The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hey, this is John. Standard warning for people who are in the car with their kids, there’s some swearing in this episode.
[music]
John: Hello, and welcome. My name is John August, and you’re listening to Episode 713 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Often on this podcast, we speak with writers who have decades of experience in the industry, and while there’s definitely wisdom to be gained there, it’s perhaps not so relevant to listeners who are just getting started in the business as it operates now in 2025. Today on the show, we are talking with a writing team who graduated from Loyola Marymount in 2018 and then went through a variety of jobs both inside and outside the industry. This year, their first film debuted, KPop Demon Hunters, was a worldwide phenomenon, top of the Netflix charts, culturally inescapable for a while this summer. Welcome and congratulations to Danya Jimenez and Hannah McMechan, our guests on Scriptnotes. Welcome, guys.
Danya Jimenez: Thank you.
Hannah McMechan: Thank you.
John: I’m excited to talk with you about your journey from film school to now because it’s much more recent than a lot of other guests have been, but also just the process of going from, I’m in film school to now I’m being paid to write, to I now have a thing coming out in the world where people can see. I want to talk about day jobs. I want to talk about moments where you thought about giving up. I want to talk about collaboration and your process of working together.
In our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about what Hollywood gets wrong about Gen Z and portrayals of Gen Z and things that could be better or just misassumptions that are going to happen here. Let’s get started. Talk to us about where you guys first met, what you guys were writing separately. Danya, let’s start with you. Why did you end up at Loyola Marymount? What was the process that got you there?
Danya: I realized later on that I wanted to write for TV and film. All of my friends were doing political science, business. Those were the degrees that they were chasing after. I remember telling my college counselor that I was going to do the same thing, and she was like, “You cannot do that.” She was like, “I will actually talk to your parents because this would be a huge mistake.”
John: What did this counselor see in you that you weren’t seeing yourself?
Danya: I don’t know. That’s a really good question. I think she just saw that, oh, we had a lot of fun writing my college essays, they were very creative, and I never said, “We should be more serious.” I think she was like, “Oh, you should just do this.” She knew that I would never do my homework. I would always watch TV and film up until like 4:00 AM, and then that’s when I would get to do my homework.
John: You were procrastinating film buff, and she thought, “Well, that should be a film student.”
Danya: Yes. She put all of the pieces together before I did. I also didn’t even know that this was a job that you could have.
John: Nor did I until I actually was in college. It’s good that somebody tipped you off with this beforehand. You were aware that movies were written probably, but not that it was a job you could have.
Danya: Yes, I was like, “That’s not my business. I don’t know who’s doing that, but it certainly would not be me.” It wasn’t until I watched, this is the randomest movie to mention, but I always give it a shout out, No Strings Attached.
John: Sure.
Danya: I watched that a few times, and I was talking to my dad about it. I was like, “Yes, that job seems incredible,” even though he’s having the worst time in that movie being a writer’s assistant or a writer. I don’t even know. My dad was like, “Yes, that’s a job that you can have. I think you could do it if you wanted to.” I was like, “Oh, I should look into that,” even though, again, he was miserable in that, and I was like, “I want to do that.”
John: Hannah, talk to us about this. When did you decide, “Okay, maybe film school is the thing for me”?
Hannah: I was like a more serious type writer girl. I was really into novels. I remember being so young, I truly think whenever Microsoft Word first came out-
John: Oh, Microsoft Word’s been out forever. Microsoft Word is older than you, but-
Hannah: Oh, yes.
John: -you were writing. You were always typing.
Hannah: Yes. I remember being a child, child, and just writing books on Microsoft Word on my parents’ computer.
John: Books, how many were you writing?
Hannah: I was doing chapters-
John: Incredible.
Hannah: -of just, I don’t even know what because it was so long ago, but I really loved it. Then I started hearing as I got older, like, “Oh, you can’t make money writing books.” Then I was like, “Oh, well, how can I make money writing”? Then at the same time, I also loved movies and TV shows, but I also didn’t know that that was a job. Then I think when I was applying to colleges, I was like, “Oh, maybe I combine it? Maybe it’s easier to break into the film industry,” is what I was thinking at the time. I was like, “Oh, this is a smart practical choice is to, instead of writing novels, I’ll try to make it in the film and TV industry,” which realized later was not the case-
John: Absolutely.
Hannah: -but at the time, I was like, “This is better than novel writing.”
John: Hannah, what was the first screenplay you read?
Hannah: I actually think it was The Social Network, because we had to read it in one of our film classes in college.
Danya: Wow. I can’t believe you remember that.
John: Was that the same for you, Danya? Did you read any before that?
Danya: I could not even guess. What my first script was that I read, I have no idea. I just remember scripts that I did read when I was younger, like in internships and stuff like that. I read Nocturnal Animals. It was random.
John: Interesting one to be the first screenplay you read.
Danya: What’s the other one that was with Shailene Woodley, and it’s a really short script because it all takes place on a boat, and I think it’s 40 pages long?
Hannah: Oh.
Danya: It was all–
Hannah: She’s stranded in the water?
Danya: Yes. That one was really interesting to read, too.
John: Growing up in the age of the internet, you could have Googled and found scripts for anything, but you didn’t really do it until you had academic requirement to start doing it, and I’m always curious about–
Hannah: I think I truly was like, movies are made while they’re shooting it. They just have an idea. I didn’t know that scripts were a thing.
John: Nor did I. It is weird how we grew up reading plays in English class. There’s a play, and all the actors are saying the lines are in the play. We’re in plays, and we see all that stuff. We just don’t associate, oh, there’s the same underlying document behind a movie until you read it, and you’re like, “Oh my gosh, that’s the script.” The first script I read, I’ve said this on podcast many, many times, was Steven Soderbergh’s script for Sex, Life, and Videotape was published in a book along with his journal, and so I could actually watch the videotape and flip through the thing.
Oh my gosh, everything they’re saying and doing is there on the script. It’s such a revelation. It’s just like, “Oh, there really was a plan. There are blueprints behind this building.” It’s so exciting to see that. You guys both decided to go to school to do that, and often on the podcast, we are dismissive of what you learn in film schools, but tell me what you learned in film schools and how it was helpful and how it got you guys together. Danya, to start with this, what are the classes you were taking in Loyola Marymount film program? This is undergrad, basically, right?
Danya: Yes, undergrad. I really liked the film history ones, watching in the theater all the old movies, even though I did not talk shit on it. We just did a LMU Q&A session after watching K-pop, and I did say that I fell asleep a lot in that theater, but I did enjoy watching all these old movies that I wouldn’t– or even not old movies. I watched In the Mood for Love in that theater, and I remember being like, “Holy shit, this is the craziest thing I’ve ever seen.” Just so beautiful.
John: Let’s talk about that. One of the advantages of going through a film program is you’re required to watch some things that are outside of your normal area of interest, which can be really good. It also helps you develop your taste, what you find interesting, what clicks with you, and if something’s not clicking with you, makes you introspect and figure out why it’s not clicking with you. You’re forced to respond to things you would otherwise never see, so that feels good. When were you first writing, though, in these programs? Hannah, what was the first thing you needed to write? Was it a general film and TV degree, or was it specifically a screenwriting degree that you were getting?
Hannah: Our school was specifically screenwriting-
John: Wow.
Hannah: -which is cool because there’s not a lot of colleges that offer specifically screenwriting, but I think we didn’t immediately jump into write a full feature, write a full pilot. It was we were doing scenes at first.
John: That sounds like the right plan. Can you give me a sense of what is the prompt for a scene? What would you need to go off to to write? Was it within a genre, or was it, “Here are the characters”? Talk to me about that.
Hannah: I’m trying to remember.
Danya: I’m surprised you remember that. I’m like, “Yes, that totally–“
Hannah: You know my memory. I don’t know if he– I’m saying “he” because most of our professors were men. I’m trying to remember if there was a prompt. I don’t know if there was. I think it was whatever you want to write about, write a scene, and there might have been a theme of like, “What is the emotion? Here’s an emotion that you guys should be writing about.”
