The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2023/group-dynamics).
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
**Craig Mazin:** Okay, my name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** This is Episode 599 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. We often talk about story in terms of the journey of a single protagonist, but some movies center on a group of characters that serve as the hero. Today on the show, we’ll look at these group dynamics and how to think about them both on the scene level and story-wide. We’ll also talk about pitch decks and translations of public domain works. We have some follow-up on binging episodes versus putting them out one week at a time. We got a real grab bag of stuff here today, Craig.
**Craig:** I love a grab bag. It keeps us spontaneous and fresh.
**John:** That’s the goal. In our bonus segment for Premium members, I’d love to talk about how you start playing an RPG video game, because I’m looking at two new ones, Diablo and the new Zelda. You may find the same experience. I want to start playing them, but I also don’t want to make dumb mistakes that have me burning like 10 hours. We’ll talk about strategies for how you start playing one of these games.
**Craig:** What a great topic. So much anxiety. So much early game anxiety. Oh my god, what skill tree will I pick? We will dig into that. You know what? If you don’t play video games but you are a Premium member, stick around for that bonus segment anyway, because there are life lessons, my friends. Life lessons.
**John:** I’m excited to hear them. Let’s start off with this new report that I saw, uh, today. So Deadline had a link to it. Well, Deadline actually did not have a link to it, which was so frustrating. They had a zillion links in their article, but none of them actually linked to the actual study. I had to Google a quote from there to find an actual better article about it. We’ll link to something from The Streamable.
It’s a study on which is more successful for streamers, to put all the episodes of a season out at once or do them week by week? This is a thing we’ve talked about often on the show, and our opinions on this, which I think you and I both are in the opinion that you build more momentum and more love for a show week by week than putting them all out to binge. Here are some numbers that study that.
This is from a company that monitors actual TV. They’re not getting their data from the streamers themselves. They’re getting it from viewers and who’s watching a show, who’s finishing a show. What they were able to see is that if you put out all the episodes at once, more people will finish the whole series, but the actual growth of the show is limited. It doesn’t sustain for as long. To me, I think what we’ve always talked about is that if you are a streamer, your goal is to keep people subscribed to your service, and therefore it makes sense to just keep people hooked as long as possible.
**Craig:** Obviously, I’m a big believer in the weekly method. This makes total sense to me, because it is true that if you have all the episodes available, you do fall into a kind of inertia, the inertia of motion. When an object is in motion, it wants to stay in motion. An object watching a show wants to keep watching a show. Watch the next episode. Watch the next episode. Watch the next episode. Sure, you’ll finish it. In finishing it, it’s eaten so quickly, digested so quickly, that it’s forgotten quickly.
There is no ability to share a communal discussion, whereas for both of the television shows I’ve made, the week-to-week model wasn’t part of its success, it was almost all of its success. It’s not like The Last of Us premiered to small numbers. It premiered to fantastic numbers. It just grew from there. It just grew, and it became a global discussion, because it was week to week.
The week-to-week model also creates this cottage industry of summary recaps, tons of podcasts. There was probably, I don’t know, 15 or 20 podcasts that would just do a, “Okay, we just watched this episode of The Last of Us. Here’s what we think.” I think everybody should be doing it. Now, that said, this article is making an argument that certain cases, binging may be better.
**John:** The two marquee shows they talk about from 2022 are Netflix’s Wednesday and HBO’s House of the Dragon. Wednesday was a binge all the episodes at once. House of the Dragon was the classic weekly model.
Wednesday did great. It was a giant hit. It did do big numbers for them. It had a lot of rewatching too, which is understandable that you’d get through the whole thing, then just go back and rewatch the whole thing. If you think about Wednesday, it had some breakout cultural moments. Wednesday’s dance got to be a big thing. It did burn really bright, but it didn’t continue out over the number of weeks. I don’t think it has the cultural conversation that House of the Dragon did, for its classic weekly structure.
Netflix can’t be upset with Wednesday, and HBO can’t be upset with House of the Dragon. They both were very successful for what they were trying to do.
