The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hola y bienvenidos. Me llamo John August, o Juan Augusto, si prefiere.
Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.
John: Tú, ahora mismo, estás escuchando a Scriptnotes, un podcast sobre guionismo y las cosas que interesan los guionistas. Craig, it’s nice to see you again.
Craig: Ay, caramba.
John: I just felt like doing it. I do it in French every once in a while. I just haven’t done it in Spanish, maybe ever, so I felt like, “I’ll just try doing it in Spanish.”
Craig: I’ll tell you what, we’re going to have to run this by Melissa and do a little accent check on you.
John: Yes, I sound like a North American person speaking Spanish, hopefully. Like a guy who grew up in Colorado who learned Spanish in grade school.
Craig: That sounds about right.
John: That sounds about right, yes. Today on this show, Craig, I am coming in hot with a thesis that I ran by you a little bit at D&D this week.
Craig: You did, yes.
John: I believe that screenwriting is distinct from other literary forms largely because of its orality, so morality without the M on front. As screenwriters, we write things that are largely meant to be spoken, not just the dialogue, but the action, the screen description, everything, which raises the question: Are we in fact oral storytellers that just happen to be writing things down? Is every script just a long pitch? I’ve got a tiny bit of data, and Craig, I think you’re going to be game, so let’s have this discussion and figure out whether we are mostly just storytellers who are writing things down rather than other traditional scribes.
Craig: Yes, I already know where I’m leaning on this one.
John: We’ll find out. Well, dig into it.
Craig: Dig into it.
John: We’ll also answer listener questions on deliverables and undeniable scripts. In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to look at the movies coming out in 2026 because some people are quietly predicting that it will be one of the biggest years ever at the box office, and I think they’re probably right. Craig, maybe you should start writing movies again.
Craig: Well, I’ve got one coming out.
John: You’ve got one coming out, in fact, yes.
Craig: I’ve got one coming out that I wrote 10 years ago. It’s like an echo of a memory. Also, yes, because after doing television now for quite some time and still some time to go, the thought of prepping something once, casting it once, shooting it once, editing it once, posting it once, is amazing. I love that idea. Also, the length of the shoot, because I remember a 40 or 50-day shoot heading into that, or I think one of the Hangovers, it was 78 days. It was like, “This is going to be forever.” No.
John: Luxury. A luxury.
Craig: Oh my God, it’s 78 days. Are you kidding me?
John: Craig, here’s my pitch. A movie is like a series, but there’s just the pilot. How great is that?
Craig: It’s Episode 1 and the last episode, which is [groans]
John: Yes.
Craig: I actually have been thinking quite a bit about when all this is done, maybe a little palate cleanser of a movie would be nice.
John: All right. Before we get to that, there’s actually some news. This is where I say, WG members, check your email because there are member meetings coming up about the next round of contract negotiations.
In the West, we have meetings on February 11th, February 18th, February 21st. In the East, we have a meeting on February 17th. Go to one of those member meetings because that’s where you find out about the contract negotiations coming up. There will also be special, smaller meetings for people like Craig who are out of the country. There’ll be Zoom meetings after that.
If you can come to one of the meetings in person, it’s always better because you can ask your question in front of other people and just get a sense of, “Oh, there are actually a lot of writers in this union.”
Craig: Oh, yes. I think everybody in the union currently still has that sense.
John: Yes, I guess we were on strike at some point, so we saw people.
Craig: Sometimes I think about this, right after a strike and heading into the next contract negotiations, as we are, there are still a bunch of new members who came in after the strike, but everybody in the union now has been in a strike. I would say a good chunk of us have been in two. It’s like an army of grizzled veterans walking back through the forest. Then the new kids, the rooks, show up [crosstalk]
John: Yes, they put the fresh recruits in.
Craig: “Get in line, this is how it works.”
John: Yes, there will be some people who’ve never been to a member meeting, who’ve never seen, “Oh my gosh, this is what it looks like when we’re a bunch of us in a hotel ballroom.”
Craig: Sometimes you get an earful of some weird shit.
John: You do.
Craig: [laughs]
John: Yes. What happens in those things, we don’t discuss in a broader sense. We don’t talk about the specifics. I will say there was a moment where a comedian stood up and started to give a set. It’s just like, “No, no, this is not the place for that.” That person has become much more famous in the time since. I just remember them as this person who was inappropriately trying to do a set and is a much bigger celebrity now. Anything could happen. I’m not encouraging you to try your material in these rooms.
Craig: No, it’s not the place to do it. Because anyone can talk, inevitably, there’s a type of person who legitimately has a question and wants to ask it and must ask it publicly because that’s the way it works.
John: Totally.
Craig: Then there’s a type of person that gets very excited to talk in front of other people. They might be a little weird, and that’s fine. The people on the stage, hopefully, are very [unintelligible 00:05:16] stayed and sober and helpful and clear.
John: Yes, that is the goal. All right, let’s do some follow-up. We have a longer piece here from Ace. This is going back to Episode 719 when we talked about not having time to do your best work.
Drew: It says, “It’s a pain point for so many editors in our business. Most often in network TV and lower budgets, the schedule defaults to the guild minimum days to deliver the editor’s cut. The expectation is to keep up with camera, and then cut the show in four or five days before the director arrives in the bay. I’ve not met an editor on the planet that thinks that this is a sustainable timeline. In the old days of film, there was significantly fewer dailies, but in the digital age, we still use this outdated scheduling model due to our guild deals. We need more time before the director’s cut begins.
In stories with major action or tonal sequence editing, it takes time to refine the edit and get it to play emotionally. Hard to do when you don’t have enough time to watch everything. We can get an assembly together, but most editors have told me that they either shortcut to the deadline or stay late on their own accord. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been at the office until late at night with another editor trying to get through an avalanche of dailies just to keep up with the unreasonable schedule so that our directors are given the best experience during their days. We don’t complain. We help, and we work hard. We want our work to be the best work before we show anyone.
This applies to everyone in our pipeline. DITs want to make sure that their color and metadata is their best work. Our assistants want to make sure that materials are grouped correctly and organized to the best of their ability. When the schedule is too tight, everyone grinds, mistakes are made sometimes, and people don’t feel like they’re doing their best. In contrast, when we have enough time to do our best work, I’ve seen director’s cuts done a day early, I’ve seen fewer notes in the longer term of a post schedule, and everyone on the team is a lot happier overall.
