. It was all about sending your heartbeat to your friend or staying in touch with your closest buddies. It was completely different. They didn’t realize this is mostly a fitness tracker that also keeps notifications. That’s what the Apple Watch is now. I think we’ll figure out in the next couple years what the Apple Vision Pro really is for and what the use cases are, and a lot of what we talk about now will seem a little bit silly.

**Drew:** I wonder if that has been the barrier for most of the VR/AR stuff is just that people don’t have the headsets. I think like you were saying, having computers in your home let people experiment with computers and figure out what that is.

**John:** Also, I will say there are much cheaper headsets out there. For a certain thing, I’m sure they’re great and probably better than the Apple Vision Pro. The rock stability of the illusion that you’re actually in that space is so good that that’s why I’m saying even if you’ve tried other headsets and been under-impressed, it’s worth it to go into guest mode on somebody else’s and just see what the world is like.

**Drew:** Yeah, definitely.

**John:** Drew, thanks so much.

**Drew:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes 269 – Mystery vs. Confusion](https://johnaugust.com/2016/mystery-vs-confusion)
* [Scriptnotes 332 – Wait for It](https://johnaugust.com/2018/wait-for-it-2)
* [A3 Artists Agency Shuts Down](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/a3-artists-agency-shuts-down-1235821430/) by Aaron Couch and Rebecca Sun for The Hollywood Reporter
* [Verve CEO and Co-Founder Bill Weinstein Leaves Agency After 14 Years](https://variety.com/2024/biz/news/bill-weinstein-verve-talent-agency-out-1235916578/) by Cynthia Littleton for Variety
* [A few thoughts on Sora](https://johnaugust.com/2024/a-few-thoughts-on-sora) by John August
* [GOODY-2](https://www.goody2.ai/)
* [Meet the Pranksters Behind Goody-2, the World’s ‘Most Responsible’ AI Chatbot](https://www.wired.com/story/goody-2-worlds-most-responsible-ai-chatbot/) by Will Knight for Wired
* [Claire Keegan](https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/274817.Claire_Keegan)
* [Contextual computing with Vision Pro: My Writing Cabin](https://www.macsparky.com/blog/2024/02/contextual-computing-with-vision-pro-my-writing-cabin/) by David Sparks
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Segments originally produced by Godwin Jabangwe and Megan McDonnell. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/632standardV2.mp3).

The transcript for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2024/adapting-for-television).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has a few F-bombs, just in the One Cool Thing section. So if you’re listening with your kids in the car, you can skip just that section.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 631 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, there’s a long history of bringing TV shows to the big screen. For example, my own Charlie’s Angels movies. But today on the show, what happens when you go the other way and bring a big screen property to television.

We’ll talk with the co-creator and showrunner of the new Mr. and Mrs. Smith movies about that process and the differences between telling a story over eight hours rather than two. We’ll also answer some listener questions on samples, casting, and more. And in our Bonus Segment for Premium members, we’ll talk about film school and fellowships. But first, Drew, we have some follow-up.

**Drew Marquardt:** We do. In Episode 629 we had someone write in who is in a writing team, and they were wondering if they could pass their original samples on to their reps or if one person on the team could do that.

Paul wrote in to say, “I was in a similar situation in 2018. My writing partner and I had been writing separately for years until we teamed up for one project. That landed us a manager in LA, and we sold our pilot to NBC. But we knew going into the partnership that we both wanted careers in Hollywood, and that meant getting a manager. Our partnership just happened to be fruitful and lead to that goal, so it was never an issue with us when we each presented separate works to our new manager. We were happy and rooting for each other, because we respected each other’s goals. We are each other’s cheerleaders. We both now have separate writing careers with the same manager, while maintaining our friendship, which began before writing anything together.”

**John:** Great. It sounds like they went into this process of getting a manager with the expectation, we will ultimately separate and do some different things, which feels right. Having that conversation up front seems good. Looking at the Brian follow-up here too, it also feels like communication was key for them.

**Drew:** Brian wrote, “My writing partner and I had had the conversation very early on about how we would deal with situations like this, and it’s worked out well. First, we were okay with developing stories together, and only one of us actually wrote the script. If that’s the case, it’s only the person who wrote the script who claims it as a sample. Second, him and I have different skills. I have an MFA in playwriting. He’s a stand-up comedian. We know we will eventually want to work on different stuff. Our partner writing is never to get in the way of our individual expressions. Third, if we get represented together, we know all work with that agent until such a time that we both have established careers, we’ll be writing together. And fourth, we delineate our stuff, my stuff, and your stuff before we ever start writing. It’s a shocker, I know, but open and consistent communication was key in making it work.”

**John:** That last point seems really important, because we’ve talked with other writing teams who have come on the podcast, and they will talk about, “This is an idea I have. Is this an idea for us together? Is this an idea for me separately?” I think that’s important to early on establish what those are. We talk about first-time writing partners and the importance of having this conversation but also getting some stuff on paper about what’s going to happen here, because when you don’t do that, it becomes really uncomfortable for everybody involved.

**Drew:** Seth Rogen talked about that.

**John:** That’s right. More follow-up on phonetic alphabets.

**Drew:** Jonathan wrote, “I’m enjoying your adventures in phonetics this year, and I thought you might like to know that the Earth Species Project in Berkeley, which is using AI to decode animal communication, has now introduced the first inter-species phonetic alphabet to transcribe animal sounds.”

**John:** I’ve seen a little bit of that on TikTok or Reels, which is how old people get TikToks. It is actually really cool, because there are consistent sounds that birds are making, that different things are making. It feels like an important first step to identify these things. Honestly, machine learning and AI is going to probably have some real insights here, because they can just listen to tens of thousands of hours of things and see what are the consistent patterns that we can’t notice that they can notice in there. Watch this space, because I feel like this time next year we’re going to hear some real breakthroughs about not just whale sounds, but bird sounds and other stuff happening there.

**Drew:** That’s so cool.

**John:** It’s cool. It’s cool. All right. That’s enough follow-up. Let us get to the meat of this episode. Francesca Sloane is a writer and producer known for Fargo, Atlanta, and the new series Mr. and Mrs. Smith, on which she is the co-creator and showrunner. Welcome, Francesca.

**Francesca Sloane:** Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here.

**John:** It’s great to have you here. I want to talk about the show, obviously. But before that, I want to get into your career path, because if I look at IMDb, I see you starting in 2017, and it feels like a rocket ship, really fast. I bet that allies a lot of other stuff that happened before then. Can you talk to us about how you got started in the industry as a writer? What was your genesis here?

**Francesca:** Absolutely. I never had the chutzpah, I guess you could say, to think I could be a professional writer. I always was a writer in terms of just being somebody that liked to tell stories and focused on that in school and things like that. But in terms of thinking I could make a career out of it, that was never actually part of the agenda, I guess you could say. I had gone to art school, because my parents were big on education. It was something that I enjoyed, making films and writing stories. They were not thrilled that a non-trust fund kid decided to pack their things, move to LA, and go to art school.

**John:** What school were you going to?

**Francesca:** I went to California Institute of the Arts, which was actually a very anti-narrative, experimental school.

**John:** I think of CalArts as animation and just really experimental films. It kind of feels New Yorky for being in Los Angeles.

**Francesca:** Definitely. I would agree with that. That was what drew me in, which also takes me even further away from a typical screenwriting career, writing narrative things. But even within that structure, there was a teacher there named Nicole Panter, who was really cool. She used to manage the punk band The Germs. She worked on Peewee Herman. She was very cool. She led a very loose-based screenwriting course. That was my favorite class of CalArts. But even with that said, I got into making these experimental video art type work.

I just took any job I could, because at that point, I just liked Los Angeles. I worked at Yum Yum Donuts. I cleaned toilets. I nannied for celebrity children – well, celebrities who had children.

**John:** I think celebrity children would be awesome.

**Francesca:** Celebrity children. I was Haley Joel Osment’s nanny, even though we’re the same age. No. It was just constantly just doing whatever I could to pay the bills and still make art. But I would still go home and write these screenplays for no reason. I wasn’t even sure why I was doing that. I eventually decided to go to UCLA for a masters program, mostly because I figured I could get a teaching job at some point. If I was able to be in a creative writing community and be around writers in that respect, I felt, what a beautiful way to be around imaginative people for the rest of my life, again, still not considering that I could actually do that by going down the direction of trying to write TV for myself. I ended up writing a script that won a competition there.

**John:** Tell me about that. What was the competition like? What was the script?

**Francesca:** UCLA has this screenwriting competition. I submitted this script called Headbangers, which is about this punk kid in the ’90s who moves to North Philly, which is very close to where I grew up, and is immersed in a world that makes him fall in love with rap music.

**John:** Great.

**Francesca:** I wrote it very much about the kids that I grew up around. It felt very authentic to my experience at the time. That landed me with a few meetings with managers, because if you win the competition, that’s the prize is you get an opportunity to meet with people from the industry.

**John:** I’m going to have you pause right there. It sounds like the script you wrote was a script that you had unique experience in. Someone could read the script and meet you and say, “Oh, she’s the one who wrote the script,” and it feels like there’s a good fit there. You feel like, “Oh, I get that she is the person who wrote this script.”

**Francesca:** I think that that’s very true. I actually remember there was one manager who said this very bizarre, backhanded thing, where he said, “I’m so surprised when I saw that your name was Francesca. I really thought a man wrote this script, because it just felt like such a masculine energy.” I found that so strange, because to me, I just wrote something that felt very honest. But I guess maybe he was leaning toward the fact that the protagonist happened to be this teenage boy. But I remember that striking me as something really, I don’t know, interesting, but also kind of a problem. I thought, “I’m definitely not going to work with you, sir.” But it was an interesting way to dip your toe in.

That eventually led me to the path of meeting my manager, who is this man named David Katzman. Every single person said to me, “Just make sure that you weigh your options. Don’t hire anybody in the room.” I hired David in the room immediately.

**John:** I hired my lawyer in the room too. Sometimes it just clicks.

**Francesca:** Exactly. You get a feeling. In fact, every single thing that I’ve done so far, I have not listened to that advice and have always gone with my gut in that way. So far, knock on wood, it has not led me astray.

**John:** At this point, you’ve signed with a manager, and you have a script that has caught some interest. Do you have other stuff to show? What’s happening next?

**Francesca:** I had nothing else to show, actually. In fact, he had said to me, “How would you feel about trying to be in a writers’ room?” I said, “I’m quite shy. I always imagined I would write, if anything, if I was going to go down this path, features, because I spend so much time by myself.” He said, “Why don’t we just give it a try and see what happens.”

There was this Sony Crackle show that was looking for somebody, and I think specifically a Latina woman for one character on the show named Izzy, who happened to be that as well. In order to be a part of that room – they were worried that maybe Headbangers was a fluke – they said, “Does she have any other samples?” I had nothing. Over the weekend, I wrote a slew of short stories and a few short scripts. I just said, “Here. Just give them this. We’ll see how it goes.” That ended up doing the thing.

**John:** That’s great. For international listeners, Crackle, I guess it maybe still exists. I don’t know to what degree it exists.

**Francesca:** I don’t know either, honestly.

**John:** It was an online video platform, that point where everyone thought web video’s going to be the next thing. Was it WGA? Was it not WGA?

**Francesca:** Actually, it was not, and I was not WGA, obviously. I had started that room very briefly. But at the exact same time, before that room even started, I ended up meeting with Veena Sud for her show, Seven Seconds, that was to be on Netflix. But that wasn’t anywhere ready to go. We said that if somehow I land that gig, which was a big question mark, I would be able to leave the startup Crackle room early and leapfrog into Veena’s room. All of this, again, big question marks. Nothing was certain. That ended up ultimately happening. Veena did end up hiring me for Seven Seconds. So I jumped from the Sony Crackle room to Veena Sud’s room.

**John:** You were worried about being in a room, because you felt like you were a shy person who wanted to write alone. What was the process of adaptation of learning how to be in a room? Because rooms are very different. There’s different cultures. What worked for you?

**Francesca:** Oh my gosh. It was like just meeting my people. It was the first time where I felt like I truly fit in. That sounds very idealistic and romantic. But it was just sitting around with a bunch of nerds, talking about characters and story and world building. For me, that was just so exciting. In fact, when I write on my own now, I get a little lonely, because it is so incredible to be able to bounce ideas off of people in that way and laugh and give personal anecdotes. It just all clicked. I just didn’t realize that that was what it was going to be. It felt right. It felt like home.

