Scriptnotes Transcript

The oringinal 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.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 702 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We often discuss how to start a script. Today on the show, how do you finish one? We’ll discuss last looks, those final steps when you think you’re done, but you need to get your script ready to hand in. We’ll then apply some of those lessons to samples we’re reading for our new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we look at the first three pages of scripts our listeners have sent in and offer our honest feedback. Today, we’ll have bonus feedback because our beloved Scripnotes producer, Megana Rao, is sitting here to the left of me to help us out.

Megana Rao: Hi. Thank you so much for letting me come back. I have so many questions on this topic.

John: You have a very specific question about last looks because that’s prompted the whole episode.

Megana: Yes.

Craig: I mean, we don’t let you come back. It’s not like you’re begging us all the time. We’re like, no, and then finally we let you. I personally want you here.

Megana: Thank you.

Craig: I can’t speak for John.

[laughter]

John: It’s fantastic to have you here. Trying out some new stuff in the studio here. We don’t have headphones on, which is strange, but good.

Megana: I feel naked.

Craig: It is a little nudifying. Also, I have always loved the vibe of bald men wearing headphones because we all look like Lobot from Empire Strikes Back, which I think is amazing. It’s just regular.

John: It’s just regular. Yes.

Megana: Yes, it’s fun.

John: In our bonus segment for premium members, let’s discuss musical scores and the function of the soundtrack in feature films. We had a question about that, and we haven’t dug very much into that. I want to talk about what we’re looking for in music, in the things we make. We have no items in the overall news category, but I want to talk about something new I learned this week. Not new to me. Craig, you understand the musical scale. As for you– I forget. Megana, what instruments did you play growing up?

Megana: I played piano, violin, and the recorder.

Craig: The recorder.

John: The recorder, absolutely. The recorder is a fundamental music education which actually ties into this.

Craig: It is. We all played the recorder or even its stupider nephew, the song flute.

John: I don’t know the song flute.

Megana: Oh, I did not play the song flute.

Craig: The song flute is for kids who struggle with the recorder. [chuckles]

Megana: Then I should have been on the song flute.

John: Craig and I, we went hardcore down the woodwind track, and we were both clarinet players.

Craig: Deep clarinet.

John: In our early music education, we learned do, re, mi. We learned that. What I learned from Mike this week was that in French solfege, which is the do, re, mi, they only use do, re, mi. They don’t have letter notes for C, D, E, F, G, A, B. They don’t.

Craig: When kids are learning piano, they don’t learn middle C? They learn middle do?

John: Do.

Megana: What?

John: Yes. Is that wild? Our international listeners are like, well, of course.

Craig: Wait, they say it’s in the key of fa?

John: Yes.

Craig: That can’t be right.

John: That seems impossible.

Craig: That’s impossible.

John: No, you actually look it up. There’s–

Craig: Because there’s things like Minuet in G. Do they translate that?

John: Different countries will do different things for how they handle stuff. In France, it literally is.

Craig: Did you fact-check them on this?

John: I did. I looked up, the answers here. It’s the system of a fixed do system. Fixed do is solfege. Do is always the root C. Whereas we have the movable do system, which is, I think, just so handy because that way we can talk about do is just like the root of whatever–

Craig: Of whatever it is.

John: It’s just wild. It’s assumptions I would have made about like, well, everyone, they must work the same way.

Craig: I got to tell you, when you look at the history of classical music in Europe, you see, obviously, great composers from Germany and Austria. You see great composers from Italy. You see a couple from England. France?

John: Oh, so that’s what it is.

Megana: [chuckles]

John: Yes. Send your letters into ask@johnaugust.com and we’ll forward them directly to Craig.

Craig: Listen, I’m just wondering where are all the great French composers, the great classical French composers.

John: Did you see?

Craig: Okay, keep going.

John: God, the guy who wrote Romeo and Juliet. They’re all French authors.

Craig: That was Tchaikovsky. Russians, great.

John: Oh, no, no. There’s a different French–

Craig: The Russians had a ton.

John: They had a ton.

Craig: Tons.

John: What are you going to do other than compose music because it’s cold outside?

Megana: Do only French people have this system?

John: No, so it’s common throughout a lot of Europe.

Megana: Okay.

Craig: The other countries that don’t give us great classical composers. [chuckles]

John: You can also find a lot of Americans. It’s just strange to me that I would have assumed that everyone’s using the same A through G notation.

Craig: Do you think they’ll let me into France after this?

John: No, but this was not the deal killer.

Megana: You’ve been on their list for a while.

Craig: They’re the easygoing about people that criticize the French. It’s going to be fine.

John: Let’s do some follow-up. We had more advice for general meetings, which is our topic in Episode 699.

Drew: Alyssa writes, “I wanted to share a tip that’s helped my Zoom generals immensely, just in case it helps someone else. Before every meeting, I put my dog on the bed behind me. Without fail, he will be the first thing commented on. While his first couple appearances were a happy accident, seeing such a positive reaction to a cozy mini poodle with an underbite meant that I was happy to manufacture the situation if need be. In the Zoomverse, having something, anything bold in the background lays the ground for both an easy icebreaker and leads so naturally into a conversation about who you are and what you’re all about. It does mean I always have to make my bed before meetings and occasionally bribe my dog with a treat, but I think it’s worth it.”

John: I love this advice. I think it’s practical. It’s usable. Just having a first thing to talk about and having them compliment your dog. Love it.

Craig: You have to force that dog on the couch, though. He doesn’t want to go. “Hey, sit good on the couch. Mommy needs a job.”

John: Every dog wants to be on the bed, though, too. You let the dog up on the bed.

Craig: My dogs love being on the bed. You know it’s a sad day when your dog is too old to get up on the bed. I know. I have two dogs. Bonnie, the younger one, will spring onto the bed effortlessly. Cookie just stands there like, oh, and can’t get up there. She’s big. We can’t really get her up there. Then we got to get her down.

Megana: Do you have steps for her?

Craig: We don’t have bed steps for her. Maybe we should get her bed steps.

Megana: Yes, or a little ramp.

Craig: I’m not sure that she’ll still be here by the time it shows up. It depends on how fast the shipping is. She’s really old. Poor Cookie. She’s almost 15.

Megana: What?

Craig: I know.

John: She’s a big dog.

Megana: She’s like such puppy energy. I had no idea.

Craig: Not anymore.

John: Cookie?

Craig: Oh, geez.

John: This podcast took a depressing turn.

Craig: Yes. Thanks for reminding me about your vital dog.

[laughter]

John: No, Craig. You need to put Cookie up in the background and then you can talk about how sick she is.

[laughter]

Craig: I just want to say that you guys are really lucky. This may be the last Zoom where Cookie’s in the background. All right, here’s my comedy.

John: All right, let’s get to our marquee topic, which is brought to us by Megana Rao. Megana, can you remind us of what your question was that you wanted to bring to the show?

Megana: Yes. I have been working on this feature script and I was about to send it into producers and was really just taking my sweet time in the “polish phase.” I wanted to talk to you guys about what you do when you are doing your polish phase or your final pass on a draft. What sorts of things are you looking at? What questions are you asking yourself? I think there also might be a little bit of anxiety or comfort with me taking my sweet time during this phase because it’s like everything’s where it needs to be. Nobody has given me notes yet. How do you deal with that? How do you know when done is done?

John: How do you know you’re not just procrastinating?

Megana: Exactly.

John: Or that you’re just being OCD about stuff that actually doesn’t matter at all?

Craig: Well, I am OCD about stuff that doesn’t matter at all. It’s so funny. I was talking about this with Mehr, my new assistant, because she also works as the script coordinator for our show. It’s her job to go through the script right before it gets sent out through Synchronize as the official draft. If she finds typos, she fixes them. I’ve just let her know if, for instance, I’ve left out a letter and you stick a letter in and it makes the line go longer, which means the page breaks differently, tell me, because I will not turn a draft in with dialogue that is slopping over across two pages. I have a problem. I know that.

Megana: Wow. I thought that my question was going to be really nitpicky, but no, I had no idea the depths to which–

Craig: Scott Frank also has this. We’ve talked about this at length, and we know it’s dumb. We know that. I indulge it.

John: I’ve, over the years, started indulging it much, much less. I just turned in a script yesterday and–

Craig: All the dialogue broke across pages.

John: Every single line won. It was just little dangling lines. I did the spell check, drew right through it as well. I went through and I was looking for examples of I was using the same word too much. I was using the word processing too much. Because I was writing the scene separately and it’s like, oh, it made sense in each of the times I was using it, but collectively, like, oh my God, I’m using that word too much. I can take all those out.

I would look for, you sort of blur your eyes and look at the page. It’s like, is there anything that’s weird about it? Is there anything that just feels strange? It’s too dark. It’s too light. You’re looking for widows and orphans. Honestly, our software all takes care of those situations. What Craig is describing is, let’s say I have three lines of dialogue and it’s at the bottom of the page and the application may split it at sentence level, so the next sentence drops to the next page. You try to avoid that if at all possible.

Craig: I do. There are two things that I think about with dialogue as I’m going through. Obviously, part of the tweaking process is checking for typos and repeated words. I like to read the whole script through because sometimes I might think like, oh, I don’t need this paragraph, or I thought I did, but I don’t because something happens later and it’s fine. For dialogue, I try, again, avoid terribly, frighteningly avoid the continued dialogue on the next page. The other thing I look at is there are times where someone says something that follows another person’s line that should be together on a page.

John: If you were to page flip, you’d lose the context.

Craig: It almost feels like a drum roll, please, page turn, and it undermines it. There are times where I look for those things to make sure that it feels okay. Honestly, just reading it through and the usual stuff, I don’t get too crazy. What are you doing in your process there, Megana, that seems to be occupying so much of your time?

Megana: Well, I feel, okay, this is after I’ve had friends read it, and I’m going through and doing all of the stuff where if I have one word hanging off, can I rewrite the sentence?

Craig: Oh, big fan of that.

Megana: I’ll do a couple of command F passes for words that I feel like I’m using too much or I’m worried I’m using too much.

John: What are examples?

Megana: Here’s one that’s not specific, but I’ll do a just pass where I’ll command F for the word just.

Craig: Oh, you’re a big just person.

Megana: Yes. You almost never need it.

Craig: Well, I can come up with all sorts of reasons why I don’t need it.

John: I can also imagine cases where you’re using it. It’s the right question to ask. Do I actually need it in this case?

Craig: If you know that you use a word as a bit of a crutch or a tick, then yes, it’s worth searching for. I’m not sure I have. Well, if I have them, I’m not aware of them, so I don’t do any specific word searching. Maybe I should.

Megana: Well, mine thankfully come from having John having read my scripts. I’ll do a pass for tries to, which I think is sort of like young woman hedging.

Craig: Oh, yes. I could see you hedging. I could see a hedge.

Megana: Thanks to John, I now go through and just make it a little bit more assertive, but that is another example of a pass I’ll do with a command F where I almost never need a tries to. The character just does the action.

Craig: Does the thing. Yes, if they try to and fail, that’s interesting. Tries to pour a cup of coffee and succeeds, [laughter] it’s not that interesting.

John: It isn’t that interesting. We had a guest on recently, and I’m forgetting who it was, that talked about doing a transition pass, which is basically, the day before you’re sending it in, you’re sitting down and actually just looking at, what are the transitions between all the scenes, and are they the best transitions we could do? Does it naturally flow from one thing to the next? Is there a visual? Is there a way that you can get the energy leaning forward at the end of a scene so it tumbles into the next scene with a lot of spark there?

I won’t do a specific thing for that, but I am always mindful of, is there a pre-lap that makes sense? Is there a way that I can carry the energy across that transition? The project I just handed in now is animated, and the transitions will be incredibly important. I wanted to make sure that you could always get a sense of, okay, this is how we’re going to move from this thing into this thing because it’s not going to be an accident. It’s going to be a lot of animators building stop motion stuff to make it all happen.

Megana: I was just rereading the first episode of Chernobyl and Go last night. You both use transitions a lot in the beginning of a script and you highlight it because I think you’re establishing visual language. Then later on, the story just carries itself. Is that something you’re aware of that you’re thinking about when you’re doing these sorts of last passes?

Craig: Well, the beginning of scripts tends to be a little more lyrical because it’s the beginning. We’ve talked about how in the first 10 minutes of sitting in a movie theater, the audience is accepting. They are welcoming everything in because they are learning. They’re new to this country and they want to learn. You can be a bit more lyrical. Once you’ve established everything, then like you say, I think people can put that visual language on top of the read as they’re reading it, and there’s probably less call for it. At the end, you’ll see a lot of lyrical writing come back, I think.

John: We’re going to get into the first three pages of the temples that people have sent through. I will spend a little bit more OCD time on those first couple of pages because you’re inviting somebody in and you just want everything to present itself well so no one has any excuse for stopping reading or setting it down. Making sure those first three, five, 10 pages just really read flawless and there’s nothing there that’s going to jump out is incredibly helpful.

Over the years, I’ve been less prone to the word Jenga or the word Tetris where you’re trying to make things fit exactly the right way so that the page breaks fall down. With careful work, you can almost always squeeze a page or two pages out of a script by just making pages break a little bit earlier and it ripples through the script. I just do a lot less of that now.

Craig: If I see a big chunk of white space at the bottom of a page, sometimes I’ll be like– but usually I’m okay with that, honestly. It’s funny, I don’t worry about length. I think it was much bigger deal in features. I never worry about length.

John: Well, you’re also the boss now.

Craig: I’m the boss. I also know that there are pages that look slow and they’re fast, and there are pages that look fast and they’re slow. The other thing I like to do as a final, what are we calling this, last looks?

John: Yes, last looks.

Craig: Is I read it as if I know nothing. I try and flush my brain of everything. I don’t know anything. Who’s this? Who is that? What are they talking about? I don’t know. Sometimes I will note, oh, you know. That’s not clear to somebody who knows nothing. I don’t love clarity notes because I try my best to make it as clear as I want it to be. There are times where I realize it’s not as clear as I want it to be. The reading as a tabula rasa is a good idea.

John: Agreed. Also, the tabula rasa reading may also help you. If you’ve moved scenes around, I think I’ve noticed that sometimes, oh, I moved this character’s introduction to here, but I didn’t end up uppercase in their name on the first time they showed up. It’s weird that the uppercase is showing up in the wrong scene. Stuff has moved around and there may be other dependencies that I’m not thinking about at the time, which is helpful.

Megana: How do you get into that mindset? I think when most readers are in this phase, they are probably very close to deadline. They have been reading this thing over and over again. In my case, I’ve memorized what it is, so I just start hearing it. How do you get to this point where you’re looking at it with totally fresh eyes?

John: Printing it out is a big help for me because I’m so used to reading it on the screen. If I read it, like what I handed in yesterday, I print it out and sort of did all my corrections in pen on the paper because I’m just reading it differently if I’m reading it on paper is a good way to do it. There’s people who will proofread by reading it all backwards. It’s like, I don’t get that.

Craig: [unintelligible 00:16:51]

John: I don’t know. That’s the thing people do for recognizing those mistakes. The obvious things, spell checking, making sure you’re spelling characters’ names consistently because if you have a weird character’s name, you may have made different choices for how you’re going to say that. The title page, so often I’ll focus on everything else and I’ll forget to update the date on title page.

Craig: Date on title page. One of the last things I do for an episodic script is figure out what the title of the script is. I don’t like to do that until I’m done with the script because I sort of want to think, okay, what’s a weird little moment or a thing or an idea from this script that then would make an interest-inspiring title? People wouldn’t quite know what it means until they’ve watched the episode. I have to remind myself to do that or else the title will be Untitled Script.

John: Yes, that’s not good.

Craig: Nor, nor.

John: It’s also going to sound stupid, but you need to– You’re sending in a PDF almost always. Drew was asking yesterday, how did you turn in scripts before? It’s like, oh. We should explain. It’s like we would call the studio executive and say, I’m ready. You can send a messenger to pick up a script. We would print up the script. We would put it in an envelope. We had to have lots of paper, brass brads, and envelopes. We could stick it in and a messenger would just show up at our door and pick it up. It was always whenever you call about the messenger, then you would find another typo and you’d have to reprint a page or to–

Craig: Scramble.

John: Scramble.

Craig: Scramble. Yes, absolutely. You would also have to make sure that your printer, you’d have to go through, flip, flip, flip every page because sometimes your printer would just like, I don’t like page 38. It’s blank. It would just do that sometimes.

John: I will say printers used to be more reliable than they are now. I have many more problems printing now than I did 10 years ago.

Craig: I’m not surprised because they’re no longer a vital piece of equipment. The divisions within, I don’t know, whoever owns Brother–

John: Brother or Epson.

Craig: Epson, this is like seven guys.

John: My Apple LaserWriter, it worked well.

Craig: I remember I had a Brother Daisy Wheel printer in 1985.

John: If you were to print a script on one of those things, that would be a three or four-hour process because you’d have to feed him. It was awesome.

Craig: A Daisy Wheel printer. Do you know what this is? Is this the one that got the little punch holes on the side? No. That’s a dot matrix printer. That’s different. That was a little thing that would go side to side, left to right, and put dots. Then the dots would create letters. It was like– That’s what that sounded like. The Daisy Wheel printer basically had what a typewriter has. It had physical things. It would spin.

John: It was a plastic disk with all the letters on it.

Craig: It would spin to the letter, and then a thing would go, bam, and hit it. It would go very fast. It was like the fastest typer, but it was still typing it.

John: It was incredibly loud.

Craig: It was so loud and slow. Those disks would, if you wanted a different font, you had to get a different disk.

John: Click in a new disk.

Craig: Yes.

Megana: Wow.

Craig: I know. There was ink ribbons. It was madness.

Megana: It’s like a printing press.

John: Yes, it was a printing press.

Craig: Now, we talk about this as a horrible thing, but people in the 1500s would have thought literally God Himself had handed this to us.

John: Yes, but this was at a time when there were still script processing departments at studios.

Craig: Absolutely.

John: Now, we send it in a PDF. My point is that you may have your own system for how you’re labeling your files, but whatever file you’re emailing through to your executive, your producer, whoever, just make a smart name for that, that makes sense to them. Like, title of movie, date, is a good choice. Don’t say first draft, second draft. Just say date.

Craig: Yes. If you’re rewriting and you’re not the first writer in, stick your name on the file as well, just so later when they’re looking through all the files, they’re like, “Oh, that’s the John August draft.”

John: That’s amazing drafting. That’s a smart choice. What else can we help you with figuring out in terms of last looks?

Craig: Or just your life.

John: We’re here for all of us.

Megana: We’ll do that offline or like bonus, bonus segment.

Craig: Oh, bonus, bonus segment. I like that.

John: Absolutely. For super premium members.

Craig: Yes. Oh, we should have a super premium.

John: Absolutely. A new tier.

Megana: Okay, here’s a question. You’ve written this thing. You’re sending it out to your producers. Stuff has changed between the last time you’ve spoken to them. Are you getting ahead of it? Are you annotating like, you gave me this note and this is the change that I made, or are you letting them figure that out as they read the draft?

John: That is a great question. If it’s the second draft that they’re reading, if you’re coming in with specific answers to things, this is like you responded to their notes, I think it is good in that email. If it’s just a few things, it can go in the email. If there’s a whole, here’s an explainer, I will put that in as a separate document just to walk them through what the changes are.

Megana: Oh, interesting.

John: Because you may have revisions turned on so they can see the stars, but they may not really get the context of what that is. That is a useful thing. For our first draft, before I turned it in yesterday, here’s what I actually said in it.

Craig: Here’s your stupid script, jerks.

John: Hello team, untitled maybe, excited to share with you the first full draft of this script. I say that because then if I’m looking for, why did I send that in? I can actually Google and search for that. No real warnings or disclaimers. I think and hope it feels like the treatment and subsequent discussions. Then I refer to one specific thing which we never actually discussed, but is a context kind of thing. We’re going to have to need to talk about this. Looking forward to discussing and digging in after the long weekend. Hope everyone has a great one. Files attached, goes through, happiness all around. If you’re sending through a multi-paragraph email with your script, I think it’s not helping you.

Craig: The person who’s making the decisions isn’t going to even see that email. I agree. I think if you’re doing a second draft and there are a lot of notes and a lot of changes, it could be helpful to turn revisions on. Give them two files. Give them a clean one and give them one with the asterisks. This way, it’s like, what do you prefer? Do you like to just read it through without knowing what changed or do you just want to go to the changes, up to you?

John: That’s a really good point. I will tend to do that. One file will be parentheses clean, one file will be parentheses starred, and then they can see both things.

Craig: Then they have a choice. Because from the point of view of somebody that, as I start to take on projects as a producer, and I occupy the space of the evil ones, what I’ve noticed, it’s fun, is that there are times where I will read something and I’m not sure if it’s always been that way or if it’s changed. As writers, we are 100% masters of the script. The people reading these scripts read a lot of scripts. They have a lot of notes conversations. In their minds, it gets confusing sometimes as to whether this was always there, it’s an answer to a note. Yes, a little bit of extra helps.

John: In generating the clean versions of scripts, what I used to have to do was I would save the file again and then just go through and clear all revisions and save a clean version of that. In Highland Pro now, you can just tick the box, don’t print revision marks, and just export the PDF again.

Craig: Oh, you know what? You can also do that in the software. I really should do that. Although, I don’t really do it now. Now, for television, I just send a draft in and then we just start. In feature land, it would make total sense.

John: Absolutely. Because you don’t want to send a draft that has star revisions all over it to an after. There’s something like that.

Craig: Exactly right. Of course, there are levels of revisions too. I don’t think I’ve ever used the setting where it’s like show all revision levels because that’s just, oh, congrats on your asterisked draft. I wonder why that’s there. Have you ever come up with a use case for that?

John: There were times, I remember on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, there were a couple sets of revisions that went back and forth and they asked for, hey, can you give us a draft that just has this stars on it? I’m like, no. It wasn’t useful for my process, so I didn’t hold on to all those levels of revisions.

Craig: Oh, that’s interesting. I do. I just go through and I just advance it. If I’m not in production, I can just call it level one, level two, level three, whatever it is, so that I can actually go back and say, here is what was changed, this date, this date. What I do is I name the revision instead of just blue. I edit the name so it’s blue and then I include a date. It’s obviously the date that it was turned over so that it’s not just also like, oh, what was level three? I don’t remember.

John: At a certain point, certainly on television, a script coordinator will be doing that work rather than the feature writer themselves. You still do it yourself?

Craig: I change the name of the revision. I try and do as much as, so I change that. I do that and I keep track of the revisions because as I’m writing, I want to make sure I know what changed. The script coordinator is going through to make sure that I didn’t screw that up actually because sometimes you get into things where you realize, oh my God, I was working out the wrong draft and it was the one that I blah, and then it’s a whole nightmare and then you got to go. There was one nightmare that I created that Allie Cheng had to un-nightmare for me. I got to tell you, it felt great not having to do it. I’m not going to lie.

Megana: Also, Craig, who is reading your drafts before you send them in to people?

Craig: My producing partner, Jacq Lesko, and this is the method that she and I have been using all the way back before Chernobyl even. Doesn’t matter what I write, whatever the day’s work is, I send it to her. She reads it, comes back, catches some typos, if there are any questions, positive comments, areas where she bumped, anything, I take that in. Every day’s work is read. She knows enough about me now to know that when she gets the next day’s work, she goes back for a good five, six pages because she knows I would have also tweaked earlier stuff. I don’t asterisk that, obviously. Everything is read every day.

John: Oh, wow. That’s not how we’ve ever worked in our office. Drew and Megana, when you’re working for me, I will tend to give you full drafts of things. Megana, did I ever send through scenes as I was writing them? At times, I’ve worked more scene by scene rather than the full thing. Have you proofed individual things?

Megana: The only thing that’s coming to mind is Arlo Finch. That, I was definitely reading chapter by chapter, unless you were doing a rewrite and there was a specific thing. Even then, you would send me the rewrite within the context of the full draft.

Craig: Well, you move around when you’re writing.

John: Yes, I do. You’re always page one, two page, whatever you’re at.

Craig: Exactly. Whereas I’m linear. I think if you write linearly, it’s easier to have somebody reading every day because it’s like a story being told very slowly to them. They’re getting like, if every episode were five minutes long, that’s what they’re getting. Yes, if I were to write, oh, here’s a scene that happens later, I don’t know if she would know what to do with it.

Megana: I was going to ask you this because in the first few pages of Chernobyl, it’s so specific. Each sentence is a very specific shot and it’s so detailed. Is that something that in your first draft you were doing that or is that like–

Craig: Yes.