My hope in mentioning this is that the DGA may discuss this issue more at the upcoming negotiations and find a healthier, holistic solution to post-production schedules in collaboration with IATSE. We all want to do our best work and tell these stories in the best way.”
Craig: I have many thoughts.
John: Yes, I’m sure you have many thoughts. I would say on a macro level, I get what he’s saying because he’s saying what we all feel sometimes as artists and people who are working in this business is that if I had more time, I could do this better. I’m forced to rush to do this, and not to the best of my abilities, and that’s so frustrating. It’s also the first time I’ve heard it called out, but it makes sense that we do just shoot a lot more now, and we print a lot more now, so there’s a lot more footage to go through. That’s something that editors, assistant editors, and other people are doing at the very start of the process. Craig, I know you have opinions about the post-production workflow and the value of editors.
Craig: The big thing here, Ace, is that everything you said, with the exception of the last thing you said, is absolutely correct. Let me walk through. The problem here is, Ace is signaling out network TV and lower budgets. Everybody gets screwed on that schedule. That schedule is not designed to create quality, although there are people who have managed to do it, and those people are magicians. That schedule is designed to hump out episodes repeatedly, quickly, over and over and over and over and over for half a year, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba.
That means the writing has no time to be written, the show has no time to be shot, so the writers are cranky, the editors are cranky, the directors are cranky, the people who run the post-production are cranky. They’re the crankiest because whatever they got, they got to get it through. The editors are cranky. Then the directors become cranky again because they get about 12 minutes to ‘edit’. Then the show runners are cranky because they get that cut, and they go, “The hell is this?” Now I got two days. Plus, then we have five minutes to mix it, and it’s out the door.
The whole thing is a fast food assembly line. It is bad for creativity, and it is unfair to people who are trying to do good work. Is there anything to be done about that? Not if that’s the machinery you join. It’s not like they hide it.
John: Ace is specifically saying it’s most often in network TV and lower budgets. In network TV, there is a pattern for how you’re supposed to be doing this in the sense of the writing is not that distant from the actual airing of the show. Friends didn’t have three weeks to put everything together. Those things had to happen quickly. It’s really the struggle of if you’re doing something like that, if you’re doing reality shows that have a fast schedule, if you’re doing Love Island or just nearly real-time, you’re not going to be able to do your best work. I guess the meta question is what is the best work you can do, given the constraints, and how do you maximize the output given the constraints that you have?
Craig: I don’t think you can. To me, time and the availability of time for each part of the process is the thing that separates some television from what we call prestige television. It’s not actually the quality because sometimes prestige television is bad, and sometimes network television is good, but by and large, it’s time. On our show, we take time. There is no minimum editor’s assembly cut. When they’re ready, and they’re happy– They got to get something to a director but–
Let’s talk about the directors for a second. This is the one thing that I think Ace isn’t quite right on, and it’s the DGA. At least in what we’ll call non-network television models, it’s the showrunner who’s really doing the final edit of the show. I spend more time editing through each episode than any of our directors because the directors get, I think, a week and then they go. Typically, they’re going on to work on other shows. They’re not in the mix. They’re not there to carry this to the end. Really, that’s when I dig in, and I take weeks because we really dig in and we do have a lot of footage and we do take our time. I want to give my editors their best chance.
The DGA is not the gatekeeper here. IATSE, certainly, as a representative of the editors, can advocate. You can’t really talk to the WGA because the WGA represents writers, not producers. A writer-producer like me, they represent me up to the hyphen, and then they don’t. The people to talk to, I think, would be IATSE directly with the AMPTP to say, “We want our editors to get more time.” If I were running a network show, I would rather give my editors more time than the directors more time because the editors are looking through every little tiny thing. That’s just my two cents.
John: Let’s talk about the showrunner there because the showrunner is a writer and producer. That showrunner has some sway over how things are going to be done and how the money and the time is going to be allocated. Powerful showrunners may be able to choose to shift some time and money in order to put more time towards editorial, but there’s a cost to that as well. There’s other things they can’t be doing. There may be less time in production because they’re having to move that thing. They’re always making choices. There’s always compromises, and that’s the thing you’re butting up against is choosing where to spend your time.
It was great having Eva Victor on the show last week because they were talking about they had all the time in the world for prep, and then the reality of making anything is that you have less time in production than you would hope for. Then, in the future, I think you tend to have a lot more time and a lot more leisure because there’s not the pressure of, “We’ve got to hit this release date,” unless you’re backing up against Sundance or something. You got a lot of time. That’s one of the reasons why I think it’s going to be perfected more because you have the time.
Craig: There is financial pressure on independent films. Every single week you keep your post-production office open, you’re paying the editor, you’re paying the assistant editor, you’re paying the PA, and lunches and all that. You’re absolutely right. It’s a question of resource allocation. I am a little crazy about this. I don’t fight with HBO ever. There are times where they have to figure out how to deal with me because I don’t get crazy. I sort of go, “Look, this is an immovable object.” The immovable object is, “Well, how long do you need to edit this until it’s good?” That’s how long. “How long is the mix going to take?” Until it’s good, and I’m going to make it better than you think it should be, and it’s going to take longer than you think it should be, and that means I’m going to be spending more money than you think I should be spending.
I think Season 1, they were like, “This guy–” They’re lovely. I’ve come to really enjoy their company. They’re great. They back me, and they support me. They just had to sort of get accustomed to my thing and see that it worked, that there was a benefit to it. I do think that one of the things I am responsible for is protecting my editors and making sure that they get the time they need because this workflow from DIT through, remember, then there’s a whole workflow on the other side of color timing, DI, and all that stuff that has to happen and we have to lock the picture in order to mix. I have my editors at the mix; editors are the most important part of this thing. Once you say, “That is a wrap, everyone, great job,” pile up the trucks and drive home, everything now, as far as I’m concerned, is about editors and editing. They need to be protected.
John: Next up, we have a follow-up from Lesley. She is writing about your comment about Steve Jobs.
Drew: Leslie says, “I’m a historian and the executive director of the Steve Jobs archive. In Episode 719, you talked about knowing whether your work is good enough, and Craig recommended watching Steve Jobs’ keynote introducing the iPhone in 2007. I thought you might be interested to see the attached email Steve sent to himself about a year before he died. I think it speaks to the question of why he cared so much about his work.” Craig, do you want to maybe read this because this would be good for you?