Danya: Oh, yes, I just remembered this. That brought me back.
Hannah: Yes, but they were pretty vague. I think everything was pretty vague. I feel like the best part of going to film school was your friends more than the actual curriculum. Not to say that the curriculum isn’t great because they do force you to write, but it’s not like you’re really being taught anything that you don’t already have within you. They’re just forcing you to have a deadline, so that forces you to write, which is the hardest part.
Danya: Even structure, you can look these things up. You can buy books, but yes, the professors were great. They’re very supportive, very friendly, I would say, which is different from, I don’t know, what I heard about most film schools, that it’s very cutthroat. Ours was very like, “We’re all here together. We’re all going to do it collaboratively.”
Hannah: Yes, which made everybody in the program really close to each other, which helped later, because then you all get into the film industry together and you’re all helping each other versus having weird animosity towards each other.
John: Drew and I both went through the Stark program at USC, which is a graduate-level producing program. We definitely learned a lot in the class, but it was having that group of 25 students who were doing the same things, who were graduating at the same time, was incredibly helpful in terms of just the shared knowledge you had and the connections you had entering into the industry.
I do want to go back to, though, the writing you were doing in those classes, because we had Scott Frank on the podcast talking about theoretically if he were to open up a screenwriting school, how he’d want to do it, and it was very scene-based, that he was frustrated that a lot of the film and TV education about writing is like, “Okay, now write a pilot. Now write a feature.” It’s just like you need to start on a granular level with what is happening in a scene, what are these two characters attempting to do, how do you build out from that? Any of the things you wrote in that class or while you were in film school, did they become anything? Did they become samples? What was helpful about that writing? What came out of that?
Danya: Oh, yes. Honestly, a lot of the things we wrote there, not that they were produced, but they got us our agents, managers. They’ve gotten us jobs before.
Hannah: Yes, we still send stuff that we wrote in college as a sample for staffing. I will say nothing that we wrote separately has ever been sent out into the world or is usable, but once we started writing together, it was like, “Oh, these are good things, let’s keep using those.” Yes, there are things that to this day will get us staff that we wrote senior year of college together.
John: Meeting up with your writing partner in college is a very classic way things start, but you guys are separate students, so you both had to do your own work, but when did you start actually writing together?
Danya: We would have our own assignments that we were technically writing on our own, but we were both writing them together behind the scenes. I think one of our professors knew that we were doing this.
Hannah: Yes, but that didn’t start until senior year, but we found out that we should write together junior year. Then that senior year is when, yes, once we came back from study abroad, we were like, “We’re going to cheat the system and write all of our things together so that we can use them when we graduate.”
Danya: I remember getting our grades back for our scripts, and if one of us got a better grade, I was like, “Well, that’s annoying. We wrote that together.”
[laughter]
Danya: “It’s not fair,” but yes, it was worth it.
John: Talk about the early dynamic of being a writing team and what’s progressed over the years, because we’ve had a lot of teams on the show, and sometimes one person’s at the keyboard and one person’s at the side. Sometimes they completely write separately and then they pass documents back and forth between each other. What are you guys like? What works well for you? How did you discover what works well for you?
Danya: We kind of do it all, just depending on the deadline and the project. If we think it’s more comedy-based, then we will try to write it together because we will riff.
John: In person together?
Danya: Yes. Always try to do it in person, but we’ve started doing Zoom.
Hannah: I know. If things are piling up and there’s a lot of things that are due around the same time, then we’ll just split it up and do it completely separate, and then we’ll swap, but if we have time, it is a comedy, and so we want it to be really fun, then we’ll really try to write it together just because it turns out so much better if we’re riffing off of each other in person versus by yourself writing a scene. It just is never as funny.
Danya: Yes, or we’ll write it separately and just deal with the structure part, which is what sucks. Sorry. Then we’ll get together and punch it up, and that’s a reward for doing it by yourself.
John: Write it separately. Write scenes separately and stick them together or just completely different takes on how to do something and then you have to figure out what the–
Danya: Oh no. We’ll split it in half. We’ll be like, “I’ll do the second half, you the first half,” or we’ll do scene by scene.
Hannah: We’ll do the structure together. We’ll outline the whole thing just so that at least we’re on the same page about that, and then, yes.
John: Divvy up the scenes. The very few times I’ve had to write with a partner, that’s the approach we’ve taken, and you agree on outline, then you’re doing separate scenes. Most of the times, it works well together, as long as you realize, “Oh, that beat you were going for on yours, I also did in mine,” and so something has to move back and forth, but you can figure it out.
Hannah: The hard part about that, too, is if you’re writing and then you’re like, “Oh my God, I have this really cool idea, and so now I’m going to seed it in here, and so I need to make sure that she knows to pay it off later.” I feel like stuff like that, like runners, jokes that you want to be building off of, that’s really hard to do separate because then it’s just like you’re setting up a whole thing that’s never going to be paid off in the exact way that you’ve seen it in your head.
Danya: Yes. Also, it’s fun reading each other’s pages and being surprised by jokes.
Hannah: That’s true, yes.
Danya: We’ve been crying, laughing at each other’s things just as a little surprise.
John: Let’s go back to you’re graduating from Loyola Marymount. You’re here in Los Angeles. Are we both from LA? Where were you coming from?
Danya: I’m from Orange County.
Hannah: I’m from right outside of Yosemite.
John: Okay. You graduated. You’re deciding to stay in LA. You’re not moving back to where you came from?
Hannah: No.
John: Is that now what happened?
Hannah: Oh my God. I’m like, I could not go back to my town. There’s like 5,000 people in the whole place. I think we both were very delusional, and that has helped us, and so I think we both were like, “We’re going to make it. We’re obviously going to make it.” Once we started writing together, the pilot that we wrote together our junior year, got us into the Black List Women in Film Lab our senior year of college. After that, that just fed into our delusions because we were like, “Well, we’re amazing writers, and they think so,” so yes, when we graduated, we were very much– and after we got into that program, we sent cold emails to everyone in the industry with that script.
John: You say everyone in the industry. How many people were you sending emails to?
Danya: Oh, so many people.
John: More than 100?
Danya: IMDbPro is scary to have access to.
Hannah: It was probably like 200 emails.
John: Wow.
Danya: Just copy and paste. It wasn’t like a cover letter that we’re–
Hannah: No.
Danya: No. Just generic.
John: You’re saying, “Hey, we’re this writing team. We’re in the Women in Film Black List program.”
Hannah: Yes. That was in the subject line so that they opened it, actually.
John: Short thing about who you are, what zone you’re in terms of how they should consider you and that script, or what were you sending through?
Hannah: Yes, we sent the script that we went through the program with.
Danya: I think we sent it as a link so that people wouldn’t see an attachment and be terrified of the email. It was like a secret insert.
Hannah: Yes, we were really strategic about it, and we tried to only email assistants at agencies and management companies instead of the actual agent and manager, so, hopefully, the assistant would open it, read it, and be like, “I’m going to recommend this to my boss,” which didn’t end up happening for some places, but it worked out because one of the places we sent it to, he turned out to be the head of Lit at Abrams. We didn’t know that we had accidentally sent it to him, but he was the one that actually opened it, brought us in. This was our senior year.
Danya: We were still in college, yes.
Hannah: We were still in college. We graduated with an agent hit-pocketing us. I think that was like, “Oh, we’re on the right path. We’re not giving up, because everything’s kind of–“
John: I just wanted to define terms for people who don’t know. Hit-pocketing means that they haven’t officially signed you as a client, but they’re– put you out there in the world, and if that deal happens, then you’re going to be a client. Just sort of a not full and official, but sort of yes, we’re rooting for you. It’s a common way for things to start out as an agency relationship. Talk us through that interest from Abrams, that sort of sense because it’s got to be just weird to be a college senior who has an agent and it seems like, “Oh, this is all going to click and work.” Was there jealousy among your classmates? Were you not sharing that news? It feels like a big deal.