**John:** Seven Seconds was a Netflix show. It was a bigger show. Veena Sud’s an experienced showrunner. Were you taking notes? Were you trying to figure out, “This is how I do that job,” or were you just heads down, like, “I got to deliver as,” you were a staff writer, I’m guessing?

**Francesca:** Yes, I was a staff writer. I was so naïve, which I actually think worked in my favor. I didn’t understand the hierarchy that you’re supposed to know when going into that. I wouldn’t necessarily give this advice. I think it’s good to do your research and become well learned before you enter any kind of environment. But I did not do that. I did just go with human interactions and feelings. I started to figure out very quickly that if I was speaking too much, certain people had certain energies about it. I learned my place just by picking up on cues. But I didn’t totally understand that. I just was this dog with a bone that would get so excited.

If we couldn’t crack something in the room, I’d go home and spend the night trying to figure it out, to come in with something the next day, just because I was excited, not because I was kissing ass or anything. I had never had a job that inspired me that much before. Looking back now, I feel like I would be so annoyed with me if I were the upper-level writers in that room.

**John:** We have a lot of listeners who are going to be in that same situation. What advice can you give them when they’re feeling like the energy is just a little strange here? How did you navigate? How would you recommend it now that you’ve had to be the person in charge? What advice do you give?

**Francesca:** I think being excited is a wonderful thing. I think being a hard worker is obviously something that can only be helpful in that dynamic, because ultimately, that’s what you’re there to do is to break story, figure out the problems, solve them. But I do think it’s really important that you’re not taking up too much space, just like anywhere. It’s like really making sure that other people have opportunities, because most of the time, when you do that, your ideas can only become better, or they might actually see something that you’re not seeing yet. The collaborative process of a writers’ room is the beauty of it in the first place.

I will say though, Veena is absolutely incredible. But that was a very straightforward, conventional way of running a room. It was very much about plotting and breaking things and character development. The way that I like to work, ever since working on Atlanta, and the way that I run my room is more parlor style, talking more about your own life and anecdotes and what you saw that might’ve been interesting online or things like that first, before you go into the rest of it.

**John:** When you say first, first bit of business in the day is all that talking stuff before you get to, “This is the episode that’s on the board. This is what we’re trying to focus on.”

**Francesca:** Maybe not even just the day. I think even just the first few weeks, it’s just becoming about the alchemy in the room.

**John:** You said be careful that you’re not taking up too much space. A thing we hear a lot of writers of color talking about when they’re going into these rooms, it’s that feeling like, “How do I show up with my full self? How do I feel present in this place and not always asking permission to speak?” Any guidance on that?

**Francesca:** This is not anything unique, what I’m saying right now. But I really think that people react well to being your authentic self. I think don’t think about that as much. I think I’m saying that less about being a person of color myself, which I can totally relate to that sentiment. I think I’m saying that more in terms of making sure that you’re also listening and that you’re not so hungry to get your own idea out, just because I think it makes your idea better. But I would advise to not think about that as a person of color, and go in and just be completely unabashedly you.

**John:** They hired you for a reason. That’s always a thing to remember. You were picked out of a lot of choices, and so recognize that they want you in that space. They had many choices, and they chose you.

**Francesca:** Exactly. I totally agree with that. I think the less that you think about that, the more that your brain can process than other things. It’s a liberating thing to actually be like, “What would this character do?” as opposed to, “Oh god, what am I doing here? What should I say?” There’s a freedom in that.

**John:** You’re in a room. You’re seeing how television is written. But did you get a chance to see how television is made in that first process? How close was the writing room to the actual production?

**Francesca:** Veena was such a G in that respect. She created the room so that even, no matter what level you were as a writer, you would basically go in as her stand-in. You would advocate for whatever you would think Veena would want, and you would show-run. I got very lucky with that, because here I am, I don’t know, this term is not the greatest, but this baby writer. I’m on set and being able to do the job that a showrunner would do. We would touch base with her every single day. She was still very much part of the process.

**John:** That was a show that was shooting here in Los Angeles?

**Francesca:** They shot that in New York. That was also very exciting is to be able to be on location in that way and do all of those things and make a lot of mistakes, which I definitely did, and learn from them. She was good about that.

**John:** Some examples? What mistakes did you make being on set?

**Francesca:** There’s a part of you that wants to make sure that you’re doing right by Veena. Because Veena was such a good leader, it wasn’t even just because you want to do right by your boss. Specifically, we wanted to do right by Veena Sud, because she was just this incredible person, and she worked so hard, and she really had a vision for her show. I would sometimes get anxious, because I would think, “Oh, Veena wouldn’t want this that way.” Then it really is a matter of how do you communicate those things. You also have to respect your director. My director was Ernest Dickerson, who is a big-

**John:** A legend.

**Francesca:** Yeah, a legend. Here I am. In his eyes, I look like a 13-year-old little twerp coming up and trying to give him notes constantly. I would have to gauge how to give notes, because I didn’t want to feel like a gnat that he had to shoo away. I think a few times he probably did feel like that, but I understand why he did. Those kind of things, like navigating how to give those notes, making sure that certain things are actually happening, when he might have a vision that might be different than what I would assume Veena’s would be.

**John:** The challenge as the writer, you know how the whole thing has to fit back together, and sometimes on that set, the director might be fantastic but may not remember these pieces have to get together this way. You were in that room as a showrunner was approving this script and what the purpose of that scene was, what the purpose of this segment was.

**Francesca:** Exactly.

**John:** Sometimes you’re the only person on that set with that memory.

**Francesca:** Exactly, exactly.

**John:** Coming off of that show, how was it moving to the next show, to the next show? Was it a steady progression? Did you have ups and downs?

**Francesca:** I wish I could say I had ups and downs, because it just makes the story more interesting. But I was one of those very lucky people where it just kept on going, one room to the next to the next to the next.

**John:** What are some differences you’ve noticed in different rooms? You’re coming off of a really good experience there. Hopefully, they were all good experiences. But every room is going to have its different culture, its different vibe. What were some differences you noticed between the rooms?

**Francesca:** Every single room was an entirely different job in terms of how different they could be. I don’t think I could point at any room and say, oh, this one was similar to this one. They were all completely different beasts. After that room, I jumped right into, and I actually came in a little bit later, to Beau Willimon’s show The First. That had its own intimidating factor, just because there was already that alchemy that I had described earlier, and here I am as the new kid stepping in. One person can truly change an entire thing in terms of a room. Jeff Melvoin once said to me that a writers’ room is like choosing who you want to be trapped on a submarine with for hours and hours at a time.

I was a little bit intimidated by the fact that I was jumping into that room a little bit later. We were there to support Beau’s ideas. It was a lot of us kind of helping him constructivist thing, which felt different than how collaborative Veena’s room was, where she really wanted to pull from us. I used to describe it as – and I mean this with complete respect – but it was like if you play a pinball machine, you know the two little things that bat the ball around?

**John:** Yeah.

**Francesca:** I felt like that was our job.

**John:** You’re the flippers.

**Francesca:** Exactly. We were the flippers, which was totally fine and understandable. It was a great room with really talented people. But that was very different than what I had experienced right before that. It was also a smaller room, significantly smaller.

**John:** That was a first season show. It was a whole group of people together. Going into Fargo: Season Four, that’s an anthology show, so there’s not ongoing mythology, but I suspect there are people who are coming back year after year on that show. What is it like fitting into the fourth season of a show with established people?

**Francesca:** Interestingly enough, yes, it was an anthology show, but we were all brand new to Noah, which was new for him too.

**John:** Great.

**Francesca:** Noah was the consistency there, but we actually all were this new crowd trying to replicate this really strong voice that other seasons had already expressed. What was interesting about that season as well though is it was tackling race. Part of what is interesting about Fargo in terms of the comedy is that it’s actually not necessarily pointing at something as heavy as that. It Trojan horses in heavy material by not speaking on those things. I think it was a big challenge in terms of the tone of the Fargo universe to try to bring that into the fold. I think we did our best. I think Noah did a fantastic job. He’s a genius. But I think it was an interesting place to play because of that obstacle.

**John:** You were talking about how in your rooms you like to have a parlor feeling where there’s a lot of blue sky and a lot of potentially weeks of chatting about stuff to get the speed up and running. Was that more, “We have this many episodes. Let’s get started and cracking.”

**Francesca:** Definitely. Noah lives in Austin, and he was also directing Lucy at the time. There were times when it was just the room in that sense. When it was just the room without our leader, so to speak, there was a lot more of small talk and personal anecdotes. We actually all got very, very close. It was an incredible room. It’s Enzo Mileti, Scott Wilson, Stefani Robinson, who I ended up meeting, which was my link to Atlanta, this guy Lee. It was just incredible, so we really bonded as friends. But when Noah would come back to the fold, it was go time. It was work. I used to explain it like we would mine ideas, and Noah would come back to the room, and he would take our ideas that felt like fuel or coal, and then in real time turn them into diamonds. It was an exceptional thing to witness. But that was that process.

**John:** Great. You teed this up. Then you moved into Atlanta, which is an established show. You’re coming into the third season of it?

**Francesca:** Yes.

**John:** What is it like? I assume there were writers who’d been through that whole process. There’s the ongoing storylines, those things. How do you catch up to speed with it? How do you get running when something is already going like that?

**Francesca:** Atlanta was the biggest gift of my career. I think it will always be, actually. It was my favorite show. I remember meeting with my agents years before. They said, “If you could pie in the sky, what would it be?” I said, “Somehow write on Atlanta,” which seemed really unusual and unlikely, because part of what makes that show so incredible is that it’s specifically a Black point of view in a lot of ways. It was just a silly thing to even say. Then ultimately, it just happened.

Stefani Robinson hit me up and said, “Hey, Donald’s looking to expand the room. He especially would love strong female voices. Do you have anything?” Again, I wrote a sample that wasn’t a thing yet. I wrote this silly look script called Tuesdays that was about four different Tuesdays in a row between this family. That felt like my tone actually, but part of why I liked Atlanta so much is I felt like my tone could lend itself more naturally to a show like Atlanta. That got me a meeting with Donald Grover and Stephen Glover.

**John:** Stephen Glover is his brother and producing partner, right?

**Francesca:** Yeah, he’s the funniest person on the planet. Literally the funniest person on the planet. No one can make me laugh more. I feel like a baby when Steve’s in the room, because I’m just laughing at him constantly.

That was the most intimidating room. I keep using the word intimidating, but that was the most intimidating, because this is a collection of friends. These guys were all friends before they were writers together. Two of them are even related to each other. They have created this hit show for so many seasons, then took this hiatus and have a big thing to prove by coming back so late. I actually jumped into that room late as well, because I had been doing a development project that didn’t go through.

Not only was I coming in as a new writer to this group of friends, I was coming in late. I was also the only writer that was Salvadorian and Jewish. They have this whole other sort of shorthand. It was terrifying, but it ended up being the room that I was most comfortable in at the end of the day. I’ve never felt more aligned with a group of people in my entire life than I did with the Atlanta writers’ room.

**John:** I want to wind back, because you said, “Oh, I’d written a new thing which was right for this Atlanta sample.” Listeners might be confused, because it seemed like you’ve wrote things for these other shows. You could point to these produced scripts. Can you explain why those things you did for other shows are not useful samples for you trying to be staffed at your next thing?

**Francesca:** Absolutely. I think with every show, you’re writing to that specific voice and that specific showrunner typically or creator. None of the shows that I had previously written on felt like Atlanta even a little bit. Not only that, I even feel like my previous script that got me in the door in the first place, Headbangers, was so self-serious and actually so-

**John:** You’d grown.

**Francesca:** Yes, exactly. I was ready to be a little bit sillier, be a little bit less dramatic, and just write things that just felt a little bit more about the everyday, without trying to say something with every single line on the page. I wrote this thing in two days, because it felt so easy to me. It felt really natural. Thank god that resonated with the show Atlanta.

**John:** The other reason why you don’t tend to use things you wrote for another show as samples is because it’s really hard to show what was your work versus somebody else’s work. That was obviously broken as a room, so it was a bunch of different people’s inputs. You don’t know who touched every line. Even though it has your name on it, it’s not really fully yours the way that your sample is going to be yours.