Craig: Sure. Steve Jobs wrote, “I grow little of the food I eat, and of the little I do grow, I did not breed or perfect the seeds. I do not make any of my own clothing. I speak a language I did not invent or refine. I did not discover the mathematics I use. I am protected by freedoms and laws I did not conceive of or legislate and do not enforce or adjudicate. I am moved by music I did not create myself. When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive. I did not invent the transistor, the microprocessor, object-oriented programming, or most of the technology I work with. I love and admire my species, living and dead, and I’m totally dependent on them for my life and well-being. Sent from my iPad,” which may be the best sign-off there possible.
Well, this is an interesting meditation on gratitude. It’s interesting. She says, “I think it speaks to the question of why he cared so much about his work.” I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the historian and executive director of the Steve Jobs Archive knows him and his work better than I do, but I’ll tell you what I get out of this is humility, especially for somebody who changed the world in a profound way and in a way that continues to ripple ahead. I sense great humility here, which is a remarkable thing.
John: Yes. It’s also the recognition that you are a part of a process that started before you and will continue after you. The fact that he was in it the last year of his life also makes sense that he had this realization. Is it an email that he would have written to himself five years earlier? I don’t know, but it makes sense for where he’s at in his life.
Craig: The thing that really grabs me is, “When I needed medical attention, I was helpless to help myself survive,” but he didn’t realize that at first.
John: Yes. He didn’t.
Craig: That was a fatal error. He felt like maybe he could help himself survive. He chose, I guess, what we call alternative therapies for a very serious cancer. It’s hard to say if he would have lived or not had he engaged in science-based, evidence-based medicine faster. Thank you, Lesley. That was lovely to receive. I’m very glad that you were listening.
John: This email reminded me of a piece I read this week by Kevin Kelly, who was a former editor of Wired, who’s now, I think, in his 80s, and still blogs and writes a lot. This was him talking about, as a young man, he backpacked through Asia and hitchhiked everywhere, and so just relied on other people helping him out. This is really talking about receiving kindness.
He writes, “I believe the generous gifts of strangers are actually summoned by a deliberate willingness to be helped. You start by surrendering to your human need for help. That we cannot be helped until we embrace our need for help is another law of the universe. My New Age friends call that state being pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. Instead of believing everyone is out to get you, believe everyone is out to help you. Strangers are working behind your back to keep you going, prop you up, and get you on your path.
The story of your life becomes one huge elaborate conspiracy to lift you up. But to be helped, you have to join the conspiracy yourself. You have to accept the gifts. Although we don’t deserve it and have done nothing to merit it, we’ve been offered a glorious ride on this planet if only we accept it. To receive the gift requires the same humble position a hitchhiker gets into when he stands shivering at the side of the empty highway, cardboard sign flapping in the cold wind, and says, how will the miracle happen today?”
Craig: That’s beautiful. I love the idea of all of us as sort of less narcissistic Blanche DuBois, depending on the kindness of strangers. There is an idea about prosocial behavior that suggests that, because there is an evolutionary benefit for us to be part of a group, we have an instinct, therefore, to be helpful to a group so that they will let us into the group. You could draw all this back to a selfish gene theory, which is fine; it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we have it, and it does feel good. It feels good to help people; it just does.
There are people, I think, who don’t experience that feeling, but I know you and I do. What is this episode? 7-what? Well, why are we doing this? We’re doing this not because we have been sentenced by a court. We like it. It feels good to help people. It really, really does. I love this idea of pronoia, the presumption that people are actually out to help you. That’s great.
John: As I look at the protests in Minnesota this week, and I look at the marches in Sub-Zero weather, and people trying to get in the way of ICE doing terrible things, that resonates for me. It’s the people who don’t know who they’re actually helping, but they know they’re helping. That’s a crucial aspect of being human.
Craig: Yes. The concept that you are going to be 1 of 1,000 people, and of that 1,000 people, some of you may die, but that may create some small movement on the needle. The civil rights movement in the United States was very much– Whereas the civil war was just you were sent, and you had to do it. What they find in war is that people really are just trying to defend their friends; they’re not trying to defend their side. To march across a bridge with the expectation that some of you are going to get bitten by a dog, some of you are going to get hit by a fire hose, some of you are going to be beaten with batons, that incredible scene in Gandhi where the march on the salt works happens, that is the highest form of pronoia, is, “I’m going to help you by putting myself in a position where I will actively be hurt.” It’s not just that I’m out to help you; I’m also out to get hurt myself to help you.
We do these things because of the unity we feel. We went on strike. There are rules, and the rules say you have to strike. Although there’s a way out of it. There is a way out of it. You can say, “I’m financial core. I still can work on [unintelligible 00:22:18] cover projects, but I’m not subject to the rules, and I can work, and I don’t have to strike.” When we strike, what? I don’t know. Three people do that, maybe?
John: Basically, no one does it. Yes.
Craig: Basically, no one. Regardless of what you feel about the merits of any particular strike, you have a sense that if you can suffer a little bit for the betterment of your group, it’s worth it, or suffer a lot. It’s what keeps us together. I love this concept.
John: What I see in both Steve Jobs’ email and in this blog post by Kevin Kelly is recognizing that you are benefiting from others doing that on your behalf. It’s so easy to overlook that. We think of ourselves as protagonists who have to go out and do the thing, but it’s recognizing that we are also the beneficiaries of other people helping us out. Again, it’s gratitude, and it’s also just remembering that you’re part of this bigger experience, and that no one is an individual. We often talk on this podcast how relationships are everything, and we think about the people in our lives who we know directly, but it’s also relationships with invisible forces and invisible groups that we can’t perceive.
Craig: Yes, the shoulders of the giants upon which we stand.
John: A little bit more follow-up. Brian wrote in about Eva Victor.
Drew: “Thank you so much for inviting Eva Victor on. A key reason their interview was excellent for me was the fact that Eva made this film like an auteur. Scriptnotes is largely focused on the craft of screenwriting, which is great, but rarely does Scriptnotes do a deep dive with a true indie auteur who did it all to create a worthy film from scratch. It’s fascinating and inspiring, and this is the core reason why I pay the premium subscription for Scriptnotes.”
John: Oh, well, that’s lovely.
Craig: Yes, well, we got your $5. That’s all we care about.
John: Haha.
Craig: Yes. [chuckles]
John: I think Brian makes a good point. It’s that we’ll have Rian Johnson’s on and stuff like that.
Craig: Greta Gerwig.
John: Yes, Greta Gerwig. We don’t have a lot of auteurs who are just doing their own thing, and that’s why it’s so nice to have those. Now that I think about it, we do have a fair number of auteurs. Christopher Nolan. We have mega auteurs.