**Craig:** Yes, and they will both come back, and they will both make more. Look, it’s a little bit of a question too of the tone of a show. Wednesday does feel like it goes down a little bit easier. House of the Dragon’s pretty heavy. It’s violent. It’s upsetting. It’s hard to watch that show one after another, after another. Wednesday’s much lighter fare. It’s more of a young adult show. It’s got comedy elements.
If I were Netflix, and I’m not, if I were, I’d run it week by week. I would, because I just look at how there is this world of discussion, analysis, debate, group watching. If everybody was watching that dance scene at the same time, it would’ve been even bigger.
**John:** Yeah, very possible.
**Craig:** It just feels like they’re missing out. This is part of the Netflix fire hose. There’s something that’s slightly cheapening about the fact that you can see everything all at once, all the time, no matter what it is.
**John:** Looking at Disney, with Disney Plus, so two of their Marvel shows, Loki 2 will be weekly, like the way it was always. That makes sense, because there’s going to be a lot of speculation in between episodes about what happens. Echo, which is the spin-off of Hawkeye, is going to be all at once. Maybe that makes sense. They can at least see how it does. Echo is a younger show. It is probably more on the order of a Wednesday, so maybe it’ll make more sense for that show to be all at once.
**Craig:** It might. I did see some commentary on the internet that framed it in terms of this is how Disney values these shows, with the understanding that putting it out there all at once was a devaluing move.
Now, I’m not sure what the benefit is of putting it all out at once versus week by week, unless the idea is we don’t think… I think this is what people were implying by the devaluing. If the company thinks, “We actually don’t think this thing is going to build. We got to get them real fast,” this one is going to be like, we got you, you watched it all, hooray, but no one’s going to be coming back week after week to watch this. That’s an interesting concept.
Netflix hasn’t had the ability to discriminate like that. It is interesting that Disney has started to discriminate like that, whereas HBO only does things week by week. We’ll see what happens. I’ve just always been puzzled by this whole, here it is all at once.
**John:** All at once. With Stranger Things, this most recent season is split up into two chunks. You could say it was for story reasons, but it was really I think to hold people across another month so that they would have to stay and subscribe to Netflix. I think that was good for the show, because it built up speculation about what happens in the second half of the season. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do more experiments where they are trying something more weekly down the road.
**Craig:** I’m curious. We should have the Duffer Brothers on the show for sure, not only because they’ve made this just culturally important televised institution, but I want to hear their opinion on this. Stranger Things seems to me like the poster child for a show that ought to be week to week, because it’s a mystery. It has cliffhangers at the end of every episode.
**John:** Definitely.
**Craig:** It has these “holy crap” moments that you want to share with everybody communally.
**John:** It is intense. It’s intense, and the episodes are long. It feels like once per week would actually serve that show really well.
**Craig:** Yes. I wonder if they’ve ever asked. I know that Ted Sarandos is on record as saying the whole binge method is part of the DNA of Netflix, but maybe not.
**John:** Yeah, but other DNA has changed too. Netflix was shooting their first pilots as we went into the strike. They had never done pilots. Now they’re doing pilots. They didn’t have ads. Now they have ads. A lot is changing. I do wonder if the binge model will also change.
**Craig:** Honestly, I have never understood it. It always occupied that same space in my brain that MoviePass did, which is, wait, what am I missing? In the case of MoviePass, nothing. I missed nothing. I was correct. You were correct. Anybody with half a brain was correct. In this case, I just wonder. It feels like I’m missing something. I just don’t know what it is.
**John:** I think here’s maybe what you’re missing is what metric they’re going for, because this article would say that you look at Wednesday, and overall people finished the show more. They may have some metric that says people finishing a show is better in the long run for our retention. Maybe they have some reason why they believe that. I think they’re missing out.
The bigger point we’re making in terms of when you don’t release a show week by week, you lose out on the whole ecosystem that can build up around it. That feels like a giant loss. There’s just no way to get around that.
**Craig:** There is something that feels like a lack of vote of confidence. Queen’s Gambit that Scott Frank made, that ought to have been a week-to-week show. I haven’t asked Scott about it, but it just seems like that would’ve been way better than putting it all out there, because it was fantastic. My whole thing is, if it’s crack, don’t give them all the crack at once. The whole point of crack is-
**John:** Also, people want to say, oh, teenagers will want to watch it all at once. They can also watch it all at once when it’s all done, and so they can join in the conversation.