**Francesca:** Absolutely, especially in a show like Fargo, because on a show like Fargo, Noah is such an exceptional writer, but really does go in there and play a lot with the scripts, as he should, because it’s also replicating the Cohen Brothers, and it’s such a specific tone of voice. On that note, I was already really surprised at how that would work, and then I was already really flattered and amazed at how much of my stuff would actually end up on television, that was actually my… I’m like, “Whoa. I actually really did write that. Holy crap.

**John:** Megana Rao, who’s our previous producer, and Megan McDonnell, also a Scriptnotes producer, they now have TV writing careers, and they still do marvel at, “Oh, that actually is my thing. That’s my scene.” It’s so nice to see when that actually happens. It gets all the way through to production.

**Francesca:** Yeah, it feels magical.

**John:** This explains your connection to Donald Glover. Does this get us to Mr. and Mrs. Smith and this new series?

**Francesca:** It does, yeah. Donald and I connected immediately. I will say that in the Atlanta room though, I did make sure, because at that point, all of those lessons that we talked about earlier had been learned. I did a lot of sitting back before I would jump in. I actually only spoke when I really felt like I had something pretty solid to contribute, because I just felt their bond. I didn’t want to be the thing that came in and interrupted something that was so beautiful and worked so well. It took a little bit longer for me to feel fully comfortable to show my real self. Then when I did, it was wonderful.

But I will say from the very, very start, I remember Donald had this Memorial Day pool party at his house before we even started the room. I went and I remember sitting down by the pool and got flanked by both Stephen and Donald. They both sat down next to me. Donald’s son was swimming in the pool. He was probably around five at the time. There was this moment he’s swimming and he’s swimming and he swallows some water, and he gets really panicked. At the exact same time, all three of us laughed as soon as we saw he was okay and said, “Do you remember that feeling of death at that age?” We all laughed at that, because it’s this fleeting thing. I thought, “Oh my gosh, the three of us see the world really similarly.”

It was this throwaway thing, but it was very comforting and very cool. From there, it was off to the races where references that Donald and I would pull were the same. I just started to realize we were very similar children. That made it really easy for us to connect creatively.

**John:** Great. What was the brief on Mr. and Mrs. Smith? I don’t know quite what the genesis was. Obviously, this is based on the Simon Kinberg movie – Simon’s a friend; he’s terrific – which was Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie. It was high stylish Doug Liman, who directed Go, directed that. A huge success.

**Francesca:** I love Go.

**John:** Thank you. It was the start of Brangelina. All sorts of things stemmed out of it. Where was the genesis of, “Okay, we’re going to do this as a series.” How did the Donald of it all come together? Talk to us about that.

**Francesca:** Donald and I knew we wanted to do something together. We didn’t know what it was. Donald called me one day. He is good friends and works with Michael Schaefer, who at the time worked at New Regency.

**John:** New Regency produced Mr. and Mrs. Smith for Fox, I think.

**Francesca:** Exactly, yes. He said, “Hey, what if we do Mr. and Mrs. Smith, the TV series?” I started laughing. I thought he was totally joking around with me. He’s like, “No, I’m actually completely serious.” I said, “Why would we do that?” Not as a diss on the movie. Just our specific voices do not lend itself to that at all.

As we kept talking about it, he said, “We could really focus on the marriage of it all.” I had just gotten married, so it was heavy on the mind. I never thought I would get married. Donald never thought he would get married. Now we’re both married. We started talking about that. We started talking about how we could focus more on in-between moments. As far as an action show was concerned, that felt really intriguing to me.

Then Donald said, “Yeah, okay. Do you want to pitch this at some point?” I said, “Maybe down the line.” At the time, I was developing something for Jordan Peele, and I was developing this erotica comedy series. He’s like, “Yeah, cool, cool. I’ll come back to you.” Then he called me and said, “Can we pitch this next week?” That’s very Donald, by the way. He waited all summer and then all of a sudden it’s like, “How about next week?” That’s very typical. I said, “Yeah, why the hell not? Let’s get together, crack this thing, and pitch it.” We were off to the races from there.

**John:** The original film is about a husband and wife who, they’ve been married for a time and they’ve discovered that they’re actually spies for rival organizations. It’s the secrets you keep inside of a marriage. From that initial pitch, had you decided to basically flip it that these are complete strangers who are put together as a marriage and then have to learn about each other? That was your initial pitch?

**Francesca:** No. Actually, our initial pitch was that this was a marriage that was on the rocks, and things had gotten stale. We actually did pitch something closer to the film.

**John:** Closer to the premise.

**Francesca:** It wasn’t until we were really workshopping it that we felt like two strangers was the correct angle for a variety of reasons, one being the why. We really wanted it to be about loneliness. That just felt like the better angle in terms of bringing that to light.

**John:** You say workshopping. What does workshopping it mean?

**Francesca:** Tossing around ideas, banging our heads against the wall, saying, “Let’s go down this path. Here’s why this is great.” Then we felt like within the eight episodes and the eight hours that we had, showing milestones of a relationship from start to finish felt like the freshest take, and especially in terms of having missions of the week.

**John:** Absolutely. The meet-cute is that they’re essentially assigned to each other, and it then has to evolve from that. Had you solid it with the vague, initial pitch of being more like the movie, and then in actually developing it internally, you decided, “We’re going to change the premise.”

**Francesca:** Yes. We pitched it exactly as you just said. Also, it definitely helped that at the time, Phoebe was on board.

**John:** Phoebe Waller-Bridge, another previous Scriptnotes guest and incredibly talented writer and actor. Was the goal for them to write it together? What was the initial vision for this?

**Francesca:** The origin, everyone’s very curious about this piece, which I totally understand. No one is more of a legend to the writing community than a Phoebe Waller-Bridge. She’s incredible. Donald and I knew that we wanted her to play Jane, because in my mind and in Donald’s mind, it just made sense that it had to be this meta couple and that they had to be truly well matched. For what Donald did for Atlanta and a community in one way, Phoebe felt like she did that. Fleabag. They’re also friends. They’re also funny in very different ways, but still very, very funny.

**John:** They’re in the same Star Wars universe.

**Francesca:** They’re in the same Star Wars universe, exactly. It just felt right. I actually wrote this little synopsis with all of these places that episodes could potentially go. He sent them to her, and she read them. I waited with bated breath to see how she would feel about it. She loved it, which floored me. I couldn’t believe it. She came on board initially to act and then ended up asking us, “How would you feel if I wrote it with you guys?” That turned us into a three-headed monster of creators together, which was a dream to me.

When we pitched it to Amazon, it was just Donald and myself, but we did say, “Our Jane could be Phoebe Waller-Bridge,” which Amazon’s mouths hit the floor. They were very happy about that idea, especially they both had deals there. There are so many reasons why it was amazing.

**John:** You’re developing this. You and Donald are figuring out your take. She would come on board also as a writer at some point. It sounds like ultimately the visions did not align perfectly. That also happens. It’s so frustrating when you see reports like, “Oh, there’s bad blood,” or anything. Sometimes things just don’t work right. Is that a fair summary of what happened there?

**Francesca:** It’s a really fair summary. Donald let me cast the room with this incredible group of people. The room ended up actually being all women, all women of color, completely based on merit and the strength on the page. It actually wasn’t based on anything outside of that.

**John:** What were you looking for? This is your first time assembling a room, right?

**Francesca:** Yes, it’s my first time assembling a room. I was looking for people that could get along. It was really important to me that we all felt like we would be friends, that we weren’t just there for work. It was important to me that people were generous about their own stories and vulnerabilities and being able to laugh at themselves, because so much of this had to be pulled from personal lives about relationships.

Most importantly, I wanted the writing to be strong. I wanted the writing to be able to speak to personal dynamics, but still also have a sense of humor. I was really excited to have all women, because I really felt like the strength of this show would be more Jane’s story, even though it is about two people. I wanted different perspectives of different kinds of really strong woman come into the room and get their voice to that.

**John:** I want to make sure I’m getting the order of events here right. You’re putting together this room. Had you already written the pilot?

**Francesca:** No, we had not.

**John:** That’s interesting. You had a vision for what the show was going to be, but there was not a pilot yet.

**Francesca:** No pilot.

**John:** You’re putting together this room. That room has to figure out whether the whole show is including the pilot.

**Francesca:** Exactly. At that point, I had done that first, before necessarily knowing if Phoebe really was going to come on or not, with this big hope. “Let’s hope that she does. If she doesn’t, we still have a great room.” Then she said yes, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, we cannot be beat. We’ve got everything. We’ve got the great women in the room. We’ve got Phoebe. We’ve got Donald. We have Stephen Glover. We’re unstoppable.”

To your point earlier, with different time zones and Zooms and a pandemic and all these different kinds of voices, ultimately Phoebe gave so much. Phoebe and I would a lot of times end up just on the phone for hours and hours, just the two of us, really trying to figure this whole thing out. But ultimately, Donald and I had such a distinct vision for the show. It evolved over time, and it changed, but the crux of it is still the same. Eventually, the visions just weren’t aligning. She was very gracious about stepping away and letting us do our thing.

**John:** You have this room. You have this vision. You’re talking. But what point is there actually a script? At what point is there something on paper to say, “This is the show we’re trying to make.”

**Francesca:** At one point, I had done a pass of the pilot. I then passed my pass to Donald. Donald did a pass on my pass. That pass went to Phoebe. Phoebe did a pass. There was one moment where we all blew up each other’s scripts. Then finally, we all band together one more time from the first pass that I had sent there. We went back to it. That ended up being the pilot that, once Phoebe ended up leaving, I rewrote one more time. But ultimately, that was what ended up being on television.

**John:** This script exists. The room still exists. Now, the room can read this thing. “This is the show we’re trying to make.” I always feel like the script helps anchor our expectations in a way that it’s all nebulous until there’s something on paper.

**Francesca:** Yes, 100 percent. That is exactly right. I will even say that the most important thing that we figured out in the room was the milestones of the relationship and making that the anchor of the series, and also then figuring out how we could take these missions that could otherwise be so silly and make us get away with the unbelievable and pausing disbelief because it was able to speak then so directly to the relationship milestones. That was the freshness of it. That’s how we got away with some of the silliness. That was the best and most useful part of what we did collectively as a team in the room. The scripts had to change so many times, especially once Phoebe left and once we found Maya. Maya of it all happened when the room mostly disbanded at that point.

**John:** Let’s talk about Maya, because she’s another creator, brilliant writer, performer. Were you specifically looking for that energy or someone who could do that, or she was just the right person and available at the time?

**Francesca:** It’s a great question. It’s a combination. I think going back to earlier, the gut reaction thing, I think it started off as a gut reaction.

**John:** The gut reaction is true, just the same way Phoebe’s interesting opposite him. She brings a very interesting energy opposite him.

**Francesca:** I agree. I remember being on a text thread with Carmen Cuba, our casting director, and then Michael Schaefer and Donald and Hiro. We’re like, “Who? Who? Who?”

**John:** Hiro Murai, who’s the director.

**Francesca:** Hiro Murai, who is, yes, the director, one of my really close friends and probably one of my favorite people on the planet. We were texting each other. Carmen said Maya. As soon as she said Maya, I was typing Maya. I was like, “That’s just too strangely aligned.” Then Hiro said Maya. We all felt her, but none of us unpacked why. I think in retrospect, it is the fact that she is also this visionary. She’s also a creator. There is that meta quality that I was looking for with Phoebe in a different way with Maya and Donald. Also, there’s something interesting about them playing these rejects. It feels like a good pairing.

**John:** She plays lonely really well.

**Francesca:** She does.

**John:** We know that from Pen15. She’s not afraid also to let you deep inside of her.

**Francesca:** She is the queen of allowing herself to embarrass herself so deeply that it turns beautiful. She does that better than anybody, in my opinion.

**John:** You have a pilot. Now, you have all the scripts. The room is largely disbanded. We have a new actor on, so you’re having to rewrite some stuff to tailor it better to her experience. Now, you’re also responsible for production. This is the first time that this is all on your shoulders. What was that process like getting up to speed with that?

**Francesca:** Just a little anecdote or background on that too is that we started talking about the show in 2020, we started writing the show in 2021.