Megana: Okay. Wow.

Craig: Absolutely. That’s why I talk a lot about directing on the page and how important it is supposed to win these people, so you shouldn’t. So much of what I’m trying to do, whatever that day is, is get as much out of my brain onto the page as possible that is of interest. That is of interest is the part that I think a lot of people struggle with because they don’t know which part would be interesting, which isn’t. Yes, I do that.

I think, in part, it’s because I’ve gone through that process, where I do hand over six pages and then she walks back in my office and says, “I was confused. You said this, but where are they or how is that different from this?” I’m like, okay. Over time, I’ve just gotten more and more detailed. Lindsay Doran also, a brutal where are they, why are they standing, what does the room look like person, which has been amazing.

John: The pros and cons of what you’re doing with Jacq Lesko is because she’s seeing it every day, she has a consistent vision for what it is, but she won’t have fresh eyes to look at a brand new draft. She’ll have to just sort of do a mind wipe on herself.

Craig: She will never get an episode the way that other people get it. That’s a great point. If it hadn’t been a successful process from the start, I’m sure I would have abandoned it. As it turns out, it has been.

John: It also feels like there’s just some accountability because you know you’re handing this in to her every day.

Craig: Well, that’s the other thing, is that she’s down the hallway like the Grim Reaper and I know she’s there and she’s waiting.

Megana: She’s so sweet.

Craig: No. No, no. Yes, she is. Just a reminder, you said that this draft would be done by April 15th. Are we still on track for that? I’m like, you know we’re not on track for that. What are you thinking now? I just know it’s like, there is a librarian asking for the book back. It kind of helps.

John: I do wonder if some of our listeners could create this situation for themselves where they just basically have an accountability partner where every night they’re sending through the pages they wrote to that person and vice versa.

Craig: Yes, absolutely. You don’t need to hear back from them. Just, here, I’ve proven to you that I wrote another– I think it would make a huge difference. If you have a choice as a developing writer between attending one of these script groups, which I think oftentimes can be corrosive, or having an accountability partner where you guys give each other zero notes, zero feedback. You just go, you owe me five pages. Where are my five effing pages? That will be helpful, I think.

John: If any listeners out there have tried something like this or are going to try this experiment, write back to us and tell us what happens. All right, let’s do our accountability, which is a Three Page Challenge. Three Page Challenge for people who are new listening to the podcast, so often we put out a call to our listeners saying, “Hey, send in the first three pages of your script.” It could be a screenplay. It could be a pilot. We will give you our honest feedback. Just make sure it’s clear to everybody. People are asking us for this feedback. For harsh moments, it’s because people asked for our honest opinions.

Craig: They asked for it.

John: We have three very brave writers who’ve sent stuff through. Let’s start with Katie Seward. It’s a pilot for The Thin Place. Drew, can you give us a quick synopsis for folks who don’t have these pages in front of them?

Drew: San Francisco, 1924. A herd of bison break out of their paddock and move down the city streets in the middle of the night. A lone bison lags behind and stops under a streetlight. We then cut to present day where, in a hotel bar, Connor Sullivan, 36, is trying to tell his friend his theory about how time is controlled by capitalistic forces. His friend, Francis Dunn, also 36, keeps showing him pictures of the Olsen twins, marveling at his ability to correctly tell them apart. They negotiate who’s going to buy the next round of drinks.

John: Great. If you want to read these pages yourself, look at the show notes, and we’ll have a link to the PDF so you can read through them with us. Megana, you’re our guest here. We start with you. What are some things you enjoyed or stuck out for you as you started reading through these pages?

Craig: In a non-enjoyable fashion as well.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: I loved the setting. I was really excited about Golden Gate Park, the bison paddock. I love that park and I love the bison that are in there. I was very interested to read more about 1920 San Francisco. We quickly shift away from that. I was also really excited by what this guy was saying, this character, Connor, was saying about satellites and time and what seems like it’s going to lead to a conspiracy theory around that. I found that really fascinating. I thought that the Olsen twins game was clever and cute and I enjoyed reading that.

John: I liked the Olsen twins as well. I liked the idea of starting with the bison in the paddock. That is an opening image. I have many criticisms of how it was done, but that as an opening image is really good. I was a little frustrated that I didn’t feel like how this was going to tie in by the end of these two pages. I wanted a little bit of a better sense of what is the juxtaposition of these two things mean for us. Let me just dig in with some of the things I noticed from the top here. A monster’s got a little growl, heavy wet breath, giant bodies pound against wood. Again, this is all done over black. Something cracks. In the darkness, we see– Wait, what? How do we see something in the darkness, Craig?

Craig: I got there and it was, listen, Katie, this is what you wrote. In the darkness, we see a massive bison in the dark.

John: I see at least two problems with that. First off, we can’t see in the dark.

Craig: Correct.

John: From the darkness, ventures a massive bison.

Craig: Then we mentioned dark redundantly. This is all over black, so we can’t see anything. Now, if you want to say over black, also, I would say a monster’s got a little growl, heavy wet breath. Those are sounds. We don’t have to indicate the sounds. Then it says giant bodies pound against wood. I would write the sound of giant bodies pounding against wood. Again and again, something cracks. Then how do you want this to be? Tell me this movie, do you mean when it cracks through, that’s what makes light flood in from the moon or a street lamp or something? Or do you want to just go exterior Golden Gate, boom, bison explode out of their pen? Yes, the way this opened is confusing.

John: Here’s why I think it’s relevant to today’s episode. This feels like a last looks thing. You need to notice that what I’m saying, over black, darkness and dark, back to back to back in these first couple lines. You got to pick where you’re going to do this and sort of where to move on. This is a thing I think you could notice in that last step here. In the next block here, where exterior Golden Gate Park, night, the entire herd streaming out of their paddock, trampling over the battered gate. The entire herd streams out of their paddock. Again, there’s no reason to go for the gerund here when I feel like it just gives us a simple verb. Next block here, but our bison lags behind. Capitalizing the hour felt like a weird choice too.

Craig: Very Trumpian tweet style. Yes, sorry, truth. Is it a truth? Is that what he does?

Megana: Truth social?

Craig: Yes. He tweets a truth, he truths.

John: He truths. Whatever that is.

Craig: That’s a great word for lying. I love it.

John: Then we get Connor’s pre-lap. A pre-lap, valid choice.

Craig: Yes, but I suspect that this may be what’s on your mind. You tell me if I’m right. If you pre-lap somebody who is in a bar or a crowded restaurant, that sound will be with them also.

John: Yes. It’s not a clean sound.

Craig: It’s not.

John: As I started reading this pre-lap, I assumed that this was somebody on a microphone or was sort of a voiceover.

Craig: Exactly.

John: A clear space.

Craig: You may wonder how I got here. Yes. The issue is, you can’t do this. You literally can’t do what she’s trying to do here. What you can do is show this bison dazed, frozen, staring at us, and then, boom, smash cut to a guy, a crowded happy hour hotel, and we’re hearing him before we see him. Then we see him because the sound will be accepted.

John: Yes, but you could have or you could have pre-lapped the sound of the hotel bar. That could also have been interesting too. Why are we hearing this background noise that doesn’t match with what I’m seeing on screen?

Craig: Then you’d barely get a few words. The point is, and this is why this is important, Katie, the point is when you do this as a screenwriter, you are ceding way too much control to a director because the director’s going to go through this and go, well, this person didn’t write things that are physically produceable. Let me start fixing it. You want to fix it. You don’t want them fixing it. Fix it.

Megana: If Katie wants to keep this dialogue over the image of the bison that we’re seeing, what should she write instead?

John: You can’t. Connor could do it as a pure voiceover, but then it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t track quite right here.

Craig: You literally can’t do it unless you wanted to have the noise of the hotel and the bar with him, which would ruin this moment because you’d be staring at this bison and hearing a bar for some reason. It just doesn’t make sense.

John: I think there’s a way you could sell that, but it would be a different feel for what this is. It just doesn’t–

Craig: Especially because there’s continuous action. We’re looking at a herd and then suddenly we would hear. Like John says, you can get away with a slight prelap of the noise of the bar and maybe even one thing. This bison and then the sound of a bar starts to fade in and we hear a woman say, Mary Kate or Ashley. You could do that and then, boom, we’re into the bar and he looks in and goes, Mary Kate. You could do that, but you can’t have this run.

John: I like the idea of the Mary Kate or Ashley runner. I like the frustration that he’s feeling that this is just a parlor trick he can do. He doesn’t actually care. He actually is trying to engage on conversation. The challenge I ran into is that the scene descriptions, the actions in between, like momentary pain flashes across Connor’s eyes, but it gives in. No more physics talk. It felt out of scale with what was actually happening here. In a scene that really should just be dialogue, boom, boom, we were stopping a lot to address people’s reactions to things.

Megana: It was just hard for me to believe that these two characters, if I am to believe that they’re old friends and went to grad school together, are having the conversation that they’re having.

Craig: Right. It feels like they just met.

Megana: Yes. It’s like a first date or like a blind date, a setup, I believe it. If my friend could do this, I would never bring it up again.

Craig: Right. You mentioned it’s somebody else, but you wouldn’t suddenly discover they have this parlor trick after all these years. To me, it felt more like he was in the middle of picking this girl up and he was trying to impress her with what he’s impressed by, but she only cares about this other thing that he can do that isn’t that impressive, except that when you’re trying to pick girls up at a bar, anything that impresses them is great. Anything, right? That’s the point of learning this parlor trick.

You mentioned pace, I think, John, is what you’re referring to. Everybody knows the wonderful scene that opens the social network, and this has a slightly social network opening scene vibe to it. There’s a questionably spectrum-ish sort of guy, and there’s a girl, and they’re not quite connecting verbally. That scene is notoriously fast. It is paced faster probably than any dialogue scene ever, and I’m throwing in all the screwball comedies of the 30s.

When you are pacing, and this feels like it should be paced that quickly. Honestly, what I would do is have him say less stuff like, Mary Kate’s on the left. It should always be like, Mary Kate. So, dadadadada, Ashley. Dadadadada, Ashley. Nope, Ashley, and then Mary Kate in the same dress. Dadadadada, but make him– I don’t think he would use extra words because he’s so interested in talking about what he wants to talk about. All the stuff in between, the description, shorten because you want to keep the pace.

John: If you absolutely need it, you can pull it into a parenthetical for when the dialogue blocks rather than having it be its own separate thing because every time we stop reading the dialogue to read the scene description, we’re losing the sense of the pace of whatever we really feel like on screen.

Craig: Right. We have, that’s Mary Kate. Action. Dejected, Francis returns to scrolling through pages of images of the Olsen twins. Then the dialogue continues. Francis holds her phone up again, a picture of the twins in their Full House days. Connor examines it carefully, then we complete. I think he’d like, it wouldn’t take that long. It says Francis. In the dialogue, it says Francis, in parentheses, not listening. She’s not listening. I’m not sure I need a lot of description also showing that she’s not listening. It could say in parentheses, looking on phone, Jeff Bezos. I also did not understand this.

This is important because Connor’s making this interesting point that theoretically will either be relevant to the plot or just an interesting window into his personality. He’s talking about time and he says, the satellites we use for Google Maps have to get the time beamed out to them from Colorado. I think beamed to them or sent to them from Colorado. The next brick of text is, or dialogue, the clocks they have on board gain so much time, our GPS would go off by six miles a day otherwise, exclamation point. I don’t understand what that means. What does that mean have so much time and what is, and go off by six– Our GPS would go off by six miles a day, otherwise is incredibly unwieldy. It’s very clunky. It doesn’t sound easy to say.

John: It would drift by six. There’s ways to get to it.

Craig: Yes, exactly.

John: To Katie’s credit here, I feel like if you do the blur of the eyes test and look at the pages, they have a good balance of light and dark.

Craig: Yes. Absolutely.

John: There’s not chunks that are impenetrable. There’s no road blocks in your reading, which is nice.

Craig: Can I pull one more thing out?

John: Please.

Craig: This tends to stop me, and I see it quite a bit. Francis, in this kind of not horrible expositional way, says, which was harder, your PhD in science, which again is crazy because they literally lived together in grad school. How does she not know? That just seems ridiculous. We’re developing this expertise. To your point, this should have already been covered by their friendship. He says, my PhD is in quantum mechanics and we lived together when I was in grad school, you bitch. She rolls her eyes.

John: Yes, I wrote, ouch, on that.

Craig: That’s just aggressive.

John: It’s aggressive, but it’s also, it feels expositional. It just feels like, oh, this is not for us. This is for the–

Craig: A, expositional. Very expositional. We lived together. This is an, as you know, I have a degree in– B, if it’s two women calling each other a bitch, sure. If it’s a straight guy and a girl in a bar and he just casually calls her a bitch, it feels aggressive.

Megana: I guess I didn’t mind it so much. It was more offensive to me that she said science instead of–

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Science?

John: Science?

Craig: Do you stuff with numbers?

Megana: If she said quantum mechanics or some sort of physics and it actually was theoretical physics or whatever niche thing, that would make more sense to me. Yes, it was just more offended by the science part.

Craig: Yes, they’re both stopped me in my tracks. Then why is she saying, I’ll buy the next round if you know what I do? They lived together. They lived together. Anyway, this is trouble. The last line also, Francis goes to buy him another drink. As soon as Francis turns her back, Connor’s face falls. Is cheerfulness a performance? He’s barely holding it together.

John: I wasn’t reading as being cheerful.

Craig: Also, I don’t believe he’s– How do I know he’s– If he’s barely holding it together, this was a lot of talking. He seems quite activated and passionate about this topic. If you are barely holding it together, you’re probably listening more than talking because you’re barely holding it together. These are things to think about, Katie, but interesting stuff. There’s obviously a lot going on here, which I want to know more about.

John: Yes, we can know more. Tell us about the long line for this pilot.

Drew: A millennial fundraiser can’t accept her best friend’s alleged suicide, so she digs through his San Francisco apartment full of mysterious scientific instruments, dives headfirst into nostalgia for their wild 20s, and unravels a conspiracy that goes further into the past than she ever imagined.

John: All right, so she is the main character and he is going to be dead.

Craig: Well, guess what? In these three pages, they are screaming to me that he is the main character. The perspective is entirely his. Entirely his. She walks away, we stay with him. If she’s the main character, I think this needs to be reconsidered.

Megana: I also want his dialogue, like what you pointed out with the six miles off the GPS or whatever, I want his dialogue to be a bit wonkier and more esoteric in that case, like he’s more misunderstood.

Craig: If he’s barely hanging on and there’s like a maniac to what he’s saying, a little mad scientist-ness, I need to see her being like, are you on coke? What’s going on? She needs to notice. I think that something’s going on because while one can make the argument that people who have depression often present as normal, the problem when you’re dramatizing it is that it just seems like you cheated, that you didn’t give us anything of interest and then they kill themselves. They’re not around to say, oh, let me explain. That was all an act. You know what I mean?

John: One possibility here for Katie to consider is if it’s not just the two of them at the scene, but there’s a third person that like, so her showing off her friend’s ability to tell the– She just wants to show off his freakish ability to tell the Olsen twins apart, whereas he’s trying to communicate important stuff to this third person, could be really interesting and just gives someone a point of focus.

Craig: That’s a great idea. If I were writing this, I would have, yes, I would make it from her point of view. She’s trying to understand what he’s saying because what he’s saying is provocative. She’s like, I don’t, but how? How is time part of capitalism? Explain that. There’s this other friend who’s like, Mary Kate and he’s like, Ashley, and she’s like, just trust that he’s going to get them all right. It’s what he does. Go back to the thing about the– so she’s interested and she has a want and her want is to understand him. The other friend is doing Mary Kate and Ashley, which is interrupting and creating frustration with her. Then I would know it’s from her perspective.

Megana: Because this isn’t setting me up to like Francis very much.

John: No, it isn’t.

Craig: No, it’s setting me up to like Connor, and then he dies. Oh, no, he died.

John: Oh, no, he died. Our next script has an arguably protagonist on the spectrum as well.

Craig: Oh, fun.

John: Let’s talk through Sunset Paycheck by Holden Potter. Can you give us the synopsis, Drew?

Drew: Eric Bond, 27, is at a job interview. We see a balance superimposed, $2,743. The interviewer, Casey, asks him where he sees himself in 10 years and his greatest strengths and weaknesses. Eric gives a very confident answer. Later, Eric walks through a park with Jane, who asks him how the interview went. Jane is excited to hear that he got the job and the interviewer asked all the questions Jane had prepped him for. Eric Venmo’s Jane $10 and the balance goes down to $2,733. We learn that Jane works at Casey’s company and tells Eric all about his future coworkers. Eric asks Jane if she’s told the company they’re a couple.

John: Great. We officially have a trend, which is two scripts that open over black.

Craig: Over black, which is fine.

John: I think we need to find it and go ahead. Just like a Stewart special, it’s a Three Page Challenge that opens with a flash forward and it comes back in time. Let’s workshop a term for opening over black.

Craig: Well, it’s going to have to do with Drew. He’s the one thinking that.

John: It’s like a Drew noir.

Craig: The Drew darkness.

John: The Drew darkness.

Craig: This is a Drew darkness.

John: Just some Drew darkness. His voiceover is, where do I see myself in 10 years? We open in a pretty classic job interview. I’m not mad at it. It’s a familiar scene. I found myself in the last script where there were a lot of scene descriptions interrupting the dialogue flow that weren’t actually helping me out or telling me more about what was special about what I was seeing.

Megana: I think a lot of the action lines that were describing Eric’s character confused me more.

John: Yes. It happens to Casey as well. On page one, Casey is stunned and surprised. Really, you’re stunned in a job interview?

Craig: And surprised.

John: Both. As people who play Dungeons and Dragons, we know they’re incapacitated and paralyzed. There’s a very specific condition for a specific thing.

Craig: She has the stunned and surprised condition, which now they took away the surprised condition in 2024 rules, as you know, Drew, and I’ve talked about that at length on a different podcast. A great choice to do that. If they’re playing 2014 rules, stunned and surprised, Casey will not make it through this combat.

John: No. 100%. Here’s the thing that is unique to the script I do want to talk through.

Craig: Megana is so bored with us. [chuckles]

John: The fourth line down on the first page, text of $2,743 fades in below the chair, then fades slowly after. An interesting idea that they’re basically constantly showing his Venmo balance, but you’ve got to make that more clear of what we’re seeing because I had no idea what it was.

Craig: I thought the chair was worth $2,743. That’s what this is telling me. Text of $2,743 fades in below the chair, fades away slowly after. That’s after a sentence that says, “He adjusts his chair in an awkward motion slowly.”

John: My focus is on the chair, the actual object, and so I’m thinking, well, that dollar figure must have pertained to that chair. Also, his age was 27, and the text is 2743, so I kept thinking like, wait, are those numbers connected somehow? Is there a purpose here? I think it’s an interesting idea to show that we just got to set that up really cool and clearly from the beginning.

Megana: Just why not clarify that that’s his bank account?

Craig: Net worth.

John: Net worth.

Craig: You can even say his name, Eric Bond Net worth. I don’t know. What does fiddles with his lips mean? How do you do that?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: What is that?

John: It was one of the things that was making me think from the start, like, oh, this could be like a spectrum-y thing here that we’re trying to– Because his dialogue choices felt a little spectrum-y, and so I wondered whether that was a physicality that we’re–

Craig: Well, it says, “Eric fiddles with his lips and takes a sip of the water cup in front of him.” Now, you don’t take a sip of a cup. Takes a sip of water from a cup. Also, this is like one of those ventriloquist gags where they drink milk and make the dummy talk. [laughter] How are you doing both of these at the same time?

John: We’re also missing a from. Eric sits across Casey Morgan. Again, this is your last look, so you’ve got to make sure that you don’t have stuff missing out of here.

Craig: He says, “Well, okay, where do I see myself in 10 years?” Well, that’s a great question. Then she says, “Take your time, dear.” Which is a very nice thing to say. Casey looks down at her notepad. Eric flutters and rolls his eyes. What an idiot. Why after take your time, dear? Super nice thing to say. Why is he rolling his eyes?

Megana: Rolling your eyes in an interview is so rude.

Craig: It’s crazy. It’s a crazy thing to do, and it’s not even called for.

Megana: I also don’t really know what flutters means.

Craig: It’s like this. It’s a thing.

John: The fact that it stopped us to think, what does it actually mean? What is it doing? It’s the wrong line there. Cut it or find a better way to get that in there. I think you cut it and get more into the meat of it.

Craig: “Well, if hired in 10 years.” You want well, comma, if hired. Well, if hired is a strange phrase. Well, if hired in 10 years, I won’t have this job. I think it’s an interesting concept. It’s an interesting interview gambit. You probably want to- because I don’t have this job. What job? We don’t even know what the job is. It hasn’t been mentioned yet. Well, if hired in 10 years, I won’t be working here. Then Casey is not surprised.

Now, my biggest issue, Holden, is that we are forced to watch two people sitting across from each other talking, which is my favorite thing to write. I love two people sitting across from each other talking, but when two people are sitting across from each other talking, it must feel like an action sequence with dialogue and emotion, or in this case, one-upsmanship, lying, concealing, different wants, different–

John: Surprise, seduction.

Craig: It’s just rambles. He just talks. The point he makes, it takes forever to make it, and it’s not a particularly fascinating one.

Megana: Also, in that part that starts with, “If you look at my resume,” I don’t understand why, if this was a question he was expecting, he’s umming so much, and that’s written out in the dialogue. Then I think this is the last looks thing. If Holden would have read this out loud, he starts two sentences with now, and then he says grow and no. I think that’s just a little too rhymey and awkward for an actor to say.

John: That’s good advice.

Craig: Also, why would somebody in an office care why you left a job in a mini golf course? You worked in a mini golf course, because no one wanted to hire you for an office job. That’s fine. Or you love mini golf, but I don’t care why you left the mini. You left mini golf because it was mini golf. You’re getting minimum wage. Of course you left.

Megana: A bigger note that I had with these pages is that these questions are so basic, and they’re so generic that Eric being surprised about it or them betting on it was upsetting to me. I feel like if the questions were more specific, I’d learn more about Casey and just have more respect for how odd the situation is. Someone being surprised that you’re being asked your greatest strength at an interview was baffling to me, whereas–

Craig: Right, or where do I see myself in 10 years? This is the most–

Megana: I think you could just say something so much more interesting about corporate America or interviews by the questions you’re asked. At Google, I was asked so many times what my death row meal would be or what my walkout music would be. I think there’s something so bleak in those questions and how standard they are.

Craig: Something so horrible and pointless. I’m here to code stuff. Who cares? Who cares what I eat when I die? My walkout music? I don’t have any. I like coding. [laughter] Am I getting this job or not? We all know you’re not going to decide it based on my walkout music.

Megana: There’s something cutesy that you could do.

Craig: Now here’s one other thing that’s important. Jane makes a point of saying, I’m assuming she said, “Is that right?” Which is not a particularly–

John: Not memorable.

Craig: The biggest problem is on page 2, they chuckle. Not sure why. Casey looks down back at her notepad. Eric cringes and his posture sinks. I don’t know why, because she just chuckled and he said what he wanted. Then she says, “Okay, is that right?” Why is she saying that?

John: I don’t know. I don’t know the context.

Craig: It doesn’t follow from-

John: Big question mark with that.

Craig: -what she said, what her attitude is.

Megana: Then we come back to it, right?

Craig: Then Jane’s like, did she say it? Did she say the thing? Yes. I would have had him like, okay, is that right? I think that’s an interesting thing. If an interviewer suddenly asks a question that shouldn’t be asked because it doesn’t follow for you to be like, “Yes.” Then later like, yes. For no reason. It didn’t belong. That would be interesting to note.

John: To Megan’s point, if she asks a really weird question, then the recall on asking the really weird question makes sense.

Craig: It makes sense.

John: More last looks things here. On page 2, exterior Loose Park afternoon.

Craig: What’s a Loose Park?

John: I assume that’s a place.

Craig: The name of a park?

John: It reads here.

Craig: I think there is a park named Loose Park, and you don’t live in the US. It’s like a famous park in London, which I don’t think it is. You need to say the full name of it or just name it something else. Loose Park sounds odd.

John: The Loose Park here, Holden is using double dashes before the time of day, which is not common, but it doesn’t bug me. On the first one, there’s a space between the place and the hyphens, and now there’s not. Just be consistent.

Craig: Consistency. Check my list and see.

John: Here’s the description of Loose Park. Ducks in a pond. An older gentleman feeding the ducks. A woman walking her dog. A couple walking by the water. Have you ever been dealing with stress where you’re supposed to just look around the space and just identify the name things in the room? That’s what it felt like to me.