**Craig:** Also, isn’t part of life telling teenagers no? By the way, I have no idea how crack works. I don’t know why I was just saying, “Isn’t the point of crack,” and then I trailed off, because I don’t know the point. I actually don’t know.
**John:** You could put something on the table and say, “That’s crack.” I’m like, “Okay.” I can recognize the paraphernalia around it, but if you were to say, “This is a rock of crack. This is a portion of crack. This is the appropriate amount of crack for a person to use,” it’s probably zero, but I wouldn’t know what it is.
**Craig:** I think if you put a piece of crack, and I don’t even know if the term piece… A rock. A rock of crack.
**John:** I’m assuming rock, yeah.
**Craig:** You put a rock of crack down next to a rock of a little bit of drywall, I’m not sure I would be able to tell the difference or pick out the one that’s drywall versus the crack.
**John:** If it was something that I got out from the tread of my shoes, that kind of thing, I wouldn’t know the difference.
**Craig:** I’ve noticed that Drew’s been real quiet about this.
**Drew Marquardt:** I have secrets.
**Craig:** I’m guessing that he’s like, “Oh, guys. Guys. Guys.”
**Drew:** We need to have a meeting.
**John:** Back in Scotland. Back in Scotland.
**Craig:** We need to have another side podcast that’s just about crack.
**Drew:** Just me talking about the different sizes of crack rocks.
**Craig:** Just you talking really fast and wildly about crack. We solved that problem.
**John:** We solved that problem. Let’s do some more follow-up here. Drew, we have something about tone meetings.
**Drew:** David Michael Maurer, ACE, wrote in. He said, “Loved listening to Episode 598 with Vince Gilligan. Wanted to share that in my experience as an editor, being part of the tone meetings is incredibly helpful. It allows me to hear firsthand what the showrunner and writers intended and listen for any creative pivots that the director may discuss. I can also ask questions earlier in the process about things like VFX or complicated sequences that may impact post-production and set time to sidebar with the director if needed so that they’re supported.
“Usually, this helps my editor’s cut get closer to what everyone intended tonally earlier. This also makes the director’s cut easier and stronger, and the showrunner’s first editorial pass becomes a much more enjoyable experience.”
**Craig:** Oh, yes. Oh, David Michael Maurer, I would like to kiss you for that. We certainly have our editors sitting in on our tone meetings. It’s essential. Look, editors do need a sense of freedom to approach the footage without feeling like they’re shackled.
On the other hand, you know, in talking about this very topic with Tim Goode, who’s one of our editors on The Last of Us, he does look back at the script a lot, and understanding what the lines are between the lines or why things were said or why things were put where they were, which does come out in a tone meeting, helps flesh that out.
We call it the clue book, because sometimes editors are like… I watch a scene and I’m like, “Huh.” They’re like, “I just didn’t quite know what to do here given the footage.” I’m like, “Let’s look at the clue book.” Then they’re like, “Oh. Oh. Oh, okay. Oh, okay, okay.” Getting a jump start on the clue book is a fantastic thing. If you are a showrunner, please, for the love of god, include your editors on tone meetings, for sure.
**John:** Craig, just a little sidebar here. Thinking back to The Last of Us, or Chernobyl as well, the editor may have been involved in these initial tone meetings. They have a sense of what that is. When they look at the footage from a scene, I assume they’re looking at what is the closest to a master shot that there would be.
In a lot of these shows, can you even fairly say that there’s a master shot for the scene? Are you ever just filming something wide enough that you can get the whole sense of what the scene’s supposed to be?
**Craig:** We certainly do. We’re not television. We’re HBO. Look, Chernobyl and The Last of Us certainly had the budgets and the creative ambition to be as cinematic as we could. We definitely shoot lots wide wides, wide wide wide wides and weird wides. It is a little different than some smaller shows. Obviously, every show is different.