**John:** There’s a pandemic happening, yeah.

**Francesca:** I got pregnant, and then I had just had my baby at the top of 2022. Then we were off to production. I was juggling being brand new first-time mom, brand new first-time showrunner. I joke around sometimes that I had twins, because it really did feel like that in a lot of ways. We had an amazing line producer, Anthony Katagas, who’s this old-school cinema head, really knows New York. When we decided it was going to take place in New York, he was the guy. Anthony’s the kind of producer that never tells you no. He just says, “How can we do this? How can we figure it out?” which is really fun for a bunch of scrappy kids with a big budget for the very first time. It was incredible that we were able to do it.

**John:** What lessons did you learn early on as a showrunner? What were the things that were complete surprises? Background is, I produced a show very early on and had a complete nervous breakdown. It was a disaster.

**Francesca:** It’s so hard.

**John:** It’s so hard. I think you had more TV experience than I did going into it. Just the amount of just staying on top of everything is so tough.

**Francesca:** Oh my gosh. It doesn’t matter how much experience you have. I even feel like if I ever have the opportunity to show-run again, which I hope I do, it’s still going to be a shit show. It’s part of the experience. I didn’t realize how much of it was people managing. I didn’t realize how much of it is also being a psychiatrist and then needing a psychiatrist for yourself. Also, so much of making sure that you’re managing the budget and being wise. Here’s a little stupid example, but I feel like it says a lot. When I wrote initially, I would write these scenes with the cat, so many scenes with Max. Maya’s allergic to cats.

**John:** Oh, god.

**Francesca:** The cat one day ran and got lost under the stage and cost us hours, which cost of us money. All of a sudden, Max is in maybe no scenes anymore. Maybe we can have sometimes Max sit on the couch. That’s an example of learning and thinking on your feet in a small way, but there are way bigger versions of that. As you’re making this thing, it takes so much time and energy. People were losing their parents. I lost my dad. You’re having to push through these personal matters, close out the noise, and still give everything you can to this moving show. Also, the tone, I think I learned a lot that you have this idea when you write something on paper, and then in the reality of it, it’s this ever-moving, evolving thing. It tells you what it should be, versus the other way around, and you have to pivot. I hadn’t known that until this experience how much pivoting you end up actually doing to service the show.

**John:** How much rewriting were you doing while shooting a lot?

**Francesca:** Gosh. A lot. That I won’t do as much this next time around, because that was bananas. But yeah, quite a bit.

**John:** We have some listener questions I thought might be good for us to talk through.

**Drew:** The first one comes from Chat McG. Says, “I recently read Christopher Nolan’s screenplay for Tenet. While I enjoyed it very much, I don’t think an unknown writer would’ve gotten very far with it as a writing sample. This got me thinking, what makes a good calling card screenplay for an unknown? If you had to start from scratch, what kind of thing would you write? Would you steer clear of certain genres? Would you try to reinvent the wheel to get noticed or write something solid in a popular genre to assure the reader that you know what you’re doing? How would you write to impress the agent’s assistant’s assistant to pass it on and get noticed?”

**John:** You read a ton of samples for this. What was a good sample for you? What did you like to see on the page? Were you finishing all the scripts? How did you get scripts? Talk us through that process of picking writers for your room.

**Francesca:** There are a lot of not-great scripts. I hate to say that. I was so surprised by that. Again, in terms of answering a question or giving advice, I always feel silly about it, but I just want to come from a sincere place, and I hope this isn’t too sincere. But I think if you’re trying so hard to write a script to get in the door, you’re doing it wrong. I think you have to first write a script that you feel connected to. It has to start with you. If you’re not feeling anything by it, and you’re just thinking about the agenda as a whole, people can read that straight away.

I think we live in a really hard and cynical world, but I think the thing that transcends is being authentic. I think it’s contagious. I think people can sense it. As long as you’re writing something that feels really true to you and makes sense to you and makes you feel something, then that’s going to hopefully make someone else do that. But I don’t think you should think about where it can take you.

**John:** This question about should you write in a popular genre or that kind of stuff, it’s like, no, because really, it’s meant to represent you. It’s not meant to be made necessarily. It’s just what is the script that someone can point to, it’s like, “Oh, you should read this, because it’s really good, and I want to meet this person who wrote this script.”

**Francesca:** Exactly. Tuesdays was about Tuesdays, and it got me to eventually make Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

**John:** Another question.

**Drew:** Joshua writes, “I recently received notes from someone at a major studio. He told me that in pilots, you should follow major character introductions with a, ‘Think Mindy Kaling,’ or a, ‘Think Joel McHale,’ to give them a sense of what kind of person could be cast in this role. I hadn’t received this note before, but he implied this is standard practice now. Did I miss an industry-wide memo or could this just be for their particular studio?”

**Francesca:** I think that’s a particular studio thing. I think as long as the rest of it works, if that feels like that little wink goes with the tone of how you’re writing everything else and that feels natural for the rest of it, sure. But if you’re writing this hard-hitting, cinematic experience where you’re getting lost in the vision of it, and that’s how you write, and you’re like, “Think Mindy Kaling,” that will not work.

**John:** I bristle at this, because I also think if you say, “Think Joel McHale,” immediately that’s a white guy. Also, it limits your choices down. Listen. If that studio really wants it that way, you got to listen to that. But I don’t think that’s good advice in general.

**Francesca:** I agree.

**John:** I wouldn’t do that.

**Francesca:** Don’t box you in.

**John:** It feels lazy too. Then we’re only going to read their dialog with that cadence in our heads.

**Francesca:** Yeah, it’s really limiting. Definitely. I agree with you.

**Drew:** Rashani in Sydney writes, “I read lots of scripts and usually find them with ease. I’m working on a story about art and decided to read the Mona Lisa Smile script, but I couldn’t find it for free, so I paid $20 for it on a website I wasn’t even sure was legitimate. The story has a happy ending, since I did receive my pdf copy the next morning. But I’m curious, why are some scripts in the public domain and others not? It might be a silly question, but I never questioned this before, since every script I ever read, I found on the internet for free.”

**John:** First off, scripts aren’t in the public domain. There’s still copyright to the person who wrote them or the studio who released them. But most of them are available. You just download them on the internet. That’s good. It’s a good thing that’s happened over the last 20 years is that they’re available and people can read them. It’s so helpful for all people who want to learn more about scripts. Way back when I started here, there were stores where you could pay your 20 bucks to get a printed script of a thing. That’s not good. Scripts want to be free.

**Francesca:** I agree. I remember one of the most educational experiences for me way more than screenwriting school was just reading Buck Henry and seeing how much came from his mind. It blew me away. I thought, oh my goodness, what a beautiful medium to tell a story, and never thought about this until this exact moment. But I don’t know if I would be doing what I was doing in terms of writing scripts, so I hadn’t read that script.

**John:** Exactly. Listen, Rashani. I think it’s great you got the script that you wanted to read, but also maybe you could share the wealth and just put that up someplace so people can read that script and no one else has to pay $20 to get it.

**Francesca:** Yeah, I’m with that too.

**John:** Whoever wrote Mona Lisa Smile, they’re not getting any of that $20.

**Francesca:** Exactly.

**John:** It’s not a legitimate thing that you’re paying somebody.

**Francesca:** Exactly. I couldn’t agree more.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Do you have something, Francesca, you want to recommend to our listeners?

**Francesca:** Yeah. If I deeply care about somebody, I always get them this book. It’s called Bluets by Maggie Nelson. It’s technically a poetry book. I feel like it’s more of a philosophy book. It meditates on the color blue. It’s really, really specifically from a woman’s point of view and unrelenting in sorrow and sadness and love and loss. I really feel like if anybody wants to get into the depths of how deep my sadness can go and how that’s actually then sort of liberating, I always get them Bluets to get some kind of a glimmer of what that feels like.

**John:** That sounds great. That’s great. Mine is a blog post I read this past week called A Unified Theory of Fucks by Mandy Brown. I’ll read the premise of it. She says, “You are born with so many fucks to give. However many you’ve got is all there is. They’re like eggs in that way. Some of us are born with quite a lot, some with less, but none of us knows how many we have. When we’re young, we go around giving a fuck about all kinds of things, blissfully unaware of our ever-dwindling supply, until one day we give the last fuck we’ve got. The invisible bag of fucks we’ve been carrying around all these years is irredeemably empty. We have no more fucks left to give.”

**Francesca:** That’s so great.

**John:** It’s a really good metaphor. She continues on to say that you can’t buy more fucks, but you can get fucks. People can give a fuck about you, and so you can collect fucks. It’s the importance of giving a fuck but also being willing to receive them when people are trying to give a fuck about you.

**Francesca:** I’m very into that.

**John:** It’s just a really smart philosophy and a smart way of framing that thing. Just give a fuck about things.

**Francesca:** I do. I give a fuck about things.

**John:** You clearly do. Absolute pleasure talking with you.

**Francesca:** You too. Thank you so much. I was so nervous, but this was actually really nice.

**John:** Yay. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. Reminder that our outros have some version of (sings). We’ve been getting some outros recently which are charming, but they’re not a Scriptnotes outro.

**Drew:** They’re full songs.

**John:** They’re full songs. We don’t need those. We want 30 seconds that feels like a clever variation on Scriptnotes.

**Drew:** Perfect.

**John:** Ask@johnaugust.com is also a place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today, or send some follow-up. You can 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 weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. 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 film schools and fellowships. Francesca, Mr. and Mrs. Smith is on Amazon Prime Video everywhere worldwide?

**Francesca:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** All episodes are out now, right?

**Francesca:** Yes, all episodes are out.

**John:** Should watch them and rejoice in the thing that you made.

**Francesca:** I would love that if they did.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Francesca:** Thank you so much.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** For a bonus segment, I would love to talk about film schools and fellowships and all the stuff you do before you get started in this career, because you went through CalArts. I think you’re the first person on our show who’s gone through CalArts. What did you take from that? What recommendations do you have for someone who’s considering film school, or should they do something else? You must be asked this question. What advice do you give people?

**Francesca:** CalArts I think was an incredible experience for me, but in ways that have nothing to do with what I do now for a living. I think CalArts was an amazing experience for me, because I think I met people who changed the way that I think.

For instance, James Benning is a professor there. James Benning makes these gorgeous long-form films. For instance, he made, for one example, this film called 20 Cigarettes, where he does these portrait pieces. I happen to be in one, but I fast forward during my part. It’s just a person starting a cigarette, from start to finish. It’s gorgeous. It says so much without giving anything away.

That affected my writing. But it was very costly. I don’t actually think it did anything in terms of moving me ahead in this career. Same with UCLA. I think what I got out of UCLA masters program was time to write scripts. This is no shade on either school. I think that they’re incredible. I think that they help other people. But I don’t actually think it impacted where I ended up if I had not had either one of those educations.

**John:** CalArts I think about as being just really an art school. Did you have other normal university classes? Did you have English and all of the other stuff, or it was just art the whole time?

**Francesca:** For instance, there was a math class that was called Math as Art. I remember we would have to come in. A friend of mine Patrick’s math problem was him saying in front of the room, “And on, and on, and on, and on.” He got a high pass. That sums up the answer to that question.

**John:** That’s incredible. I’m guessing you came from a pretty good educational background, so you didn’t necessarily need that full college experience. But for somebody who might benefit from that or benefit from the challenging medieval lit class, you weren’t going to get that at CalArts.

**Francesca:** No, you weren’t going to get that at CalArts. Actually, I went to Philadelphia Public Schools. I’m not sure how great my education was. I just was somebody who was a lover of books and knowledge and history on my own right. I think a lot of that just came from me. But I do think my biggest career education was watching films and watching television and watching my heroes, like you even, for instance. I think if you want to tell stories in this way, that’s the greatest way to learn and learn film history and things like that.

**John:** Going to UCLA for a specific graduate program, two years, three years? How long was that?

**Francesca:** Oh my gosh. My brain from the past years is scrambled.

**John:** You were a young child, so that explains it.

**Francesca:** Exactly, exactly. Technically, I believe it’s a two-year program.

**John:** Going into that, did you have samples to get into that? How do you get admitted to that program? What was your expectation going into it?

**Francesca:** You do have samples, and you have to apply, and you have to get letters of recommendation and go through all of that process. My expectation of that was, people think about it in terms of networking, I’m sure, which makes a lot of sense. You do meet people that way. I personally wanted to go to get a masters and hopefully get to write at least one script that was good enough to allow me to then teach. That was my angle was higher education.

**John:** As a fallback, you could always teach it while you were still writing.

**Francesca:** Exactly.

**John:** I have misgivings about sometimes graduate film school programs, but I think the least you were going to do is you were going to come out of there with some work finished. You had to come out of there with some samples. You’ll have to write a half hour. You’ll have to write a feature. You’ll have to get an experience writing different kinds of things.