Danya: Yes. We were living at the time with all of our best friends in one house, and we’d be like, “Okay, here we go, off to Beverly Hills.” I think everyone was happy for us. Everyone in the house was doing different stuff. We had actors. We had directors. No one was a writer, really.
Hannah: Yes, but I will say, even though we technically were signed, and we also got a manager, too, because he hooked us up with our manager, we thought, “Oh, we’re going to immediately be working in the industry,” but that didn’t happen. For the first eight months that we were post-grad but signed, we were really confused, we were like, “How can you be signed and not have [crosstalk]?
John: Yes, be working. Totally.
Hannah: Then we became substitute teachers. I feel like it was a weird contradiction of we’re these fresh-out-of-college signed writers, which feels very hard to do, but we’re substitute teaching. It was a weird disconnect where we were so excited and felt so good about ourselves, but also we’re going to teach kindergartners that were pooping their pants every day and writing after work.
Danya: If there was jealousy, it was immediately gone once they saw us waking up at–
John: Yes, because that’s the natural toiling of it all.
Danya: Oh, yes.
John: A couple questions about substitute teaching. First off, can you be that unqualified and be a substitute teacher? Because you don’t have to have an education degree.
Danya: Oh, absolutely not, and you should not be teaching. I’ll say that. I was teaching high schoolers, and I was like, “I should not be here.”
John: I think of substitute teachers are often babysitting, but you don’t even have the necessary skill set for that. How do you get hired as a substitute teacher?
Danya: It is so easy.
John: What do you do?
Danya: The first thing you need is a bachelor’s degree, actually.
John: You got that.
Hannah: Yes.
Danya: Then you need to take the CBEST test.
Hannah: That’s basically like the PSAT. It’s the easiest test in the world. It takes like an hour. It’s truly probably like second-grade level stuff.
Danya: We were stressed about it, though. I remember we were at the laundromat doing a practice test as we were doing our laundry.
Hannah: We were stressed, but that’s because we’re really bad at science and math.
Danya: Yes, that’s true. Not a strong suit.
John: I love taking tests, and I miss taking tests. I loved standardized tests. Now I’m thinking, like, we’re going to take the CBEST test. You’re going to be a substitute teacher. Absolutely. It’s my calling.
Danya: It’s honestly a really fun job. It was traumatic in a lot of ways, but so fun.
John: Does it pay at all?
Danya: Yes.
Hannah: Yes.
John: How much do you get for a day of substitute teaching? Like if filling in at a kindergarten, filling in a high school, are you making–
Hannah: I think it was literally like $150 a day, which at the time we were like, “Oh my God, you can’t get this anywhere.”
Danya: You’d be done early. You’d be done latest 3:00 PM.
Hannah: Yes. Then we’d go to WeWork after–
Danya: Which we had a free membership.
Hannah: Yes, through the Black List because we love them. They’re our biggest supporters. We would go to school 7:00 AM, off at 3:00 PM, go write our own stuff on the side. We did that for eight months, which at the time felt like no one had struggled as long as we had, which is so not true, but at the time we were like, “Oh my God, this is taking forever. When are we going to make it?” Then we finally got our first paid writing gig and luckily never had to go back to substitute teaching.
John: Let’s go back to the Black List Women in Film program. What did it actually consist of? You applied to it with this script. You got into the program, but what were you actually doing in the program? How often were you meeting? Who were you meeting with? What were the things you were doing over the course of that program?
Danya: We were meeting, was it twice a week for a month, I think, and we would go to Hollywood to NeueHouse. They were there first, which was super fancy. It was way more social, I would say, than working on your script that you got in for, which I think was incredible because that’s what we were there for, to make all these connections. We didn’t know what agents and managers were, the difference between them. We didn’t know what generals were. They did a lot of mock generals for us with actual execs. They had showrunners come in and talk to us. We had like– who did we have come in that was so cool?
Hannah: Jenny Connor.
John: She’s great.
Hannah: Yes, she’s great. Ah, no, I’m not going to remember anybody’s name.
Danya: Like Sex and the City, Mad Men.
Hannah: Yes, just really, really big showrunners and cool execs from every studio, and they just put all of us ladies in front of them and really just taught us how the industry worked. Once we got in, it was like, “Your script, who cares? We’re going to teach you how to operate.”
John: All the other things. It was teaching you the business and the ethos of it, just how it feels to be in the industry, which is really important also because you’re coming right out of undergrad, so you’re still fresh baked in terms of you’re not used to the working world, and so it’s good for you to have that exposure. Let’s now fast forward to, you’ve been substitute teaching. You are now, is it your agents, your managers? Who is getting you into the media, into your first paid job?
Danya: We actually got that through a student at LMU, who’s– honestly, she was more of an acquaintance at the time. She was one of our best friend’s friend, and she was the youngest assistant at Sony at the time or something. I’m pretty sure she was doing that while she was a senior in college. Her boss, Alex Zahn, who’s now at Netflix– Her name is [unintelligible 00:24:08], by the way. She’s also still in the industry. She told us that Alex was looking for a Latino script. Super vague. We’re like, “No worries.”
John: Yes, sure. Absolutely.
Danya: “We’ve got you,” which we didn’t. We actually had never written a feature together at that time. We went to a diner and wrote a feature in a week, and we mean it when we say a week because it was bad. It was a long pilot. There was no descriptions. The action lines were so, so basic, but her boss read it and liked it, and so he’s like, “I’d love for you guys to come in.”
We went to Sony and me and Hannah were like, “Wow, we are selling this thing. We’re doing it.” Then he was like, “Yes, this script is not going to happen. However, I have this rewrite assignment that I think you guys would be good for.” We’re like, “Okay, totally.” We pretty much pitched on this rewrite for, I want to say like two weeks. We were just going back and forth, because he really needed to trust that we could do it, so we were doing way more than I think a normal rewrite would require before being hired.
Hannah: Yes. I think he just really liked us and liked how we wrote, but also knew that we were so young and so inexperienced that if he was to convince his boss to hire us, he would need basically the entire script written before we got hired, and so he really put his neck on the line for us, which is incredible. We owe so much to him because if he had never given us that first writing credit, I don’t think we would have been validated to get anything else after.
Danya: It also gave us a lot of confidence, I feel like, because it was a studio job. We were going to Sony. I don’t know. As far as we feel.
Hannah: Yes, that wasn’t our agents at all. It was just our connections from college and hearsay. I also think what we did in the beginning that helped so much is if we truly heard anything that anyone was looking for, we went and we wrote it in a week because that’s how crazy we were, and I think that that’s something that you really have to be willing to do is to actually not sleep for a week and write something, even if it’s bad, just because I think that not everyone does that, and they don’t have the material when it comes time to give it to someone.
Danya: It’s also a lot easier to do with a writing partner because you’re both being anti-social losers together. Especially when we were really young and all of our friends were going out partying and stuff and we were just like, “Here we go, to WeWork on a Friday, on a Saturday.”
John: The Friday nights at home writing in my early 20s were very productive, but also very anti-social. It’s a real reality. You guys are 22, 23 as you’re starting to do this. That is the era which is like you don’t need sleep. You just crank, and that’s great. This project at Sony, it’s a rewrite at Sony. You get this job to do a rewrite probably at scale or something. It’s a small amount of money, but enough money, and it’s an actual, real job job. What was it like going from, “Okay, we can write a script” to like, “Okay, now we have to deal with notes from a person who’s actually telling us what they want and what to do”? Did you end up feeling good about the script that was finally delivered?
Danya: No. It was as good as I think we could have made it with the concept itself. It was not something that we would normally write ourselves. It was more of like a melodrama. The first draft that we wrote was horrific. We sent it to our manager and he was so panicked. We have the chillest manager, like such a, sorry, Drew, frat star. He called us at, I want to say 11:00 PM and he’s like, “Okay, we’re going to go through this whole thing and figure this out,” because it was so, so bad. I think the night before we had to send it in, we rewrote the entire thing.