Craig: Yes, and Chris McQuarrie. The thing is, what I would encourage Brian to consider here is actually not to diminish what a writer-director does because it is exciting, but to remind them that if you sit down and talk to most people that we call an auteur, they’re going to very quickly start pointing at the people that help them.
Just to stay on theme here, I write and direct episodes of this show. Am I an auteur? Well, I’m going to start talking to you about my editors. I’m definitely going to talk to you about the actors. I’m going to absolutely talk about the cinematographer first and foremost, the production designer, and then you start going down the line of all the people that worked to do something, the visual effects people, the artistry. You’re not really an author. It’s not. I wish I could just kick that word back over to France.
I used to say this, and I think maybe people thought, “Well, because he’s not a director–” Well, I direct, and the whole [unintelligible 00:25:19] filmed by thing still makes me want to vomit. It’s ridiculous. It’s an insult to literally everyone who worked on the movie. It’s such a joke. I feel that way about auteur, but I get Brian’s point. If I just replace the word auteur with writer-director, then this works great.
John: Yes, filmmaker. Yes, for sure.
Craig: Yes.
John: Lastly, a bit of praise that is not specifically towards Craig, but a relative of Craig’s.
Drew: This is from Hannah in Lethbridge. Hannah writes, “This is not a question, and it’s not for John and Craig. It’s for all the listeners who heard Craig plug his daughter Jessica’s music and thought, ‘Hmm, yes, but dads are going to dad.’ I’m here to tell you that dads are going to dad, but nevertheless, Jessica’s music is amazing. I came across her in the wild, and I only just put the connection together. Way to go, Craig, and Craig’s plus-one for producing at least one amazing artistic thing.”
John: Craig doesn’t have to talk anymore about his daughter, but Jessica really is a unique, singular talent. It’s very nice to see her and to know her from before this was discovered out in the world. Listen, independent of her relationship to Craig, she’s going to do some amazing things, and it’s just neat to see it from the ground floor. She’s recording new music now. We’ll see, there’ll be albums, there’ll be things, but she’s a real talent.
Craig: Yes, I really got in on the ground floor. I was there from that first breath. Well, I’ll tell you, Hannah, that’s lovely to hear. I’m so glad that you appreciated that, and I will share this with Jessica because, no surprise, I don’t believe she subscribes to the podcast. What I really like, Hannah, is that you’re from Lethbridge, a place where I’ve spent quite some time. I’ve even spent time in that Lethbridge casino. Lethbridge is a–
John: I have no idea what Lethbridge is. Tell me.
Craig: I’m going to tell you. Lethbridge is a town in Alberta. It is a city, and it’s pretty close, I think, to Montana. It’s down towards the border there. It’s like a factory town, a little bit. There’s a big vegetable cannery. The trains go through there to pick stuff up from the US. Well, probably not now anymore. It’s a blue-collar city, but you could feel a spirit. It’s funny. I’m like a guy that spent time in a lot of weird Canadian cities, and I dig it. I liked it. I like Lethbridge, and I like that Hannah is there in Lethbridge, and I salute you, Hannah, and I salute Lethbridge. Had a great time. Casino is small. I’m not going to lie. It’s a small casino, but it was trying.
John: All right, let’s move on to a marquee topic here. My thesis that I’m trying to defend here is that screenwriting has notably higher orality than other prose writing. I stumbled across this because there was this thing called Havelock’s Orality Tester. I’ll put a link into the show notes, too. You can paste in some text, and it tells you how oral it is versus how literary it is. The idea is that some text basically kind of is written to be spoken aloud, and some stuff is just written to be read with your eyes.
The definition that they have on the little site here is: Orality refers to the characteristics of speech that distinguish it from writing, the patterns, rhythms, and structures that evolve for memory and performance before the advent of literacy. Drawing on the work of scholars like Walter Ong and Eric Havelock, this tool analyzes text for markers of oral tradition, formulaic expressions, repetition, sound patterns, direct engagement, and the agonistic tone of a spoken debate.
It put some text in to score. A higher score suggests that the text carries the DNA of the spoken word. If you paste some stuff in, you see it tags things. Things like a literary marker might be qualifications that signal uncertainty. Nuance, that would be impossible in live speech. Nested clauses, this is a thing you run into all the time. In a novel, you can have many nested clauses, and your eyes can track back and figure out, “Where am I at in the sentence? What am I actually referring to?” If you try to say that aloud, you would get lost. A lot of Trump’s speech issues are because there’s just the clause within a clause, and it never comes back to the original thing. It’s like, “Wait,” you get lost.
Craig: I think there’s a problem underneath that problem.
John: There’s other things happening there, too. I think we know there’s a decline that’s happening there. Literary stuff will often acknowledge opposing views before it counters them, which is not a thing you tend to do in speech. Embodied action, a description of physical actions and bodily experience, that’s a thing that tends to happen much more often in oral tradition than literary tradition. We saw a bit of that in, I think, Kevin Kelly’s thing, which I would say actually felt spoken, where she’s talking about standing on the side of the highway holding a sign. You’re putting yourself in the body of that person in that space.
Other orality markers, using first and second pronouns, asking questions, imperatives, so musts, the commands. Contractions, discourse markers: well, so, anyway. Interjections, short clauses, fewer nominalizations, where you’re taking a verb and making it into a noun. It’s all just tracked for me. It’s one of those things where it’s like, “Oh, yes, that describes a thing I’ve noticed but never had a word for.”
Craig: I think this would be incredibly useful for screenwriting teachers whom I’m often railing against, to use at the beginning of a class on screenwriting, because very few people who begin have spent time reading screenplays. I certainly hadn’t. What I had spent so much time doing was reading literature because I was a student. I was reading Shakespeare, Faulkner, short stories, and essays, all of which really were not oral. They had low orality. They were highly literate.
Maybe the closest thing that I was reading at the time that felt like maybe it would fall into orality was Stephen King. His books tend to feel like that. He has these long paragraphs in italics that are really designed to be spoken. They’re beautiful. I always loved those. I think this would be an amazing way to start with people and say, “You’re going to have to actually weirdly forget all that, because even though you were taught that was the stuff that’s going to help you be a writer, it’s not going to help you be this kind of writer.”
John: Another thing which is striking about screenwriting, which I don’t know it tracks for orality, but it feels like it would, is that screenwriting is a present tense. We’re not referring back to characters [unintelligible 00:32:07] the past, but the actual action of a screenwrite play is in the present tense. You’re right there. You’re describing a moment that generally you’re in with the person who is hearing you, who’s there. That’s why it feels so alive and so active.