**Francesca:** More than anything, you’re paying for the time and the discipline to get that done. I was fortunate enough that within my first year, I ended up getting cast into my first writers’ room. Then it was really about juggling writers’ rooms and finishing my masters at the same time.

**John:** And all the jealousy of your classmates.

**Francesca:** Yeah, and sometimes professors too, honestly. It happens. But it was important to my parents that I finish that, that I finished the education and got the paper, got the masters.

**John:** Any fellowships, any other programs along the way that you participated in? Were any of them useful?

**Francesca:** I did a Sundance Lab, which was really incredible, just because the community was really smart. I got to meet a lot of other really talented individuals. It changed my perspective on how to make things, just a little bit. Not entirely. I think any experience that makes you reflect on your own process and how to create something is worth your time.

**John:** I’ve worked with Sundance Labs a lot. This was a TV lab? A feature lab? What was it?

**Francesca:** This was a feature lab.

**John:** Were you up on the mountain doing all that?

**Francesca:** No, this was the one that was local. This was for actually that script Headbangers that I had workshopped there and I had written so many years before. It was interesting, because I almost felt like I had evolved from that, and I was still going back to it, which is really interesting. I did have one mentor. I won’t say who it is. But she had said something really funny to me. She said, “If you don’t change your script,” because I was saying I wanted to make it even more experimental and this and that. She said, “If you don’t change your script, I’m afraid that white people are really not going to like your movies.” I said to her, “That might be one of the coolest things anyone’s ever said to me.”

**John:** The Sundance model is really interesting. Basically, they’ll take filmmakers or TV writers and their scripts, and you’ll meet with a succession of established writers who are just talking through what it is you’re trying to do and how to help you do it. I always describe it as being, when I’m in that role as an advisor, I am just your friend with a pickup truck. I’m helping you move from where you were to where you want to go.

**Francesca:** That’s cool.

**John:** I’m not going to tell you how to set up your apartment.

**Francesca:** I like that.

**John:** I’m just going to help you get the couch through the door. That can be really, really useful.

**Francesca:** Definitely.

**John:** If a person has the opportunity to do Sundance Labs, I always say recommend them. But it doesn’t mean you take every note and just do every note. That’s just not how it’s going to work.

**Francesca:** I think that’s right. I do think out of all of the communities that this industry has, that one that is really supportive. I really do like Sundance.

**John:** They’re generally rooting for you. They have no other agenda…

**Francesca:** Absolutely.

**John:** … other than make the best thing you possibly can make.

**Francesca:** Completely.

**John:** Cool. Francesca, thanks again for this conversation.

**Francesca:** Thank you so much. Thank you.

Links:

* [Francesca Sloane](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4300986/) on [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/f__sloane/)
* [Mr. & Mrs. Smith](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CLRQGR5G?ref=DVM_US_DL_SL_GO_AOS_MAMS_mkw_sfphkCC9t-dc&mrntrk=pcrid_689516632965_slid__pgrid_156782128925_pgeo_9030930_x__adext__ptid_kwd-2265602445555) on Amazon Prime Video
* [ISPA: Inter-Species Phonetic Alphabet for Transcribing Animal Sounds](https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.03269) by Masato Hagiwara, Marius Miron and Jen-Yu Liu
* [Bluets by Maggie Nelson](https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/bluets)
* [A Unified Theory of F-cks by Mandy Brown](https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/unified-theory-of——)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* Craig Mazin on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@clmazin) and [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/clmazin/)
* John August on [Threads](https://www.threads.net/@johnaugust), [Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/johnaugust)
* [John on Mastodon](https://mastodon.art/@johnaugust)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Eric Pearson ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/631standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 630 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we welcome Celine Song, a playwright, screenwriter, and director, whose movie Past Lives is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay.

We will talk about that movie, but also getting staffed on a TV show, raising financing, making your first feature in two different countries. But before that, staffing on a TV show, deciding between film school versus playwriting school. We’ll answer some listener questions. It’s a great conversation. And in a bonus conversation for premium members, Celine and I discuss Zoom and other online performances, including her staging of The Seagull on Sims 4. But first, Drew, we have some follow-up. We have the best listeners in the world, and they came through this week.

Drew Marquardt: We had a lot of people write in about examples of the Tiffany problem, which we talked about last week.

John: The Tiffany problem, that’s where Tiffany is actually an old name, so people used to be called Tiffany, but if you use that name now, people think that just seems weird, a period film should not have a character named Tiffany.

Drew: There’s quite a few examples. Courtney wrote in, “As a birdwatcher, one Tiffany problem I know of is the call of a bald eagle. Most Americans associate a bald eagle’s call with soaring, almost echoing screech, not pretty per se, but definitely powerful and approaching majestic. Here’s an example. (bird screech) But that’s actually the sound of a red-tailed hawk. An accurate bald eagle sound is almost painfully high-pitched and typically kind of chippy, like a yapping dog.” (eagle call)

John: Wow. That is really, really different. We’ll put a link into the YouTube videos of those two, because when you see the bald eagle doing its thing, it’s like, that’s not a graceful way of making a sound.

Drew: No, not at all.

John: A perfect example of a Tiffany problem, because if you put in the real thing, people would laugh. It just doesn’t sound right. We associate the bald eagle sounding a particular way, even though it’s not the situation. Unless you’re going to call it out, I think you’d go with the wrong version. What else do we have for Tiffany problems?

Drew: Michael in Astoria writes, “My favorite reference for the Tiffany problem is Deadwood and its infamous use of profanity. When researching, David Milch discovered that while historic analogs for his character did in fact swear freely, they would use archaic profanity that is comical to modern ears, would’ve had all the characters sounding like Yosemite Sam if they’d insisted on historical accuracy. So rather than provoke unwanted laughter in the audience, he opted for modern profanity that was accurate to the spirit of how the curse words were intended, but which the characters would not have actually used.”

John: Again, a problem where historical accuracy and specificity could’ve worked against you, and so you made the choice to have everyone dropping F bombs all the time. I get it. It does change our perception of how people spoke in that time, but they just don’t have any other real, good Western examples of profanity, so it felt real to me.

Drew: Although now I’m curious what those weird swears were.

John: I want to hear what all those words were.

Drew: Kate writes, “I used to be a children’s book editor, and I once edited a book of short stories set during the First World War. One author wrote a story set at a girls’ school, and she included a scene in which one girl wrote a note to another reading, ‘See you at,’ like the at sign, ‘break.’ And I queried this use of the at symbol. And the author assured me that the at symbol had been in use since at least the 1500s. It was used that way in the early 20th century. I told her that didn’t matter; it would seem anachronistic to a reader anyway.”

John: I grew up knowing that that symbol meant at or that we used it to mean at, although I think it also could mean to or at for a quantity at a certain amount at a certain price. I remember seeing it on typewriters, but of course we didn’t really use it everyday use until there were email addresses and ultimately handles for things. I agree with Kate here. At feels strange historically. I think it could bum for some people, even though it’s accurate.

Drew: Phillip writes, “Recently, my mom mentioned rewatching her favorite film, The American President, and how it occurred to her how much paper the people in the White House are shown using. This is accurate to the time it was shot. But it was shocking to her how much digitization has changed office work.”

John: Yes, I think if you look at older things… I remember looking at broadcast news. They have to use these tapes. They’re literally carrying tapes around.

Drew: Oh my god.

John: It seems impossible. Older movies are going to have paper in them. We talked about all the kazoos in Maestro, which is basically like, yes, people would’ve been smoking a lot in that time, but it’s just distracting, because there’s just so much of it. This mention of The American President, I have to take a little sidebar to talk about, Rob Reiner was on Love It or Leave It, this other podcast I listen to, and was talking about how Aaron Sorkin’s script for The American President was like 350 pages. It was some crazy, crazy long script. Sorkin later apologized for the script being so long, but apparently, a lot of the stuff that got pulled out of the script for The American President became The West Wing. So maybe that’s an argument for writing long sometimes.

Drew: I love The American President. It’s nice and tight.

John: Nice and tight. It was not nice and tight to begin with. Examples of the Tiffany problem. What else do we have for follow-up?

Drew: We had some listeners write in about different foreign courts, because we were talking about Anatomy of a Fall. Anonymous writes in to say, “I’ll share what I know of a Russian courtroom, which will probably come as no surprise to anyone who’s read stories of people charged and quickly convicted in Russia.

“Back when adoptions there were allowed, you had to go to court to get yours approved. In our region, even with the foot-high stack of stamped, embossed, certified, and Apostille documents testifying to every aspect of your interest and ability to adopt and raise the child, there was still no guarantee you would get approved. And why? The room setup gives a clue.

“While the judge presides over the court from a familiar front-and-center raised platform, what’s completely freaky is that when you walk in, you see that the entire left of the room is taken up by a prison cell made up of heavy iron bars on all four sides and the top. This is where the defendant stands during the trial, though thankfully not prospective adoptive parents. We get hard, wooden benches.

“When I asked why, it was explained that contrary to our legal principles of innocent until proven guilty, in Russia when someone is charged, it’s assumed they’re guilty and you must prove your innocence from jail. I looked it up later, and legally, this is in fact not true. But as they say in Sleepless in Seattle, it sure feels and looks true.”

John: This is an example of just the courtroom setup. Imagine that there was a scene taking place in a Russian courtroom. If, in the script, you did not actually describe what things are like, we would default to our American expectations of a courtroom, and they would be wrong. It would be a very different feel from what we actually would see in the film. This feels crucial information for a screenwriter to know if you’re going with this kind of scene. Similarly, in Anatomy of a Fall, if you didn’t know what that French courtroom was set up like and would just default to an American thing, you would be just incredibly wrong.

Drew: David in Australia writes, “I want to share my experience sitting on a jury in Australia. The biggest disappointment for me was that the jury was removed from the court any time there were matters of law to discuss. Whenever a lawyer would overstep or they needed to discuss precedent in certain areas of the case, the jury wasn’t privy to this information. The public galley could stay and listen during these moments, but the Australian system seems to think that this would taint the jurors. I guess it’s probably better than having a judge tell the jury, ‘Disregard everything you just heard,’ because let’s be honest, no one’s disregarding that stuff.”

John: I’ve been on one jury trial, and there were situations where I felt like the matters of law went to the judge’s chamber, so rather than us leaving, the judge and the counsel leaves to talk in his chamber. But yeah, it again is a structural thing. You do need to know what the differences are in a different country, because otherwise you could get this wrong in a way that would hurt your story. Let’s wrap up with, I see Lewant has a thing from the Netherlands.

Drew: To your point about defaulting to the American style, Lewant says, “A one-panel comic from a Dutch newspaper says, ‘Fulk and Zuk spend most of their student days watching TV.’ And this judge says, ‘Will you please stop referring to the stenographer as members of the jury?’ The joke is that the Dutch court system does not have a jury system, yet most of us personally witness it through U.S. media.”

John: Exactly. If you’re in one of these countries, and you’re expecting a jury trial, and there is no jury, that is very different. Again, if you’re writing a scene that is taking place in a foreign courtroom, don’t rely on your American expectations of how things are supposed to work, because it could be very, very wrong. Drew, thank you for the follow-up.

Now, let’s welcome on our guest. Celine Song is a playwright, screenwriter, and director, whose movie Past Lives is Oscar-nominated for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Celine, welcome.

Celine Song: Thank you. Hi, hi. So happy to be here.

John: We’re so happy to have you here. I really want to talk to you, of all the folks out there on awards season, because I think your experience feels probably the most relevant to a lot of our listeners, who are aspiring filmmakers, because not only is this your first feature, but you’ve made it internationally. It’s complicated between two countries. It’s a very personal story that you could’ve done as a book or as a play, but to do it as a movie felt like the right choice.

We had Lulu Wang on a couple years ago to talk about The Farewell. It felt like she was telling a story that only she could direct, and so same like you only would make sense for you to direct this. It just felt so relevant to a lot of our listeners.

I’m so excited to talk to you about not just your movie, but also the process of getting to the point where you could make that movie. Could we start back at the beginning? What is your experience or history with storytelling and with filmmaking? Where did that start for you?