Hannah: Yes. It was definitely the most stressful experience of our life, having to go from writing for fun to writing for paid work, and yes, because we hadn’t really written features before and we were hired for a feature, the first draft was 135-something pages.
John: That’s long.
Hannah: It was just so meandering. We had no idea what a structure for a feature was supposed to be because the only other one we had written was that diner script that we wrote in a week to get this project. Yes, our poor manager was like, “This is due next week?” and we were like, “Yes.” He’s like, “Oh my God.”
Danya: We didn’t know that you could push– He gave us four weeks, which is–
John: That’s a crazy amount of time.
Danya: It’s a crazy amount of time, and we didn’t know that we could be like, “Hey, actually, I think we need more time,” so we were like, “Fuck, okay, it’s due tomorrow. A hard deadline, we’re going to get a bad grade.” I don’t know why we were so [crosstalk] about it.
Hannah: Yes. We didn’t know anything.
Danya: No.
John: You’re now paid writers, and so you’re getting some money, not enough to get into Guild or get insurance or any of that stuff yet, but you’re getting some money. Then were you just taking other meetings? How are you going from that? I have to suspect that both your manager and your agent are very excited they can now market you as people like, “They’re coming off a job at Sony.” It makes it much easier for them to get you on the list for other things. Were you aiming for other feature stuff, for TV staffing, anything? What was your mandate to them?
Danya: We really wanted to staff on a show bad, because we’re pretty social, and I think at the time, it was like Pen15 had just come out.
John: Oh my God, what an incredible show.
Danya: We were like, “Obviously, we’re going to get on that.” That was our mindset. Yes, we were like, “Please submit us places, anything. We’ll do anything.” We did roundtables. We did punch-ups.
John: Let’s talk through for people who are listening. Roundtables, you’re bringing in a bunch of writers to look at a script that is somewhere in development, or maybe it’s heading into production, and so you are talking through the stuff, making suggestions for things that can improve. Sometimes you’re even doing a little reading of the script there as you’re starting to do the work, versus punch-ups, which is you’re just looking for joke, joke, joke, joke, joke. Both of those are one-day situations, they’re paying you a grand, a couple grand, not much.
Danya: No, even less than that.
John: It was an opportunity for you to be in the room with other writers and executives who were noticing, like, “Oh, they’re funny,” or whatever, and hopefully they’re going to use you for other projects down the road.
Danya: Yes, exactly that.
John: They can be a grind, they can be a trap, they can be a problem, but it’s very reasonable for you guys to have taken those jobs when you took them. You have the money from this one Sony rewrite, and you’re just stringing that along and trying to find the next paid gig. What ended up being your next paid gigs?
Danya: We did one roundtable for American Pie Girls’ Rule. That was like a female youth pass because two older men had written it. Our friend actually ended up being in the movie, Natasha Behnam, which was really cute. Then we did one youth punch-up for that animated movie. What’s that called? Ron’s Gone Wrong?
Hannah: Oh my God, I forgot about that. Yes, we did.
John: When you say that kind of punch-up, how long were you working on that?
Hannah: I think they just sent us the script. Yes, that one, we didn’t have to go in person. They just sent us the script, we read it, and we gave–
Danya: No, we did go. We gave notes in person. Remember, that’s where we met Andrew.
Hannah: Oh, okay, but we got the script ahead of time and got to read it and then come in prepared. Then I think the next thing we got was the Disney Channel writers’ room, which that truly felt like the first real, real job because you’re going in every day, nine to five. It lasted, honestly, almost a full year.
Danya: It was a Disney Channel show, so lots of episodes, but then also the pandemic extended that.
Hannah: Yes. We got our own episode, which was so cool to get at that age. I think we were– were we 23 or 22 when we got hired for that?
Danya: Yes.
Hannah: It really felt like, “Okay, this is finally, we’re set a little bit in the industry.”
John: One challenge, though, of course, is you’re splitting a salary, so it’s great that you’re getting paid some, but it’s going half and half, and money goes out to your manager and to your agent, so it’s challenging on those fronts to make that all connect, but it’s great that you have an ongoing, having a sense that this is your actual job that you’re showing up for is so validating and so important. What are the steps between here and KPop Demon Hunters, and did you have any sense that it was going to be a thing, thing when you were first meeting on it?
Danya: While we were in the Disney Channel writers’ room, that– wow, you’re going to be so happy with it. Hannah’s always dying to tell this full circle moment. Actually, you know what? You tell it.
Hannah: Okay.
Danya: This is your moment to shine.
Hannah: It’ll finally hit.
Danya: Because everything’s been set up.
Hannah: I know. It’s already been set up.
Danya: You don’t have to do it. Okay.
Hannah: Normally, I have to set up the diner script, but we’ve already set it up. That diner script that we wrote in a week for that one exec, we continued to edit that and work on it over the next year or so because we did really love it. The first draft was awful, but eventually it got to a good place, and we submitted it to the Sundance Feature Lab. We got into the Sundance Feature Lab with that script while we were in the Disney Channel writers’ room, and so we went out there. Luckily, our showrunners let us take a week off. We went out there, and one of our–
John: Is this while it was still in Utah, or had it moved to Colorado at that point?
Hannah: Utah?
Danya: Yes. Park City, yes.
Hannah: Yes, Park City.
John: Park City. This is the winter lab or the summer lab?
Danya: Winter.
Hannah: Winter. It was 2018 or 2019?
Danya: 2019. Yes, it was in January of 2019.
Hannah: Yes. Right before the pandemic. This was when we were hearing that it was in Washington for the first time. That was that Sundance.
Danya: It was actually Ground Zero at that time.
Hannah: Yes.
Danya: We knew a lot of people.
Hannah: We didn’t realize that was Ground Zero. Anyways, one of our mentors at this program was Nicole Perlman.
John: Who’s fantastic. She’s been on the podcast before.
Danya: Oh my God.
Hannah: Nicole is terrific. She did Guardians of the Galaxy. She’s worked a bunch on really beloved sci-fi fantasy shows, and she’s an absolute dream. One of the things that I’ve adopted from her is the idea of a writing sprint, which is basically you set a timer for 60 minutes, and the next 60 minutes you’re going to write. Nicole pioneered, just on Twitter, she would say, “I’m starting a writing sprint at the top of the hour. Who wants to join me?” and so you just join in. It’s good to have other people were writing along with you.
Danya: She’s so cool. We owe her, honestly, everything.
Hannah: We do. We always keep forgetting to thank her. We’re always like, “We should thank her.”
Danya: This is our moment. Thank you.
Hannah: Hopefully, she listens to this. She was our mentor, and she read our script, which our script was raunchy, rated-R, live action. She was like, “You know what? You guys would be perfect for this movie that I’m EPing called Untitled KPop Demon Hunters,” which the name has never changed, and that was five years ago. We were like, “That’s so interesting. What is it?” She’s like, “It’s a kids animated movie about K-pop.” We were like, “That is not what we do. That’s not really what we want to do, but we’re also 23, and so we will do it.”
John: Always say yes. Yes.
Hannah: Yes.
Danya: Yes, always.
Hannah: She recommended us to Maggie, the director. We came back from the program, and we immediately pitched, went to Sony, pitched to Maggie and the producers. Our pitch was terrible. It really, really sucked. It was not an animated movie.
John: Let’s talk about why. You read the script. You read Maggie’s existing script.
Hannah: No, there was no script.
John: There was a concept space. Okay, but not a script. All right.
Hannah: Yes, it sucked because animated movies, they need to be big. I guess that was the main thing.
Danya: Also, we had just written one feature at this point. That’s important to note. It was live action, and it was for Sundance. Now we’re being asked to go in and pitch on a Sony animated movie. Millions of dollars. Huge difference. I think what we pitched, if it were live action, it would be less than $1 million. I think it took place in one home. The finale was a pool party.