Craig: You have to repeat them to make sure you remember them. Yes, this does feel like a memory game. How about just an older gentleman, not an older gentlemen. There’s only one of him. That’s a mistake. An older gentleman feeds ducks in a pond as a couple strolls by. A woman walks her dog.

John: If you want to go with a couple walks by the water, Jane, you got it. Then it’s Eric and Jane.

Craig: If we know him, we don’t say a couple walks by and then cut to the couple, and it’s Eric. Reveal the couple as them. I can see them, because you just said a couple–

John: We have eyes.

Megana: Also, the office chatter and machines began to drown out the interview on the line before I felt like was unnecessary for cutting to a park.

Craig: Then suddenly it’s quiet. Yes. If it said, “As his anxiety rises,” but he’s done talking, so there’s nothing left for him to say. It says, “I don’t quit, no matter the obstacle–” Then he stops talking. The sound rises. What is the actor doing while that’s happening? Just uncomfortably run out of dialogue? This is one of those things where you have to just say, how do I do this? Holden, you are going to make this movie. I want you to make this movie. You’re going to go out with your iPhone and shoot it. Can you shoot some of these things the way you’re describing and go through that exercise? It’s important.

John: Last looks, page 3, both laugh. That laugh was capitalized for some reason. Not the whole word, just that the L was capitalized. Eric asks, ?Seriously though, am I going to like it there?” is a question. Yes.

Craig: Jane.

John: Who is Jane? Jane is 26.

Craig: This is what I know about her. 26. I know what shirt she’s wearing, which is not important. I know that when Eric says, “She did ask every single question you’d say she’d asked,” instead of every question you said she would ask, which is more, I guess, grammatically correct, Jane jumps up and down. I know that she is slightly insane, because she’s jumping up and down at the most mundane thing possible.

John: Let’s back up a sec here, because they came from someplace. They didn’t just start walking. Just now, we’re going to say that what–

Craig: What were they talking about before this? How is this possible? You’ve got to make this movie in your head. You’ve got to imagine it. Jane needs to be a character. There’s something off about these. They don’t feel like full people. Maybe they’re not. What if they’re AI robots?

John: Could be.

Megana: I wrote, seems like they don’t know each other.

John: They’re dating.

Craig: Or they’re AI robots.

John: Or they are.

Craig: Well, let’s find out.

John: Let’s find out. Well, actually, one last thing.

Craig: Sure.

John: Title page, all looks good, and the email address is there, but just also like the full mailing address. No one’s going to send you a postcard. I don’t think you need your mailing address there. Phone numbers, I wouldn’t put my phone number there. Just so you know, randos are going to call you.

Craig: It’s a fair point.

John: Tell us what’s actually happening in this full script here.

Craig: After losing almost everything, Eric Bond struggles to live off his last paycheck as he learns to save time, money, and even people with the help of firefighter, Anne Sheeran, who craves the one thing Eric has, authenticity.

John: A character is Anne Sheeran, who’s not been introduced yet, which is fine. It’s three pages in. I’d like that his declining balance is going to be a recurring thing throughout this. That makes sense. You set that up on page one. Great. I don’t know.

Megana: I think that number should be lower.

Craig: That’s not a horrible number.

John: For a 26-year-old, no.

Craig: No.

Megana: If he just got a job, I’m not that worried about him.

John: [unintelligible 01:00:55].

Craig: Maybe he didn’t get the job.

John: Maybe soon.

Craig: Can you read that again?

John: Yes.

Craig: I just want to hear it again.

John: After losing almost everything, Eric Bond struggles to live off his last paycheck as he learns to save time, money, and even people with the help of firefighter, Anne Sheeran, who craves the one thing Eric has, authenticity.

Craig: I’m not sure a movie about somebody learning to save time and money is going to be particularly interesting. I don’t feel like this character is just bursting with authenticity. More importantly, I’m not sure how to portray Anne Sheeran, the firefighter, in a way that posits that she is inauthentic and wants to be authentic. If you want to be authentic, just stop pretending and lying, I guess. I’m not sure how Kirk is going to help her with that. This may be trouble.

John: It may be trouble.

Craig: It may be trouble.

John: Holden, thank you for sending it through. Let’s get to our third and final three-page challenge. This is Levelling Up by Sylvia-Anne Parker. I will say from the start here, it’s leveling with two Ls.

Craig: She’s British.

John: She’s British. I looked it up.

Craig: She’s British, and there’s so many Britishisms throughout. It was almost like I got a feeling she was like, no, seriously, I’m British. I am so British.

John: Story with me.

Craig: I trace back to the Saxons, like the early Saxons.

John: Those angles. I hate the angles.

Craig: I love the Saxons.

Megana: Putting a U everywhere.

John: Talk us through, if we were not reading the pages, what we would see.

Drew: After a quote from Martin Luther King Jr., the sound of choking takes us to a bathroom where a woman is being drowned by an unseen assailant. We then cut to that same woman. It’s Grace Tierney. She’s in her 50s, and she’s Black, waking up on a London tube from her nightmare. She grabs the arm of another passenger who pushes her away. Grace gets off at the next stop. We then cut to a tower block in Hackney where Jeannie, a 20-something white woman, discovers her heat isn’t working and brings her 60-something father a blanket.

In a podcast studio, Grace interviews Cameron Stonely, the minister of a new program called Levelling Up, aimed at reducing economic imbalances across the UK. When Grace presents him with numbers that prove a widening disparity, he tries to spin his way out of answering her questions. Grace’s boss and producer, Dennis, watches from the other side of the glass with a look of pain.

Craig: This is the opposite of true darkness. This is white

John: Okay, I’m white. A white screen.

Craig: This is true whiteness.

John: We’re opening with a nightmare image again, a thing we’ve seen before. This woman is being pushed underwater. Let’s talk about a woman, (Black), versus a Black woman.

Craig: It doesn’t bother me.

John: Doesn’t bother you?

Craig: No. What bothers me is that it’s a woman. I don’t know how old she is.

John: Ultimately, we’re supposed to be matching that up to Grace herself.

Craig: It would be good if you just put a 50-year-old woman just so I just know what I’m dealing with there, because it’s all about the imagery.

John: When we actually get to revealing her, it says, the woman Grace Tierney 50, which is just an awkward construction. I might try the woman– Grace Tierney 50– just to separate it off because- to make it clear this is the woman we just saw before.

Craig: A positively.

John: A positively.

Craig: A positively.

John: Good choice. Megan, what was your reaction to these pages?

Megana: I really enjoyed these pages. I liked this character. I am curious about what this nightmare she’s having in the middle of a pack tube is. I love a podcaster going after a minister. I’m excited about that. I just felt like things could be a little bit punchier, but I’m excited about the potential of this.

John: I am too. The idea of we see Grace. We don’t know her context, and then we see her in a podcast situation, feels right. My assumption is that we’re going to find that the tower block apartment and the heat not working is related to levelling up as a program.

Craig: I hope so.

John: I hope so. I had to reach to get myself there because I felt like, why am I seeing this here now, and why am I not continuing to see Grace throughout this?

Megana: It felt unnatural for that. If I’m watching her on the tube going to work to then cut to this woman, Jeannie, and I also just felt like that scene with Jeannie could be more dramatic.

John: There’s no dialogue in the scene. We can’t tell if this may be a postcard image, because there’s no actual real action happening in them. You’re looking at this stuff, and you’re not sure why we’re here. We’re seeing a tower block, literally just an image, and then we’re inside that apartment and just seeing an old woman. There’s no dialogue. No scene actually happens.

Craig: That just doesn’t work. You can’t do it, really. What’s going to happen is you’ll cut it out. If you want to be there, there needs to be at least one line of dialogue or something to say, “I understand why I’m here.” If there’s not a line of dialogue for us to push past the dad through the window and see Grace walking to work or something just to connect it somehow, otherwise, just this floating scene that could go anywhere just doesn’t fit.

I want to talk about the very beginning. In the very beginning, there’s this stylistic choice to start with a white screen and then the sound of typing and then see text typed onto the screen. It’s this visualized act of typing a sentence. As the weeks and months unfolded, we realized- now it’s a quote from an American, so I don’t know, maybe I would put a Z there, but whatever, realized that we were the victims. The typing stops, resumes, of a broken promise, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That’s a really cool quote, and it’s a really cool moment where it pauses.

My issue is we go from that, which is this stylized thing, to another very stylized thing. It’s like I started with two desserts, and I feel like you can do one dessert. I’m not sure you can do both of these things. It’s such a great image to start with somebody drowning. That’s, whoa, I’m in it. That’s exciting. I would argue that maybe that’s the way to go here. The quote is really cool, but I would sacrifice it.

John: Let’s imagine the opposite of the case where we keep the quote and then just come to Grace on the tube.

Craig: You could do that.

John: What resonates for me about that is it’s just like, oh, how does that tie into this? I’m curious how that ties into this next thing.

Craig: You wouldn’t be able to have her waking up out of a nightmare, I don’t think.

John: No.

Craig: Let’s talk about waking up out of a nightmare, which is something that happens all the time to us in life, and it happens all the time to characters on screen. It’s just that it happens very differently to those of us in life than on screen. When you wake up from a nightmare, your eyes open, that’s pretty much it. That’s how I do it. Here, it’s really tricky, because we show her with her mouth wide open, which is meant to match her drowning, I guess. Then she sits up in her seat with a start, breathing heavily from the nightmare. Without looking, she grabs hold of the arm of the male passenger, Black, 30s, in the seat next to her and yells, “Marcus.”

The passenger roughly pushes her away because he’s not Marcus. Then she realizes, I don’t believe that at all.

John: I don’t believe it.

Craig: She wakes up and immediately knows she’s in the tube, by the way. She’s on a train. She reaches without a no-look reach to her right, yells somebody’s name as if she needs that person without looking at them. No.

Megana: As a nightmare queen, I have startled awake and grabbed the person next to me on a flight, but my eyes aren’t open yet.

John: That’s a crucial difference.

Craig: Have you woken up? You see what I’m saying? You’re not there yet.

John: You grab the person and then you wake up. I believe that.

Craig: If your eyes are closed and you grab the person next to you, in my mind, you could be grabbing them in front of you or turning to them and staring in their face. It could be anything, but the no-look grab and the no-look name while the eyes are open, is not a realistic thing, nor is it necessary. I know she wants us to know that Grace had somebody named Marcus who was important to her, a husband, a son, a boyfriend. We don’t know. There are other ways to get that.

Megana: Just before that also, we cut from this image of the water going into her mouth, and then she says, fast cut to a packed carriage. I would prefer a fast cut to mouth wide open, and then we get the packed carriage later.

Craig: Absolutely. If you’re going to cut to her, you’re going to cut to her. You’re not going to cut to a wide shot of a train and then cut to her. You have to think about how would I actually edit this? I want to talk a little bit about the interview, because there was something about it. First of all, when somebody has a disturbing experience, if they are then the next thing we really see is them doing their job, it feels like there needs to be a moment where we’re with that person and understanding that they’re taking a breath, having a drink of water. Flushing that out of their system, and then focusing in.

It says, “Grace dons headphones, ready for work. Grace is dedicated to her job. She’s damn good at it, and she knows it.” Which, by the way, I hate. I’m just going to say it. I hate she’s damn good, and she knows it. I don’t know that she’s damn good, and I don’t know that she knows it. If she’s damn good, why does she need to know it? That just feels overconfident. Kind of an annoying characteristic. I’d rather other people tell her she’s good at it. The most important thing is I would prefer a moment here where Grace dons headphones. She’s not ready for work. She just had a nightmare about drowning.

Take a breath here. Have somebody say, okay. She’s like, “Absolutely.” Then it’s gone. Then the red light comes on, or she’s not okay, and then the red light comes on, and she changes, because she’s– Last thing, we are in East London, which is one of the poorer areas of London. It’s where a lot of these council housing, and they call it quick-build, multi-occupational housing, ugly blot on the landscape. There is this prior scene that we’re discussing where there was somebody trying to warm up her father, a flat tower block, Hackney, London, so East London.

Then she interviews this guy, and the point that she makes is hospital waiting lists currently stand at 7.46 million cases in the north of the country, as opposed to 4.27 million in the south, highlighting the north-south divide. London is in the southern part of England. Why is her point here that the northern– By the way, the northern part of England does get the shaft relative to this big city in certain cases, but that doesn’t seem to be what we’re talking about here. Why are we spending so much time in East London, but then worrying about the folks up in, I don’t know, Yorkshire or Newcastle?

John: I want to talk about the actual flow on the page of this, because reading through it a second time, you realize like, oh, it’s meant to be that she’s just talking over him, but it’s not clear on the page that she’s talking over, because right now we’re seeing Cameron suddenly, it’s all dot, dot, dot to connect through the things. Visually on the page, it looks like they’re each taking their turn, and that’s not the intention here. I think this is a case where you do need some smart dual dialogue to show that this is simultaneously happening.

Craig: I think you could do this in this dual dialogue, and whenever I can avoid it, I do, but there is a way to do– Well, first of all, Cameron Stonely is just talking. He’s doing this thing regardless of what she says. I think ending each line of dialogue with dash, dash would be better than dot, dot. Dot, dot is a trail off. Dash, dahs is on cutoff, and then just a simple Grace parentheses cutting him off. How do the figures differ? Cameron Stonely rolling ahead. This government is doing, and then you understand that she’s going to keep cutting him off, and he’s going to keep rolling ahead. This looks a little bit like a page of Morse code because of the amount of dot, dot, dots.

John: I think the intention here is that she’s not backing down. She keeps going, but she’s also not letting him ever attempt to answer the question. I want to make sure that as an audience, we see that she is both listening and pushing through.

Craig: That’s where I think this could be broken up a touch with single lines of Grace lets him go on for another second, then enough already or whatever, so that we’re with her. We end with her saying, “Are you simply lying your way out of answering the question?” That is not necessarily a more aggressive line than, “Are you able to back up your claim with concrete evidence? Please answer the question.” Stonely’s stream of spin is brought to an abrupt halt. This guy is pretty good at just ignoring what you’re saying, and I’m not sure why that would bring him to a halt.

Through the glass, into the control room, comma, we would want there, Grace’s boss, producer Dennis Reardon, 35 white, old head on youngest shoulders. What are youngest shoulders? What is an old head? You mean older than he looks or looks older than he is?

John: I think it’s his experience. It’s like why he’s beyond his years.

Craig: Maybe that’s a British expression.

John: Oh, it could be.

Craig: It might be a British expression. Old head on your shoulders. Looks on with a pained expression. Why is he pained?
John: Good question, because we don’t know. Is Grace being too aggressive? What’s going wrong here?

Megana: To Craig’s point about the line of she’s good at her job and she knows it, I want to see how she’s good at her job in this versus that line.

Craig: I think that she doesn’t take any crap, and she really wants these people to answer, but if this is who she is, and this is how her podcast works, why is Cameron Stonely going on it? If this is what she does, why does Dennis Reardon suddenly seem pained as if to say, “Oh, no, she’s doing it again.” This is what she does. If she were doing the normal, okay, interesting, and then just something snaps and she just does something really aggressive and then he’s pained.

John: We’d have to see what normal is before- because we have no–

Craig: She just jumps right in. I’m not sure why he’s pained here. It would be good if we saw him earlier, not pained, and then she says something, and then he reacts so I know what it was.

John: Well, to your point, if he’s the producer asking, “You’re good?” She’s like, “Yes, you’re good.” Just establishing him earlier could help a lot. Title page looks great. A date on there would be helpful just so we can see when this is from. It’s not essential.

Craig: This is an interesting choice. Capitalized her name. You normally don’t, but-

Megana: I like it.

Craig: -I think it’s like, “Hey, I’m Sylvia-Anne Parker.”

John: You’re going to pay attention.

Craig: You’re going to pay goddamn attention to me. I want to find out what this is.

John: Oh, please, yes.

Craig: When a campaigning journalist confronts a government department over its socioeconomic policy, she discovers that the ministers in the department are the target of a serial killer.

John: Wow, a serial killer was not something I was expecting.

Craig: I wasn’t expecting that based on I thought maybe a supernatural thing possibly was going on.

John: I would say that the drowning thing does not feel connected to that premise that I was just given.

Craig: Yes.

Megana: I thought it was going to be more of like a get out experience of drowning. I didn’t think there was going to be actual physical violence.

Craig: This is an interesting choice. This is a movie that is criticizing the government for failing to achieve their promises of leveling people up and helping them economically, but the serial killer is going after those people. I have to stop the serial killer from killing these ineffective government people.

John: We’ll have to read the description to know what’s happening.

Craig: I’m sort of rooting for the serial killer. Not really, but I’m not like, “Oh, no.” That’s an interesting choice.

John: We want to thank these three writers for sending in their pages and everyone else who sent in their pages. Drew gets hundreds of these. If you want to send in your pages, it’s johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. There’s a little form you read through. You click the button. You attach your PDF, and we look through them all. If you want to read through these pages with us, remember that they’re in the show notes. Just click the links there, and you’ll get the chance to look at those PDFs.

Let’s do our one cool things. My one cool thing is a blog post by Hollis Robbins. The title of it is How to Tell If Something is AI-Written. I try never to use the word writing with AI, so AI-Generated. Hollis makes really good points that for us, for humans, language represents a signifier, so a word like a tree, along with a signifier, the actual real or imagined tree. Because we exist in the world and have concrete examples of things around us, we’re talking about those concrete things, versus LLMs don’t have any of that. They just can generate a string of patterns that match to other language that they see, but they don’t actually know what things really are.

If you’re reading it through text and you’re wondering, did an AI do this? Is this real or something? Some tests you might try to do. If you can’t see anything, nothing springs to mind, it’s more likely going to be AI. All these tests are also, it could also just be bad writing, but good writing will tend to have concrete things that evoke an image in your head. If you look for a naturally perfect balance where every point has a counterpoint, where every advantage has a corresponding challenge mentioned there, so they’re always balancing the pro, the con.

Craig: They’re both sidesy.

John: They’re both sidesy. In the absence of concrete details, they’re not giving an example of an actual, real person or actual thing in the world, but it’s a hypothetical, because they don’t actually have a reference to a thing. AI can be good at persuasion, because it has learned a bunch of rhetorical patterns without having to believe the actual argument underneath it. I think the converse of this is looking at, well, how do you write things well? It’s something we talk about so often in screenwriting. It’s like you’re creating a visual for the reader, so the reader sees something in their head as they’re doing that. That’s what we talk about in these three-phase challenges. It’s what we talk about every week.

It’s how are you evoking the experience of sitting in a place, hearing the sound, feeling things? That’s why we say we, because we are putting ourselves into these things.

Craig: Never say we, John. I saw that on Reddit.

John: Absolutely. Two examples that Hollis makes is of things that create a visual. Instead of apologizing, she brought donuts. I get that. I feel the donuts. I see that. I understand what you’re saying. His idea of teamwork was to circle my title and draw a sad face. Again, you’ve created a visual. You’ve created a moment. I believe that in a way. I just think the lesson here is just make sure you’re not detecting AI stuff, but also just don’t write like an AI.

Craig: Don’t sound like AI. It’s funny. As you were talking, I never considered this before. Do they still do standardized tests for college?

John: They still do. [crosstalk]

Craig: The SAT section where you would read some sort of three-paragraph narrative about some historical event, and then you have to answer questions about it.

John: It was boring writing.

Craig: That was basically early human AI. Just a blunt, featureless, both sidesy, just unflavored oatmeal writing.

John: It really is.

Craig: AI certainly does that well.

John: I just had some really good observations in there, so I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. Megan, what do you have to share with us?

Megana: My one cool thing, does it still count? I haven’t done this thing yet, but I’m going to do it.

John: You absolutely could aspire to a thing.

Megana: I am going to the Pageant of the Masters tomorrow. Have you guys heard of this?

Craig: Of course.

John: I’ve been to the Pageant of Masters.

Megana: You have?

John: I went last year, and I’m so excited for you.

Craig: I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never been to it.

John: Do describe it.

Megana: You are also welcome to describe it, because you actually know. I’m going tomorrow. It is this festival in Laguna Beach. They’ve been doing it for the last 90-something years. It is a living art show. Have you seen the rest of development?

Craig: Of course.

John: There’s an episode where the Bluth family does the equivalent thing where they all dress up and recreate a work of art, a painting, but they’re there in person and filling the roles.

Megana: It’s a fantastic scene. It’s one of my favorite episodes. I don’t know why I didn’t realize that this was a real festival that they were referencing. Tomorrow, I will go down to Laguna Beach, take the trolley from downtown, which I’m so excited about. I think there’s something like 50 artworks that they recreate.

John: What is the theme this year?

Megana: It’s Road Trip in California or California Masters. It’s all paintings that are in different California museums. It ends with Da Vinci’s Last Supper.

John: Oh, yes. I think it always ends with it. I think it was a comment.

Megana: Oh, does it? Because I was like, I don’t know that that is in any California museum.

John: That’s not in California.

Craig: Oh, no, that happened in California, Jesus. According to the Mormons, I think it happened in Missouri.

Megana: There’s apparently music and narration, but please tell me, John.

John: It really is remarkable. It’s a thing that everyone in Southern California should at least go to once. The year we went, fashion was the theme. It was fashion throughout the ages. The curtains close. The curtains open. A work of art is there, giant-scale work of art, but with actual actors in there who are painted to look like the thing. It’s a wardrobe, but it’s also makeup. You don’t believe that it’s actually human beings doing it. The changes between them are so quick. How did they possibly do that?

Craig: Do they have two stages in the alternate?

John: No.

Craig: They have people waiting to run in.

Megana: They have thousands of volunteers.

John: It’s a huge thing that happens. There’s some stuff off of this.

Craig: Is the audience just a mass of people with their iPhones out taking pictures constantly?

John: Oh, you’re not supposed to take pictures.

Craig: Oh, thank you, Pageant of the Masters. I can’t stand it. Just watch the thing. I told you I went to go see Jesus Christ Superstar at the Hollywood Bowl. I think it was awesome. It was fantastic. So many phones out. I’m like, just live the moment. Be in the moment. Then grab a video from one of the 14 million people that took a video.

John: I’m so looking forward to your report on what you think, because it was really great. The narration was really well written. All the music stuck together, which was great. Tickets are expensive, but–

Craig: Sounds like they would have to be for all those volunteers. Wait, volunteers?

John: Volunteers, but also other people. Everyone I think you see on stage is a volunteer, but the staffing behind everything else is incredible. There’s a whole orchestra.

Craig: Oh my goodness. I assume it’s a nonprofit venture.

John: It must run it all. Craig, what do you have for us?

Craig: Well, this is a repeat, but I try and do it every year at this time, because as we record this, we are two days away from what David Kwong and I refer to as Helpenmas. This is our friend Mark Helpen’s puzzle Labor Day extravaganza. David Kwong has flown in. We will be solving together over the course of Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. That’s usually when we finish. Our goal is to finish on Sunday. We never do. We’re usually top 20. By the time you hear this, we will have solved it, because it’s a Tuesday. However, not too late for you to jump on this. It is free. If you just Google Mark Helpen puzzles, it’ll take you to his puzzle page where all of the Labor Day extravaganzas are listed.

Fair warning, it is hard. It is not what I would call extremely hard, because I’m not good enough to do extremely hard. There are some MIT puzzle hunt stuff that are just extremely hard. This is hard, but so beautifully crafted from a puzzle construction point of view, so elegant, so much attention to detail. There’s always a theme and he writes beautifully. There’s always beautiful flavor text leading into the puzzles. There’s a tip jar where you should leave a tip. That is always my one cool thing as we approach the Labor Day weekend.

John: I’m going to repeat one of my other one cool things, which is to get your flu shot. Flu shots are now available. The flu sucks. Don’t get the flu. Get the flu shot.

Craig: I was talking to my doctor, one of my doctors, because I’m a middle-aged Jew. I’ve got like 100 of them now. She said her thing was to wait until the end of September to get the flu and COVID booster because you get about three to four months before the vaccine doesn’t quite have the same potency. The flu and COVID will probably peak around December, January. That was her.

John: I love that she still believes that we’ll have flu shots.

Craig: She told me that the flu shots were locked in in terms of the strain and the production of them before the brilliant Trump administration decided that we don’t need to be healthy as part of their Make America Healthy Again thing.

John: I just believe that tomorrow they could come down and say, “Oh, no, we’re banning flu shots.”

Craig: I don’t think they’re going to ban flu shots. The bigger issue is next season, they will not provide the flu shot makers with their evidence for which strain will be predominant.