Celine: To me, I went to grad school for playwriting. Then I stayed in playwriting. I was a playwright for 10 years, including my years in grad school. I was doing a lot of plays in New York City, off-Broadway. I wrote on a TV show as a staff writer, Wheel of Time. That was the first for-screen writing that I’ve done. I think it really was writing the script for Past Lives, and it really was the script that did the work of getting itself made. But I’ve been a dramatist for a lot longer. I feel like that would be the right word for it. I’ve been a dramatic storyteller.

John: Can we wind all the way back though? Because I’m really curious when you were aware of stories being told on screen. What got you to the point of, “Oh.” Because before you decided, “I’m going to go to school to learn this,” you had to think, “This is a thing that’s interesting to me.” What are those original sparks? Were there things you were seeing? Were there plays you were seeing? How did it all start?

Celine: I think when I was very young – I was like seven – I wrote a poem about a spider eating a butterfly. The poem was about how it is sad that the spider is eating the butterfly, and the butterfly is getting eaten, but what can you do about it? Because spider is really hungry. Spider has to eat. I think that really is my first foray into writing really more than anything. I really do think about that as my first piece of work, because I think that there’s something about that, what that poem is about, that I think lives in me pretty fundamentally. For example, there not ever being any villains.

John: I want to get into that with Past Lives, because it’s a story without villains. I think you said in an interview the only villains are time and circumstance. It’s fate that’s made this thing not be possible in a certain way.

Celine: Time and space.

John: Of course, your characters are able to overcome some of that because of the wonders of technology and Skype, but there’s limits to how much that can happen. But still staying on your trajectory there, you’ve written a poem. You can write a story with characters. But why go into playwriting, why go into filmmaking ultimately, rather than becoming a poet or a novelist? What was the trajectory there? At this point, were you in Korea when you were writing that story? Had you already come over to Canada? What was your history there?

Celine: I wrote the poem in Korea, in Korean. Then when I turned, I think, 13 is when I moved to Canada. I was ESL, so I was learning English. I think that was a main thing that I was doing, and keeping up with schoolwork while being ESL. Eventually though, I took Latin in school, and I became a part of Classics Club.

In Ontario, where I grew up, Ontario, Canada, there is a classics conference. There they actually have a play competition, where you write a play and you get to put it on. There’s also a filmmaking competition, both of which I wrote and directed something for. Mind you, I was still a little ESL. But I wrote a movie and directed it, and then I wrote a play and directed it. This was high school. I think that those were some of the ways that I was just doing it sometimes, doing it any opportunity I could get.

But when I went to college, I went to university for psychology, and I minored in philosophy. I think that for a while there, I thought that I was going to be a psychologist. But I never made it, because in my final year as a psychology student, I wrote two plays for the short play festival that was happening at my university. I was like, “I think I just have to write fictional things, write dramatic things.” Then I think that after that, I started applying to grad school, and I decided to go to school for theater.

John: We have a lot of listeners who are ESL, who either they’re living in the States but grew up ESL, or they’re living internationally and they’re debating between writing in their own native language and writing in English. At what point were you deciding, “I’m going to focus on English,” or, “I’m going to use the two of them.” At what point did you feel like the artistic work needed to incorporate both or one thing? What was your process there?

Celine: I think that to me, it really has to do with who the audience is. I think that if I am making something for a Korean-speaking audience, then I would probably write it in Korean. But I think because my audience that I had moved to New York City to be a part of the community for is an English-speaking audience, so I was writing in English. I think it was very much about, how do I tell the story in a way that the audience is going to come meet it? Who’s going to fill the seats? I think that really was the impetus behind it.

I think something that is very difficult about being ESL is actually less the not knowing English of it, but the lack of confidence, or the way that it is harder to hold onto the confidence, especially as a writer. To be a professional writer, the professional writer means that you are the expert, you’re the chosen expert, or you’re the expert in a community for communication and being able to use language and being able to experiment with language, all of those things.

The ESL, it is, of course, a bit of a chip on your shoulder about, “Yeah, but it’s not my native language, so how good can I be?” That’s of course something that is coming from everyone around you, who when they find out that you’re ESL – or in my situation, I have a light accent for being an immigrant – and all of those things, there is a way in which you are questioned or underestimated by people who English is a native language. But some of that, I think that of course becomes a little bit internalized. So you walk around feeling like, “If I’m ESL, how good can I be?”

But I think that something that really shifted that for me and really gave me such confidence is that, actually, I have a handle on two languages. When I think about the language of English, being able to look at it objectively or think about it objectively or from the outsider perspective, even a little bit, gives me actually more control. It actually gives me a deeper understanding of how English as a language works.

There was a really amazing feeling that I had working on a play where I was like, actually, I am in the engine of the English language, because it didn’t come naturally to me. I didn’t just show up and then English was there for me. I actually had to learn the parts of it. In that way, I can be better at it than a native speaker.

In the meantime, I also have the context of an entirely different language that works completely differently structurally, that gives me the depths of knowledge around language, generally, that it makes me actually a better mechanic in general of any kind of language too. Also, I know what the alternative is. I’m like, “There isn’t a word for it in English, and there is a word for it in Korean.”

What an amazing thing that just the way that I think about the world, the way that I think about character, story, can be just a little bit bigger, because I speak more than one language. I think that that was such a big turning point for my life as ESL. I hope that moment and that feeling of confidence comes to all your listeners who are ESL as well.

John: What I hear you saying is to avoid that tendency to apologize or to step back from the fact that you’re not a native speaker and lean into the fact that because you had to learn it, you actually recognize some things about the language, and you recognize what’s beyond the edges of what’s possible in normal English.

Celine: Yeah, and also specificity. When I’m choosing a word, I can be more specific with it, because it’s not how I have always thought about that word. I can be really specific with it.

John: I grew up in English, but then I had Spanish very early on. Spanish was my first process of learning a language and actually learning, oh, there are verbs, there are nouns, there are adjectives. I actually had to learn all this structural stuff that comes with the language. Getting that in the third grade was really early for me, but it was incredibly helpful to recognize, oh, we must have these same things in English and probably every other language too, and just give you a systematic sense of like, languages will do very different things, but they’ll still have the same concepts behind how they are organizing themselves. It made me just more curious about English, because I could see where the roots of things were. You saw how things grew together and grew apart over time.

Celine: Exactly, yeah.

John: Now, I want to talk to you about writing in English and writing in Korean, because obviously in Past Lives, characters can speak Korean, and we will subtitle it, which is great, because that’s a convention of film is that we can subtitle things. But if you’re doing a play work with Korean characters, subtitling is much more difficult. I haven’t seen your play Endlings, but in that play, are the characters speaking English and speaking Korean? How do you approach that for the stage?

Celine: They speak English. I think that something that I really found is the way that Past Lives is a script that’s written is bilingually. I would write what I wanted the character to say in Korean, and underneath, I would translate it in the way that I saw the subtitles. And of course, I knew that the subtitles is a part of the story.

For example, there’s a scene in the film where the character Hae Sung, who only speaks Korean, the character Arthur, who only speaks English, they meet each other for the very first time. If this movie was about a traditional love triangle, they would start being angry with each other. Because this is an unconventional love triangle, what happens is that Hae Sung and Arthur, they look at each other, and then the first thing that they do is Arthur says hello in Korean, in bad Korean, and Hae Sung says hello in English to Arthur, and in bad English. I

n that way, you’re seeing that these two characters are trying to speak in the other person’s language, and really choosing to speak in a language that is not comfortable for themselves. I think in that way, the movie is fundamentally a bilingual story. It’s actually about bilingualism. It’s about the way that the main character, Nora, holds two parts of herself that are in different languages and different cultures. I think in that way, I knew it needed to be written bilingually, and I am bilingual myself, so that is what I wanted to do.

Then when it came to subtitling the film, I wanted the subtitles to be a part of the picture. It’s part of the visual language of it. When the subtitles show up or the subtitles don’t was something that I wanted to be really specific about, because some part of the language has to remain a mystery, because it is about the mystery of not speaking the other person’s language or not speaking the language of the person that you’re in a marriage with, even. It had to work that way.

John: Obviously, in the childhood sections that are set in Korea, or if you’re with Hae Sung and his friends who are speaking Korean, it’s more conventionally subtitled. You’ve written English lines. You know exactly what they need to be. But it feels more traditional in the New York sections, where there are characters who wouldn’t be able to speak with each other. You’ve been much more cinematic in terms of recognizing the communication gaps between them.

Celine: Of course. Of course, some of the translation is not meant for direct accuracy. It is sometimes rewritten to express the feeling that I need it to be. I think that sometimes it’s like, the metaphor, the poetry of it in English is not going to translate to Korean and vice versa. I think that those are the things that I wanted to be deep in it with, because that’s really what the script was about, and it’s what the movie’s about.

John: Now, before you could go off and make this movie, you actually had another credit. You’re working on Wheel of Time, the Amazon series. I’m really curious, what else were you writing that got you staffed on Wheel of Time? That was your first staffing job. Could you talk us through that? Because a lot of our listeners are probably thinking about, it seems impossible to be staffed on an American show like that. What was your process getting there?

Celine: I think I just wrote a pilot. I wrote a pilot as a spec pilot. It was about professional poker players. It was just there as a sample. It was a traditional three-act with commercial breaks, kind of like a hardcore TV pilot. But the thing is, I know that this is something the showrunner of Wheel of Time, Rafe, and I talked about as the reason why Rafe hired me, which is that Rafe doesn’t play poker, but when he read my pilot, he understood poker, if not the game itself, but what poker is at its heart. Even if you don’t know the mechanic of poker, you understood why poker is fun.

That is a skillset as a writer that he was looking for, because of course, Wheel of Time is a very intricate and deep, with magical systems, fantasy show. You need a writer who is able to translate just a wall of meaning kind of story and to find something that even somebody who’s not familiar with the world can love. I think that that’s why he loved the pilot and that’s why he hired me for it. Also, I am a TV writer who had read Wheel of Time before. I think that was another part that I think was really great.

John: I realize I’m falling into a trap that so often happens in interviews where you assume that every step was deliberate and planned, so that you wrote this pilot so you could get staffed on Wheel of Time. That wouldn’t be the case at all. You’ve gone and got your degree in playwriting, right, as a graduate degree?

Celine: Mm-hmm.

John: But what were those years in between? What were you trying to do that caused you to make the choices you did, to write the plays you did, to write this as a pilot? When did you get your first representation? What was that process like? Because it wasn’t overnight.

Celine: No, of course not. I think that if it is overnight, I think that you pay for it being overnight somewhere else in your career. Does that make sense?

John: Yeah.

Celine: I think that’s a very real thing. But it was certainly not overnight. I graduated from my MFA program for playwriting, and then I didn’t have representation. For many years, I think I really didn’t have anything except for my plays that were getting done in smaller spaces or off-off-Broadway, or if you’re lucky, a little bit of something at off-Broadway. So much of it is about just walking around with your play and submitting your play and hanging out with other playwrights and complaining about how no one’s doing our play. I think so much of it is about working in theater and living in theater.

John: Were you teaching? What else were you doing? What other jobs were you-

Celine: I would have a day job, or it would just be like getting by on things. I had a play that was getting done in Omaha, that got done in Chicago. Sometimes those checks would come in, and that would be really great. But it’s a check for like $500, which at the time was like, “Okay, now I can pay rent.” But it is like that.

I think that in 2017 – I’d been out of school for, I guess at that point, three years – is when I got my agent. I got my agent through, there’s this program at the public theater called Emerging Writers Group. Only people without agents can apply to that program. I went there, and at the end of the two-year program, they set you up on a few dates with agents. One of the agents that I went on a date with is my theater agent now as well. He’s at CAA. Of course, because of the nature of the agent that CAA is, they have many other departments besides theater.

I met my theater agent, and then he helped me get a team together. Then I told them that I would like to staff on something or something. Meanwhile, I was talking to my current film agent. I was telling her about, I’ve been thinking about this movie, Past Lives. I think it’s happening a little bit like that. It really is the work of my agents, who both got me the staff writing gig for Wheel of Time, because they’re the ones who put my poker pilot on Rafe’s desk.

John: Before we jump on to getting Past Lives made, just a moment on Wheel of Time, because that would be a situation where you’re writing in a room. You have a bunch of other writers around you. In what ways was it similar or different to what your experience was as a playwright? Because you were apparently in a playwrights community, so you had some folks around you, but this had to have been different.