Also, the K-pop aspect of it was all wrong, too, because we had watched maybe one video and we thought, “Okay, they’re dancing in this one video.” Obviously, in other videos, they have instruments. Duh. We pitched all of them with guitars, drums, all this stuff. Maggie was like, “Okay, so no to all of this, essentially, but I like your guys’ voice.” She was writing a movie about three girls in their 20s that were roommates and best friends and coworkers. At the time, we were also living together. It was just a really easy match, I would say.
Hannah: It was a personality high.
Danya: It was a personality high.
Hannah: It worked out so well because we felt so connected to the girls. Everything else, she was kind of like, “You can learn about K-pop. You can learn about what it means to write for animation, but I like your voice. I like your vibe. That’s what I’ve been looking for,” because I think she’d been interviewing a lot of older men with the right credits and stuff. I think what she couldn’t find was the voice.
We really lucked out, because we didn’t have the credits, and we didn’t have the structure or even a good pitch, but we had the vibe. Then, yes, everything else came later. We learned about K-pop later. We learned about how to write for animation later, all that stuff. Yes, in the beginning, it was just like, she was like, “I trust you. I’m going to take a chance on you,” and it worked out.
Danya: I will say it’s also very important to mention that we did become K-pop stans. I don’t want anyone to come for us. She told us to watch maybe one K-pop video and maybe a K-drama. It’s called a K-hole. There’s obviously the drug one and then there’s a K-pop one. We entered K-holes, spent thousands of dollars on our boys, tickets, merch.
Hannah: Yes, just so that no one thinks we’re not K-pop stans.
Danya: Yes, we are hardcore stans. Also, I watched so many K-dramas. They’re still some of my favorite shows, K-dramas.
John: Awesome. One of the other challenges in Kpop Demon Hunters is that you have a trio of heroes and each of them have their own storylines and things they need to service. I did Charlie’s Angels, and they share a lot of kinship between the two of them. It’s a really challenging thing to do because every scene has to support multiple things. It has to support individual character stuff of one of the three, their group dynamic, and move the plot forward, and you have to have surprises and reveals. It’s a challenging structural movie. At the time that you were coming into it, it was just a Sony theatrical movie or had already sold to Netflix? Did you know where it was headed?
Danya: No. All we knew was, yes, Sony theatrical. That’s what our contract said.
John: Was your contract for a number of weeks, a number of drafts? What did your contract look like?
Danya: Everyone else on the project was paid weekly. Ours was for a treatment, a script, a rewrite, a polish, like a standard live-action movie. Very different how you do animated movies and live-action, which we didn’t know at the time.
John: I’ll say that, actually, I haven’t done a lot of animated movies, I generally am contracted on drafts and revisions, but it’s absolutely true that most of those people are on there weekly because it’s just this long, ongoing process. The challenge of you guys being on a draft basis is that those drafts can stand out for a very long time and they cannot pay you as frequently as they should pay you. How long were you working on KPop Demon Hunters? How many months, years was it?
Hannah: We were on it for the first two years, and then we were off it the third year when it sold to Netflix. I think Netflix wanted new writers to come in and take a look. Then we were off it for a year, and then they brought us back the fourth year. Then we were off it again the last year, the fifth year. I guess it was a total of two and a half, three years.
John: Isn’t it so strange when you leave a movie, I’ve done this a lot, you leave a movie, you come back and you’re like, “Oh my God, it’s grown a lot, but it’s also grown in weird ways,” things you don’t expect and decisions are made like, “Okay, well, that is what we’re doing now.” It must be exciting to actually see illustrations and probably temp reels and you got to see pencils and probably tests for a lot of things, and yet it’s almost a movie, but it’s not quite a movie. It’s a weird state when you come into movies that way.
Hannah: We loved seeing the animatics, the character designs, the set designs because you just don’t get to see that in live action.
Danya: Working with the storyboard artists and seeing what they bring to each scene, you’re like, “God, you’re so funny and smart. That’s exactly what it should be.”
John: Yes. During the two years you were originally on KPop Dream Hunters, then you were off and so on, what other work were you doing? I assume you were going out for a bunch of meetings. What was that life like? It doesn’t stop while you’re employed. Tell me about that.
Danya: It was the pandemic, so we had a lot of time. Didn’t have to do anything social. We were working on the KPop movie. We were still in our Disney Channel room. Then we were also working on the Diner script because Amazon and Macro optioned it. We were doing that with them. Three projects at once for the first two years
Hannah: Yes, which was really challenging, but because it was the pandemic, we were able to juggle it all. Eventually, the show ended and the Amazon project ended, so then we were just KPop. That was extremely time-consuming, so that took up all of our time towards the end. Then we got on another TV show. We did a Ren & Stimpy reboot, writer’s room.
Danya: We did a Paramount Plus script that never went anywhere, but they did pay us.
Hannah: We did a Lord Farquaad origin story for Dreamworks. Just a treatment, though. Never made it to script.
Danya: Oh, we did a Cheech & Chong biopic that also did not go anywhere. So many things die.
Hannah: Everything dies.
Danya: Everything dies.
John: Through all this other work, because KPop Dream Hunters was not a Writers Guild-covered movie, are you guys WGA yet? What got you into the guild?
Danya: The Disney Channel room got us into the guild originally, but we have been in and out of the guild so many times because we did not make the requirements.
Hannah: Yes, because we kept going to animation.
John: That’s really one of the giant challenges. As you’re dividing your work between two different places, you don’t earn enough in either space to give them health insurance.
Hannah: Yes. Well, the most recent show we did, luckily, has us in the WGA for a while. It’s the Matthew/Woody show that we were co-producers on. So many random things in between that paid the bills but never actually went anywhere.
John: That’s a screenwriter’s life. That’s the reality. Most of the things you do are not going to get produced, but if they’re putting money in the bank account and keeping a roof over your head, those are the jobs you take. Hopefully, they’re building towards other things down the road. If that project doesn’t get made, at least you’ve got something out of the experience or the connections or something else that’ll help you out for the next thing past that. Drew, we have some follow-up from previous episodes. Let’s start with, back in 7/11, we were talking about breaking in. We have two guests here who have more recently broken in. Let’s see what the instinct is here.
Drew: An aspiring adult woman writes, “Sam’s question about how to break into the industry at 34 really hit home for me. I appreciated the brutal honesty of Alina and John’s response, but damn, it also sucks. I’m also 34, living Sam’s goal, working as an assistant at a production company, and I feel stuck in a different way.
I’m so close to everything yet still so far. I’m utilizing every connection I have and will continue to forever, but I’m frustrated by the people long past retirement age not passing the torch. Of course, the industry is changing and there is uncertainty in the air, but I believe so much of the problem is that the 65-plus crowd is not stepping aside and letting a new generation be the adults in the room. We just have to keep writing. Keep writing, Sam.”
John: All right, so much to unpack there. I want to start with the last point about people stepping aside. I’m not sure that it’s writers in their 60s who are the problem, but it may be decision makers in their 60s who are not hiring new people may be one of the factors that’s, I think, really at play here. It’s great having two of you in front of me because you’re both in your early 20s, and this is a writer who’s 34 and is experiencing a different thing.
You had the ability just to sort of get out of college and go right into it, which is what I was able to do, too. I know there’s such an advantage to being in your ramen days where life is cheap and you don’t actually have big expectations of things. It’s nice to just be young and hungry and write the script in a weekend because you need to get that done. You must have classmates who are starting to be frustrated by the inability to sort of get headway here. What are those conversations like and what do you find people doing?
Hannah: Close to home question. I think our advice always to everyone is find a way to do this that’s not paid because, obviously, you have to do other things to make money. You have to work a restaurant job or work an assistant job or freelance stuff, and you need to be doing those things so that you can survive. I also think if you only do that, then some people can just completely– they’re not even doing the thing that they love to do anymore because they don’t have any time to do it or they have no energy to do it.