John: We’re getting way off topic. Even this last time, they did not convene the meeting that they were supposed to do. The manufacturers just had to figure it out themselves.

Craig: They did for this time, but next time is in question. I am the most pro-vaccine person on the planet. Maybe you’re right there tied with me. Megana, as we know, anti-vaxxer.

John: Stipulating that is not correct.

Megana: I love vaccines. Give me as many as you can.

Craig: Give me as many as you- I love a vaccine. I’ve always loved a vaccine. They now have, I think, their first measles death in Mississippi. Pointless measles death. Pointless. Heavy sigh. Anyway, Labor Day puzzle extravaganza, everybody.

John: That is our show for this week. Script notes is produced by Drew Marquardt. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answer many weeks. You will find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with a signup 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. If you’re following us there, you may see more stuff from our show in the weeks and months ahead.

You’ll find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drink wear. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. You’ll find the show notes with links for all the things we talked about today, including the PDFs for the three-day challenges. In the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Thank you to all these premium subscribers. You make it possible for us to do this each and every week. We have new chairs in this office because of our premium subscribers. Thank you.

Craig: That’s why I’m sitting on this nice chair?

John: Yes.

Craig: Thank you, premium subscribers.

John: You can sign up to become our premium subscriber at scriptnotes.net where you get all those back-up episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on Film Scores. Megana Rao, thank you for coming back on the show.

Megana: Thank you.

Craig: Craig [unintelligible 01:28:23] question. Thank you, Megana.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Coming off of that outro music, let’s talk about more music. Jenny wrote in with a question.

Drew: From your perspective, what should a score aim to accomplish in a film or show? What sets a good scores apart from great ones? To what extent are you working with composers to capture texture or tone that you’re imagining versus leaving it in their expert hands? What are your thoughts on temp tracks? Are they a helpful tool or a creative hindrance?

John: Last week, we went to see John Williams’ show at the Hollywood Bowl, which is always great. One of the pieces was introduced as Adagio with motorcycles. Basically, John Williams had written this brilliant, clever piece of music, and then you basically can’t hear the music at all because there’s just motorcycle sounds over the whole thing, which raises the question like, oh, did he need to write that clever piece of Adagio music? The music’s great. Music is essential.

I love music in the movies I watch and the TV shows I watch, but there’s two very different patterns I notice. One is the music is there to support and it’s there so that there’s not silence. There’s a thing. It’s just filling some space. Then there’s the music that’s like, pay attention to this music. I’m thinking Blade Runner 2049. It just starts big and loud. The music is always a big part of what’s going to happen here.

Craig: There are so many different ways to explore how this works. To me, scoring is like writing again. It’s another chance to write. To answer, I guess, the last question, how important is temp music? Incredibly important, because when you’re editing, you know you’re going to need score in certain areas. You want it, and you want to make sure it’s working, and you want to be able to create something that feels like it’s being supported by the structure that music creates.

I think of scoring in two ways. There’s scoring that is connected to and consistent with what is happening on screen, and then there’s scoring that I just refer to as underscoring, which is scoring that punctuates or emphasizes what’s on screen. Somebody says something dramatic and the music goes, [mimics] that’s underscoring, which I tend to avoid, but some things it works great for. There’s also what I call, “Funny music,” which is never funny. It’s music for comedies, and it always sounds something like this. [mimics] I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. I hate it. It destroys everything in its path.

Scoring is essential. It’s an essential part of the process for me, whether it was Hildur Gundadottir on Chernobyl or Gustavo Santaolalla on The Last of Us and David Fleming on The Last of Us, we do a session where we just talk through scenes, and then we let them do what they do, and then it comes back. I listen, and they send it connected to the scene, and I watch it. I listen, and then I give my thoughts. They’re always how it made me feel. I didn’t want to feel like that, or, oh, you’re making me feel like this, but I actually want to feel like this, and it’s all about the language of feeling. It’s exhaustive and exhausting and leads to some of the most beautiful stuff imaginable. I love score. I love it.

John: It reminds me of costume design. There’s some projects in which you want to notice what people are wearing. It has to stand out. It’s a big part of it, and there’s other ones where it’s just like everyone should plausibly be wearing what they would be wearing in real life. I don’t want to pay attention to those things. Music can work the same way where there’s times where it’s just supporting. You’re not really paying a lot of attention to it. Then there’s The White Lotus where it’s just like this whole scene is just this wild, crazy music, and that’s part of the delirious joy of that show.

Craig: Completely. There’s music that is more sound design than music. In Chernobyl, I think the first music we hear is when Legasov walks outside. He makes his little recording, and then he walks outside to go hide the audio tape and the scores. [mimics] That’s it.

John: The Hans Zimmer race. Something has happened there, yes.

Craig: It’s Hildur Gundadottir on a cello that has been distorted and lowered and all sorts of cool stuff, but it’s not melodic. I’m not even sure how you would notate it. It is sound design. Sound design and score often blend. With particular composers now, when you look at stuff like, for instance, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, that line between sound design and score, again, can get a little blurry, which is fun. Which I love.

John: Now, if we had the comedy music underneath, like Tron: Ares, that would be amazing. [mimics]

Craig: Brutal.

Megana: I was going to ask, since both of you have directed, and Drew is directing your first short.

Drew: Not first but a short.

Megana: A short this week. What questions are you asking yourselves when you’re meeting with your sound designer, your composer? What vision do you have going into it?

John: You have to speak to references. You can talk about your script, obviously, like what you’re feeling here, but you’re going to have to use metaphors. Working with Alex Wurman on the music for The Nines, we had to come up with the main theme before the frame was shot, because Ryan Reynolds plays it on the piano. We had to figure out what is that longing theme? What does it sound like? We know it’s going to be on a piano, so it has to make sense on a piano. How are we going to do that? [mimics] Figuring out what that was, was a very early part of the process.

That’s unusual. In most cases, you’re giving a sense of the overall space for something, and you’re probably casting that composer based on their previous work. You’re using their previous work to temp score it.

Craig: Absolutely. You don’t want to be talking to composers that have no evidence that they can do something like what you’re doing, but you, of course, don’t want them duplicating anything they’ve done. You just want to know you’re generally what I’m looking for. Then I think one of the things that helps is to say, “Look, here’s what I don’t want. Here’s what I don’t like. Then here’s what I am looking for and what I do like.” Then you just vibe it out. They should ideally read the script and have thoughts, but I will say some composers work very differently and achieve brilliant results.

The aforementioned Gustavo Santaolalla, Gustavo likes to score without looking at what’s on screen. He just knows, okay, this is what the scene is about. This is what the feeling is and the emotions are. I’m not going to watch the scene. I’m just going to write a piece of music. Let’s see if it fits. A lot of times it does. You make adjustments here and there, but that is specific to him. Look at process. I think when you talk to him, look at their prior work. Talk about process. Talk about your goals and your aims, and talk about the things you don’t want, and then pray, because God’s honest truth is you don’t know until you start getting stuff back from them. You just don’t.

John: You’ll hear stuff. Are you ever hearing music independent of picture? Are you sending your tracks and then you have to–

Craig: I never listen to music independent of picture. What I ask for is music when they send it to me– Scott Hanau, one of our music supervisors, is amazing this way, because he coordinates all of this. What I used to get back was the standard thing, which is here’s the scene. Here’s the cue. We’ve cranked the cue up to 11, and the scene is down to a 2, so that you can hear the music. My problem is that’s not how anyone’s going to hear this music. What I ask them is to also send me a version. Much like Scott, just do a basic shot in the dark mix here, so I generally know how this will sit. If I can’t hear a moment properly, I’ll go to the other one. I want to see how it sits.

John: Sometimes you have the luxury, just like you’re writing for an actor, you know in advance who the composers are going to be. The movies I’ve done with Danny Elfman doing the music, I have a sense of the world of his music and it’s just so helpful. I know, okay, I’m actually planning out for some space where we can get the– If I bring that in there, that’s going to be great. The opening of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I knew I could really hear what the opening title sequence was going to be like, which is we’re in the factory assembling the chocolate bars and all that stuff. I could hear it even before he’d written a note of it.

Craig: That’s the joy of working with an established composer, because you know– I remember when I was reading the script for Dune, I don’t know if John Spitzer at the center or Eric Roth, but I think it was probably Denis. I think it’s when we maybe first see the worms, he wrote, in all caps, full Zimmer power. You know, okay, I know it’s full Zimmer power. It’s full Zimmer power is like [mimics].

John: You’re going to feel this in you.

Craig: It’s just like a thousand horns at the same time. When you’re starting out, and you’re talking to people that are also starting out, it’s a little tricky. You just got to vibe it out. If you have some temp pieces that are in the world, you can make a little mix tape of like, here’s the world that I’m thinking about.

John: The other thing that’s helpful, if you’re starting out and you’re making a lower budgeted film, you’ll have a conversation with your composer about like, what can we actually afford in terms of real instruments? My initial conversations with Alex Wurman were about like, well, piano, and he’s like, accordion. Hear me out because accordion can actually sound like a lot. It’s a much bigger sound than the one player would ultimately give you. It’s like, yes, you can digitally do a bunch of stuff, but we wanted some real things in there. Piano, accordion, harp actually gives you a lot of things, and then we can figure out, okay, what are the wins that are actually important and what are not important?

Craig: This is an ongoing battle. It’s been an issue also on Broadway as well where they have very strong unions that are protecting real players. The golden days of going to see John Williams and the LA Philharmonic doing the score for you and watching it live are slowly diminishing or rapidly diminishing, because you can create very accurate sounds with synthesizers and samplers. For what we do, maybe some of the bigger action cues rely on that for budget. I stay out of that discussion. I’m really just listening.

Happily, for Chernobyl and for a lot of stuff on The Last of Us, it really comes down to a person doing weird stuff in a room with Cellos. Gustavo loves a plastic tube. He loves a PVC pipe and his Ron Rocco, which is this very specific South American stringed instrument. I’m always just making sure it doesn’t sound synthy, because bad synthy sounds synthy unless that’s what you want, and then it’s great.

John: Going back to my wonderful thing in terms of when things feel artificial, you feel like there’s nothing really there. We do have a sense that there was an instrument. There’s something underneath that thing. It’s not just a waveform. It really was something that created that sound. Thanks for the question. Thank you, guys.

Megana: Thank you.

Craig: Thank you.

Links:

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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

I love talking to screenwriters about their experience getting their first movies made because it’s the difference between writing a script and actually creating a movie. Last year, we had Justin Kuritzkes on to talk about his experience with Challengers and Queer, back-to-back with Director Luca Guadagnino. Today, we’re here talking with Nora Garrett, the first-time writer of Guadagnino’s current After the Hunt. Welcome, Nora.

Nora Garrett: Hi, thanks for having me.

John: I’m so excited to talk to you because I think one of the reasons why I love this as an example is we have so many listeners who are working on their scripts, they’re aspiring writers, they’ve written some scripts but they’ve never gotten a thing made. And so that transition point between like, these are all the words I have on paper and this is a movie that’s actually existing in theaters, just talking through that process gives people a sense of the journey. Craig and I could talk about it and our experiences, but that’s not what happens in 2025 and you have just gone through this process.

Nora: Yes, that is true.

[laughter]

John: I’m sure there were moments that were great and moments that were surprising and fantastic and also terrifying.

Nora: Yes. Oh, I mean, there were so many moments of abject terror that I felt like I was just in a complete state of disassociation watching myself go through it and be like, be cool, relax. [laughs]

John: Yes.

Nora: Yes, it happened really fast. It’s interesting to be on the back end of it now looking back.

John: Cool. I want to talk about your journey as a writer, sort of getting up to this point, getting this in the hands of a director who actually made your movie with Julia Roberts starring. Because we have the actual script in front of us, I want to talk a little bit about the words on the page and your experience writing those words, but then seeing like, oh, those actual actors have to do these things and that whole process.

Nora: Yes.

John: And revisions, probably the most revisions you can also imagine. I saw from the cover page, you went to double white, so you went all the way through the colors.

Nora: Yes, we sure did.

[laughter]

John: We’ll also answer some listener questions. Then in our bonus segment for premium members, I want to talk about day jobs, because until very recently, you had a day job doing other things, and I want to talk about what your experience has been trying to have an identity as the person who is a screenwriter and a filmmaker and an actor, but also the day job of it all.

Nora: Of course.

John: Cool. Well, let’s get into it. You and I are both from Colorado, so.

Nora: Oh, my gosh. Really?

John: Yes. I saw that you were born in New York. Were you raised in Evergreen?

Nora: Yes, I was raised in Evergreen. Wow, where are you from?

John: Boulder, Colorado.

Nora: Oh, my gosh, amazing. Wow.

John: Talk to us about Colorado, because my experience of Colorado was that I had no idea how lucky I was growing up there. Then you go back and like, “Oh, my God, this place is so pretty.”

Nora: That was exactly my experience. Exactly. We moved from New York when I was four, but I was adamant that I was a city girl to the point where I have vivid memories of touring the houses that we eventually lived in Evergreen. I was telling the real estate agent, I was like, “I’m a city girl, I don’t belong here.” [laughs]

John: You’re four. Yes.

Nora: I’m four. I’m four. I think my father at that point was like, that’s when he was like, “I don’t understand. I don’t know what to do with this girl.” It wasn’t until I left Colorado to go to NYU and then came back from the city that I realized that this is such a gorgeous, bucolic place to live. My experience of Colorado, and I think it’s still true, is that it’s a pretty big artistic town in the middle of the country.

John: I grew up in Boulder. We had the Shakespeare Festival. For not being at a hub, we had a lot of cultural things.

Nora: Exactly. I was dancing at first at Colorado Ballet and then I transitioned to acting and I went to Denver School of the Arts, which is a local magnet arts high school. I think that there was a lot of local theaters and a lot of local theater that I was able to be involved in alongside the Thespian Convention and the Shakespeare Festival. I always felt like Colorado had a liberal and an artistic bent to it, even despite being in a landlocked state. [laughs]

John: Can you talk to me briefly about dancing? Because you’re the only person I know who’s gone from dancing to screenwriting. Dancing, my perception of it, especially ballet, is that it’s all about reducing differences between things, being flawless, and practicing thing until it’s absolutely perfect. Then I don’t want to say you’re interchangeable with other people, but there’s just no flaws to be seen. Did you love it? Why did you stop dancing? What got you out of dancing?

Nora: Sure. That’s a very astute observation. I think that I loved ballet. I loved it so much because of the regimentation that you’re talking about, I think. I think I was someone who really responded well to structure and that’s been true throughout my entire life. I responded really well to six days a week, very rigorous, two to three hours a day of ballet. I responded to the same rigor when I went to school and took that really seriously.

I think having parameters was important to me, but it’s a ruthless job. Ultimately, I stopped because I had sort of a prescient notion at the age of 13 that I was like, I’m never going to be a prima ballerina. The best I can hope for is corps de ballet. Just because my body simply didn’t do the things that they needed. I didn’t have clean lines. I don’t have hyper-extended elbows or knees or really good turnout. What I did get from that experience was a certain amount of discipline, regimentation, but also it was very performative. There was a lot of opportunity for performance at Colorado Ballet because it’s not like ABT where it’s super competitive to get in the nutcracker.

John: I shared your love of just being, for me it was like testing and standardized testing in school. I loved actually just being right and knowing that I finished the thing and I was done and I’ve gotten the correct answer. I loved that there was a correct answer. While I was always good at writing, and I loved being praised for writing, there was something just really comforting and nice about just like, oh, no, I got like 100% on the test, and that was really easy.

So much of what we’re doing now, there is no right answer and there’s no perfect word for this thing. There’s no perfect scene. You’re always dealing with the imperfection of it all. Going from ballet, which you’re right or you’re not right to acting, there’s no right performance. What was the transition there?

Nora: Yes. Again, really great questions. I feel like the ballet of it all, I mean it’s really just containers, right? I don’t know. I got familiarized with Anne Bogart’s work in college, but she’s a director who talks a lot about the container of something and specifically the container of archetypes. I think with ballet, there’s a really rigid container of steps, but there’s still room within those steps for expression.

A lot of ballerinas take acting lessons because you don’t have words, so you really have to give an ontological experience of emotion to the viewer. I think that with acting, I thought there was a right way, for sure. I was not able to enter into going from pretty much regimented dance to regimented acting classes. I was not able to segment my brain and be like, okay, there were steps that I learned and there were perfect ways to do things in this medium and there’s not in this medium. I thought those two things were transferable to my own detriment, really.

John: To some degree, in musical theater where there’s a track, and to learn a track, you have to drop in that thing, I have such respect for the swings who can come in and just go through any track and a thing, but it really is not directly comparable, the experience.

Nora: No.

John: We have a lot of guests on the show who’ve gone through improv classes. They always were recommending improv classes. The thing about that is there’s no time to stop and make the perfect choice. You just have to continue with what you’re doing.

Nora: Absolutely, yes. I think for acting, it’s something where you can really get into a point where I’ve certainly been there, where you just belabor the thing. I think that it took me a long time to realize that sometimes, especially for someone who can be really cerebral like me, it’s better to just get yourself into a different track and just go with the first instinct as opposed to trying to find the perfect choice.

John: We had Greta Gerwig on the podcast a while back and she was talking about coming out of the mumblecore tradition and how she loved and respected a lot of it, but she got really frustrated that there wasn’t a text to anchor yourself back down to. You felt like as an actor, it was just too terrifying to have nothing underneath your feet to get back down to and that she felt like she could actually push much further once there was a text underneath there.

I hear some of what you’re saying there. It sounds like ballet, yes, you’re getting every step right, but then you’re finding ways to express yourself within that. As an actor, if you have scripted lines, you know those scripted lines, you’re making choices about that rather than every other moment.

Nora: Right. I think that the best-case scenario as an actor is you get to the point where you know the lines so well that everything feels spontaneous within the structure of the memorization and within the structure of having the understanding of your character. Everybody gets to that point differently, which I think was something that took me a really long time to understand. Some people really need to focus on every single line and the motivation behind every single line in order to trick their brain into being spontaneous, and some people can’t do that. They have to just veer straight into the spontaneity. I think I was very convinced that I was like, no, there’s one method and I must find it. [laughs]

John: Was that the reason for going to NYU was to find that method, to find that answer?

Nora: I knew I always wanted to be back in New York, which based on my four-year-old dictums, I think.

John: It’s Eloise returning [unintelligible 00:09:52] and stopping that, yes.

Nora: Exactly. I read all the Eloise books. I read Eloise in Russia. She went to Russia.

John: Of course, she did. Yes.

Nora: Of course, she did. There’s hotels in Russia. I was very adamant that I was like, I’ve got to be back in the city. I belong in the city enough with like, I don’t know if you felt this when you left Colorado, but I met people who didn’t know what elk were.

John: Oh, yes, of course. Yes, absolutely. They’re not necessarily like, no, they’re these giant wild creatures who doesn’t wander through your backyard. Yes.

Nora: Yes, exactly. They’re bigger than deer. I was like, “Oh, yes, everybody knows what an elk looks like.” My first friends at NYU were like, “No, you know what an elk looks like. We do not.” I think I was in high school looking back on it. I think that I was told I was a talented performer. I don’t think that I was going off of a feeling of like, wow, I love this and I’m obsessed with this and I just want to follow this. I think I was chasing the feeling of being good and of being someone who was talented and had that sort of external validation. It wasn’t until I got to NYU that I was like, “Oh, I really love this.”

John: Can we talk about NYU? Because I visited New York in college and was like, “Oh, this is overwhelming.” Specifically, the NYU area is just an overwhelming place. My daughter did a summer program there in high school. She’s a city kid. We lived in LA and Paris. She’s like, “I can’t handle the street harassment. Just the daily life of it all was tough.” What was your experience coming from Colorado to a place like NYU?

Nora: My family lived in New York for a really long time, like my extended family. I would go back and visit. I think what I was super attracted to was the autonomy of it. I’ve always been someone who was like–

John: Yes, developing quickly.

Nora: Yes, very quickly. I think that I felt like a person who was an adult faster than other people, which not true, but I felt that way. I’ve always been really attracted to the notion of being there and you can get yourself wherever you want to go and you’re not reliant on anybody else to get you there. There’s a certain amount of autonomy in that respect that I wanted to have. I was desperate to get out of home. Not because of anything bad, but just because I was like, I want to be alone.

John: Also, you’re like the protagonist in your own story and you recognize that you have to leave home in order to have your great adventure.

Nora: Yes, exactly. Yes.

John: When did you read your first script? You probably read some plays in high school, but when did you get the first sense of that when it wasn’t like another classic play that you’re reading?

Nora: That’s a good question. I have to think about that. I read a ton of plays for a very long time, but also read a lot of books. That was my first introduction to writing was just being a huge nerd and reading a ton. I remember very distinctly learning how to use a parenthetical for the first time as a very young kid. [laughs] I think that it must have been in college because of– I want to say that I’ve read a script before this, but we did have a class I think my sophomore year of college, where it was acting for film within the container of, you’re at a school for acting for the stage.

We read The Talented Mr. Ripley. The goal of the class was to learn a certain filming technique as opposed to a theatrical one. We read The Talented Mr. Ripley seven times, I think, back-to-back. That was probably my first experience. I remember being really struck by how little was on the page compared to plays.

John: Let’s talk about that, because classically when I look at plays right now, there’s sometimes a lot of scene descriptions where it’s setting up to look at the thing, but then there’s pages and pages and pages of dialogue. What you’re saying, it’s like The Talented Mr. Ripley, and this is for an acting exercise, so it’s really about how are you able to communicate to when the camera’s enclosed, what is the edges of your frame? What was not there on the page that you were expecting to be there?

Nora: More, I think. [laughs] I just thought–

John: You thought it would be much more scripted in terms of every little movement, every step?

Nora: Yes. I thought it would be– it’s not only about stage direction, because I think also, I was very obsessed with the canonical plays. I loved Edward Albee. I loved Tennessee Williams. Tennessee Williams stage directions are verbose. It is just like a stack of stage directions or very stacked, rather, I don’t know. I think that going to reading The Talented Mr. Ripley, I was like, “Oh, this is so much about the actor’s performance.” I think that that varies script to script, because now I’ve read so many. In that one particularly, I was like, oh, wow, it really is about who you are as an actor bringing yourself to this, because it’s not the same type of roadmap, I think.

John: Also, you look at the differences between a stage play and a screen play. A screen play only needs to be filmed once. It only needs to be actually acted once. Those scenes, they’re going to do it once and they’re going to be done. You can experiment with that versus stage play. In theory, this is a set of instructions for creating basically the same experience again and again and again, no matter who’s in those tracks and who’s in those roles.

Nora: Exactly.

John: That’s an inherent difference between those two things. You’re reading The Talented Mr. Ripley. You start probably reading some other things. When did you start acting in people’s films? Were you acting in shorts while you were at NYU? What was the first time that you were on a set with a camera aimed at you?

Nora: Sure. I did start doing short films in school. I think they really started kicking off probably around the summer after my junior year because NYU and specifically Stella Adler, where I was studying, they have a very rigid– It’s so funny to look back on it now because the stakes felt so high, but they basically were like, “You’re not allowed to act anywhere beyond the confines of this school until your junior year,” which not everybody subscribed to. Again, I was the rule follower and someone who was very serious about this education. I felt like, okay, I’m not ready. I’m a nascent creature. Then I have to wait until one teacher tells me I can go off.

Yes, it was probably around summer of junior year. I have done so many short films, some of which have seen the light of day and some of which have not. I think that I’d probably be terrified watching them back now. I think it all started because I was dating a guy who was very into film. I think his friends were also very into film. They were these people who were involved in the acting school, but they knew they wanted to go to Hollywood. They knew that they wanted to be screenwriters. They had a–

John: They’re the worst. They’re terrible people.

Nora: I believe the term is film bros now. If I’d had that verbiage, I would have used it back then. They’re still my friends to this day, but they had an encyclopedic knowledge of film. I grew up watching Legally Blonde, Charlie’s Angels, Liar Liar, and The Big Green on repeat. I was like, those are my four. That’s what I’ve got.
[laughter]

John: [unintelligible 00:17:01] right.

Nora: Yes, exactly. They had seen everything. I felt like, “Oh, those are the people who make this,” but they were also very committed to making short films. Because I was dating this guy, and I was an actor, I got into that web.

John: We have a lot of listeners who are making short films. What advice could you give to them about having been in a bunch of short films and student short films and posts? What are good experiences? What are bad experiences? What are things you wish those directors had a better sense of when they cast you in something?