The other challenge for our editors is we shoot a lot. For instance, our shooting schedule on average for an episode is 20 days. Now I say that around most people that make television and they just are weeping, because they get five days, maybe 12.
**John:** It’s crazy. So many one-hour procedurals, maybe they had eight days, now they’ve been cut down to seven and a half or they have to cross-board two shows to get 15 days.
**Craig:** At that point, your ability to shoot anything other than the bare necessities is really reduced. We do have that. They have a lot more footage to work with, which creates a lot more possibility, which is certainly part of what we do. If you look at Chernobyl or The Last of Us and count the big wides, you’ll count a lot of them. We’re big on those.
**John:** How often, as you were setting every day, did you do wides first versus a more specific shot? Are you almost always wides first?
**Craig:** Almost always. If we’re exterior, I always want to start wide, because it helps me start to choreograph the motion of the scene. It’s kind of free blocking. We’ve obviously blocked. Because it’s big and wide, you get a little bit of a sense of where positions are. It helps you. You can move things around a little bit. It starts to give you a little bit also of a sense of tone. It afford you an opportunity to create a visual transition, if you need, from what was prior, or you plan ahead to make your visual transition something super duper close. You just know when you’re getting close, you gotta grab that. Generally speaking, I follow the traditional wide and then march in.
**John:** It also gives you a chance to really look at the performances and see what it is that you may want to, little moments you may want to pick up as you get closer in or change or give yourself some options, because-
**Craig:** The actors are also using those big wides as rehearsals, because they know the moments that are crucial aren’t going to be playing in this huge wide, but it gets everybody’s juices flowing.
**John:** Some more follow-up.
**Drew:** Patrick writes, “That Disney TV movie from Episode 597 was in mono because there wasn’t stereo television in most places. That wasn’t until later in the ’80s with shows proudly displaying ‘in stereo’ at the beginning. For The Ewok Adventure in 1984, George Lucas being George Lucas, he wanted people to have the chance to watch it in stereo. They got radio stations in major markets to simulcast the audio in stereo. There were even ads explaining how to set up your home stereo.”
**John:** I do not remember The Ewok Adventure. I do remember the first time I would see the little bugs in the corner of the screen, like, “in stereo,” because it was a big deal when stuff was in stereo.
**Craig:** I gotta say, there’s gotta be some word for this, a memory that was simply not there and now is there. Just by Patrick saying, “Proudly displaying ‘in stereo,'” suddenly I’m like, oh yes, of course. I remember seeing “in stereo” for sure, but it was just gone out of my brain. It didn’t exist until Patrick reminded me. What is that about?
**John:** Let’s go on to our marquee topic. This is full disclosure. Our guest on next week’s episode, we already recorded that episode, and we were going to talk about this topic, and we ran out of town. I’m pulling it backwards or forwards in time to talk about it here on this episode.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** I want to talk about groups. So often on the podcast we’re talking about classic dramatic theory, where you have a protagonist who begins a story. They have one set of beliefs and conditions. They undertake this journey that transforms them, finds them arriving at a different set of beliefs and circumstances. We talk about our protagonist. We talk about an antagonist, who’s the person who’s forcing them to change. There’s other characters, of course, who are very important. The central protagonist storyline is key to many movies, probably most movies. Craig, would you agree?
**Craig:** Yes, I think so. I think so, for sure.
**John:** There are movies that don’t have that one single, central protagonist. They’ve grouped the characters who share that spotlight. I thought we might spend some time talking about those kinds of movies and what a writer needs to be thinking about when you’re tackling a story that doesn’t have the one constant protagonist, but rather has a group that is doing that hero’s work.
Some examples of the classic thing would be like an Erin Brockovich, a Michael Clayton, an Elvis, Amadeus, Tár. They often have the character’s name as the title of the movie. That is one kind. Then there’s Charlie’s Angels or Reservoir Dogs, ensemble comedies like Best in Show or The Hangover, A Fish Called Wanda. There’s a lot of movies that do have groups of characters. Ocean’s Eleven has groups of characters that do things. Let’s spend some time thinking about the difference and how you make sure that there still is a narrative story drive even with disparate characters carrying the football through it.