I feel like it’s so important to be like you just have to keep doing the thing that you love and the thing that you want to do, even if it’s an improv show or a short film that you wrote and you funded yourself and you shot on an iPhone. We know people that are doing that and are making their own content for really cheap. That’s incredible. You have to keep doing that.
Danya: Hopefully people that you know that you’re friends with are, I don’t know, farther along in their careers that can watch one of your short films and be like, “Wait, that was really good. I want to send this to someone.”
Hannah: We’re also constantly sending our friends to our manager. We use our manager as our personal, “You have to help our friends get reps.” We threaten him. We’re like, “Send these people out, find someone at your company.” He’s doing the work of multiple managers because we’re like, “Now you need to go find other managers to rep our friends.”
Danya: I feel like we’ve said this to a few people, but having a writing partner, even if it’s not permanent, is so helpful because it’s someone holding you accountable. It’s like when you sign up for a workout class, you’re like, “Oh, it’s early, I’m cold, I don’t really want to go.” If Hannah’s at the workout class and I’m like, “She’s waiting for me, I got to show up, I have to go.” It’s just so much easier to do anything. I don’t know if it works for everyone, but it certainly helped us write even when we really don’t want to.
John: Going back to this question here, she’s saying that she’s working as an assistant at a production company and she feels stuck. One of the challenges is that being an assistant there, you have some access, you have some, but you’re also probably completely exhausted and your days are spent doing all this other stuff and you probably don’t come back home with a lot left in the tank to be doing other writing. As your substitute teaching jobs, they weren’t the ideal jobs, but you were saying you got done at 3:30 in the afternoon and you actually had some more time left, and you didn’t spend your whole day writing. You spent your day doing other things.
My summer that I spent between my two years at Stark working at Universal, I was just filing papers. It was completely mindless. When I came home, I had not used my brain at all and I could write at night and it was actually still possible. I would encourage this writer to look at what is the setup that she’s in right now and is it allowing her to get writing done. So often I think underneath of this is that people start to resent writing because their career isn’t happening, and really what they are sort of should be resenting is that circumstances of their life is not permitting them to spend all their time writing, and that’s reality. We have another question here from Beth.
Drew: Beth says, “I love hearing you guys talk about ways to break the inertia and moving from the thinking about writing into writing. I find it helpful and sometimes it just gives me the confidence to put pen to paper, but the one layer to this problem I don’t really hear anyone anywhere talk about is trying to overcome this obstacle when you also have ADHD. I wanted to write in and see if you come across any writers who’ve had to change their process to overcome obstacles such as this where conventional writing tips just don’t work or maybe work 50% of the time.”
John: I saw you guys exchange a look. Does that resonate with you at all?
Danya: I have that. I have ADHD. I love to word vomit on paper and then edit later because I think if you just put anything out there, even if it’s so disorganized, so bad, it feels so much better to go back and edit that than slowly write something that’s perfect. I would not get anything done if I wrote that way, and Hannah’s the opposite. Hannah has to write everything perfectly immediately. I also will do a plug. Not that this is my device, but Brick, if you are distracted by your phone, is really nice.
John: Brick is the little gizmo which you tap your phone on and it basically locks down your phone so you can’t be pulled away by it.
Danya: Yes, exactly. That’s been really helpful. I mean, not that anyone needs to be on medication, but I am on medication and it is helpful. Mostly, yes, just vomit draft. That’s the first thing that I try to do. You really have to psych yourself into it. It’s like jumping into a pool. You just have to do it. Once you start, it’s easier to keep going, and me and Hannah will do this and I know it’s not healthy to do, but we won’t pee. It’s something that is like a reward to us because any distraction is actually huge if you have ADHD.
Hannah: We won’t eat. We’ll be like, “We have to finish this and then we’re allowed to eat.”
Danya: Which that one’s really bad. Peeing is a middle ground.
Hannah: I will say also, I think having a writing partner with OCD helps as well because if it’s ever too getting off in all these random places, my brain is very much one track tunnel vision. I typically will pull back to the immediate task at hand.
Danya: Also, if you’re stuck on one thing because of the OCD person, it’s good to have someone be like, “We got to move on or else I’m going to have a freakout.”
Hannah: We keep just suggesting writing teams. It’s great.
John: Maybe a good solution for a lot of people is that both the coach, the accountability, we’re in this together, just having a buddy will help you there. Listen, ADHD is a real thing and there’s medications for it. There’s other ways to address it. I want to make sure that people aren’t using it as a wave away excuse. Writing is also just really hard. It’s uncomfortable to start writing. It is for everybody, no matter how your brain is set up. It’s just not a pleasant thing to get started doing.
I think Beth needs to take some time and try some different ways to see what is actually productive for you, what tends to work. Whether it’s done as intent to do a vomit draft, great, or as more focused, like, “I’m going to get this right the first time,” whatever it is that is actually getting words on the page for you is a solution that’s good as long as it’s overall healthy and you’re not doing other dangerous things to yourself. Give yourself some grace to understand that it’s going to be a process, a journey. Not every day is going to be fantastic, but you’ve got to– writers write. You need to find some way to actually get those words down on the page.
Danya: There’s also one other thing that just reminded me. Sometimes what we’ll do is we’ll send voice notes to each other and then you can just copy that and paste it. Even though it’s so bad and not accurate, that’s also so helpful to just have actual words on a page and then you can edit it later.
John: Yes. I’ll do the same thing. There’s a dictation program I like called Aqua Voice. It’s really good for if I’m going into a pitch and there’s things I need to talk through, I would just hit the button and just word vomit all the things I need to say in it. Then on the call, I actually have that to refer back to because it’s a practice for it and I can see the text that’s there. That’s nothing I’m going to send to somebody, but it’s just for your own purposes and it’s getting it out of your head and onto something that you can edit again or touch again if you need to. Let’s take a question from Hunter. He’s asking about taking a semester in LA.
Drew: I’m a writer and law student in Baltimore. I’ve written a few scripts and I’ve made a few connections in the business, but I recognize that I’m at the very beginning of my career and there’s a long way to go. I have an opportunity to take some law school classes at UCLA as a visiting student, which would mean spending a semester in LA. I have family I can stay with there. I can work my current job remotely, attend classes, spend the rest of my time trying to write and network. Do you guys think this is worth my time?
Danya: Absolutely.
John: Some enthusiastic nods on this side.
Danya: For sure. That sounds like you have to. It would be weird if you didn’t.
Hannah: Yes. It would be weird if you didn’t. I think being in LA is so important. A lot of things have become virtual now, and it’s a lot easier to live other places and try to make it in the industry now. It still feels like such a place where you’ll go to a coffee shop or a bar and you’ll run into someone that works in the industry and you’ll become friends with them and it’ll just be a very natural type of networking that isn’t so official and business-like if you’re living here and you’re going out with the people and you’re hanging out with the people that work here.
Danya: Yes. Also, the friends that you’re going to make in that class are going to be so helpful to you even if you don’t think so in the moment. We have gotten so many things just from friendships, whether that’s from college or just the bars, coffee shops, people you’re talking to, and also, I’ll say this, Generals. If you can go on Generals while you’re here in LA, going in person is so much better than virtual because you’re just creating a real relationship with someone versus something through a screen. It’s just not the same at all, and it’s fun to go in person. You’re getting a sense of the city, the entertainment industry.
John: We’ve been doing the podcast for 14 years now, and I would say, over the course of the 14 years, it’s never been less important to live in Los Angeles, but it still actually is really helpful. Just in terms of getting a sense of what this is like and, Hunter, you’re also getting the sense of would you even want to live in LA? You might have this fantasy of what LA is going to be like, but then you get here and it’s like, “Oh, it’s actually not what I was hoping for. It’s not a thing that I want to do.” Yes, I think you owe it to yourself to come out here and try, and a summer semester feels great.