When I say that a screenplay just feels like a long pitch that’s written down, yes, there’s specific grammar we use in screenplays, the ints, the exts, the transitions. If you notice what we do on the page, what a lot of screenwriters like you and I both do, is we’ll often end sentences that go into the transition that it continues to the next thing.
Craig: Always.
John: We’re always bridging those things so that it reads well, but it’s really so that it sounds good. It sounds good to say aloud.
Craig: Yes. We know when we listen to people telling stories that flow is important, a sense of continuity. What it implies is that the person who’s telling you the story knows where it’s going. We’ve all had the experience of listening to somebody tell a joke and watching them realize they screwed up or can’t remember, and it comes to a hitchy stop, and you think, “This is not going to be that funny anymore,” because they don’t have confidence in it, which means I don’t have confidence in it.
With your screenplay—this is something Scott Frank said to me a long time ago—he said, “You want to feel like the person who wrote this is in complete control of it.” That is different than good and bad, but it is sort of an essential start, that they needed you to read that so that you would read this, and then the next page is this on purpose, and never just like, “Oh, wait, a scene is happening,” or they’re correcting something. The plates are getting wobbly as you spin them, and you lose confidence.
John: Yes. None of this should be taken as a slam against literary style-
Craig: Oh, God, no.
John: -because I think all of the sophistication that you see in that is so important that there’s things you can do in a book or in a scientific article that is very clearly good for that medium, and that it’s just, thank God we have it, and thank God we have the innovation and the centuries of literacy to be able to do that kind of stuff. It’s just different from the oral tradition, which I’m arguing screenwriting probably really stems from.
If you think back about the origin of screenwriting, it started as just a list, and then it became just like some descriptions of how it’s going to come together and feel. Even playwriting, obviously, it’s off the dialogue is an oral tradition, and Shakespeare was an oral tradition before it was written down, and that’s why there’s multiple folios and controversies over where stuff came from. The scene description was so minimal, it doesn’t have some of the DNA that screenwriting does, which is basically creating visuals all the time.
Craig: I think this is such a nice distinction to make because it also helps people who may, in a snobby way, think that screenwriting isn’t real writing understand that it’s just a different kind of writing; it is trying to achieve a different feeling, but it is writing nonetheless. You have the Richard Brodys of the world who insist that screenwriting is not art, whereas I guess apparently writing refuses. I think you may fall into that trap if you are over-educated to the point where you have become blind to the existence of another kind of writing entirely. I don’t quite imagine how that can even happen, but apparently it does.
There’s a cultural value to this because I think some cultures have simply relied more on orality than others. Western culture has tended to be very much about the literary tradition, with wonderful exceptions in drama. They’re still doing Death of a Salesman. That clearly is art, high on the orality scale. Of course, we’re still performing Shakespeare and ruminating and iterating on Shakespeare in so many different ways. Western civilization tends to get very fussy about the literary stuff.
Orality, I think, as you go around the world, you may find that it’s higher or more prized in those cultures than it might be in some ivory towers here in the West.
John: We’ll see. Listen, I’ve not read Havelock or Ong or any of the original material here, but if you want to experiment with this yourself, I’ll put a link in the show notes to this orality tester. It’s fun to just grab some text from your stuff, but also just grab a few paragraphs from a scientific paper, a literary paper, or a newspaper, and see what it is, because it’ll give you a score. More interestingly, it’ll break down why it’s giving that score, and it’ll highlight the sentences and what it’s noticing in there that has aspects of these certain discourse markers or epistemic hedges, and what it’s seeing in there that’s giving you this instinct.
Craig: One final question, as I look at it, is this going to scrape stuff as we put it through, because it is .ai or–?
John: Yes. I don’t know. If you’re pulling stuff that’s already on the internet, I don’t know that it’s actually a thing to worry about.
Craig: Yes, it’s already out there.
John: All of the stuff I put in there is stuff that’s already on the internet, so it’s fine. Again, I don’t think that any writer should change how they write to get a higher score in this. I don’t want anyone’s work to be like, “Well, you have to hit this number on this.” That would be a giant mistake. I think what you and I are both arguing for is that I think an important part of learning about screenwriting should be to understand how it tends to feel on the page and why it tends to feel so spoken on the page.
Craig: Yes. Conceptually, this is a great place to start, so you understand where you’re heading as opposed to where you think you might be heading.
John: Exactly.
Craig: Great.
John: Cool. Let’s answer some listener questions. I see one here from Lori.
Drew: “An increasingly common piece of screenwriting advice is to just write a script that’s undeniable, but what does that even mean? Does ‘just write an undeniable script’ mean the way to sell a script is to write a script that sells? Is telling someone to write something undeniable actually useful advice? If so, what does it really mean other than write something good and marketable?”
John: To me, this reminds me of– and I cannot think of the source of this, but when someone says, “Oh, yes, next time we’ve got to try harder.” It’s not like you didn’t try as hard as you could last time. It was no shortage of effort; it just didn’t happen. It just didn’t work. Undeniable feels like one of those, “Ah,” it’s something you’d say about something after it succeeded, “Well, it was undeniable.” Well, plenty of people denied it.
Craig: Yes, of course. Nothing is undeniable. There are people who have written a script, the movie gets made, they win an Oscar for that script, and other people are like, “I hate that. I hate that script. I hate all of it, and I would deny it.” The problem, Lori, is everybody is desperate to try and say something. There is nothing to say. We’re saying that as guys who’ve been doing this for a while. When you really get down to this question, and I think what’s underneath this question is, “But how do I write something that people are going to love and make and buy and give me a job?” and all that.
The answer is that you’re going to write something that they will want to buy and make, and they will be impressed by. There is no way to advise you how to do that. None. We try to give you general advice about how to write things in ways that we wish we would have had to maybe get there a little quicker, but write something good for whom? You only need to write something that one person says is undeniable. You can send it to 80 people, 79 of them deny it. This is not an undeniable script, but if one person buys it, job done, you did it. The truth is, no, it doesn’t really mean. It’s much. It’s a mouth filler to answer when people are asking you for some sort of give me a step one through seven method of writing a script that people will buy. It just doesn’t exist.
John: Lori, in the longer email, notes that Lawrence Kasdan wrote The Bodyguard in 1975 and his script was rejected 67 times and became a giant hit. He’s undeniably a great writer, but did he write the undeniable script?