Nora: Great question. I feel like I would say really use short films as a sense of experimentation. I think I took everything very, very seriously. I felt like I never knew what short film was going to catapult me to fame. [laughs] That’s what I felt like. Honestly, I was like, “Someone’s going to see this, and then I’m going to be famous at the age of 20.” It’s just not that. You’re making stuff with your friends, and it’s really, truly a time to learn and expand and make really bold choices that may or may not work.

I think that when no one’s watching, it’s really the opportunity to veer into that and steer into that scope. I think as an actor, it’s a great time to learn about your own process and what works for you and watching yourself back, and trying to figure out the dissonance between, oh, this is what I meant to do, and this is what’s actually on the screen. I think everyone in the short film process probably feels that way. Yes, that’s what I would say.

John: I’m friends with some folks who’ve been making a bunch of short films using folks who are very good at social media. These are folks who film themselves constantly. I think that’s one of the things that’s going to be fascinating to watch 10 years from now is how many of those people graduate towards doing bigger, longer, expanded things. These are people who get a chance to iterate all the time.

I think what you’re describing is that they can just constantly experiment, but they’re not used to the sense of an ongoing narrative. They’re used to a 90 seconds, but if you have to tell a story in 5 minutes or 10 minutes, it’s just a different beast. Or if you need to work with a larger, more experienced crew, it’s not just you setting up lights yourself. It’s a different thing. I’ll be fascinated to see how that works.

I’d love to just push a little bit more on, you’re an actor who’s agreed to be in a short film. What are your expectations going in? What do the directors and people who are helping out to make the film need to know about? How do they make it a good experience for an actor?

Nora: Sure. Okay. I feel like some of my best experiences were when you knew that– It’s a couple of things. I think you want to feel like, especially with short films where it’s sort of run and gun and everybody’s doing a lot of different jobs, I think you want to feel like your voice is being heard and you’re being valued as a creative entity within the film.

I think it’s important that you know that you’re going to be taken care of throughout all the process, throughout all the extenuating processes after you film. I think it’s important to, and again, this might not be important to everybody, but I think it’s important that you know what cameras you’re shooting on and you know that those cameras are going to look really good, that even if this isn’t a perfect product, you’re going to have something that’s really good for your reel and that it is going to be edited and that there is going to be a final product that you can eventually see.

John: That it actually goes to you and it disappear.

Nora: Exactly. That’s happened to me before. I’ve shot shorts that never seen the light of day. I think it’s much more holistic when you understand that this is going to be something that you can watch because everybody needs it at that point. It’s not the same thing where you’re like, okay, well, I committed my time and energy for free. The promise of that is I’m going to have something to look at at the end of the day. I think it’s a matter of short films are so stressful. I do think there’s a certain way that you have to protect your cast from that stress.

John: Some of these short films you were making with friends, which is great and that’s a safer experience, but were there things where you just auditioned, like you saw, noticed, and you went and auditioned for, you submitted for, and you were just working with strangers?

Nora: Yes.

John: What is that like as a person? You probably didn’t have reps or you had no one on your team at that point. How are you making sure that this is going to be a good situation that you’re actually safe?

Nora: [laughs]

John: For example, would you only meet in a public place or would you go to a place-

Nora: Oh, sure.

John: -where there’s an apartment? I would just love some good advice.

Nora: Yes, of course. I mean–

John: I’m not thinking just for our actors who are listening, but for filmmakers, make sure people feel good about the experience.

Nora: I think something looking back on my experience, especially immediately post-collegiate when I was auditioning a lot for these– I was on Backstage, I was on Actors Access. I did a big cattle casting call for Columbia Film School, which was actually one of the best. I did the same thing for USC when I moved out here. Those were some of the best experiences because you’re meeting film students who are doing their MFA and you’re auditioning in Columbia and you know that it’s the container of the college, so you know that all these people are very committed to doing something and making something and have the resources.

I don’t know if I ever auditioned in someone’s living room. I’m sure I have, but I think for Friends, I think there’s a certain desperation of a young actor that really, at least for me, I would have done anything. You know what I’m saying? I think I would have gone anywhere, seen anybody, done anything, because I was like, again, I was just like, put me in pictures kind of thing. I was just like, “I’ve got it.” I think also there’s a lot of stuff told to young actors that is really hard and harmful. I don’t know if you watched The Rehearsal.

John: Yes.

Nora: Yes, but I was watching it this most recent season and it just broke my heart, because I was like, “These people just want the opportunity to be on HBO and it feels like, God, I really recognized myself in that.” I was like, “I would have done anything too. I would have made out with someone for 12 hours on a soundstage.” Because there’s a certain amount of you just really– you’re told for so long that this business is impossible and you’re told that you have to do whatever it takes and you’re told that no one’s going to make it. Part of doing whatever it takes is sometimes, I think, hopefully now it’s different, but compromising what you believe to be artistic integrity or just the integrity of self. Yes.

John: As an actor, you’re constantly waiting for someone else to pick you to do a thing. As a writer, you can just write your own thing. When did you start writing in screenplay form? When did that start off?

Nora: I always wrote since I can remember, and started with prose and really bad poetry. Got into slam poetry in high school, which is embarrassing, but I feel like I should say it.
[laughter]

John: If you say it enough, the shame will just go away. This is a part of your identity.

Nora: Exactly. That’s what I’m hoping. That’s what I’m hoping. I’m hoping that if I say it-

John: Slam poet.

Nora: -then everyone’s like, then I–

John: Former slam poet, Nora Garrett. Yes.
[laughter]

Nora: If you only knew. Yes. I got really deep into it.

John: Oh, yes. We’ll find it. We’ll find it. [crosstalk]

Nora: Oh, yes. It’s so embarrassing, but I loved it. I think the web series was the thing when I was graduating college. Everybody was making a web series. I was acting in a web series, and so I wrote a couple of web series. They were just bad. They were bad. I think it was also the Girls’ renaissance.

John: Oh yes, of course.

Nora: Everything was that feeling of like, oh, I am also an almost 20-something living in New York. I can also write about my life in this way. It’s only now that I look back and realize how detailed and nuanced and brilliant Lena Dunham is and how you can’t repeat that. That’s what we were all trying to do. Yes.

John: You’re writing those things and you’re writing stuff that you would shoot immediately after. At least there was a feedback loop. You could say like, oh, this is what was on the page. This is what it’s actually like to try to make the thing. This is what it looks like in editing. You do get a lot of experience that way.

Nora: Yes. My last semester at NYU, I did Stone Street, which is the film and television studio. That was really like we would write things and then shoot them in the studios. They looked horrible. They were just awful. I would love to think that I had the cognition at the time to have any creative feedback about the artistic process, but I think I was really just caught up in how starkly insane it feels to see yourself on film for the first time. I think it’s also when you make something and the distance between you making something and what actual film looks like is so vast that you’re just like, oh, this isn’t even that art form.

John: No. [chuckles]

Nora: This is literally like a camcorder. Yes.

John: Yes, absolutely. It’s an image on a screen, but that’s really about as close as we got there.

Nora: Right, exactly. You’re like, oh, these are pixels arranged in a way that they’re supposed to be arranged, but this is not film. Yes.

John: When did you write your first full-length feature-y script?

Nora: The truth is, is that After the Hunt was my first full-length feature.

John: That’s great.

Nora: Yes, that is the truth. [laughs]

John: Talk to us about the idea of it and going into it. I guess we should say that I saw it a couple weeks ago, but most of our listeners probably won’t have seen the movie yet. How do you describe it? Maybe describe what your initial intention was for it, and if it’s different than the final thing, tell us what changed.

Nora: It all started with the character of Alma, which is played by Julia Roberts in the film. Again, at the time, was not played by Julia Roberts. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if there was a character who had, at the core of their identity, a secret? This secret is something where I thought it could go one of two ways. I think I was also very obsessed with the notion of success and successful people, probably because I had been outside of the realm of success for so long, and I was trying to gamify the system in a way, but I was obsessed with the price of it, and not necessarily the external price, but the internal price.

I had just listened to a podcast called Liars, I think, a part of This American Life. Basically, the upshot of that was that statistically, people who are more successful in our patriarchal capitalistic society are people who are better at lying to themselves. That can ensure more success. I thought, A, I felt validated by that, but B, I was like, wow, what a fascinating notion? Again, what’s the cost of that? Because I felt like there had to be some sort of internal cost.

Alma was this character who I thought, okay, if she has this secret about something that happened in her childhood, but at an age where you’re coming online enough to understand what you’ve done, how do you metabolize that into your adult life and specifically when you start having adult relationships? Then how do you think about yourself when you start reaching for professional success? Does this lie, does this ability to obfuscate and compartmentalize really help, or is there an eventual consequence?

John: From that initial instinct, were you trying to feel like, well, what is the perfect vessel or vehicle to explore this thing? The Julia Roberts character is a professor of ethical philosophy at Yale. She’s uniquely obsessed and caught up with these questions of what is truth, how do you live an ethical life? She has this secret at the start of it. Was that baked into the idea initially?

Nora: Yes, it was baked into the idea initially. I think when I was thinking about the first logline, I did think about the professor and student relationship. Having her be a professor of epistemological thought or ethics was my tongue-in-cheek way of being like, oh, she literally teaches something that she has not fully synthesized within herself. It was the expansion of that initial feeling of the dissonance of someone who lies to themselves about their own experience.

John: Yes, so very classically, the people who study psychology or psychiatry often have their own stuff that they’re wrestling with and digging through. It makes sense to put it there. One of the things that strikes me so great about that setup is Craig and I have talked for years about how it feels like there’s a paucity of female characters who have to make ethical choices in movies.

The thing we always do for [unintelligible 00:30:09] is about Episode 483, Philosophy for Screenwriters. We were talking through that and that we don’t see it. In this case, your creative character was just so exactly wrestling with that situation. Tara was another example of that. When you have this central question that you want to explore, did you know what the genre was going to be? Because I’m not even quite sure what genre to put your movie in, the finished movie. What do you consider your movie?

Nora: Yes. I think the genre that it started out initially was the psychological thriller. Because I think that, to me, the question at the heart of a lot of psychological thrillers is what is real? I think that is something where that question, when you put it internal as opposed to external, when you’re like sort of what is real that I think, what is true, what is false, what is true, and what is false in what’s happening right now, that to me is the source of that almost psychosis or that feeling of just like, what can I trust? Then I think Luca was more interested in how do we create something that feels more like an adult drama?

John: Adult drama or melodrama, which is a word that has a negative connotation right now, but we used to make melodramas. Is there something delightful about the drama is the drama in a way?

Nora: Yes, of course. Yes. I think he was really interested in making the theatricality of a psychological thriller into something that felt a little bit more drawing room, a little bit more lived in. Yes.

John: Let’s talk about Alma and all the balls you have her juggling. She is a professor seeking tenure at Yale. There’s that whole issue. She has a graduate student, a PhD candidate student who is daughter-like to her, but also obsessed with her and is potentially a problem. She has a marriage which is okay but has some weird dynamics and strains in it. Her husband is a psychiatrist.

She has a best friend who’s also in the department and they have a complicated relationship, an Andrew Garfield character. She has some medical condition, which I’m not quite sure what it is weighing on her. She has a secret. She has a secret from before. She has a comfortable life, but a lot of things pull in her in different directions. In other stories, one of those might be sort of enough, but there’s a lot happening there. Then these aspects conspire to make things even more complicated for her. How much of that did you know before you started putting pen to paper?

Nora: I think something I should say is that I started writing this screenplay as part of a class that I was part of a group of female writers who we’ve all share our work with each other. One of them had written a rom-com and she told us all that she was like, I took this really great class. The whole thrust of it was that you’re just going to finish your first draft in 12 weeks. Basically, the idea–

John: That’s a classic sign-up kind of thing.

Nora: Yes, exactly.

John: A boot camp, like you’re just doing it.

Nora: 100%. You’re just doing it. I thought, okay, I’ll do that. That could be a great way to sort of put a container around something that can be a little bit nebulous sometimes, which is the work ethic.

John: [unintelligible 00:33:26] containers I’ve heard so far.
[laughter]

Nora: Yes, containers. [laughs] I do. I love organizing. I used to be a professional organizer myself. [laughs]

John: Oh, okay, great. Yes. We’ll get to that in the bonus segment.

Nora: Yes, exactly. A lot of these decisions, and we talked about this, you touched on it a little bit earlier, but a lot of the decisions had to be made really quickly. Part of that was really beneficial because you just got out of your own way. I think that it’s hard to look back and narrativize how much I knew prior. I would say that the triad of Julia Roberts’s character, Ayo Edebiri’s character, and Andrew Garfield’s character, who as Alma, Maggie, and Hank, that was something that I knew going in.

I think I wanted something physical, something that somebody could point to to see if this was someone who was very calm, cool, and collected on the outside. I wanted there to be something physical that you could point to that showed the degradation, the falling apart, or just maybe in more obvious terms that whatever you deny will show up in the body somehow, kind of.

I think also I was interested in substance use. I don’t know, just sort of that as somebody who was able to be high functioning across all levels while potentially being degrading to their body. I think especially as a woman and especially as a female character, women’s bodies are such where women are often made to take such good care of them. I was interested if you can take the Brad Pitt character where he’s constantly eating in half of his films and give that trait to a woman, which is, I realize, a horrible thing to make a female actress do. [chuckles] That notion of just hunger and a lack of concern for the body because you live such a life of the mind.

John: Great. Talk to us about the 12 weeks. Over the course of 12 weeks, did you finish the script? Did you get through it?

Nora: I did because, again, I love rules. I did finish it. Again, it was just really bad. I think all of it was a really good exercise in learning that just, I think for a really long time, I let great be the enemy of good. I was made to push past that and just realize if you get something down, it’s not the final iteration by any means.

John: Let’s talk about that, getting it from it’s finished to actually to good. What was the process there? Who were you showing it to? What were the drafts you were doing? What was that like?

Nora: I had shared a lot of my writing with a couple of really close friends, some of whom belonged to the cabal of people that I went to college with. I put the first draft away for a little while. Part of that was just necessity. I was in a period of time where I was changing jobs and I was applying for a bunch of different jobs and I was very financially stressed.

Part of that was by necessity and then part of it became just trying to not think about it for a little bit and return with a fresh perspective. Then I re-outlined, re-broke the second draft, re-wrote it, and then started sharing it. I started sharing it with a group of just really close trusted friends who had read a lot of my prose before and who I knew gave really good feedback and whose writing I also really respected. Then collected those notes, did another draft and another draft and then did a reading of it with my actor friends.

John: Yes, I was going to ask. Knowing actors, it felt like it would be a great way to hear some stuff and see what’s working there. What did you learn in that reading?

Nora: I don’t know if you have this, but there’s an enormous sense of terror and shame when people start reading your words out loud. [laughs]

John: Absolutely. All the things you’d never notice were like, oh, my God, that actually isn’t the text. There’s a missing word there. People are trying to make this line work.

Nora: Yes, 100%. Or I’m like, “God, I use that word so much, like container.” I’m like, “Oh, my God, what have I done? Why did I get obsessed with the word fruition? That makes no sense.” It’s, yes. After getting over the initial hot flush of feeling like this is so demoralizing and debasing, after that, I tried really hard to just step back.

I think it’s really important when anybody does a stage reading or a reading, it’s like I had actors who, it was during the actor’s strike, and so I got a lot of my friends who were actually really quite good, but they had no other job. It was amazing to just be like, wow, these are really good actors. If they are struggling with this moment or if this doesn’t sound right coming out of their mouth, then I know something needs to change.

John: Yes, if they can’t sell it, it probably is the line.

Nora: Exactly.

John: It’s not the person reading the line. Through this process, you got to a better draft. When did you get the draft in the hands of Imagine who ended up taking it? What was that process of I have this thing and now somebody needs to read this to try to make this?

Nora: It’s so funny looking back on that version of myself because I feel like–

John: Looking back, what, two years?

Nora: Yes, [laughs] looking back. It’s not long ago.

John: The younger me.

Nora: The younger me. No, but I think it’s– I’ve had for so long, I’ve been really timid and skittish about asking for favors, asking for help. The curse of going to an arts high school, the blessing and the curse is that I went to an arts high school and then I went to NYU. All of my friends, for the most part, there’s obviously attrition, but a lot of my friends are in the arts. You have this feeling of seeing a lot of people who you went to school with and you started in the same place and then suddenly you’re seeing people who are much, much, much more successful than you.

Again, that gap is one that can be difficult to close, but also, it’s that awkward thing of I don’t want to ask my friend to help me. I don’t know what, I really don’t know what changed. I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t have a manager. I had this script, and two of my close friends who have written a lot more than me in terms of screenplays, they were like, “I think this is good. I think you have something. You should start submitting it to competitions.”

I submitted it to the BlueCat Screenplay Competition and I got excoriated. The feedback was so bad. [laughs] I remember reading it and I was just like, “Whoa, okay.” [laughs] I think they issued some boilerplate statement that’s like, “We suggest you reapply or suggest you take this writer’s notes.” I don’t think he gave me notes. I think he was just like, “This is bad.”

John: You’re on the website now.

Nora: [laughs] Yes, exactly. Well, to me, it was a wonderful indication of like, wow, somebody can hate your work, hate it, and other people can really like it. There’s something crazy making in that because you’re like, “What is good?” I can’t say what’s good.

John: It’s a person who wants to get the checkmark of success. Like, no, you want an objective measure, and that there’s just no objective measure of any of it.

Nora: Exactly. It is that thing where it’s like okay, obviously, when the film comes out, we’ll see. There’s a big feeling of just like, “Okay, you hate my writing, and this person doesn’t hate my writing.” I think that I read the feedback, and I had that moment where you’re like, “Oh, I’m horrible. Everything I do is bad.” Then I thought, I don’t know, my friends like this, and I trust them, so I’ll take the cogent notes, the salient notes, and then I’ll just keep going. Again, I think that that’s an older version of myself would have completely capitulated and just been like, “You’re right, blue cat.”
[laughter]

John: “I’m embarrassed to tell this to you. I’m sorry for wasting your time.”

Nora: Yes, exactly. I asked a friend of mine who was representative. I asked him if he knew of anybody who might want to represent me, and he set me up with my now manager, Sidney Blank. I remember our first meeting really clearly because I was at my grandmother’s house in New York. I was helping my grandmother through knee surgery at the time and also working for Meta. I took off of Meta for an hour and a half to have this meeting.

I truly thought this script would be a sample. I truly thought because it’s the exact opposite of what everybody was telling me they wanted and what everybody was telling me to write, which is that it’s really talky. A lot of conversations, there’s a lot of $5 words, it’s very cerebral at times, there’s no major set pieces. I was pretty certain I was like, this would just be a really good sample, and I’ll be able to get in rooms, hopefully.

John: Getting a room on a succession-like show would be a dream with a script like this.

Nora: That was the dream, 100%. I was like, “Hopefully, I get a manager, and then hopefully, I start working in rooms.” Sydney was the first person who said, “I really think we can make this into a movie.” That was, I think, December of 2023, I think.

John: Yes, so recent.

Nora: It’s so recent or maybe two. I don’t know.

John: What are years?

Nora: What are years? It was very recent, though. Then that next year, which I think it– yes, God, I think it was 2023. Alan Mandelbaum at Imagine had just made Fair Play. Sydney knew Alan and thought that he would respond to the script and thought that it was in the lane of what he was looking to do or had done and was interested in. Incredibly lucky for me that she was right.

John: That’s great. Imagine read the script. Did they meet with you before they bought the script? What was the process?

Nora: I remember that meeting really well. Yes, they met with me, and I met with them, really. It’s also so funny going from auditioning and trying to get agents in this town and the stark difference between having meetings in people’s offices. I had a meeting once in like an ante room of CAA once, not even in an office with a door at 6:00 AM. It was so bad. Then suddenly going into meetings in boardrooms and I was like, “Oh, this is a very different process. This is a very different feeling of courtship.” Whereas before I’d been in the position of me trying to really sell myself.

It was a meeting with Alan and Karen Lundgren and Joyce Choi. Immediately, Alan just had really smart questions and a lot of incisive ideas and passion for the piece, which again, I was still at a point where I was just like, I can’t believe any of this is happening.

John: My first paid job was also Imagine. I went through there. Colorado and Imagine. Time shifted or something.

Nora: I have a podcast called Schmitschmoats.

John: It’s so good. It’s rising up the charts quickly. At this point, they’ve purchased your script, they’ve optioned your script, or what it will be?

Nora: No. It was just a meeting of– Then Sydney wanted me to have the experience of other people who were interested in meeting with him. I had a couple of meetings and then Imagine was pretty persistent about wanting to do it, so we decided to go with him.

John: That’s great. Did you do drafts for Imagine before you went off to find a director or did you go straight to Luca? What happened?

Nora: No. I think this was so atypical across so many different lines. It’s hard to say that because obviously, I don’t have another experience to draw from. I think that Luca is a director who moves very quickly. Once he signs on to something, his confidence is such where it was lovely to borrow from it. He’s like, “This is getting made. We’re going to get it made within the timeframe that I have.”

The process of it getting to Luca was one of those ones where it feels like a very charmed Hollywood experience where I didn’t even know that production companies had reps, but Imagine’s repped by CAA. Alan had come to the meeting with a list of directors that he thought would be right for the piece. Luca’s name was right up there at the top. They asked me after we decided to work together to hone in and find a smaller list of directors. I made a list of four people who I thought, okay, if these people even see this in their inbox, it’ll be the best day of my life, and Luca was in that little grouping.

We sent the script to his agent who happens to be married to Julia Roberts’s agent. Imagine really wanted things to be we keep it in the director sphere first, get a director attached, and then we go out to cast. The way it happened because of obviously their proximity, it got slipped to Julia Roberts. Then she actually came on first because initially, Luca had a scheduling gap. No, he had a film that was going. Then that film, for whatever reason, didn’t happen. Then he came on.

John: That’s great. Talk to us about your first meeting with Luca, your first meeting with Julia, for which she was involved in those early decisions. I just remember it is just so strange talking to a big director about this thing. You feel lucky to be in the room, but also, you’re trying to like, how am I going to both make the movie that I want to make and the movie that you clearly want to make?

Nora: I think it’s really difficult being a first-time screenwriter in some ways because– especially coming from the acting world and just having zero understanding of your positionality or power in these rooms. I think I felt like, “Wow.” I feel so lucky to be here across the board. Again, it all happened so fast that it’s hard to look back and be like, “Oh, what was–” It just felt like such a no-brainer choice. This is happening now. I think it would have been insane for me to, at that point, be like, “Luca, no thank you.” That’s crazy.

I think that the first meeting with Luca was actually so wild because I used to work at the Chateau Marmont. I don’t want to spoil things, but I used to work there, and he was staying there at the time. Our first meeting was there, and my old manager was there. I remember walking past the hostess stand where I used to stand until 1:00 AM every night, and he was there. I said it was like a meeting with Luca Guadagnino and he was like, “What?” This is a crazy experience of just being like, this is a place that I’ve been so many times in such a different capacity, and now I’m meeting with this person here.

I love Luca as a director, and I’d seen almost all of his films except for A Bigger Splash. I almost put off the meeting because I was like, I have to see A Bigger Splash. Then, of course, the one film he mentions in the meeting was A Bigger Splash.
[laughter]

Nora: I was like, “Oh, no, I knew it.” I think I was just trying to remind myself that I could speak cogently about this material because I had written it even in the face of someone who I was like, you’re just such a behemoth and someone who I really admire and respect and I have no idea.

John: It should be obvious, but you forget like, “Oh, that’s right.” I’ve actually been in all of the sets that are in this. I’ve been inside this entire movie for years, and so I really can describe everything that’s in here and why everything is in here. I might be defensive, but I actually do understand it. It’s not like if this script had plunked down in your lap and you put your name on it and went into that meeting, you wouldn’t have the ability to talk about what’s really inside it. You’re the only person who’s already seen the movie, which is- A hard thing to remember.

Sometimes as you’re talking to directors for the first time or actors, you forget like, “Oh, that’s right.” They’ve never been inside this. They’re just trying to find their way in. You had this meeting where they’re immediately like, okay, these are some big things that we’re going to approach and change and fix. What was the process of working with them?

Nora: I think Luca immediately felt like the ending did not work. I think that he was really interested in teasing out more of the thorny dynamics between the characters and the thorny social dynamics and really exploring the socio-political world in which these characters were in. I think that something I was scared of when all this was initially happening is I’d heard so many horror stories of people writing scripts and then studios getting involved and everything getting denuded and the teeth being filed down and everything becoming so commercialized.