Cool. All right, now it is time for our One Cool Things where we recommend stuff that we want our listeners to know about. I’m going to just do two quick ones here. First is Pluribus, the new series by Vince Gilligan. It’s just delightful. It’s so weird and so specific and wonderful. I’m not surprised it comes from Vince Gilligan’s brain. I’m three episodes in as we’re recording this. It’s really strange, but not– we just talked about whatever happened to weird. It’s not weird for the sake of being weird. It’s just really good and unusual and specific. Check out Pluribus. It’s on Apple TV.
Second thing is just a comfort food watching for me, which is Claire Saffitz. Claire Saffitz is a chef baker who used to be on Bon Appetit, their video channel, but now she does her own stuff at her house. The video I’ll put a link in the show notes too is she makes dirt bombs, which are basically donut holes, but done in a muffin tin. She’s just such a good baker and she has such a good quality, a joy to her cooking. Check it out. They’re approachable recipes.
The other thing she does is she does this thing where she recreates KitKat bars or something like that. She has to figure out how to make something that very closely approximates junk foods. They’re remarkably difficult. I love that she will research carefully and shows the hard work that goes into experimentation, even in the kitchen.
Drew: Oh, I love watching this.
Danya: I loved her.
John: Yes, she’s the best. Two One Cool Things, Pluribus and Claire Saffitz, basically any video that she does. What do you have for us for one cool thing?
Hannah: I have two things as well. The first one, I’m going to sound like such a kiss-ass, but–
Danya: It’s real though.
Hannah: It’s real. I recently watched Chernobyl.
John: Oh, yes. That’s a good series.
Hannah: I have since become insanely obsessed with that whole situation. I’ve bought books on the meltdown. It’s a hyper fixation now because of that show. That’s one. I’m sure everyone’s already seen it, but on the off chance, you haven’t seen it yet.
Danya: Yes, I’m three episodes in.
Hannah: If you’re like Danya and you’re wondering, I’m like, “Watch it. It’s incredible.” The second thing is–
John: It’s not that good. It’s fine. It’s whatever. I don’t know. There are things to it.
Hannah: Of course.
John: I’m struck by the fact that you watched Chernobyl and was like, “I need to know more.” I watched Chernobyl like, “I’m good. I’m full. I’m done.”
Danya: Thank you for saying that because I feel crazy. Hannah’s like, “How could you not want to buy 8,000 books and listen to podcasts and watch more?” I’m like, “Yes, I don’t–”
Hannah: There’s something about radiation that–
Danya: Really hits?
Hannah: It really hits for me. I’m absolutely fixated on it. I haven’t read the books yet, but I don’t know how they’ll live up to the show.
John: Why bother reading a book when there’s already a series made of it? You’re not going to be able to do anything with it.
Hannah: You’re right.
John: That’s why, honestly, that’s one of my worst tendencies is if I’m reading a book and then I look up and someone already has the film rights, I’ll stop reading the book. Sometimes.
Hannah: No. Well, see, that’s genuine curiosity on my end because I’m like, “I’m not going to do anything with this. I just want to know more.”
John: Yes. She’s better than all of us. All right.
Hannah: The second thing is also everybody already knows about her, Chapell Roan, but a song that I love of hers from one of her super early albums from 2020 called Love Me Anyway. It’s an incredible song. I think everyone that loves Chapell should listen to it because it was her, yes, a song before she hit it big. It still hits.
John: That’s great. Chapell Roan is such a fascinating artist because she’s clearly a super mega talent and wasn’t quite recognized for how good she was and the album tanked and then she sort of redid her vibe and became the phenomenon that she is. She’s still the same person, and the difference between Chapell Roan as the icon artist and her trying to maintain a private identity that’s separate from that. It’s all fascinating and interesting. It’s just hard to be an artist these days. Danya, what you got for us?
Danya: Okay. I have two things. I changed one of them. Being crazy. I’ll do this one first. While we were in Texas, our EPs, Rhett Bair and Dave Finkel, got us really, and by us, I mean mostly me, really into Buster Keaton. I got really obsessed with the teens of Hollywood. I was in the 19-something.
John: Very early days of film. Yes.
Danya: Exactly. There’s this book that I read that was recommended to me by them. It’s called The Parade’s Gone by Kevin Brownlow. It is such a great book. It’s around 600 pages. It does take a minute to get through. If you are at all interested in the origins of Hollywood as the entertainment industry or just Hollywood and LA history. It is so interesting and seeing who created what jokes, what stunts. Even like Mary Pickford, we went to Musso & Frank last night and we tried her Alfredo pasta. I’ve been dying to try it.
John: How was it?
Danya: It was actually delicious.
John: That’s great, because so often the legendary things are actually not that good in person.
Danya: No, this was exactly what it should have been. Yes, really recommend this book if you care about history.
John: Hunter, when Hunter comes to visit LA, if it’s necessary, should go to Musso & Frank’s because it’s an iconic place.
Danya: Yes, absolutely. The pasta is around $24.
Hannah: Split it with someone.
Danya: Split it with someone. Then the other book that I’ll recommend is called Manhunt. It’s by Gretchen Felker-Martin. It follows the aftermath of a plague that turns people with high testosterone into feral beasts. The story follows two trans women as they hunt these creatures for their, I’m sorry to be crude, balls. They’re men’s balls because that’s where they can get estrogen to prevent them from turning into these creatures themselves because they’re trans women.
There’s also TERFs that are trying to kill them. I don’t know if anyone knows what TERFs are, but they don’t believe in trans people. It’s so graphic, but so incredible. It obviously explores transphobia and survival, community, gender. It is so, so good. One of the best books I’ve read in a long time.
John: That’s great. Cool. I like that you both had two. Sometimes we were lacking for One Cool Things, and now we got six One Cool Things in one episode, which is nice. All right, and that is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by James Llonch. If you want an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com, along with a sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
You’ll find clips and other helpful video on our YouTube. Just search for Scriptnotes and give us a follow. You’ll also find us on Instagram @ScriptnotesPodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkwear. You’ll find us at Cotton Bureau. Most importantly, we have the Scriptnotes book, which you can find at bookstores everywhere. Those are your copies. Those are galley copies. Those are for you to take home. They have typos galore, but the real hard covers don’t have the typos in them.
You will find the show notes with the links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all our premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. You can sign up to become one at scriptnotes.net. We get all the back episodes and bonus segments, like the one we’re about to record on what movies get wrong about Gen Z. Hannah, Danya, thank you so much for being on ScriptNotes. Congratulations on KPop Demon Hunters and your career.
Danya: Thank you.
Hannah: Thank you so much.
[Bonus Segment]
John: All right. The two of you get hired on for KPop Demon Hunters and other projects because you know how young people speak because you are young people yourselves. You must see a lot of movies and TV shows and feel like, “Oh, that does not feel authentic to me.” What are some things you’re noticing that are the things that drive you crazy about how you see your generation portrayed on screens?
Hannah: The first thing off the top of my head is when you see lingo being used because obviously this thing has normally been written two years ago by the time it makes it to screen. I feel like Gen Z lingo changes every six months, like what is cool to say, what’s not cool to say. My little brother, he is always telling me that’s not cool anymore. I’m like, “Five months ago, you were saying it all the time. What do you mean it’s not cool anymore?”
I think that the way that stuff is filtered through so quickly now and lingo goes out of style immediately. Then you see it in a TV show two years from now, the thing that the kids were saying two weeks ago, or sorry, you know what I mean. I really think older writers and all writers in general, even us, should not be using the cool lingo of the moment because we’ve seen so many shows where they’re like, “That’s fire,” and, “That’s lit.” That is from truly three, four years ago. You cannot be putting stuff. It has to feel timeless, honestly.
Danya: It’s so interesting because I’m rewatching Dawson’s Creek. I watch a lot of the ’90s, 2000s, I guess, YA shows. They do the exact opposite. They have all of these kids speak as if they are philosophy majors in college. It’s just so interesting. I’m like, “What happened?”
John: That’s a Kevin Williamson thing. It was new as he was doing it.