Craig: No. He is not an undeniably great writer because they denied him.
John: Here’s what I’ll say. After the fact argument, oh, well, that script was undeniable, and it wasn’t the case. What is genuinely helpful about a script is a script that feels like only you could have written it. When someone reads the script, is like, “Wow, that’s a really effing great script.” I don’t think anyone else would have written that script that feels like specifically your script. That is an achievable goal, I think.
That’s something that writes something that’s really good that is unique to your interest and skill set and experience. It’s going to help you out more than trying to hit “undeniable”.
Craig: Yes. There is a certain solace I’m supposed to be taking in the fact that the greatest living screenwriter, Lawrence Kasdan, got rejected 67 times with a script that went on to be massive hit. It’s hard. We do give the phrase break in a little too much stick because as we point out, you never stop breaking in.
There is a moment where credibility is achieved. It is fragile. It can be smashed within seconds into pieces, but for a moment, because of something that occurs, you get a little bit of credibility. Your job is to leverage that credibility and build upon it to get more credibility until there is a point where you are so credible that people would rather believe you than themselves.
At some point, if you sit Larry Kasdan down and you’re like, hey, we were thinking about doing the Star Wars movie. What do you think about this? He’s like, “I don’t really think that’s the way to go.” Then you’re going to go, Larry Kasdan, because he has so much credibility. When you begin, you have zero. You get a little shred. Get a little shred and you build on it. It’s not easy to get that first shred.
John, you’re absolutely right. Really, the only way, other than be a very talented writer and write something that’s very interesting to people, is to write something that is somehow specific to you. You don’t even have to know how it’s specific to you. If you just write honestly, it’ll be there.
John: Nick has a question about deliverables.
Drew: “Assume you’re in development, unpaid, on a feature script and doing notes for your producer or agent/manager. Assume you’re generally okay with their notes and assume you’ve made a good faith effort to address them, what do you actually deliver? Obviously, you send the revised draft of the script incorporating their notes. Do you also send a version with the edits starred, redlined, something else?
How much transparency do we as writers really want in this situation? On one hand, highlighting the edits demonstrates that you made them. On the other hand, do we want to show how the sausage is made? Is it acceptable to simply deliver the final revised draft that incorporates their notes and an explainer doc or transmittal email pointing the reader generally to the notes that you’ve incorporated?”
John: This is a good general question. Do you send the starred changes, or do you just send the new draft? I tend to email first saying like, hey, do you want starred changes, or do you want the full draft? If they say they want starred changes, give them the starred changes. If they want just the clean draft, that’s great.
I’ll tend to make both. I might send different ones to different producers if there’s multiple producers. It’s not a giant hassle to do starred changes in most cases. If I’m doing a big rewrite, I won’t even turn on starred changes because I know that so much is going to change. It’s not helpful for someone. If every page is mostly stars, it’s useless.
Craig: Assuming that you have– I don’t like the fact that you’re unpaid, by the way.
John: Maybe this is like, he sent his manager a script like, oh, let’s go out with this thing. The manager’s like, “Oh, this is not ready yet.” If it’s a spec that the management sought out, yes.
Craig: The sausage is not being made on the page with the asterisk. The sausage is being made in the sausage inside your skull, my friend. That’s where the sausage is made. No one’s getting in there. Don’t worry about that. The mystery is still the mystery. It’s not like handing them a script with asterisks is going to have them go, “Oh, this is how they do it. I don’t know. Let’s just get rid of this guy. We can do it ourselves.”
They can’t. Typically, in a situation like this, I will send both. I’ll just send, here’s a clean copy and if you’re interested, here’s a copy with asterisks. Up to you. It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t care. The sausage is safe in my head.
John: The sausage is safe.
Craig: The sausage is safe. Do we still title these episodes? Because if we do– [laughs]
John: The sausage is safe.
Craig: The sausage is safe.
John: We do title these episodes.
Craig: Excellent.
John: That may be the one. Let us go to our one cool thing. I had an article, but I also have a game to recommend, so I’m going to do both because I can do both. The first is an article that I think our friend, Ken White, may have first linked to. It’s called Quantum Computing for Lawyers, a subject post by JP Aumasson. We hear about quantum computing, especially post-quantum cryptography a lot.
This demystifies that, explains what’s going on and why our timelines may be a little too fast for it. We may be overthinking this a bit at the moment. Essentially, quantum computers work differently than conventional computers. They’re doing a bunch of things at once in ways that are hard to understand for our little brains.
Because they can, in theory, break our normal cryptography much more quickly, by just– The mathematics works out that they can just do things that would break normal cryptography, which hurts for encryption and Bitcoin-y stuff. We have to think about new ways to do that. Mathematically, there are ways to do that. It makes it much harder for it.
This article just does a really good job demystifying some of it and also saying, you know what? We may not actually get quantum computers in any reasonable timeline, so don’t assume that it’s going to happen. A good demystifying article. The second thing I want to recommend is a game we played once in the office and once last night called Swoop. Craig, have you heard of Swoop?
Craig: Swoop.
John: Swoop may be the next heated rivalry, Craig because it is a sensation crossing the country. It is a card game, and it looks like Uno or a typical card game. You can play it with normal decks of cards, but it’s helpful to get the real deck. It’s a Midwestern game that shares aspects with Scum and Asshole and other summer camp games.
Craig: Oh, yes. I played those.
John: Essentially, you are trying to empty your hand and your board and be the first so you don’t get stuck with points. It has a really nice mechanic. It is super simple to pick up. I will also put a link in the show notes to this video made by the people who make the decks, which is so Midwestern and kind of cheesy, but actually explains the game really well.
Craig: I’m in their website, I’m looking at their website. The Midwest is pouring off of this. It’s serving Midwest. I like it.
John: We played it with seven people last night. It’s probably good with three, but you can just play with as many people as you have. It’s a really fun game. What I like about a card game is that when it’s your turn, you’ll be paying attention, but you don’t have to pay that much attention when it’s not your turn and it moves pretty quickly.
You can keep other conversations up in the air, which is, I think, a game night where you have to focus too much on the card game. It’s not fun.
Craig: No. All right. Swoop.
John: Swoop.
Craig: Swoop.
John: You’re going to say swoop a lot, which is just a fun word.
Craig: Swoop. Nice.
John: Craig, you’ve got an article. You’ve got science for us.
Craig: I’ve got science. It looks like we’re going to double dip on science here. This is a report of a study in Stanford Medicine, their medical magazine, where they report on things. There is a team at Stanford, which is probably where they found this, that has figured out how to perhaps reverse the degenerative disease that I guess we’ll cover under arthritis or osteoarthritis.