I think something that was really special about having Luca at the helm of this film was that he has such a backlog of reputation and wonderful work that he’s really able to silo his creative experience and make it into what he wants it to be. I think he was really interested in punching out those themes and making things a little bit more gray, a lot less certain.

John: Entering the movies, if it’s worth the psychological thriller, there’d be probably a clean answer to how somehow these things sort out. My experience with watching the movies, I went to a 10:00 AM screening in Culver City with just myself, and I didn’t have anybody to talk about it with afterwards.
Fortunately, I grabbed a sandwich nearby, and there were three women who’d just seen the movie, too, and I heard them talking, so I could join their conversation as– Let’s talk about these three things because it very much is one of those movies where you want to have some discussion about what really happened there. For a movie about ethical philosophy, there are various shades of gray in terms of what people are doing and what the outcomes really are and how people got to the places they got to.

Nora: Yes.

John: Can we take a look at some pages from the script? This is how we’re starting the movie. This is the initial scenes as they’re meeting all the different characters. I want to just talk through some of your descriptions of who these people are. Emma Hoff, the Jill Robbins character, 51, beginning a typical day. We don’t give any specific more information with her at this point, but we’re going to see a lot of specific behavior from her. Frederick Mendelson, her husband. Can you read the description for him?

Nora: Sure. Frederick Mendelson, Alma’s husband, 53, handsome but fatigued, graying all over.

John: Great. I get it. Next, we have Hank Gibson. We meet him in that parking lot.

Nora: Hank Gibson, 40, Alma’s colleague, handsome and smart and scrupulous with both, having worked his way up the ladder at Yale from a lower-class background.

John: That last clause, having worked his way up, that’s not evidence that we can’t see that on screen, but we’re going to see it in his behavior later on. That’s just the cheating that we embrace in a screenplay.

Nora: I take advantage of that. [chuckles]

John: Next, we’re meeting Maggie Resnick.

Nora: Maggie Resnick, mid-to-late twenties, who bears a striking resemblance to Alma, if not an appearance, then an energy.

John: Cast in the movie, played by Iowa Deberry. Her being Black becomes an issue in the movie, but did you know it at this point? When you first wrote the screenplay, you didn’t know that.

Nora: No, I didn’t know it at the point. When I initially wrote the script, there wasn’t any specific notion of race.

John: Next, we have Patricia Engler.

Nora: Forties, a professor, emeritus of philosophy, the type of woman who is always losing her keys, her wallet, her badge.

John: Who is eating from a to-go container of soup and texting at the same time. It’s delightful. Again, it’s the specificity that I’m loving about these things. Then we’re meeting her almost in class. We’re going through a montage of scenes before we get to the opening title card for After the Hunt. We’re meeting Fabiola, not a housekeeper. She’s hired to help. She’s to do everything in person for the family. She would be the nanny if they had kids, but they don’t have kids. We’ll try to put this first three pages up, so people can download them.
There’s a lot of behavior, a lot of setting of worlds and establishing this two-professor family that makes a good income and has a very specific kind of New Haven’s apartment life, which was not in New Haven at all, right? It was actually in London?

Nora: It was actually in London, yes. Something that Luca is very rigorous about research. He has a research that he’s used on, I think, a lot of his films and used again on this one. He is very adamant about verisimilitude. He is a wonderful set designer who makes-

John: The sets are incredible. They feel so incredibly, again, specific. They’re always jammed. All these people are hoarders until you get to one point very late in the movie where we’re at a place that is incredibly spare and spartan.

Nora: Yes, exactly. That was all Stefano. It was to the point where it felt like immersive theater, where it’s like you’re walking-

John: You’re asleep no more.

Nora: Exactly. You’re walking around the sets and you’re opening drawers and you’re like, God, there’s actually what you would have in your drunk drawer if you were a philosophy professor in New Haven in 2019. This was what it would look like. He was very meticulous about that. I think that that’s a wonderful thing for actors to have, for sure. A lot of this initial scenes was something that Luca wanted as just a way to set up entering into these characters’ lives prior to feeling like, oh, we’re just at the fulcrum point.

John: Talk to us about the language, because we’re catching glimpses of them in class, and they’re just talking in what’s almost– It’s legalese or medicalese. It’s almost incomprehensible to what they’re saying to each other because it’s all just signifiers bouncing back and forth. To what degree did you know that as you were writing the first draft? How much of this came in later on? What was that process?

Nora: My cousin is getting her master’s in philosophy at Stanford. I really plumbed her experience and also literally some emails that she’s gotten from professors about announcing talks. The language that’s in the script is a very sanded-down version of the opacity that exists in that world. It is legalese. It’s jargon. Something when I was taking philosophy classes ad hoc, postgraduate, I was like, wow, this is really interesting because to me philosophy is something that is really a question of how to live and how to live morally and how to live well and how to live with integrity, which is a question that everybody has to answer. The barrier of entry is so high with these texts because they are so verbose.

There’s a part of me that loves the idea of you can say in a whole book what another person can say in five sentences, but there’s another part of me that feels like, “Come on, guys, just say the thing.” I did not have Alma teaching a lot in the initial draft. That was something where Luca really thought if this is someone who’s supposed to be at the top of her field, we should see her doing what she does. That required a crash course in philosophy beyond what I had already learned myself.

John: It also creates structural issues because you need to find where do those scenes go in a natural way that’s advancing the actual overall plot that we believe that she’s teaching this class differently because of the situations that are happening just before this and are happening after this.

Nora: Exactly, yes. How can we use those scenes that otherwise would be cut and dried boilerplate teaching scenes to heighten tension or add drama?

John: The tension reaches the boiling point. This is from page 80 of the script. This is a confrontation between Maggie and Alma just outside of a library at Yale. It starts with Alma coming up to Maggie who’s talking with their partner Alex and pulling her aside and becomes an actual full confrontation. It’s a centerpiece scene. Was this always in the script? Is that the thing that came along in the process?

Nora: Portions of it were always in the script, certainly towards the end of the scene. Some of the language in it is actor improv that was gleaned from rehearsals.

John: Oh, great.

Nora: Yes.

John: Talk to us about the rehearsal process.

Nora: Talk about being completely thrust into a world in which you’re just trying to have to tamp down your terror the entire time. Julia Roberts hosted us at her home for rehearsals.

John: Is it in New York City?

Nora: No, San Francisco. She’s lovely and so warm and disarmingly so. We had one Zoom prior where she gave notes on the script, so it at least wasn’t like a complete cold meeting. Luca basically ran it so that obviously, the actors were all very busy, so we had to stagger who was involved in rehearsals. Sadly, the only person who could not come to rehearsals was Michael Stuhlbarg because he was on Broadway acting. It started with just Julia and Andrew Garfield, Luca and I, and then slowly but surely, then Io came, and then it was Chloe, and then it was all of us.

John: How far in advance of production was this? Months?

Nora: Gosh. Not terribly far. I would say May, and then Luca went into prep in June. We started shooting early July, I think.

John: I’d love to read through some of this back half here because you’re at the point in the movie where people can more clearly state the themes and what their actual thing is. It’s not couched in specific language, or it could be a little more direct. If you put me at page 82, I’m nowhere near the actor. Anyway, Deborah is. I just want to read through some stuff here. She says, “I don’t feel comfortable having this conversation with you anymore.”

Nora: “Not everything in life is supposed to be comfortable, Maggie. Not everything is supposed to be a lukewarm bath for you to sink into until you fall asleep and drown.”

John: “There are no rewards in death for spending your life suffering as much as possible.”

Nora: “You’ve constructed a life that hides your accidental privilege, your neediness, your desperate desire to impress. At least I have the self-respect to be obvious about what I want. You, you lie all the time, living in an apartment 10 times cheaper than what you can afford, dating a person you have nothing in common with because you think their identity makes you interesting, fawning over me because you think my affection offers you credibility, another adoptive mother to replace your own insufferable one. It’s all a lie. It’s no wonder everyone thinks you lied about Hank, too.”

John: Again, it’s a moment where you actually can pull off all the niceties and things. You’re also answering an audience question. I was watching like, “Wait, if she’s rich, why is she living in that crappy apartment?” It’s rewarding the audience for that question you asked. You’re actually answering that question that was never audibly asked before. It’s like, “Why are you doing this thing?” Getting to express these, you’re not entitled to comfort, is an aspect too.

It’s almost like the audience is not entitled to a nice, tidy ending. It’s setting up, hopefully, the right invitation for the audience about what they’re going to get to because the question of what exactly happened, what all this history was and stuff like that, they’re going to be answered but not answered to the degree that here’s the clear, it’s not the sixth sense. It’s not Citizen Kane Rosebud. It’s not that kind of clear answer.

Nora: Initially, it was. Certainly, the drafts that were circulated was very much like you got the answer. I think you’re absolutely right that it is a sense of a metatextual working that Luca wanted to create, which is that these characters are saying these things to each other and the audience is having the experience that the characters might be having.

John: Well, congratulations on the script and on the movie.

Nora: Thank you. Thank you so much.

John: We have some listener questions that I think might be appropriate for you to help us answer.

Nora: Great.

John: Anita writes, “When is it appropriate to dramatize a scene versus having a character merely telling a story to other characters? How long can you go with a character who’s talking through something that happened to them without actually having to break in to show that?” A script I just turned in, I ran into that situation too. It’s like, okay, what’s too long where I don’t actually need to show the thing? I don’t know.

To me, it’s just, it’s the instinct. I’m like, is the audience going to be okay sitting in a place for a long time without doing it? Like Big Fish, there are some things where we do flashback and show the story, but there’s other times where you just tell the story. If it can be a half a page of dialogue and we feel like we could hold on to the after that long, I think my instinct is to stay. What’s your instinct?

Nora: I think it’s a difficult question. It was something that I thought about a lot with the script because there’s that feeling of how long can you hide the shark in Jaws. You know what I’m saying? How long can you make it? There’s going to be some sense of dissatisfaction, I think, when you reveal something, even if eventually, you move towards satisfaction in the end. There’s a sense of what the audience creates or what they bring to it is always going to be a little bit more juicy than finding out the real thing. I think I try to hold for as long as possible without being annoying.

John: The other thing to keep in mind is that if we have a character telling something, there’s still ambiguity. Is that character being honest? Is it not? Once you show something, the audience is basically saying, oh, it’s trusting the filmmaker. It’s showing the actual real truth. That’s not the case. You’re going to have to do a little more work to undo that dialogue.

Nora: Absolutely. Yes. I think it’s about rewarding people’s faith while creating as much tension as possible.

John: Let’s take one last question here from Nami. “I recently rewatched the first episode of The Twilight Zone, and it was building tension and releasing it and building and releasing over and over again. I was wondering if you could talk about how to build tension, if you have examples of movies or scenes, as well as how you tackle it or think about it.”

Tension and suspense comes when you feel like a thing is about to happen, but you don’t know when it’s going to happen. It’s the buildup to a sneeze. It’s the buildup to anything that triggers your mechanisms like, “Oh God, something bad is going to happen.” It can be as simple as the Hitchcock, there’s a bomb underneath the table, and you see the countdown underneath the table, or a longer-term thing where you’re just like, oh, there’s this sense of dread.

I think one of the issues that we’re living with as a society right now is that sense that there’s an overall tension. You feel like things could break at any moment. You’re just not quite sure when it’s going to happen or what it’s going to look like. In movies, you have to be always thinking about it as the writer. Are you adding to it? Are you dissipating from it? If you’re cutting into something that is unrelated, is that unrelated cut going to increase the tension because we’re still worried about what happened before, or is it dissipating, letting the tension out of a moment?

Your movie has a lot of tension in this building up to just mysteries that we’re trying to figure out. A lot of checkouts guns are being loaded in your movie. Any more instincts about tension and suspense?

Nora: First of all, I love The Twilight Zone. Again, I think it’s a delicate dance between feeling like what you have to pay off versus what is it perhaps more interesting to leave hanging, or what can you get away with not paying off and still satisfying your audience or still giving them a sense of agency as opposed to befuddlement.

John: All right. It’s come time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with our audience?

Nora: Sure. I’ve been really interested in Substack, recently. I think that it’s a great little corner of the internet when there’s a lot of scary corners of the internet. I also think it’s really great to just read Flash prose without deep commitment and also get inspiration. Jessica Tofino is a writer who runs a great Substack called Flesh World. It’s a lot about the beauty space. I’m really obsessed with optimization culture, especially as it pertains to physical appearance. There’s another man who writes, I think his title is Good Reader, Bad Grades. He writes flash fiction. I just started reading him, and I love it. It’s really tightly told and very evocative.

John: That’s great. A couple of things to respond to on there. Flash fiction as a concept can be great. These are little short bits. It’s almost the textual equivalent of TikToks where it’s just like, here’s the idea, you’re in and you’re out. Daniel Wallace, who wrote A Big Fish, has a book of flash fiction that is just delightful. I respond to it the same way. It’s like, just one more, just one more, just one more.

Substack is so fascinating, too, because there’s so many really good writers on Substack. Anytime you mention Substack, people are like, “But what about the Nazis?” It’s a tough thing where you can be frustrated by the business model in the space and that it’s corporatizing a bunch of independent voices, and yet also the time when publishing and media is struggling so much that people are actually being able to make a living writing is something worth celebrating.

Nora: See, this is a great example of how siloed the internet could be because I didn’t even know about any of that. [laughs]

John: Oh, that’s great. Literally, I’ll post something on Blue Sky about this post that I really liked, and the first comment will be like, “Oh, too bad. It’s on that Nazi platform.” I’m like, “Oh my God.”

Nora: Oh God. No, everything is ruined. I have to think of a new, cool thing.

John: The scolding that happens in popular culture is true, and that’s also part of your movie, too. Your movie is building off of reactions to me, too, but just the general sense of there’s no good way to be a decent person in the world.

Nora: No. I think it’s also a certain sense of, God, there’s nothing that seems particularly clean in this world now. Everything is touched, everything is tainted in some way, and it’s like how do you enjoy what is available to enjoy?
[laughter]

John: Well, not directly related, but my one cool thing is The Good One podcast by Jesse David Fox. We had Jesse on the show many months ago talking through comedy. The Good One podcast, it’s scripted, but it’s talking with- funny people about how they do their work. One episode I really liked recently was Ben DeLaCreme’s episode.

Nora: I love Ben DeLaCreme.

John: He’s an incredible drag performer who also does a Christmas show but talking through the behind-the-scenes of RuPaul’s Drag Race but also the bigger issues of being a creator who also has to think about producing and the overall notions of what is this space that we’re trying to do. You’re always grappling with, well, what is drag anymore? If drag isn’t dirty, is it still drag? All these issues. Just a great, smart conversation. One of many good episodes of The Good One podcast.

That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send a link to ask at johnaugust.com. That is also a 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. Those are called Interesting, which is lots of links to things about writing.

You’ll find clips and helpful video on our YouTube to search for Script Notes and give us a follow. You’ll also find us on Instagram @ScriptnotesPodcast. We have T-shirts and hoodies and drinkwear. You’ll find all those at Cotton Bureau. You can find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber.

Thank you to 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 where you get all those back episodes and bonus segments like the ones we referred to and the new one, we’re about to record on day jobs. Nora Garrett, thank you so much for coming on Script Notes.

Nora: Thank you for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right. Let’s talk about day jobs because you are now a produced screenwriter, but for a long time, you were doing other things along the way. Let’s talk about some of the different day jobs you’ve had, some pros and cons of a person who needs to keep a roof over their head but also have brain space and time to do the things they want to do. What day jobs have you had over your life?

Nora: What day jobs have I not had? I was a personal trainer. I was a personal assistant. I was a professional organizer. I was a data analyst. I was studying to be a paralegal. I was a waitress and a cater waiter and a hostess.

John: That’s good. That’s a whole range of things. Let’s talk about the service industry side first, because you mentioned how at Chateau Marmont, you had been a hostess at Chateau Marmont. Then you’re going there for a meeting, which is a very classic moment. That’s a movie moment right there.

Nora: Very movie moment, yes.

John: As a hostess or as a waiter, some pros I can imagine is you leave the job, you’re off the job, you’re done. Great. You probably have a little bit more flexibility when it comes for auditions, which is the thing you were having to do.

Nora: Yes. Being a waiter was one of my favorite jobs.

John: What kinds of restaurants were you waiting at?

Nora: I worked at Dominic’s before it closed down, may it rest in peace. It was a great restaurant. Then I worked at Crossroads, the vegan restaurant, which was– That was one of those environments where the chef was really totalitarian. You had to call him chef. That was my first experience of that. Then I worked at Little Dom’s and Chateau Marmont.

John: In picking those jobs or in giving those jobs, were you trying to optimize your hours to make your life manageable in a way that you could also write and do other things? Talk to us about that decision.

Nora: Yes. I always really enjoyed the flexibility of being able to be on a schedule that wasn’t a nine-to-five because not only could you get everything done that one needed to do during the day at a time where it wasn’t completely clogged with other people, but also, I liked being able to have my days free to write, to audition. The hard thing about working in the service industry is it’s like your days are free, but also, you’re working very late. There is that counterbalance of like there were times that I would write when I got home from work because you’re just so wired. You’re up until three, and then you’re sleeping until noon.

John: Talk to us about you’re waiting on these people. You’re waiting on decision makers. You’re waiting on parents, people who could be reading you, who could be casting you and things. To what degree is that a factor, or you just stop thinking about it?

Nora: I think the great gift of entering into this industry as an actor is the lack of control that you have in that profession is huge. The amount of control you have as a writer feels like the greatest relief in comparison. The thing that was always really difficult for me about being an actor was this feeling of like I can’t just go home and practice my instrument. I can’t go home and play violin, but you can go home and write. Then you have a product, and you have something that you can look at and read over and edit, and it’s immediate and pleasurable in that way.

There was a huge sense of frustration and a huge sense of, I think, impotence. Bradley Whitford, I think, talks about that. I think it was a commencement address at Juilliard or something like that. This idea that you have so much passion and desire and drive and need, and then you have this blockade of being like, “Well, if no one’s going to let me do this, I can’t do it.” I think it’s important to find something that’s lovely about working these type of day jobs in this city of Los Angeles is that almost everybody is trying to do the same thing as you. That can be demoralizing at times, or it can be really lovely to think like we’re all in the same boat, and so we might as well try to do something together.

John: If you were a waiter in Denver who dreamed of being a professional actor, well, you’re just delusional.

Nora: It’s like you’re in the wrong city.

[laughter]

John: Let’s talk through some of the other day jobs. Personal trainer? Was it personal shopper or a personal assistant?

Nora: Personal assistant. I wish I was a personal shopper.

John: That would be incredible. Personal trainer, I have many friends who are trainers, like my trainer, but other friends who train folks. Yes, you can set your schedule to some degree, but you’re always relying on other people showing up, not showing up. It doesn’t stop, I suspect.

Nora: No. Personal trainers do not get paid enough to teach classes. The people teaching your Pilates classes, your HIIT classes, they do not get paid enough. I was teaching a class that was-

John: You weren’t doing one-on-one clients. You were doing classes.

Nora: No, because I worked at a very fancy place where you had to teach the classes with the students. It was dance cardio because I used to be a dancer. It was very Jane Fonda adjacent. The reason I stopped is because I got a stress fracture in the middle of one of my classes. Being a dancer, I was like, it’s fine. I’ll go for another hour. I did. I was like, I’m in a lot of pain. That was the reason that job ended because I had to be in a boot after that. That was a crazy experience because it’s just I’ve never worked out so much in my life.

John: I have actor friends on Big Fish who would teach spin classes and things like that. It’s like, Jesus, your body.

Nora: You don’t even feel good. You’re a receptacle for food, and then you’re just constantly sweating.

[laughter]

John: Data analyst. This was at Meta.

Nora: This is at Meta.

John: Was that your last day job?

Nora: That was my last day job. I had taken a break from working in restaurants to be an assistant for the longest gig I had an assistantship for, which is about five years.

John: Assistant to what kind of person?

Nora: I did a couple. I did actresses, and then I had a stint with producers at CBS and then produce director. I bobbed around.

John: This was personal life stuff? Basically, get me this thing, deal with the plumber, that kind of assistant thing?

Nora: It was both personal life stuff, and it was also all of my on-set experience. I’d been on set a lot, which was invaluable. It was also partially writing experience as well and staffing and reading and coverage and all of that kind of stuff.

John: If you’re working, imagine like an actor on set and you’re a personal assistant for them, what is your relationship between it? Your first responsibility is to that person, but you also have to deal with the crew and production itself. How does that interface work?

Nora: It’s really difficult. I think being a personal assistant is one of the most fraught jobs because it’s all of the intimacy of an intimate relationship without any of the perks. I think it’s really difficult to hire someone to basically be a facsimile of you. Once they get good at it, I think there’s all sorts of identity politics that happen where you’re like, “I want you to be able to write my emails,” and you’re opening up your life to someone. I think it’s really difficult on both sides.

John: This does tie back into your movie then, of course, because I share everything with you. You don’t share anything back.

Nora: Exactly. This notion of like, oh, I’m being collected in some way, but I’m also collecting. I think the weird, tacit understanding of being a personal assistant is that obviously, most people who become assistants are trying to replicate a guild thing where you’re like, okay, I’m going to learn from you.

John: I’m the apprentice and you are this.

Nora: Exactly. That’s a difficult thing because you have to, I think as a boss, have to understand that your assistant has ambition. At the same time, if they’re really good, you don’t want to lose them. It’s a really strange dynamic. I think it’s difficult on both sides.

John: That gets us to meta. You just apply to an open job?

Nora: I went down the LinkedIn rabbit hole where I was– I mean, God, just throwing cover letters into the void. I think I was just at a point where I went back to restaurant work. I went back, and I was a counter service waitress at Pine & Crane.
Going back to a restaurant at 31 is much different than in my twenties. My body was just getting wrecked. I was getting really mentally exhausted and feeling really bad about myself, especially compared to my friends who had enough disposable income to go on vacations and do fun things. I was like, “Okay, someone’s got to give. I’ve got to figure something out.” I started the LinkedIn route. I was actually recruited by meta because of some editing work that I had done for a nonprofit.

John: Some video editing or some text editing?

Nora: Some text editing. Yes, some text editing and development that I had done for a nonprofit. They’ve recruited me to be a data analyst.

John: Let’s talk through your advice to, let’s say, the next Nora is moving out from New York to Los Angeles and is looking for a day job so that they can act or write. Where to first? Do you think restaurants is the right, best first place? What’s your instinct?

Nora: I love restaurants. I think especially because it’s where I earned all my friends. It’s where I earned. It’s where I met all my friends. I had to work. I think especially most people who are attracted to this business are people who really thrive on novelty. The lovely thing about a restaurant is that every day is different. You really observe human behavior from close proximity. It gives you a lot of wonderful skills of memorization but also performance. As depressing as it is to have spaghetti sauce on your hands and under your fingernails for five days out of the week, it’s like there’s also some type of brilliant resilience in that.

John: Cool. Awesome. Thanks for this.

Nora: Thank you. Thanks so much.

Links:

• Read along with our excerpts from After the Hunt
• Nora Garrett
• After the Hunt
• Episode 667 – The One with Justin Kuritzkes
• The Rehearsal
• Flesh World by Jessica DeFino
• Big Reader Bad Grades
• BenDeLaCreme on Good One
• Preorder the Scriptnotes Book!
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Become a Scriptnotes Premium member, or gift a subscription
• Subscribe to Scriptnotes on YouTube
• Scriptnotes on Instagram
• John August on Bluesky and Instagram
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: You’re listening to Episode 706 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, television has changed a lot over the last decade, but has it changed for the better or for the worse, or is it a mix? We’ll talk about TV as experienced by viewers and by writers like Craig working in the medium. Then we’ll answer some listener questions. In our bonus segment for premium members, Craig, let’s talk coffee. You just had some coffee.

Craig: Yes.

John: I would say if you think screenwriters have strong opinions about formatting, you should hear some of them complain about coffee.

Craig: I think he said the keyword there, which is complain. God, screenwriters complain a lot.

John: That’s all we do. We sit around and we complain. You can hear some of those complaints live at the Austin Film Festival.

Craig: Segue man.

John: Reminder that we’re going to be at the Austin Film Festival. A couple of things on the calendar here. Thursday, October 24th, is the opening night party that Highland Pro, my company, is hosting. Come see us there. Drew will be there.

Craig: Drew’s a big draw.

John: You can see Drew in person.

Craig: Yes. I think we will–

John: Pull him from behind the mic right up front there.

Craig: People, do they want to touch the hem of your garment?

Drew Marquardt: Everywhere I go.