Danya: I almost feel like that’s better because you’re not talking down to these people that you’re trying to get to watch your show. It’s almost like, I don’t know, I feel like the shows that we watch where they’re using this lingo, I’m like, “Are you making fun of them? That’s what it looks like because you’re doing it in such an inaccurate way that it comes off like that.
I also think what happens a lot is that you’re trying too hard to create content for them and you’re trying to guess what they would want versus these kids who are now watching Dawson’s Creek. They’re rewatching these classics that are not meant for them really because they just want authentic stories that are just interesting. I think trying to create something for a specific demographic is just really hard, and I would avoid that.
Hannah: Yes. I think the biggest thing is not making fun of any certain demographic because I feel like you can really tell when Gen Z is written and they’re made out to be these really flippant, dumb– I feel like it’s hard for older people to write Gen Z without being a little condescending. The only times that I feel like it works well is when they’re actually being really nice to them in terms of how they’re portrayed. I’m trying to think of shows that have done that. It’s not common. It’s normally not common to see them portrayed in a good light.
Danya: Yes. I know what you’re talking about.
John: Clueless is one of my favorite movies. I think one of the bad lessons you can learn from Clueless is that all teenagers speak with this very heightened, incredibly both erudite but overwhelmed with specific in-group lingo. It works so well in Clueless because it’s just masterfully done, but to try to do that in other things, it’s going to fall apart. It’s just not how actual human beings speak in a normal way. Either trying to, you’re saying, use lingo vernacular that’s going to be dated incredibly quickly, disaster, or try to create this fever bubble of how people speak. In most situations, this is not going to work.
Hannah: Oh, that made me think. The one that I’ve seen do so well, even though they were using lingo and stuff, is Eighth Grade.
John: Oh, yes. For sure.
Hannah: So good. I don’t know how he did that. I guess it was a bit of a period piece. He was saying, “This was the lingo of this time period. It’s not current anymore,” which I think if you’re going to do it, that’s how you have to do it. You have to do it like 10 15, where it’s like, this is what it was like during this time period, but it’s not current anymore.
Danya: I feel like comedians do a good job of that because of the style now, which is so observational in a really intense way, more so than ever, that I’m like, unless you are paying that much attention and absorbing how they speak, then you can’t really comment on it because it is so niche. It’s really hard to get right.
John: I would also say I get frustrated by broad stereotypes of, “Oh, a Gen Z person is like this,” in terms of how they address authority figures, what they do. It’s true that there are some generational differences in terms of how groups interact with each other, and there’s weird conflicts between millennials and Gen Zs and all those kinds of things, but every character is a specific individual character. That logic behind why they’re doing things should make sense, no matter where they started.
Gen Z is the first generation who grew up not just with the internet, but also with phones, constantly being able to access things. I think I’ve noticed is that sometimes older writers will have the wrong assumptions about how often kids will reach out to their parents or reach out to other people. The sort of constant communication, I have a daughter who’s 20, and that sense of always being on and being connected with people. That is a different thing than a previous generation. That sense of you could be independent but still always be in contact with your tribe is such a different experience.
Danya: Yes, completely agree with that.
Hannah: Yes. I think that’s another thing is that a lot of Gen Z, honestly, aren’t on their phones as much as I think is portrayed in media. There’s so many different ages of Gen Z, too. It’s like you can’t group all of Gen Z into one type of person because there’s the Zillennials and there’s the baby, baby Gen Zs. I feel like the phone thing is such a common trope. I also feel like some Gen Zs are going against the phone and wanting to go back to flip phones and iPods and cameras. What are they? The point-and-shoot digital cameras. Yes, I feel like it’s always going in a circle.
John: Think about the dialogue you’ve written for your movies. When you’ve come in to do a pass on younger characters, what are some things you’re seeing in those dialogue blocks? You’re like, “Oh, let’s actually turn that back.” Are you doing anything different about how characters are talking over each other, how they’re interrupting, the politeness and permission they’re giving each other? Is there any general patterns you’re noticing that after you’ve done your pass on things, it reads a little differently because of choices?
Danya: I feel like we haven’t done a pass in a while.
John: To your Diner script. Your Diner script is raunchy young women. Is there anything about that script that you think is specific to this generation where if it was made 10 years before this or 20 years ago, it would read a lot different?
Hannah: I think one of the biggest things is we really don’t like trauma porn. I think that that might be an older thing, maybe, if I’m trying to find a pattern. I think that something that maybe is Gen Z or younger is that a lot of the stuff that we write, our people are in really serious, intense situations, but they have some levity around it. They’re making jokes around it or they’re very self-aware of themselves and the situation and are trying to be optimistic even if it is a really rough situation that previous writers maybe would have shown in a very dark, depressing light.
Danya: Yes, I think that’s true.
John: I think, and this is a cliche but also has an element of truth to it, is that Gen Z individuals, they’re aware of themselves as a brand or at least how they’re putting themselves out in the world. They have a concern about reputation and presentation that is specific to the area in which they grew up in.
The curation, again, I don’t want to minimize everything that everyone’s on their phones, but the idea of curating your identity, being very measured about what you’re putting on the grid versus what you’re putting on stories, that’s probably something you can think about in terms of how the characters are responding as well, too, in terms of what they’re sharing at work versus what they’re sharing with their friends, that those tensions are always natural.
Hannah: Yes. Honestly, I don’t know if we’ve written something. A lot of the stuff that we write is almost in a different reality to where I’m trying to think of the times that we’ve actually had phones and social media in our scripts. It’s not actually that often.
Danya: It’s not. I think we try to be true to technology. It’s there. We use it.
John: I came up with 100. It exists and the phones are a thing, but you’re also finding reasons for why people are interacting face-to-face because it’s better for the movies.
Danya: Yes. I think we’ve used FaceTime before, kind of a cheat.
Hannah: Yes. Anything that can be as visual as possible. I feel like I’m trying to think of what– when we used to do those youth passes and we’d go in and you’d see what was written for the young characters, I feel like we would literally just take out anything that felt like it was lingo. Anything that was like–
Danya: Some jokes were old, if you could believe that. Jokes themselves were like, “Wait, what? This is like–“
John: Nicole Perlman has a term called the clam, which she may have told you about, which is basically a joke that just sits there as a joke. It doesn’t do anything. It’s just a clam.
Danya: There was also, I can’t remember if this was from one of our roundtables, but I think there was a misconception of physical comedy being dead. We’re like, “It is so alive. It’s crazy how alive it is.” I remember the men being shocked that we were like, “We need to add more of that.”
Hannah: That’s true. I think that might be actually a common misconception about Gen Z is that a lot of the comedy is dialogue-heavy, really talky-talky, quick, banter.
Danya: It’s like Gilmore Girls-esque, fast. You’re just like, “What’s happening? It’s too much.” I do think, perfect for Gilmore Girls, not for me.
Hannah: Yes, I think that we do like Naked Gun and dumb Talladega Nights and Hot Rod and all those movies that are really dumb, dumb comedy.
John: If you look at the comedy that’s coming out of Los Angeles, the clown tradition is a real big thing right now. Again, it’s a thing you need to be there in person to see that’s a special kind of quality that feels real and tactile, which is the opposite of sort fake digital stuff, which may be part of the reason why it’s doing so well. Thank you guys again. It was great talking with you.
Danya: Oh, thank you so much for having us.
Hannah: Thank you. We had so much fun.
John: Great.
Links:
- Danya Jimenez and Hannah McMechan
- KPop Demon Hunters on Netflix
- No Strings Attached
- The Black List x Women in Film Episodic Lab
- Nicole Perlman on Scriptnotes, episodes 164, 222, 373, 381
- Brick
- Pluribus on Apple TV
- Claire Saffitz makes Dirt Bombs
- The Parade’s Gone By by Kevin Brownlow
- Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin
- Chernobyl on HBO Max
- Chappell Roan – Love Me Anyway
- Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
- Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription (now with fewer emails!)
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- John August on Bluesky and Instagram
- Outro by James Llonch (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.