As people get older, they begin to lose cartilage between the joints. It becomes very painful, there becomes swelling. This just causes a real loss of quality of life. Of course, it’s incredibly expensive for societies to help people like this. What they have found, because they were chasing stem cells and platelet-rich injections, they found this other thing.
There’s a thing they call the gerozyme, which is a protein that is basically driving the loss of tissue function and blocking the function of this protein, gerozyme or 15-PGDH. It basically allows stuff to build back. In theory, if this pays off and it works in human trials and so on, there may be injections that will– I don’t have any cartilage in my big toe on my left foot. It’s gone. It’s gone because of an injury.
Basically, over time, it injures things. There’s an inflammation process. Cartilage just dies. It’s painful. I could get it back. As you get older, John, you’re going to start feeling it. If you don’t feel it already, you’re going to start. There are people who, unfortunately, genetically are predisposed to getting this much earlier.
It’s rheumatoid arthritis. There’s a lot of ways where this can be very disabling and painful. They can regenerate adult tissue, in theory, just by turning something off as opposed to putting something in. That’s exciting. Quietly, they just said, hey, we may have fixed a massive problem, but we’ll find out.
John: Yes, we’ll see what happens in human trials.
Craig: Early days.
John: I think this is only good news, but it does remind me of a thing I liked so much in the movie I Am Legend, if you remember the movie I Am Legend. Emma Thompson is on this news program and they say like, oh, so in a word, what have you done? It’s like, I think we’ve cured cancer. It cuts to the zombies that come through the whole thing.
I don’t think this is going to be the thing like, oh, we regenerated cartilage and now we have zombies running throughout the thing.
Craig: Yes, zombies probably no.
John: Probably not zombies.
Craig: I say probably.
John: Instead, we all just become shark people who were made entirely of cartilage.
Craig: I would love that, honestly.
John: Honestly, if I could squeeze under doors because I had cartilage, if everything was just like my nose, that’d be great.
Craig: You punch me and I’m like, ouch but also nothing’s broken. You just bent me a little bit.
John: No worries. I bend, but I don’t break. I’m like a bowel knocking a little branch.
Craig: Yes, lovely.
John: I learned the Spanish word for branch this week. I’m doing Anki, which is the flashcards for Spanish and for other languages. I do that every day. Rama is the word for a branch or a limb. I just like R-A-M-A. It’s just a great word, Rama.
Craig: Rendezvous for branch. Rendezvous with Rama.
John: With the branch.
Craig: Rendezvous with branch. I like that.
John: Yes. When the bowel breaks, the cradle will fall. It all fits together.
Craig: It works.
John: That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Thanks, Drew.
Craig: Maybe.
John: Edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Could be.
John: Our outro this week is by Jennifer Lucy Cook, a first-time outro. I love when we have a first-time contributor. It’s also an especially good one. It’s just different, and I just love that. I don’t want somebody to come in and just kills it. Thank you to Jennifer Lucy Cook. Thank you to everyone else who’s submitting outros. Please keep them coming in. I just love hearing new things after 700 episodes.
If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions, like the ones we answered today. You will find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign-up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
The Scriptnotes book is available wherever you buy books. People are still sending in their Instagrams of their books, and I love that. Drew would host those–
Craig: We wrote a book.
John: We wrote a book, remeber that.
Craig: Forgot about that.
John: There’s a book. There’s a book out there in the world.
Craig: How’s that going?
John: It’s going good. It’s still selling some copies, which is nice.
Craig: Nice. See, people want it. It’s full of useful advice.
John: Yes. You can find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll find us on Instagram at Script Notes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.
Thank you again to our premium subscribers. You keep the lights on and make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become a premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on the 2026 movies and just how many of them there are.
We’re not like a box office podcast at all. It’s just really notable this year. I’m excited to talk with Craig and Drew about that. Craig, Drew, thank you so much for a fun show.
Drew: Thank you, John. Thanks, guys.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right, Craig.
Craig: Yes.
John: 2026, we’re already in January as we’re recording this. We have Avatar as a holdover, which is still making a ton of money. The Housemaid, which I didn’t even know was a movie, which cost $100 million. It’s a giant hit. Do you know what that movie is?
Craig: No.
John: It’s Amanda Seyfried and Sydney Sweeney. It is thriller, sure, female-centered thriller, bad husbandy stuff. $100 million.
Craig: I love a bad husbandy stuff kind of thing. Do they kill him?
John: I don’t know. I haven’t seen the movie, but I know it’s in the discourse. Apparently, it’s a fun watch in a theater, which is why we make movies.
Craig: People in our business, not the people like you and me who make things, the people who run stuff, they’re like, “This movie actually is a really great thing to watch in a–” Yes, it’s called a movie. They’re all supposed to be like that. They all work like that. Yes, you could watch a movie like Pitch Perfect, you could watch it on streaming and enjoy it. Absolutely.
You don’t need to go to a theater to do it. So much more fun in a theater. Movies that are movie movies are fun in theaters. Of course, that’s why we built them.
John: Megan worked because it was a movie. It was a movie you’d watch in a theater, 100%. Here are some of the big titles coming out in 2026, which is just an absurd list. Avengers Doomsday, the Spider-Man sequel, Toy Story 5, Super Mario Galaxy Movie 2. The New Dune. Star Wars: Mandalorian and Grogu. The Odyssey. Project Hail Mary. Minions 3. Supergirl. Zack Krager’s Resident Evil.
Craig: I can’t explain how excited I am about that.
John: It’s going to be so good.
Craig: Finally. [laughs]
John: It’s finally here. We wanted to have Zack on the podcast. Maybe we can get him on for this. It’d be great to have him on. The Hunger Games, the new Hunger Games. The Devil Wears Prada 2. We know something about that movie and people who make it. Jumanji, the live action Moana. Those movies are going to open. There’s no question that those movies are going to generate some box office.
Craig: Yes. It is interesting. Of all of these, I think, is Project Hail Mary based on a book?
John: It’s based on a book that’s a giant hit.
Craig: Right. None of these are actually a fully original film. Those are going to come surprise us, I think.
John: They will surprise us. That’s, I think, an important point here is that the locks are just the thing because we already know they’re going to exist. They’re sequels, they’re parts of IP, but Weapons was a giant hit and that didn’t come from anything. Sinners was a brand new thing.