[laughter]

John: The opening night party is at the bar at the Driskill. That’s a crowded space.

Craig: Now, the Driskill had become a non-participant because they basically kicked the whole place out. I wonder why. I wonder what happened.

John: I think there is-

Craig: Mayhem?

John: -money and mayhem. They may also have been doing remodeling. Driskill is also a cool old hotel that was a weird fit in terms of space.

Craig: Yes, it was, but that bar is bananas.

John: It’s great for hanging out, but is bananas.

Craig: It’s crazy.

John: Friday, we’re hosting a Highland keynote at 10:45. We’re starting off a new feature for Highland. Craig, you at that same time are working with Alec Berg to talk about?

Craig: Oh, yes. Alec Berg and I are returning to do a second chapter of a panel we did years ago, Everything Everyone Is Telling You About Screenwriting Is Wrong, in which we go through all the advice you’re given. For instance, write what you know. We explain why that’s just wrong.

It’s very freeing, I have to say. You come there and you get liberated because if you’re going and you’re going to be at these panels, you’re going to hear a lot of what you’re supposed to do. Then you come to our panel, and we set you free from all of it.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: You got to do none of that.

John: That night, Scriptnotes, 9:00 PM, Scriptnotes Live. We’re back in the big room, and we’ll have special guests. We’ll do a couple of things. We’ll have some giveaways of the Scriptnotes galley. You’ll be some of the first people on earth to read the Scriptnotes book.

Craig: I will have one and a half glasses of wine.

John: I will have a nap, which will be great.

Craig: Oh, that’s nice.

John: Saturday, we have a Scriptnotes Live three-page challenge at 4:45 PM. When we do the live three-page challenge, the best part is the people come up on stage and we actually get to talk to them about their script and why they wrote it, and what they’re doing. We’re probably a little bit nicer because the person is in the room.

Craig: So much. Although I try to not be. I really do.

John: I try to give them information that they need.

Craig: I’m personally nice, but I’m not going to hold back too much.

John: For the three-page challenge that’s live at Austin, it’s the normal link you submit your scripts, journalist.com/three-page, all spelled out. There’s a special tick box on there now saying, I will be in person at the Austin Film Festival. Tick that box if you’re going to be there, and then Drew will know to look through just those ones for the pool of entries for this.

Craig: You’ll probably get four or five.

Drew: Just a couple.

Craig: Just a couple.

Drew: Handful. You just have to pick two of three.

John: Two, yes.

Craig: Easy.

John: We’ll probably have a special guest up there reading through these with us.

Craig: We usually do.

John: We usually do. Someone smart and great.

Craig: Somebody smart.

John: Fantastic. Come join us at the Austin Film Festival if you get a chance to. We don’t come every year, but we come most years, and it’s a good fun time. This past week, I went and visited the Entertainment Community Fund, which is the organization that helped us out when we were doing money for assistance during the pandemic. Do you remember that?

Craig: Sure do.

John: I distributed those grants. They are one of the main charities in this town who help support artists, but also crew members, anyone working in the entertainment industry who’s going through tough times. One of the things I wanted to highlight here is if you are a person who is working in the industry, who is on the verge of losing your health insurance, they have a whole special program which is just helping out those people to get them into short-term or long-term insurance solutions. Your instinct will be to go onto COBRA, which is maybe not the right choice.

Craig: Very expensive.

John: Very expensive. Notice to anyone listening to this podcast who’s like, “Oh, I’m going to lose my insurance at the end of the month or whatever,” we’re going to put a link in the show notes to talk to these people first because-

Craig: Definitely.

John: They have no vested interest in anything other than helping you get on insurance policy that’ll get you through, whether that be COBRA California or something else. It’s a reminder that it exists out there as a resource.

Craig: COBRA, unfortunately, fortunately, lets you buy the insurance you’ve been getting for, I think it’s a year or a year and a half. That’s your choice, is buy the insurance you were getting. If you’re getting insurance through the Writers’ Guild, it’s-

John: Crazy expensive.

Craig: -very expensive to buy. You’re better off seeking help with something like that.

John: An actor friend of mine ended up talking to them and getting on COBRA California and getting on Medi-Cal. It was good. It wasn’t as good as a SAG insurance, but it saved his ass.

Craig: It’s insurance.

John: It’s insurance.

Craig: It’s insurance.

John: Right now, all our European listeners are like, “You poor Americans.”

Craig: Yes, but I have things to say as well about their systems, which I’ve experienced.

John: Some follow-up. Scriptnotes book, we have signed editions now. Right before we recorded this podcast, Craig heroically signed 500 of these bookplates.

Craig: That was heroic. I got to tell you, I know people out there claim to be heroes, first responders, and so forth-

John: Craig, you doubted yourself. It seemed like, “This is going to be an impossible task,” and then you just banged it out.

Craig: Isn’t that the story of my life, John?

John: It really is.

Craig: Isn’t that me in a nutshell, doing the impossible?

John: Thank you to–

Craig: I wrote my name a lot.

John: You did write your name a lot. You didn’t even write your name a lot. You made two swirls next to each other.

Craig: Two swirls. When I was a kid, I don’t know, but I practiced my signature. The reason my signature looks the way it does is because my dad’s signature was equally garbly bizarre. I wanted to be like my dad, so I made my own version. Then I would just practice it over and over. It wasn’t like I was practicing it because I thought I would be famous or anything. I was practicing it because it just seemed like an adult thing to master. It served me so well now.

John: That’s great. I have two signatures. I have my signature for signing checks, and I have my signature, which is for signing other people’s merch. They’re substantially different. My merch signature is much more like a Walt Disney signature.

Craig: Sorry, you sign checks?

John: I’ve had to sign checks in the past. I don’t sign checks now.

Craig: How long ago? Actually, in my mind, I’m like, “When was the last time I signed a check?”

John: I signed a “check” for the other company like a week ago for– We gave a prize to this pitch competition, and I had to sign a physical check.

Craig: Wow.

John: Wow. There was a concern about the check, so they actually checked my signature.

Craig: Of course, there was a concern about the check because-

John: Why does the check exist?

Craig: What is this? My kids won’t know what it is.

John: No. Crazy.

Craig: Won’t know what it is, like they haven’t been born yet. They don’t know what it is.

John: Your future children won’t know what this is.

Craig: They won’t know.

John: If you would like one of these signed editions, it’s at a place called Premiere Collectibles. We’ll put it in the show notes, but you can just google Premiere Collectibles. You can pre-order them now, and the sticker will be in there, and you get a signed copy of the book. If you’ve already pre-ordered and you don’t care about this, thank you for pre-ordering the book. We’ve got hundreds of people send through their receipts to Drew. Keep doing that.

Craig: That’s crazy.

John: If you pre-order, send it to Drew. As we were signing, we were on the Zoom, we had a bunch of people who had pre-ordered before. We’re sending out special stuff to these people, including links to little live, streamy things. How many people did we have on the stream today?

Craig: That’s a great question.

John: We ended up with 80 questions we didn’t get to.

Craig: I think I was so under the avalanche of questions that I didn’t even see how many we had. We had 500 people signed up for it. That’s awesome.

John: That’s really cool.

Craig: That would make us one of the most popular videos on YouTube. 500.

John: 500.

Craig: 500 people.

John: 500 distinct people.

Craig: Let me hit triple digits. It’s a big deal.

John: We have some follow-up here from Patrick. We asked in Episode 704 about whether any three-page challenges had become movies, and Patrick had an answer.

Craig: Oh, that’s a good question. My project, Destination Earth, was a three-page challenge in, I believe, 2014. While it hasn’t been turned into a movie, I made it into a feature-length audio drama, which was released in 2020. Later that year, we were lucky enough to win the Australian Podcast Award in the fiction category. I think every writer has those favorite projects that never go anywhere. I’m glad this one’s out in the world in a format that people can enjoy and doesn’t have to linger in my projects folder, never to see the light of day.

John: The projects folder.

Craig: Yes.

John: You can listen to it at destinationearthaudio.com. Patrick, that’s great that you got this made. I would say that I would be surprised if a lot of the three-page challenges became movies because people were sending them through as test flight things. We weren’t picking the things we thought were the best things ever written, things that would be-

Craig: Instructive.

John: -instructive to talk about.

Craig: Out of any grouping of scripts, very few of them are going to get made. Out of the blacklist scripts, very few of them get made.

John: Let’s talk about scripts that haven’t been made. Drew, talk to us about Weekend Read because you’re the person who puts together collections. What is in Weekend Read, the app for iOS right now?

Drew: I’m doing ghost stories this week.

John: All right.

Drew: We have A Nightmare on Elm Street, American Horror Story, Beetlejuice, Coco, Crimson Peak, Doctor Sleep, Ghosts, Ghostbusters, Ghosts, the show, Insidious, Paranormal, Poltergeist, The Conjuring, Haunting of Hill House, Sixth Sense, and What Lies Beneath.

Craig: Where’s Blithe Spirit?

Drew: You always find the one that I couldn’t find.

Craig: You couldn’t find Blithe Spirit?

Drew: The play version of it, the Noël Coward play.

Craig: That’s worth it.

Drew: It’s great. That’s actually probably still protected.

Craig: Yes, I guess so, because it’s still being performed.

Drew: Absolutely.

John: If you want to read any of these–

Craig: You always find the one.

John: I love that you bicker. You have your own energy here.

Craig: I immediately go right to the one that he’s angry about. I knew it. Spent a lot of time. Where’s Blithe Spirit? Damn you. We did a big deep dive on Ghost. Is that right?

John: Yes, we did.

Craig: That was fun.

John: It was good. If you want to read any of these scripts, they’re up now in Weekend Read for iOS. Just go to the App Store and download Weekend Read. We had more feedback from Saleem on clipboard managers.

Drew: “Love the show, but the advice John gave in a recent episode on clipboard managers is already out of date.”

Craig: Thanks a lot, Saleem. God.

Drew: “MacOS Tahoe, which came out a few days ago, includes built-in clipboard manager as part of Spotlight. Mackie may be more capable. I use the clipboard manager in Raycast, and it’s also more capable than Apple’s new included offering. For neophytes such as Craig and others online, the best advice for them may be just to use Apple’s new built-in solution rather than a third-party app.”

John: I had no idea that macOS 26 included a clipboard manager. I’ll give it a look. I’m really happy with Mackie, which is free. Saleem, you’re correct. The simplest solution is the one that most people are going to use, which is great.

Craig: Sure. The word Spotlight caused slight spinal shuddering because-

John: I use Spotlight for opening apps. It’s all command.

Craig: Don’t even do that.

John: I don’t even do that. If you want to open an app that’s not currently running, how do you open the app?

Craig: Almost certainly it’s in my dock.

John: Everything’s always in your dock.

Craig: The ones that I use, but if I need something that isn’t there that I don’t-

John: You go to the applications folder.

Craig: I just go to the applications folder. I have it in my Finder window. I pinned it on the left side, so if you just click, boom, there.

John: I will Spotlight it and just start typing.

Craig: I’m a big Finder fan.

John: Not a big Finder fan.

Craig: I love the Finder.

John: I’m not as opposed to it as some people are, but–

Craig: I know that I like it more than a lot of people, but what does blow my mind is sometimes they’ll say, “Okay, someone’s asked me how to do something.” God bless him, Tom Morello. Our D&D friend. As good as he is at playing guitar is how bad he is at just managing simple computer tasks.

John: It is so much fun to watch Craig Mazin be like Tom Morello’s tech support.

Craig: He will just hand me his iPad like, “Help me.”

John: Like he’s a three-year-old who wants to watch more Cocomelon.

Craig: Daddy? If he has his laptop, I’ll say, “All right, let’s go to your Finder. What is that?” People don’t know where it is, or what it is. These kids.

John: I miss my mom, but so much of my time with my mom was just really fundamental tech support. Oh my God. It’s like, “Ben was over, and he ruined my computer,” and I was like, “He literally moved a window one inch on your computer. That’s what he did.”

Craig: He ruined it.

John: He ruined it.

Craig: My wife will occasionally use the phrase, it’s broken. “My iPad’s broken.” It’s not broken. “Is it in pieces?” “Well, no, but it’s not doing what it’s supposed to.” She listens to this podcast, by the way. I’m going to hear about this.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: I don’t care.

John: How dare you put her on a podcast?

Craig: You know what? I say a lot of nice things about her.

John: You do. You do say plenty of nice things.

Craig: I really do. I really say a lot of nice things about it.

John: Some of it is even recorded.

Craig: This isn’t even that bad.

John: No.

Craig: No. What is that? It’s broken. You mean it’s not working the way you want it to, or you don’t know how to use it? You’re broken.

John: Here’s the thing I’m trying to do, and I cannot get this to do it.

Craig: That’s a you’re broken thing. We need to fix you. The iPad is fine. Oh, she’s going to be so mad.

John: Let’s talk about television, then, instead of this issue.

Craig: Save my marriage.

[laughter]

John: This came up during a staff meeting, and Nima, who does our coding, said, “Is TV better now or is it just much worse?” Nima is fairly pessimistic. He thought it’s much, much worse. I wanted to talk through the ways that TV is better and worse now for both the viewer and for the person making television. Let’s start with the good news.

Craig: We’re comparing it to–

John: To 10 years ago. Let’s not do that. You have to pick a thing. Let’s say over the last 10 years.

Craig: 2015 to 2025.

John: Here are some things that I think is probably better as a viewer over the last 10 years. It’s much more global. The television we watched used to just be American television. Now we watch television from all over the world, including stuff with subtitles, things we would never be exposed to before. That’s great. That’s thanks to streaming. Cinematically, the way our shows look is much better than it was 10 years ago. Our standards for it, what we’re supposed to see, things just do look better. We’re spending more money on making things look great and sound great. I think we’re really focusing on the cinematic qualities of things.

This is halfway between for the viewer and for the creator. Prestige. I think we’re acknowledging that great TV is our greatest art form at this moment. While movies are still great, I think TV is really taking the dominance there. Over the last 10 years, I think there’s much better diversity and representation. We see more different kinds of people on screens than we did 10 years ago. We’re hearing more of their stories, and more of their stories are being told by the people who actually live those experiences rather than being beamed in by ordinary white guys.

This is going to be a pro and a con. We focused on quality over quantity. We’re doing fewer episodes of shows. Any individual episode of a series is probably better now than an individual episode of a series was 10 years ago, partly because there’s fewer of them. I see nods there. Anything more you’d say as a viewer experience that the things are better than 10 years ago?

Craig: They’re definitely better. That’s not to disparage the great, great shows that-

John: One hundred percent.

Craig: -were 10 years ago, amazing shows, but 10 years ago, we didn’t really even have the ability to do what we now consider to be the limited format. It was almost not a thing at all.

John: We had the mini-series, but–

Craig: Mini-series were typically– Well, the classic network mini-series was adapting a very popular novel. There were some prestigious ones like Roots or Shogun back in the ’80s, but mostly it was Sinatra by Kitty Kelley, The Life and Times of Sinatra. Over three nights, we’re going to explore Elvis. The rise of the 12-episode, 5-episode, just limited series in general. If you look at what limited series were prior to 2015, with rare exception, shows like Band of Brothers and so forth, it just wasn’t what it– Now, there are four, five, six great limited series every year, minimum.

John: Even more so than limited series, I would say that HBO always had the quality mark on what HBO was trying to do. I remember I went to an event with David Chase a couple of months back. I realized the Sopranos had many more episodes than he thought it did. I always thought it was like an eight-episode season, but no, no. It was a full season of a show, 12 or 15.

Craig: Something like that.

John: It was a sizable number. HBO set a very high standard, and people started reaching out for that standard, and that transformed things. You have to say, the arrival of Netflix, House of Cards, which was also aiming for that high standard, just set the bar.

Craig: Netflix is the good and bad news, I think, because Netflix opened up a fire hydrant and out came 4 million shows. That is the major difference between, I think, 10 years ago and now. Even though there’s been some contraction, still insane amount of television they make. I think that they make the same number of really good shows every year. That hasn’t changed. There’s a lot of quantity there. Their signal-to-noise ratio is not great, but that’s okay. That’s part of their deal. Whereas someplace like FX, for instance, still has an excellent signal-to-noise ratio.

Amazon’s been a really interesting one. Amazon, it’s not quite at Netflix level of volume. It’s not at HBO level of curation. They have made some huge bets on things, spent a lot of money. Some of them have worked out, some haven’t. What they do is they certainly support people. When they believe in something, boy, do they support it financially. Then there’s Apple. Apple’s the interesting one to watch. They had a very good year at the Emmys.

John: For sure.

Craig: The studio won everything.

John: Severance got tremendous attention as well.

Craig: Severance, it went from that show that a few people had seen and loved in Season 1 to much more of a cultural thing in Season 2. Apple was running shows, and they still run shows that I’m not sure anyone watches.

John: Expensive shows that it seems like nobody watches.

Craig: Right. That makes them an interesting patron of the arts.

John: My friend James loves the Apple show Acapulco, which I’ve watched an episode of. I was like, “I totally get it.”

Craig: There’s a show called Acapulco?

John: That just finished its fourth season.

Craig: No.

John: It is-

Craig: Are you serious?

John: It is a-

Craig: How do they– This is what Apple advertised.

John: It is a candy-colored, just delightful romp. I feel like nobody’s watched it, but it goes for four seasons.

Craig: Oh my God, this is incredible.

John: The lead actor’s incredible. Everyone in it’s really great.

Craig: I don’t want them to feel like– Apple does not advertise things. It’s not their fault or my fault that I didn’t know about this.

John: This ties into, let’s talk about, as a viewer, the things that are worse now than 10 years ago. There’s no shared cultural moments. There’s everyone–

Craig: They are coming back around.

John: Occasionally, there are some, but there are very few. I feel like the end of Summer I Turned Pretty, that was– The wrap-up of that felt like a shared cultural moment. The end of Severance, I felt like a shared cultural moment. A bunch of people were focusing on that thing, but the fact that you don’t even know that Acapulco is a show that ran for four years, 10 years ago, would be less likely.

Craig: Yes, because there are just so many fewer shows. Also, Apple is very specifically interesting to me in the way that they almost are like, “We don’t even want you to know we’re running the show.” Like See. See is a big show and we’re in it for a while. They’re just like, “Let’s not tell anyone.”

John: We have billboards here close to our house for Chief of War, but I don’t see anything beyond that in terms of the cultural conversation.

Craig: It’s a very interesting choice they make. I can’t quite make sense of it. I’m sure that Tim Apple right now is fuming and about to turn my iPhone off. The reason I point it out is just because I feel for the people that make television.

John: 100%.

Craig: I helped out on Mythic Quest for a bit, and I always felt like they were just so underserved by the marketing machine because I thought the show was wonderful. They make a lot of great stuff. Now, Amazon advertises the hell out of their things. They certainly are doing that part right. Netflix is their own advertising agency. The scary thing about Netflix is because they are subscribed to by everyone-

John: They just put some on the homescreen.

Craig: -whatever is on the home screen is advertising.

John: We’ve already talked about this, but ways the TV is worse now, the content glut. There’s just so much that it’s impossible to sift through it all.

Craig: There is so much.

John: You can never watch all the things you wanted to watch. Instead of 30 shows with 22 episodes a piece, we have 100 shows with eight-episode seasons.

Craig: If you just look at the amount of episodes-

John: The amount of episodes is–

Craig: Look, I think it’s better. For instance, Adolescence. That show is just simply– You don’t even hear about it 10 years ago. It’s not made. It is made. It just stays over there. Nobody watches it here. “Don’t understand their accents,” and now, we have so many wonderful things. Nima’s complaint is the complaint of somebody who’s getting old. That’s what’s happening there.

John: I think so.

Craig: You start to have nostalgic feelings when you hit your 30s, where you’re like, “It’s not as good as it was.” No, it’s just that you’re not living– Life is not this magical, glowing smorgasbord of 20-something-ness. That’s over.

John: Nima had two points here that I do want to try to articulate the way he said. He talked about a lack of curation and that HBO used to be the guarantee of quality. That was the seal. I would add to it that pilots were a really important filtering mechanism. The pilot process determined what shows actually made it to air. Now, because I think we’re going straight to series a lot more often, there’s a lot more series that probably shouldn’t have been made, or at least shouldn’t have been made the way that they were made, that are just happening. That curation aspect has changed.

Craig: Yes. I think HBO still curates the hell out of it because they really just have– They still act like a linear network even though they are more and more, of course, entirely a streaming entity. There’s one drama a week, one episode a week, and that means there’s five shows for the year. That’s it. They still curate pretty heavily, and that’s reflected in how things perform. FX, I think, curates pretty heavily. I can’t make sense of how the rest of them actually function. Either they’re all making a lot of money or they’re all losing a lot of money. Right?

John: Yes.

Craig: We’ll never know.

John: We’ll never find out, which is nuts. Nima’s final point was that shows are prioritizing what happens in the episode over what happens in the series. Nima’s point was that you used to talk about a show, it’s like, “Oh my, I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” You talk about, “I love the series as a whole,” but you weren’t so focused on what happened in this episode or that episode. Now with shorter seasons, all the emphasis is on that was one great episode or this was a mess of an episode. It happens in these short seasons, too, where it’s like, “Ugh, that was a clunker in the middle of that.”

Craig: Really, what he’s saying is if there’s eight episodes, six of them are great, one is fine, and one’s a clunker, that clunker is going to really stick out.

John: It does stand out.

Craig: When you do 22 episodes–

John: They were always clunker episodes.

Craig: Most of them were clunker episodes. They were disposable and didn’t matter. They were running ads throughout the middle of them.

John: Your enjoyment of the series was the enjoyment of the series and not the one hour of watching one show.

Craig: Sure. It’s just a different experience.

John: That is the difference.

Craig: It’s just different. What would you rather have? Would you rather watch Battlestar Galactica, 1982– Was that what it was?

John: Yes.

Craig: Or would you rather watch Andor now?

John: I’ll take Andor.

Craig: Andor. No offense to the original Battlestar Galactica, but how can you make– You can’t make 22 great episodes. That’s not a thing. It does become about the season. I think that that is what Nima is experiencing. He’s growing up. He’s going through early grouchy days. Soon, he will develop into full grouchiness. Then he’ll come back around to cool.

John: Because she’s listening to this show, I do want to single out Aline and Rachel as well for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which feels like it has the quality of a short season show, but they were shooting like 15 or so many episodes.

They were shooting a weekly series of the show, which is just crazy. I look at all these other streaming shows that only have to do eight episodes over the course of whatever, a show made for Apple or anything else. Yes, the production values can be higher, but what they’re actually achieving episode by episode, incredible.

Craig: Listen, I would love to work on a show, but it’s 15 episodes and all takes place at Tony’s house, and the bada-bing, oh my God, and the back room, and then it’s occasional.

John: Lets you know what sets you have? Craig, you would love to have sets, standing sets. It’s such a dream. Craig is crying now. He’s realizing what he’s done.

Craig: Just like every single time I write something, I’m like, “Then for what? For what?”

John: We’re going to shoot it for one day-

Craig: I’m just going to throw it out. We do.

John: We do.

Craig: That’s what we do.

John: Let’s talk about how, from a writing perspective, as a person who writes or creates shows or writes on shows, TV is better now than it was 10 years ago. Let’s compare 2025 to 2015. I would say short seasons are more survivable in terms of you have some time off, you have a little bit of a life. When I talk to people who work on the classic network shows, they would have a summer, sort of, but there was always-

Craig: A hiatus.

John: Yes, a hiatus. They were always just writing the same damn show. It was exhausting. We were doing a rewatch of a show that I really enjoy, a comedy, and I was talking to a friend about it. He’s like, “Oh, you know how awful that was behind the scenes?” No, I don’t want to know. Everyone was sleeping in their offices, and it was awful.

Craig: That’s not good.

John: That’s not good. I think there’s a little more survivability now, but we’re going to talk about the downside of that with short seasons.

Craig: I’m not sure. I don’t feel so survivable.

John: Streamers, I think, take wilder chances than networks ever did.

Craig: Oh, yes.

John: Which is great. You can play to a niche audience and be a hit.

Craig: Oh my God. The things that people do. That’s the big difference, really, and that’s why television– Feature films used to take big swings and then got so conservative that all they would make is a superhero movie. Now we’re dancing around and thrilled that they made a cool-ass vampire movie. We used to make vampire movies, even period piece. The original Dracula was a period piece. We’re like, “Look how– W’re doing it again.” No, that’s what movies should have been the whole time. Television used to be the same thing. Every episode of TV was about a cop-

John: Doctor.

Craig: Or a doctor. Now, my God.