Celine: Oh, completely different. But also, I think that the thing that carries us through all of it, through every medium, is our understanding and authorship of characters, story, what we need when it comes to performance. Everything that we know about what is going to work about the script is going to be the thing that carries us through all of it: story and character. That’s it. In that way, it’s not different, because all day in a writers’ room, we’re just talking about story and character. That’s what I was doing in theater. That’s what I was doing on the set of Past Lives too.

The way that it is different is that – especially for a show like Wheel of Time, where the fans of the books themselves is the audience. They’re the primary audience. They’re the ones that we are showing up for – it’s an amazing giving kind of a process. I found it to be a very giving process, where it’s like, “I would like it to be like this.” It’s like, no, no, no, these characters exist. These characters are also dealing with already existing beyond my own personal imagination. They exist in the audience’s imagination, and then of course it all begins with the imagination of the book itself. I think that some of it is about serving the characters or serving the story, which is not necessarily how I think about writing a play, for example.

I think that’s part of it, and also working with other writers on story and character. There’s always something to learn from any writer. My whole writers’ room, I learned so much from every single writer that I worked with there, because the way that I think about story is going to be different than the way they think about story. We may go my way or their way, but either way, it’s all going to be this amazing learning process of me learning how she thinks about the story this way and I think about the story this way. What an amazing thing that there is a different way to think about the same story. I think in that way, I learned so much from it. I don’t know. It was amazing.

John: Now, with Past Lives, you’ve now written a script. You have shown it to your reps. You’re talking about, “I think this is a movie I want to get made.” From those initial conversations, was it, “This is a thing I’ve written for myself to direct.” Was that always part of the framing of it?

Celine: I think that I really wanted to direct, and I really wanted them to see me as the director for it. But I think that it’s a script being written bilingually, and myself being bilingual, or it being such a personal story that is inspired by an autobiographical moment, all of these things were great reasons for them to let me be the director. I think that I was just also making an argument with the script itself, because the script was very much a pitch document for how I imagined this movie to get made. It wasn’t just a script for its own sake. It was very much a description of what I imagined the movie to be. I think these were all things that I was stacking up so that they would really seriously consider letting me direct it. Of course, when I got to, I was so happy.

John: It’s hard to imagine someone reading the script and then meeting you, and it’s like, “Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” or, “She doesn’t know what this is.” Clearly, it was very close to your personal experience. Let’s talk about the process of going out and trying to find producers, trying to find money, what that was like. You have this script, but you also have yourself. Was there a reel? Was there anything else you were showing to convince people this is the vision for the movie?

Celine: There was no reel. There was no deck. It really was just a script. I think it was a script and a conversation. I think that’s the truth of it, because my studio, A24, they read the script, and they felt the things that the audiences are feeling now about the movie at the end. They cried for the same reasons that the audiences are crying about Past Lives now. I think that they were moved by it genuinely. Then it wasn’t a long process from going from there to getting the movie green-lit.

John: To bring the movie into A24, was there a producer? Was Killer Films already attached to it, or did that come later on? Was it CAA who was taking it to A24, or was there other producers brought on first?

Celine: CAA’s bringing it to A24 first, because I always knew that, especially if I wanted to direct it, they’re the ones who take the risk.

John: That felt like the right studio for it, for sure.

Celine: They’re the right studio, because they’re the ones who take the risk on first-time filmmakers. They’ll just go for it that way. I think that we always knew that we wanted to end up there. I feel like that’s one of the first conversations. I feel like when we were there, when I’m talking to them, I think that so much of it is about instilling confidence in them that I can do it.

Besides that, the thing that really opened the door, and the thing I think that, especially because this is a podcast about writing, I feel like something I want to for sure say is that the script is the thing that bursts through every door for me. This movie was going to get made because of the script, and that’s it. I didn’t have to tell them what I could do by making a reel or a short film or anything. Those things were not necessary, because the script was a movie that they wanted to make.

Then from there, even beyond that, from the producers to department heads, every single person who worked in the movie, the thing they were coming to make this movie with me for is not me or my reel, because they’re coming to this project because of the script. Usually, I could tell who was right for the project by how they felt about the script, because of course, when I was talking to my production designer, I knew she was the right person right away, because we just started talking to each other about the script. I knew that this was the right person, because I knew that she understood the script.

It’s an amazing way to also, in a way, learn if this is the right person for the project, which is, did they understand the script? Did they feel the script? Did they feel connected to the script? If they did, they were going to work on the movie. The script was the center of gravity. All I had to do was to remember that even when I didn’t know how to make the movie, because my first movie, and I don’t know how to read a call sheet, even then, I just knew that as long as I hold the key to the script, as long as I’m the expert on the script that I wrote, I’m the ultimate authority on the project.

John: A thing we’ve talked about on the podcast a lot is that the script has to serve so many functions these days. Christopher Nolan was actually on the podcast recently talking about the same thing, which is that even at his level, the script is still the sales document. It’s not just the blueprint, but it’s also embodying the feeling of what this movie’s going to feel like. And that is not only getting the studio involved – A24 in your case – but also all your collaborators, just making sure that they recognize how they can fit into this vision of what you’re trying to do.

When we were meeting with crew for Big Fish or for Charlie’s Angels, those are very different scripts, but do they connect to the vision of it? Because if they don’t connect to the vision of it, they’re not going to be the right person for it. If they don’t get the style, the feel of it, they’re not going to be the right fit, and that’s okay.

Celine: Of course.

John: It’s recognizing that some relationships are meant to work in that thing, and some relationships aren’t. Sometimes you find issues where a person is fantastic; they’re just not the right person for this specific role, this specific part in a production. Sometimes longtime collaborators will split up on a thing, because it’s just not the right fit for both of them.

Celine: I think that’s right about it being the sales document, but I also think about it as the first line of defense too, as in what the project is and how well it’s going to go or what’s going to work about it is going to be all in there. Part of the vision for a thing is coming out of that.

The vision for it, it’s like, I can make as many mood boards as I want. If the story and character and dialog, what the performance needs to be, if those things are not there, there’s no amount of mood boarding that’s going to get any director through anything. I feel like a part of the reason I know that is because I’ve been a writer for the longest part of my life. I also know that so much of it is coming from, that’s the first step towards the vision for it. It is going to completely dictate the vision for it, especially if I am the one who’s directing it. I think you’re right; it also is about collaborators. Maybe it’s just not right for them to work on it, even though they are longtime collaborators and all of that.

But I also think that it’s like, the director is the person who is the passionate core of the whole thing, the writer director, because the script is the center of gravity. And then, of course, all around it, part of how it should work is that the fire that you have, the fire that the script communicates – because that’s how it is. I know that there’s a fire in me that I’m communicating through the script. When they read the script, when they encounter the script, the people who might work on the movie, either it’s going to set them on fire, or they’re not going to understand why it is on fire. Then what you’re hoping for is everybody showing up burning to make this make this movie with you. I think in that way the document has to be damn flammable.

John: Exactly. Now, Celine, when you wrote this script though, this flammable script, you had not been through the process of casting and location scouting and directing and editing, all that stuff. You’ve now gone through all this process. As you’re looking at the writing you’re doing now and the writing going forward, how much do you think the experience of having been through this will influence the words on the page and the script you’re writing going forward?

Celine: Completely. Everything that one does is built on the things that one has done before. I think in that way, without question. I do think that there are parts of going through the whole process that I had done before. For example, casting, I had done before, because I was in theater.

Editing, I realized, I had done before, because editing is such a fundamental part of writing. Editing is something that is happening all the time. Of course, in the editing of a film, you’re also editing it visually on top of it just being text or it just being the way that a performance is going. It’s a funny thing, because those parts, I had no fear or problem around, because this is a thing that I knew how to do.

Editing I knew how to do and casting I knew how to do. Being on set, I did not know how to do. Location scouting, some parts of it, I know what it is, because at the very least, I knew when it wasn’t right, and I knew when it was right. In that way I knew. But now, when I go on location scout, will I actually be able to look at it through the eyes of someone who actually has to go and shoot it? Absolutely. There are parts of prep that I think I just feel so much more equipped for because of it. The writing of it, of course, has always been the way it’s always been. The writing of it is the same.

I do think that I am more efficient though in my second script, my script after Past Lives, because I think that I can already imagine myself sitting in the edit and being like, “Did I need to shoot that scene?” What’s amazing is now that I know what kind of resources are put into shooting a scene, it means in the case of our film, which is, of course, shot in New York, it’s about parking 20 trucks in New York City and bringing hundreds of people around New York City. The work of that, the pain of that, the effort of that, the collective, beautiful effort, the stakes that are involved in shooting a scene I think really does inform the way that I write now, as in when I write a scene, it’s always like, “Is this absolutely the scene that has to be in the film?” The answer has to always be yes, because otherwise, you’re going to be sitting in the editing, it’s like, “Look at the half a million dollars just-”

John: Burning there, yeah.

Celine: “… on the editing room floor.”

John: I made a bunch of movies before I directed my first one. I knew a lot about production and post-production and how it all fit together and worked. But by the time I was writing my first thing that I’m going to direct, I could understand what the constraints were and use those constraints in a really helpful way, to recognize, okay, these locations are going to be onerous unless I make decisions that makes it much more feasible to shoot in these locations.

Recognizing what’s hard and what’s easy in production can really help you out when it comes to making the choices in the script. That’s why we always, on this podcast, encourage people to crew up on a film, experiment, just go out there and learn how actual things get made, because it will help you figure out, in your own writing, how to prioritize if stuff is actually going to work and not get so stuck on things that may end up on the cutting room floor.

Celine: Yeah, totally.

John: We have two listener questions I think you would be a perfect person to help out with here. Drew, can you help us out?

Drew: Nikolai in Denmark writes, “I would love nothing more than to find a writing job in Los Angeles. However, I’m currently an undergraduate student studying literature in Copenhagen, and there’s 5,000 miles and two years of school before even buying a plane ticket to LA is feasible. I was wondering if you think going to a top screenwriting program in LA could be a path towards finding a job, any job, right out of college and starting a career that way.”

Celine: I think that the moving to LA of it feels pretty necessary if you want to make movies in LA. My favorite part of moving to New York City to go to school in New York is also finding the community there, because I didn’t have a community at all in New York City. When I got to go there, I got to meet my classmates, which was a built-in community that comes with the school. They themselves had communities of their own that they could share with me. In that way, I could walk into New York City with the community built in, and one that is expanding. In that way, it was a really rewarding process.

The thing that I don’t think that a MFA program necessarily does for you is make you a better writer, because I think that you walk in as a writer you are, and then you become a better writer by writing a lot in a low-stakes way, which is something amazing about these writing programs. What’s amazing is that you can keep writing and sharing it with peers and keep failing and being bad and all of those things, without there being any professional stakes or any kind of financial stakes, except for, of course, the tuition fee. That’s a stake. But as long as that’s figured out, I think you are able to fail outside of the view of anybody who is in the industry or anything for a really long time. I think through that, you become a better writer.

Of course, one can find mentorship in the professors, who have gone through the industry and the life as an artist for far longer than you have, or far deeper than you have, at least. They’re able to provide such mentorship or a sense of how to navigate certain things. These are some of the things that really work about it.

Now, if you think that you’re going to move to LA and go to school there and then you’re going to have a career outside of it when you come out of it, I think, unfortunately, that is not a guarantee, to say the least. You still got to do it yourself. Every single part of this is something that you have to do yourself. No one else can do it for you, not even the grad school program that you’re paying a lot of money to go to.

John: Celine, you and I both have MFAs. No one has ever asked to see our MFA.

Celine: Oh my god. Why would they? I wouldn’t ask to see my MFA.

John: A huge plus one on everything you said. I think it’s such good advice, that you’re going to find a community and some mentorship, and those are all good things about a film program. The downside, of course, is the cost. What is probably useful for Nikolai to be thinking about is that getting into one of these programs is a way to get his visa and get him to the U.S. and get him here for two years. That’s worth a lot, so that’s really a lot of what you’re going to be spending your money on.

If you decide to do it, Nikolai, I would just say make sure you’re really approaching this as this is your mission, this is your job. You’re coming here to do a thing, because you’re only going to get out of one of these programs as much as you put in. Really be looking at it like, “I’m full speed going ahead.” If you don’t think you’re quite ready for it right after undergrad, then take a year, just grow up a little bit, so that way you would actually come to a program, you’re ready to kick ass in it. Drew, another question from Jacob here.