Craig: You see all these big movies, what’s great is if these big movies get people flowing in and out of theaters, they will also flow in and out for movies like Weapons or Sinners or the Weapons and Sinners to come because those are the movies that create more.
John: Because they have an amazing trailer that plays in front of all of them. I also have a list here of just the wildcards. First off, Michael, the Michael Jackson movie. I don’t know how that’s going to work. People are really excited about it. Giant question marks. Even on audio podcasts, you can see the question mark floating there. Verity is the new Colin Hoover movie. Disclosure Day by Steven Spielberg.
Craig: Always bet on Spielberg.
John: Yes. Clayface. Clayface is a–
Craig: It’s just a funny name.
John: It’s a great name.
Craig: It’s Clayface. A lot of this stuff, I don’t know when Clayface was actually invented for DC Comics, but I’m going to guess the ’40s or ’50s.
John: Probably, yes. That feels right.
Craig: Let’s do a little lookup on Clayface right now. It feels like such a Dick Tracy-ish name.
Drew: June 1940.
Craig: 1940, okay. Back in 1940, I can absolutely be like Clayface, man with a face of clay. Oh, my God. Clayface. That feels ripe for 1940. It’s just like that he’s still Clayface, man. It doesn’t matter what year it is. It’s Clayface. You know why? He’s got a face made out of clay.
John: It’s good stuff. Practical Magic 2. Mortal Kombat 2. The Cat in the Hat. Godzilla minus zero. Focker in-Law. Wuthering Heights.
Craig: That actually, I’m putting a chip on that.
John: I’m putting a chip on Wuthering Heights too. I don’t understand people who are like– come on.
Craig: Wuthering Heights has always worked.
John: Yes, and people are like, “Oh, but it’s not really Wuthering Heights because the casting is weird.” No. The casting is exactly what she wanted it to be. I’m excited to see it.
Craig: Are the people in it good? Then the casting is right. It doesn’t matter.
John: The Bride. Scream 7.
Craig: Scream 7. Kevin Williamson, tip of the hat.
John: Yes. He created a franchise that just keeps on going.
Craig: That’s a real number. That’s impressive.
John: Ready or Not 2. Masters of the Universe. That’s before we get to the animated movies. We have Hoppers. We don’t even know what these are.
Craig: Where is the movie about the sheep detective?
John: That’s right there in the– It’s hybrid. It’s half animated.
Craig: Okay, yes. Fair.
John: Hoppers, Goat, and The Sheep Detectives, which one of the people on this podcast wrote.
Craig: I’m telling you, The Sheep Detectives is going to surprise people. It really is. It’s adorable.
John: Craig, I don’t believe in Polymarket, I don’t believe in betting, especially sports betting. I don’t want to bet on a movie, but if I were to put some money on a movie, I think I would put it on that because I feel like it’s undervalued at the moment.
Craig: I would trade it as an insider trader and as somebody that is generally a negative Nelly and a worry wart and is expecting the worst, I would also put some money on The Sheep Detectives.
John: I would also put some money on, this is going to be a frigging banner year for movies. Will we hit 2019? Probably not, but will we hit really high? I think we’re going to do great. One or two of these big movies might slip and move to ’27. That can happen too. I just can’t think of another recent year where we’ve had so many just giant titles coming onto our screens.
Craig: Yes. It’s pretty impressive. Also, it’s interesting to see how things like The Devil Wears Prada 2 are– it really is like so much time has passed that it gets to be something else.
John: It’s its own thing as well.
Craig: Yes, it’s its own thing which I like that more. Even Toy Story 5, it’s been a while.
John: It’s been a while. It’s a good concept that’s toys versus the iPads. It’s like, yes, that’s a good idea. I don’t know, I’m excited for the movies. There’s going to be a lot of Barbenheimer weekends where there’s two giant movies. Hopefully, they’re the right combo where they both succeed, and that’s going to be fun, too.
Craig: Yes. It’s pretty crazy. Look at this. Wow.
John: Yes. Listen, it’s a weird time in Hollywood, the mergers, all the hand-wringing over everything. Also, it feels– What I hope is that the box office is so hot that people are like, “Oh, yes, you know what? Making movies, that’s a business there.” It is a business. That we can look at the success of each of these movies and not think like, oh, that did really well for that streamer and it brought subscribers.
No, it actually brought dollars into a box office that you can count, which I like. It’s an old-school way of thinking like, “Oh, was that movie successful? Let’s look at the numbers. Yes, it was incredibly successful.”
Craig: If it’s flipped around where television was maybe the farm system to develop talent to go on to be in movies, like George Clooney was on ER, a development system, so then he becomes a big movie star. We had writers who came out of television to become big movie writers and directors and so forth.
Let’s say it’s flipped around. Let’s say now it’s more like movies make interesting people that then make amazing shows because that’s the economics of it. I don’t care. All I care about is that there still be a place to go and watch things with people, especially comedies and thrillers, but anything you want. Netflix surely looked at what happened with K-Pop Demon Hunters and went, okay.
Because before it was always like, oh my God, Ryan Johnson, Greta Gerwig are forcing us to do this because they need their movie to be here. You could tell it was just like, we’ll give you a little window but the energy around K-Pop Demon Hunters and the theatrical experience, even they can’t miss it, which maybe is why they’re buying Warner Brothers. Maybe that’s it. They really do want a way to just keep that experience going.
John: If we take Netflix at their word that they see themselves as competing not just with other streamers, but with YouTube and TikTok and all the other things that people are pulling on their attention, then theatrical does make sense because that’s a space where you are not on your phone, where you’re not doing other stuff, where you have a person’s full attention for their time and you are able to monetize it and create culture and art that you can then take to your streamer. That does make some sense.
Craig: Makes a lot of sense to me.
John: Yes, if we ran the industry, yes.
Craig: You want to do it? You want to put a bid in?
John: Sure. That’s the future of Script Notes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting that then just took over.
Craig: There’s nothing stopping us at this point. Let’s just try.
John: Why not? Thanks, Craig. Thanks, Drew.
Craig: Thanks, guys.
Links:
- Steve Jobs’ email to himself
- How Will the Miracle Happen Today? by Kevin Kelly
- Havelock’s orality tester
- Quantum computing for lawyers by JP Aumasson
- Swoop
- Inhibiting a master regulator of aging regenerates joint cartilage in mice by Krista Conger
- The Sheep Detectives trailer
- Get your copy of the Scriptnotes book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
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- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by Jennifer Lucy Cook (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.