John: Now you can make a show like Overcompensating and get a second season of Overcompensating, which is a show I freaking love, but it’s a niche audience, and love it.

Craig: Totally.

John: Now versus 10 years ago, you can spend more time per script. The machinery of production, the television is a beast that eats scripts. You have more time to work on things and sometimes write a whole season before you start shooting, which has pros and cons.

Craig: That sounds great. I wonder what that’s like.

John: Then you can plan things. You can have setups and payoffs that you actually know are going to work because you planned. I actually think everything was always written. Downsides to that, too, but some pros. I would say a pro is that we now develop things year-round. There used to be one season, you developed all the shows. If you didn’t have a show that was going, you’re screwed. You have to wait until the next season.

Craig: There is no television season. There’s no hiring season. The way the industry functions vis-à-vis writers, that’s a whole other deal. Just for the audience, I think if you put aside your nostalgic yearning and you discount the signal-to-noise and just look at what is the actual quantity of signal, it’s tremendous.

John: Just wrapping this up, ways the TV is worse now as a creator or a staff writer, the short season doesn’t mean you’re always looking for a job. If you’re a staff writer on a show that is a room that’s running for 15, 20 weeks, halfway through that time, you need to start looking for other jobs. That sucks.

Craig: In terms of creators, a lot is worse about this method, so much.

John: We’ve talked on a podcast a lot about how when you divide the writing process from the production process, it’s those creators who end up getting dragged through three years of a show and getting paid for one. It can be exhausting.

Craig: The way it’s disrupted the career. It’s just disrupted the career.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: It’s turned it into this strange–

John: So many writers are completely divorced from the production process and have no ability to basically run a show.

Craig: Which is– Poor feature writers have been dealing with that forever. Like, this is the way it goes. You’re constantly looking for that next job. There is no guarantee. There is no schedule. There is no machinery to support anything. There’s no promotion ladder. There’s nothing. That’s what it’s now become for everyone. In terms of the audience and how they experience TV, I think the part that’s worse is the recap industry.

John: Totally.

Craig: I think the recap industry is a little bit like sports betting. Sports betting diminishes your pure enjoyment of a sporting event. The recap industry turns, particularly the big shows into– It’s almost like it tabloidizes them and again, feeds into outrage and so forth. There’s just so much clickbait on so much of it. I don’t know. I understand why it’s out there. It’s free publicity.

John: Pamela Ribon, who’s been on the show a couple of times, talking about she came up as a TV recapper. She’d watch a show and have to recap it in real time. There was an aspect to it that was actually, it was a kind of celebration in a fandom that was so intoxicating. A chance for people to participate and enjoy the thing they just watched.

Craig: Yes, but also, who are recaps for? They’re for people that didn’t watch it. I feel like we’ve just cliffnoted things so that people can– We used to say, okay, the water cooler, come in on Monday. Hate or love, you get to come in on Monday and talk about it with your friends at work, and hate on it or love on it. Now, you can be like, “I don’t want to watch this again. There’s too much stuff to watch, or I’m going to do something else. I’m just going to read the recap, and then I’ll be like, “Oh, yes. So I heard.”

John: Let’s wrap up this segment on TV, better, worse, or mixed now, 10 years?

Craig: Better.

John: I think mostly better. I think the quality of things you can watch as a viewer are better. I think, from a viewing perspective, I’m probably happier watching TV now than I was 10 years ago. From a person working in television, is it better or worse? I think it’s mixed and probably a little worse. At the bottom of the ladder, I think there’s smaller rooms, meaning fewer jobs, meaning less opportunity to actually see how stuff is working.

Craig: I have nothing to compare it to. My television career has taken place within the last 10 years.

John: My television career started in 1873.

Craig: Do you know I was [crosstalk].

John: 2000, that was when I was doing my disastrous WB show. I would say that if I had no business running a show that was supposed to be a weekly show. That’s completely out of my depth.

Craig: Running a show is hard.

John: It’s really hard. It’s really also hard for a person who’s never been in a TV room.

Craig: Yes, or a room. Running a television show is hard.

John: It’s hard.

Craig: It’s really hard. I like that they have that show runner’s training program. I’m just not sure how you train somebody for this. I get what you can impart, but it’s a little bit like combat training.

John: It is.

Craig: You join the Marines, they teach you how to shoot, they teach you how to move, and then– [screams] Once those bullets are going by, I’m like, “Training?”

John: No plan survives contact with the enemy.

Craig: No. Training is experience, survival.

John: Let’s answer a question or two. I see one here from CW.

Craig: CW.

John: CW.

Craig: Nice.

Drew: CW writes, “I usually am hired for feature projects for screenplays during the development phase, as is the case for most of us, but a new project coming up has a director wanting me to accompany him during table reads with cast and also during principal photography. He states that as the writer, I’m more in sync with the story, and he’ll need my help to chime in during those pre-production and production moments. In my country, the writer is almost never asked or allowed to be on set or reads. We are paid for the written work and cycled out once that is done.

“My question is, how do you rate for these tasks? Have you done this before on your commissioned works, and do you charge with a day rate? While others have opined that it’s a nice perk to be even invited along to do so, as writers generally are not asked to contribute during those phases, I also am aware that these tasks do take time and effort, and since they’re related to story, do they not count as labor as well and therefore to be rated?”

John: It is labor. You’re there not as a friend, but you’re there to be doing work, to be helping out. This is not under the writer’s guild; this is someplace overseas. I think your best place to start is looking for anybody who’s done similar work and seeing if there’s any comp that makes sense for you. Look at what other people are being paid on the production, look in the crew, and make sure you’re charging something that feels like it’s worth your time because ultimately, you are the person who’s going to know whether this is worth your time or not worth your time.

Craig: In the US, when it is writer’s guild, there’s something called an all-services deal, and that’s what we would apply to this. You get paid an amount of money that would cover the time that you’re working on it, and we protect our minimums by basically looking at the weekly minimum, multiplying it by the amount of time, and that’s the floor for whatever you’re– The nice thing about the all-services deal is you don’t have to bill every week. They don’t have to constantly decide if you’re going to be employed or not. They have bought your time, and then everyone can relax. You can relax and you are free then to write as much or as little as you want or need.

There isn’t this constant– You know, like when you have– I don’t know. You’ve hired somebody to paint your house, and they’re like, “Those shingles are going to be more today and then, oh, I’m going to come back.” Just here, do it. Paint the house and stop asking me. It’s the nickel and dimming that just drives everybody crazy. There is some amount that is reasonable here.

I don’t know what country CW is from, but my guess is he or she has an attorney that negotiated their deal in the first place. That’s the person I would be talking to, and that’s the kind of deal that you’d want to make, especially because you are valuable to the director. It’s not going to be a lot of money, but I would also say that the experience is tremendously important, and as I’ve said many times, you do work well with this director. A director-writer combo is incredibly powerful.

John: Yes, it is.

Craig: That rising tide will lift your boat financially when it’s time for the next one if this movie were successful.

John: CW is saying that in their country, it’s not common for the writer to be around in all parts of the process.

Craig: Same here.

John: Normalize it. Just be the person who’s there. I will say that the movies where I have been more involved have turned out better, and I also think-

Craig: What?

John: I think actors feel excited that you’re there and are an additional person who can help them out. It’s been nice and so on. Go, I was obviously there for every frame shot, but on the Tim Burton movies, where I was in there through pre-production and getting people started, it’s just nice. It really helps things get figured out and solve some problems before they become problems. Set the example, and it sounds like you’re going to– Should have a good experience.

Craig: The director basically told you why it’s a good idea.

John: Yes, do it.

Drew: Dan writes, “I plan to turn my screenplay into an audio drama for Audible, complete with score, sound effects, and professional voice actors. Do you think this has the same merit as making a low-budget feature? I work in podcasting and know I can make the audio drama extremely high quality, and I want to follow the advice of trying to make something myself with friends and not wait around to break in. I have no aspirations toward directing and don’t want to take the time to raise funds for a film feature, especially considering the audio drama can be made right away.”

John: Does it have the same prestige as a film? No. It’s going to get a tiny fraction of the audience for many films. If you know how to do this and you actually really want to do this, you should absolutely do it. If you’re not doing this because you don’t know what else to do, but you’re doing it because you actually really want to do it, that you would listen to this thing yourself, great. I always caution people like, “Don’t do the thing that you yourself would not watch or listen to. You’re wasting your time.”

Craig: This person said they don’t want to direct?

Drew: They don’t want to direct, but they wrote it as a screenplay.

Craig: Who’s going to be directing these voice actors?

John: I feel like Dan maybe feels comfortable doing that, but doesn’t feel comfortable doing the onset blocking and all the other stuff.

Craig: Generally, no. Nobody listens to that. As long as you’re fine with that. It could be that one that people love, but–

John: I hope it is.

Craig: The value for me, first of all, would not spend a lot of money on it. The value would be to make me a better writer. I’ve made this. I’ve listened to it. I’ve experienced it. I’ve edited. That will make you a better writer.

John: I’ll also caution Dan, and Dan, I’m sure you’re aware of this, but audio drama is really hard. It’s a weird format because it’s like, what is this scene? Where are we? All the things you get for free in a visual medium are challenging to do in audio. Just make sure you’re-

Craig: Why have you invited me to this greasy spoon diner?

John: Make sure you’re really thinking through how you’re going to do it and you’re listening for great examples of how other people are doing it.

Craig: And how to not do it.

John: Avoid the bad things.

Craig: Avoid the things that are bad.

John: It is time for one cool thing. Craig, you got a spoiler because I already showed you my one cool thing, which is called Phantom Inc.

Craig: You got me to buy it before we even began recording.

John: Phantom Inc. is a game that we played here in the office last week. It is in the same space as Codenames or Decrypto, where you are in two different teams and you’re trying to get people on your team to guess this thing. There’s one clue-giver, and everyone else is trying to figure out what this is. The mechanic is really, really smart. The narrative idea is that there is a spirit who is trying to describe one object. The two different teams are both trying to describe the same object, but you’re writing one letter at a time. There’s questions that the team can ask. It plays really well. It’s so smart. Phantom Inc. is available everywhere, but we’ll put a link in the show notes to it.

Craig: Love it. You’ve got a game, I’ve got a game. This week, the game, The House of Tesla. This is not referring to anything involving Elon Musk.

John: You know what? I’ve got to say, though, it’s-

Craig: It’s triggering.

John: Yes, it’s triggering.

Craig: It’s triggering. The House of Tesla referring to the scientist, not the overpriced company.

John: This looks like a very classic Craig game.

Craig: It’s a very classic Craig game. It was released on Steam and is not yet out for iOS or Android, but eventually it will be. It’s by a company called Blue Brain Games. They made the House of Da Vinci games. The House of Da Vinci games themselves were barely derivative of the Room games by Fireproof Software. Is this what I would call an A-plus example of the genre? No, but is it well done? Mostly yes.

John: Great.

Craig: I think the visuals are great. The puzzles are very typical for this sort of thing, and the manipulation of objects is fun to do. I’m going to give them a little bit of a ding on the acting.

John: It’s just voice acting, or they’re performing, too?

Craig: They just needed to cast one good voice actor to play Tesla. The way he reads things, I’m fairly certain it’s a man and not AI, but it’s on the edge. It’s so weirdly dead. I don’t know. I’d be curious to see what the deal is there, but it’s not the actor’s fault if it is a human being. It’s theirs, it’s directing matters. Let’s face it, no one’s buying this game for the great voice acting. They’re there for the puzzles and the environment, and there’s some interesting mechanics in it. I think so far, so good on Steam. It’s delivering exactly what I expected it to. The House of Tesla by Blue Brain Games. Sorry for triggering you, John.

John: I love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes has been produced by Drew Marquardt.

Craig: Oh no.

John: Welcome back, Drew. Edited by Matthew Chilelli, outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com along with the signup 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 can also find us on Instagram at Scriptnotes Podcast.

We have T-shirts and hoodies, and drinkwear perfect for the holiday season. You’ll find those at Cotton Bureau. Make sure to get your Scriptnotes shirt before Austin Film Festival so we can identify, like, “Oh, you’re a Scriptnotes listener.” You’ll find show notes with links to all the–

Craig: Oh no, Roney. Scriptnotes listeners. [laughs]

John: You’ll find show notes with links to all the things we talked about today in the email you get each week as a premium subscriber. Again, thank you to all our premium subscribers. You guys are the best. Thank you to everyone who pre-ordered the book as well. That’s fantastic.

Craig: Put us to work this morning.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Got to sign my name many times.

John: Pretty good stuff. If you want more information about the book, Scriptnotesbook.com is a place that has links out to all the different places where you can pre-order. We’ll probably also put on, if you want one of these special signed ones, to Premiere Collectibles, but we can also put a link on there for that. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on coffee. Craig, Drew, thanks for a fun episode.

Craig: Thanks, John.

John: Thanks, guys.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Craig, before we started signing all these bookplates, we got you a cup of coffee, which is from our Keurig. How would you rate that coffee?

Craig: It’s not my favorite cup of coffee. Keurig, they’re like the Blue Brain Games of– It’s what I expected to get.

John: It’s drinkable, but not your [unintelligible 00:43:41].

Craig: It’s drinkable. I’m a black coffee drinker, so I’m comparing apples to apples. Nothing can’t say, oh, this blends so lovely with the oat foam. I’m just–

John: When did you start drinking coffee?

Craig: I know exactly when I started drinking coffee. This is a weird story, actually. I think I’ve talked about this before. When I was in high school and I knew I wanted to be a doctor, and I knew I was going to be pre-med in college, I did a summer internship between my junior and senior year with the Monmouth County Medical Examiner’s Office. Every day, I would go to the morgue at the hospital and assist with autopsies. It was early. I was 16. They let a 16-year-old assist with autopsies. It was a different time, but it was really early. It started early.

I was a teenager, and I’m not waking up early. Plus, it was the summer, so I was hanging out with my friends. When the alarm would go off at 7:00, I was like, “Oh my God.” I would get to the hospital and I was really bleary. There’s the first body already. It’s like, “I’ve got to cut open another body.” They had a coffee– It was morgue coffee. It is a Mr. Coffee, that marble glass pot.

John: That has never been cleaned.

Craig: Ever. They had styrofoam cups, those old, nasty styrofoam cups. They didn’t even have milk or sugar or anything because they were like, “Whatever, we do autopsies. No one’s got time for that.” I drank this horrible coffee out of a horrible styrofoam cup in a room with dead people. That, my friend, is how you grow some hair on your chest.

[laughter]

Craig: It was terrible, and it woke me up. That’s how I started each day.

John: Caffeine.

Craig: Then I would turn and go, “What do we got, boys?” “Crush injury.” “All right, here we go.” I was also smoking in the room. No, I wasn’t. I don’t know if it’d be great, but it’s like Quincy. You don’t know what Quincy is.

John: I don’t know Quincy at all.

Craig: You remember Quincy.

John: Quincy medical examiner, yes.

Craig: Quincy, Jack Klugman played a medical examiner in the-

John: Several times.

Craig: -’70s, and he was awesome.

John: My first coffee was in college at some point, so never in high school. I don’t think I ever had coffee. My mom always had coffee, and I tasted it, but I never willingly drank coffee. My friend George and I had driven from Des Moines to Chicago because we wanted to see Naked Lunch, which was only screening in Chicago. It was so effing cold, and George was like, “Let’s get coffee.” I’m like, “Sure.” There was a Starbucks. First time I’d ever seen a Starbucks.

Craig: No.

John: In Starbucks, I got something and probably a lot of milk in it.

Craig: Give me something.

John: Maybe I asked for a latte or a cappuccino or whatever it was, but that was my first time having coffee. It was good, but it didn’t enamor me to coffee. It wasn’t until I moved out to Los Angeles post-college that I started drinking coffee a little bit more regularly. At some point, I got a coffee maker and just started drinking coffee in the mornings, but that was the turning point.

Craig: You find your way to it. It’s just like nice cocaine. I’ve never used cocaine, but I feel like coffee’s like nice cocaine. Like cigarettes, I feel like more.

John: You’re not drinking coffee right now, but you grew up drinking it.

Craig: Yes.

John: When did you start coffee?

Craig: As a little child, like a two-year-old?

Drew: I think I was probably like seven or eight. Just sitting there with like a hot cup of coffee. Tennis lessons in the summer, I would get a blueberry bagel and a little coffee with a lot of cream and sugar.

Craig: Oh, so you had milk-

Drew: I had milk.

Craig: -with some coffee. You had coffee ice cream.

Drew: Basically. I do think iced coffee was probably the gateway for a lot of my generation.

John: I’m sure for the next generation because iced coffee was not a thing in our years.

Craig: Honestly, I say this as this grouchy black coffee drinker so much, and I’m like, “That’s not coffee. That’s something else. That’s coffee-flavored milk. That’s coffee-flavored something else.” What I do, actually, my standard order is not just pure, pure black, actually. Standard order is short Americano. What does that mean? Tiny, small? Why don’t they just call it small? Small americano, two or three shots, and one pump of mocha.

It’s not a lot. Just a tiny bit of sweetness and a little bit of chocolate to mellow out what can be sometimes a little bit of a bitter awakening. Most of that mocha never makes it into the coffee, by the way. It goes in and just drops to the bottom, so when I’m done, there’s a sludge at the bottom that I never touch. It’s just that little hint, but that’s every morning. Starbucks. I wish I didn’t like it so much, but I do.

John: We grew up at a time before Starbucks and before Peet’s. Before there was nice coffee or consistent coffee.

Craig: Just diner coffee.

John: Yes. Diner coffee is generally just awful.

Craig: Horrible.

John: We’ll go to IHOP, and IHOP has just notoriously the worst coffee.

Craig: Terrible.

John: It seems like it’ll be so simple to get good coffee.

Craig: It’s terrible. Also, if you get a cup of coffee there, I’ll deal with it. Fine. I’m halfway through it. Let’s say you are somebody that drinks coffee with milk. You’re halfway through it. They come by, and they’re like, “Let me freshen that up.” They fill the rest of it, and looking like, “Now I don’t know what this coffee is anymore. There’s no sensible portion to this.” It’s insane.

John: The math formula is for adding two liquids together.

Craig: It’s madness.

John: It’s madness.

Craig: It’s absolute madness. Then there’s that blue coffee cup in New York, the green-style coffee cup, that coffee is horrible. I do remember Mr. Coffee.

John: Oh, yes.

Craig: My parents had a Mr. Coffee, which Joe DiMaggio advertised.

John: That’s the glass carafe and plastic thing on top, and you put the paper filter in and load it in. The challenge with Mr. Coffee was, you can make a decent cup of coffee with Mr. Coffee, but you’re making three cups of coffee. If you only want one, you’re making too much. I had a little Mr. Coffee, but the math just doesn’t work right. It didn’t work right for making one.

Craig: When I wasn’t doing autopsies, I was working at a Wawa, which is our New Jersey, Pennsylvania-area convenience store chain. One of the things I had to do was, every seven hours, change the coffee out because we have those coffee pots. By the time you get to the end of that shift, it is just hot dirt.

John: Yes, hot dirt.

Craig: When people pour it, they would spill it, and it would sizzle and burn on the plate below it and stank.

John: Gross. Did those coffee pots ever get washed out?

Craig: [laughs] I’ve heard from a flight attendant that coffee pots on an airplane never get cleaned.

John: I’m not sure why you do need to wash them out. What’s in there?

Craig: I guess not. It’s just hot liquid, and then you’re going to rinse it out with more hot liquid to put the same hot liquid back in. If there were anything that could spoil inside of it, but coffee is just bean-flavored water. There’s definitely not a lot.

John: Until someone’s drunk from it or if there’s milk in there, that could do a thing.

Craig: You never put milk in the coffee pot.

John: No, not in the coffee pot.

Craig: Actually, it’s like a self-cleaning thing, like a dog’s mouth. It turns out that’s an urban myth, by the way. You explored that.

John: Urban myth. Filthy, filthy mouth.

Craig: They’re disgusting.

John: My current coffee situation is I do Aeropress coffee. Aeropress is you do one cup at a time. It’s a little bit of a hassle, but it’s pretty simple, and it’s very consistent. I’m weighing my 16 ounces of coffee on the scale, and it’s consistent. I know exactly what it’s going to taste like. I’m half-caf in the morning, and I’m just full-decaf after that. I can only have very little caffeine over the course of the day.

Craig: I cut myself off caffeine-wise, but I think 2:00 PM is my absolute limit. I thought about investing in– Really, what I drink is espresso. I’ll get an Americano just because the thing about espresso is it’s like, boom, gone, done, which I’ll do. Even Americanos made with espresso, I thought about investing in a really nice machine. The problem is it’s not as good as what they got at any coffee spot.

John: We had a JURA, which is the one where it grinds and it does it all itself. It’s okay, but it’s not great. Honestly, Aeropress is much better than that is.

Craig: I will say that in my– not the place we live in now, but our prior home had that Miele coffee thing built in, and that thing was incredible because it would really make complicated stuff. It was pretty cool.

John: Circling back the conversation around to the Keurig that we had, we call that machine Little Stew. Little Stew is good for just making that cup of coffee at a time. I will find that if we have people over for a game night or we’re eating desserts, it’s like, “Who wants coffee?” That’s much more handy than me trying to make individual things. We don’t have a Mr. Coffee anymore. We’re making coffee in that.

Craig: It’s a perfectly good way to go about it. Keurig, notoriously horrible for the environment.

John: Little plastic pots.

Craig: Yes. I’ve never had a cup of coffee from a Keurig that made me go, “Wow, good.” It’s always been like, “I need this liquid to put caffeine chemical in my brain.”

John: Instant coffee has actually gotten noticeably better over the years. You wouldn’t think so, but there’s many cases where instant coffee is much better than IHOP coffee. The good instant coffee.

Craig: Sure. I have this sense memory of my parents dinging a spoon inside of a mug, ding, ding, ding, because they put those older’s crystals in there. No, Sanka is for the elderly because they can’t have caffeine. Also, Sanka isn’t even coffee. What is Sanka? What comprises Sanka? I don’t even know.

John: Don’t know.

Craig: Let’s find out.

John: What is Sanka?

Craig: I feel like it’s made of mica chips and bone dust.

John: While we’re looking that up, I’m going to pull up the ad for High Point Coffee, which is the perfect way to end this segment. Let me see if I can find the video here. What is Sanka?

Craig: It says it is coffee. It’s just decaffeinated, but I don’t know. I always thought it was made of some other stuff. Oh, this is interesting. The name Sanka is a portmanteau of sans and ca for caffeine.

John: Sans ca.

Craig: Sans ca.

John: That feels like something you could be using in a puzzle at some point.

Craig: Absolutely. Sanka is nasty.

John: Let’s end this segment with the incredible Lauren Bacall and an ad for High Point Coffee.

Craig: Oh, no, it’s Lauren Bacall, not Katherine Hepburn. Different.

Lauren Bacall: It’s very nice.

Speaker 1: Thank you.

Lauren: One rehearsal, four actors, and 20 coffee cups.

Craig: Oh, I’ve seen this. It’s great. It’s amazing.

Lauren: Around here, we don’t like coffee. We love it. I look forward to my sixth cup as much as my first one. That’s because my coffee’s High Point decaffeinated. I don’t need caffeine. I’m active enough, thank you. That’s just one reason this coffee lover chooses High Point. Oh, that aroma’s wonderful. Just look at this deep, rich color. You know what really matters to coffee lovers? This. Deep and rich. Flavor this good has to be deep-brewed into a coffee.

Speaker 2: Try High Point. The coffee lover’s decaffeinated.

Lauren: Deep-brewed flavor. I think you’ll really go for it.

Craig: Lauren Bacall is from some spot in the ocean between New York and London.

John: Which is fantastic.

Craig: Incredible.

John: I love the Mid-Atlantic accent.

Craig: We had left that so far behind by this point. She doesn’t care.

John: Doesn’t care. The Trans-Atlantic accent.

Craig: She’s like, “I love my–“ That commercial’s made for drag queens to re-perform.

John: That’s what it is.

Craig: I love a cup of coffee.

John: As do I.

Craig: It’s my sixth cup. I’m like, oh, Jesus. Slow down.” It doesn’t matter. She’s going to be peeing constantly. “Where’s Ms. Bacall?” “10-1.” “How many cups of High Point did you give her?” “12.”

[laughter]

John: She’s now mostly High Point.

Craig: Also, 12 cups of High Point at some point will equal 4 cups. They’re still caffeinated. She’s like, “I love my High Point and this line of cocaine.”

John: That’s so good. Drew Craig, thanks much.

Craig: Thank you.

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