Drew: Jacob writes, “My writing partner and I just finished writing the pilot for a comedy show we’re developing. We’ve begun inviting our writer and actor friends to join us for a table read, so that we can hear our script out loud and hopefully get some honest feedback. My writing partner and I are in disagreement. Do we share the script ahead of time for our writer and actor friends, or do we have them read it blind?”

John: Celine, what’s your instinct on table reads? Because you probably do this in theater as well.

Celine: Theater is just all table reads. Theater is just reading after reading after reading. I actually have trouble really seeing the script that I’ve written, whether it’s a play or a screenplay, unless I’ve heard it out loud in a little room full of my friends.

My answer to this question is I think that they should read it blind, as though they are your audience, because how good the performance is in the reading is not helpful. In fact, I really don’t personally ever invite actors to the reading of my first draft, because actors can make the script sound a lot better than it is. We love actors, and we rely on them so much, but I think sometimes what happens is the actors are also auditioning for the role when they’re reading it. Sometimes that’s undue pressure on the script.

I think the performance part of it is not necessarily valuable for a script, because what you would need from that reading is objectivity. What you need from that reading is the way that the story and the writing itself is hitting the first very small group of audience. I usually invite fellow writers or people who are not in the industry or something, but are able to read on sight.

I’m sure you can go through your list of friends, and you can find a funny list there. But I think it’s usually somebody whose main job is not being an actor and somebody who’s able to read on sight and is able to be clear in their reading, but does not have high stakes when they show up, and will talk to you, like a very first audience member, and who’s not going to be weird or mean about anything, who’s not going to be strange about it, but who’s going to be a wonderful vibe on top of everything. I think that once you find some of those people, I think they’re the folks who have to read it.

But I don’t think you should show it in advance, because you just want to see the way that the script is hitting them live, because that’s where you’re going to learn if the script is working. If the joke doesn’t hit, you don’t want to wonder if the reason why the joke didn’t hit is because they already read the joke and they already laughed about it. You want to see if the joke actually isn’t hitting the audience or that it is actually hitting the audience.

John: Mike Birbiglia, when he is doing one of his movies, he will bring over a group of friends, and with pizza. I think he’s very deliberately, like what you say, lowering the stakes. No one is auditioning for a part. They’re just reading through the script and getting a sense of does this feel like it’s working. They can have constructive conversations. Agreed, Celine; if you bring an actress to do that, they can sell something that doesn’t really quite work. There’s that feeling that they’re auditioning for stuff, and that can just be really tough, so I think really smart advice here.

It’s time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend something to our audience that they should check out, something useful or fun. Mine is something I just find myself using all the time. I don’t think I’ve talked about it on the podcast before. It’s called Shottr. It’s an app for the Macintosh which basically just takes screenshots.

So often, there’s something on your screen that you want to take a shot of and send to somebody or remember. You have the built-in screenshotting stuff in the Mac, but then it just saves it as some randomly named file. This is an app that you hit the keyboard command, take your little screenshot, and then you can just do stuff with it. You can mark it up. You can annotate it. You can put little arrows, like, “This is the problem.” It just makes life so much easier and handier. A quick little utility. I think it’s five bucks. Called Shottr. It’s S-H-O-T-T-R dot-CC is the URL for it. Check it out if you’re on Macintosh and you take some screenshots. Celine, do you have anything to recommend?

Celine: Yes. Baldur’s Gate 3. That’s what I recommend.

John: Oh my god, it’s so amazing. We talk about it on the podcast all the time. Tell us, Celine, who are you playing as your hero, and what’s your experience in it?

Celine: I am a custom character. Her name is Faunta. Part of it is that I just treat it as a story mode dating sim a little bit.

John: 100 percent, because you’re trying to connect with all the different characters in the game.

Celine: Exactly. I think you can play it however you want. It’s one of the most in-depth storytelling, I don’t even know what to call it, storytelling thing that I’ve ever experienced.

John: Isn’t it just so well written? I’m flabbergasted how well it’s put together.

Celine: It’s beautifully written. I’m fully invested in the characters. I’m fully invested in the story. Of course it has so many things that are usually just fantasy things, like the magic. It’s because it’s so foundational to the fantasy genre, the Dungeons and Dragons of it anyway. I think that those things are all there, but I think even beyond that, I just feel so immersed in it. I really do think that these characters are living and walking around in that way. I don’t know. I’m just so moved by it. I’m obsessed with it. I play it all the time.

I think that as a storytelling thing, I’m just, you’re right, flabbergasted. I’m just totally blown away by how good it is, and how I’ll just get into a story, and I’ll be so in it, and it’ll be so complex. The characters are all responding to it in an unbelievably sophisticated way.

John: Then to recognize how many branching decisions they had to plan for, because is that character even still alive at this point? Has Astarion ever met this character? It’s wild.

Celine: Of course. The consequence is real. There are real consequences to the story. It’s not like, however you play, you’re going to all end up here. No, you may not end up there. You may have a completely different situation. Now, you cannot deal with this character that way anymore because of what you’ve done last chapter. I don’t know. I’m just so into it. My TikTok algorithm is all Baldur’s Gate right now. Anyway, it’s so good.

John: The YouTube algorithm keeps sending me videos of like, here’s the interactions you missed or when Minthara becomes a zombie. It’s all the different wild things that could happen because of choices character make.

Celine: Of course.

John: Just that sense of agency that it gives you as the protagonist, whatever your hero is in it is just really remarkable.

Celine: It’s really remarkable, yeah.

John: Basically, we have a podcast now where we talk about how good Baldur’s Gate 3 is, but it’s true. It’s really, really good.

Celine: It’s true. It is really, really good. Game of the year.

John: What’s also really, really good is Past Lives, your film. Congratulations on it. Congratulations on your nominations. It’s such a delight to see. I remember my first experience with Past Lives was I was on a long international flight, and the woman next to me was watching Past Lives. I wasn’t even sure what it was. I could see Greta Lee and just some movie there. She must’ve watched it like three times on the flight. I’m like, why are you watching this movie again and again and again? I waited and watched it in a proper non-airplane environment. But it really is so well done, so congratulations on everything you’ve achieved so far.

Celine: Thank you so much.

John: I can’t wait to see what you do next.

Celine: Thank you. It’s in movie theaters again.

John: That’s exciting.

Celine: So amazing.

John: People can see it.

Celine: So exciting.

John: That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Mansy. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You’ll find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies. 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 The Seagull staged in Sims 4. Celine Song, absolute pleasure having you on the show.

Celine: Thanks for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

John: When I saw this in your bio, I knew I had to talk to you about this. You staged a version of The Seagull, the classic play, but you staged it inside Sims 4 and streamed it on Twitch; is that right?

Celine: Mm-hmm.

John: Talk to us about your impetus behind doing that. I also would just love to talk about this notion of theater kind of things that happen online. Tell us about how this came to be.

Celine: It was just really during COVID. The theater that I had a play, Endlings, done at, because of COVID, had shut down prematurely. We had two weeks of previews, we had opening night and then we got to do one more performance, and then the play got shut down. I was, of course, so heartbroken.

Then I think the theater was, because it is so much about people gathering and it’s about live performance, that I think there were questions about what theater community can be doing at this moment to make theater. I think that New York Theater Workshop, which is the theater that did Endlings, they asked me if I want to do anything in the virtual space, whether a Zoom play or whatever. They were like, “Whatever you want to do, we’ll do it. We’ll do a production of it, whatever it may be.”

I really just thought at that moment, it’s like, “I’ve been watching a lot of live performance, actually,” and a lot of live performances in the video game streaming world, where all of these characters and personalities, they were streaming video games. It’s a funny durational performance in a way, because they’re streaming for like six hours playing Overwatch or something. I was watching a lot of it. In fact, there is all the joys of a live performance in that. There’s something about it where there’s the spontaneity in it. There is a bit of like, we know what we’re going to do, but it also is a little bit unknown, we don’t actually know what’s going to happen, feeling of it.

I think that at that moment, I was like, “What if I was to stage a play in a video game?” Then a thought I had was, because The Sims is, I’ve always felt, so Chekhovian, because The Sims is about life as it is, and the difficulty of life as it is, and the pain of living as it is. Those are things that are fundamental to a Chekhov play. My favorite Chekhov play is The Seagull. It really was that the New York Theater Workshop called me, and then I think on that phone call I came up with the idea. I was like, “What if I stage a play in The Sims? It should be a Chekhov play, maybe The Seagull.” I think that’s really the process for it.

Then of course, what I really loved is that when I was doing the play, the two completely different communities came together. Then of course, there was community that had a relationship to both sides, which is the people who are theater goers, who never watch video game streaming, who don’t have a relationship to video games, and video game players and video game stream watchers, who don’t actually know anything about the classic play. Then there were those of us who were in the middle of that Venn diagram, where we are in a circle that contains both of those communities. We were like, “We know video games. We play Sims. We grew up on Sims. That’s part of our community. But also, we know what Chekhov is.” I think that all three groups of people came together.

I staged a play for two nights. I think each performance, quote unquote, was four hours each, and it happened over two nights. It started from me basically casting and costuming the characters to going through all four acts of the play.

John: That’s great. I remember during the pandemic, my daughter was in high school at the time, and she was involved with theater. Their plays got knocked to being Zoom plays. One of them was more traditional. One of them was just chaos. It was interesting to be able to experience this as a live event – a sort of live event. My mom could watch it from Colorado. People could participate in something in a way that wasn’t traditional. And yet I do feel like I associated so strongly with the pandemic and being trapped in that place that it’s hard for me to vision them trying to do that kind of thing now. And yet there was something really amazing about that new form being out there.

What do you see as things you took from that or things you’ve seen since then that we could keep doing, bringing weird communities together, or finding new ways to stage either classic things or storytelling that is meant to be streamed live, versus a classic either filmed or stage entertainment? What do you think is still entertainment in that space?

Celine: The ancient way of storytelling, which is just the setup, the revelation, introducing a character, you see the rise and fall of that character, there is certain things about storytelling that is fundamental in the bones of it. It’s always going to be, no matter in what form and no matter in what generation, is going to just work, because as a story, that just works. I think it’s about remembering that part while we are adapting and navigating the new realities, the new ways of watching things, the new ways of hearing stories, new ways of telling stories.

I think that even through all of that, what I find over and over again is that there are stories that endure, and these are the stories that have existed forever. We know that cavemen told these stories. To know that those stories are still going to be the same stories that is going to move us, that’s going to mean something to us, I think that it is to hold these two contradictory thoughts themselves. I don’t think we can stop progress or the way the technology is coming in or the way that storytelling as a form is changing all the time. I don’t think it’s possible for… It’s like trying to stop the ocean with your hand.

But I know that even through all of that, what I’ve learned, and what I’ve also learned through telling the story that is Past Lives, and to tell it globally, and to tell it to every generation, it is always that every step of the way, what works about the Past Lives story is one that would’ve worked on the cavemen too. I think it’s that. It sounds contradictory, but I know it’s not, the feeling that it’s both. It is that it is eternally traditional and conventional and ancient and that it is brand new. It’s always changing. It’s always different.

John: On this thread of classic stories or ancient stories or retold in different ways, I want to acknowledge that Sleep No More is closing in New York. Sleep No More as an experiential place, where the story was happening around you, and yet you weren’t always seeing all parts of it. In some ways is like Baldur’s Gate, in which you’re not going to catch all the threads. There’s no way to actually see all the different possible branches of it. I do think there’s room for experimentation. There’s room to try new things.

Some of our listeners who are probably so focused on, “I want to staff on a TV show,” or, “I want to go make a movie,” should not discount the possibility that there could be some fascinating way to tell a story that’s not part of those traditional buckets, and do that if it’s interesting to them, because they are more likely to find that new thing than an established filmmaker is to do it. They have the freedom and the access and the membership in a community that might be able to help them find a new way to tell a story.

Celine: Of course. Also, the truth is that everybody’s looking for the thing that worked before. I think some of it is about how we break through the risk-averseness of the industry.

John: Celine, absolute pleasure talking with you about this as well.

Celine: So fun. Thank you so much.

Links:

• Celine Song on IMDb and Instagram
• Past Lives
• The Seagull on The Sims 4
• The Wheel of Time
• A real bald eagle call vs a red-tailed hawk
• Deadwood and The American President
• Shottr
• Baldur’s Gate 3
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram and Twitter
• John on Mastodon
• Outro by Nico Mansy (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.