**Craig:** One of the things that teamwork, and I like to think of them as teamwork movies and stories, do is they reinforce a natural pro-social desire we have to see functioning relationships where individuals get to shine because of their diverse abilities.
Pretty much the entire Marvel universe is like this. Yes, they definitely did Captain America. That’s Captain America. Iron Man is Iron Man. It wasn’t until they hit the Avengers where things went kaboom, because we love watching The Dirty Dozen, we love watching Seven Samurai, we love watching Ocean’s Eleven, where a team is assembled. Being on a winning team feels good. It takes away the burden of being the only one.
A lot of single-protagonist stories talk about the one somebody has chosen to win. In this case we’re all working together. Each one of us is different and has a moment to shine. The story is about the relationships. Now, typically, the relationships are narrowed down to one central relationship inside of the group, because we can’t really handle more than that.
Everybody gets a chance to win, and everybody gets a chance to lose. Watching the team struggle, fall apart, and then come back together actualized and all doing their individual parts is so satisfying. It’s just satisfying on a deep, deep level.
**John:** We hadn’t planned for which movies you wanted to tackle. Even thinking about the first Star Wars, A New Hope, it is Luke Skywalker’s story. He does protagonate in a very classic way, and yet the ensemble around him is very, very important. We see the team dynamics form and splinter and the tensions within relationships that are not even specifically about Luke.
You have smaller groups within that larger group. Of course you have C-3PO and R2-D2 and then their relationship. You have Luke and Leia and their relationship, but also Leia and Han Solo, their relationship. Within that bigger dynamic, you have smaller individual pairings or triads there, and you want to see how those are developing within the bigger context of things.
In those relationships, you have to be able to track those independently of the plot. It’s not plot stuff. It’s really about the growth of characters as we’re following them through the story.
**Craig:** If you note, each one of those characters will have some sort of failure and then some sort of success. The failure and success is within the context of the team. R2-D2 and C-3PO are basically failures. C-3PO is a failure all the time, but then R2-D2 is the one that ultimately saves them all from dying in the trash compactor. Eventually, C-3PO has his moments where he gets to win. That is exciting to watch. It’s exciting to see Han Solo be both swashbuckling and cool and then also selfish and then cool again. Everybody doing their part is just, again, it’s like watching all these pieces click together that feel so good.
In The Hangover, Alan, Zach Galifianakis’s character, is an absolute disaster of a human being and so much fun to write, because he’s just chaos. He’s completely unhinged. He has the strangest worldview and an enormous amount of confidence and certainty, even though he deserves no confidence and certainty. When the chips are down, literally, he just engages this bizarre gear he has and wins all this money at blackjack, because he’s special. We love watching that. We love watching the underdog who’s good at nothing suddenly shine and crush it.
**John:** Now, thinking about The Hangover movies, we talk about this on the macro scale, but let’s think about it on a scene level. You have several of the characters together in a scene. Classically, you would want to have your protagonist be driving that scene, and yet you don’t have one clear central protagonist. How do you approach a scene and who should be in charge of the scene, or are mostly people vying for control of the scene?
**Craig:** The Hangover, that trio of characters follows a pretty classic dramatic method of imagining one person that is split into three parts. You have the id, the ego, and the superego.
Ed Helms, his character is very much the superego. He is responsible. He is anxious. He’s concerned about logic and rules. Then Bradley Cooper’s character is very much about, understood, but force of action, getting things done. This is essential. If we have to break the rules, so be it, but it’s all in service of doing the right thing.
Then you have Zach’s character, who is chaos. Chaos, appetite, urges. Watching those three guys negotiate with each other is a little bit like watching a single person struggling to figure out what to do. Just like in real life, sometimes it’s our id that we need to release to win the day, and sometimes not.
**John:** Thinking back to the Charlie’s Angels movies, those were some of the most difficult things I ever had to write, because you had three central characters who fundamentally had no conflict with each other. They had some sisterly conflict, but their primary source of friction was not with each other. They each needed their own backstory, each needed their own love interest and thing that they were going out that was separate from the main A plot. It was really challenging.
Yet I could think of them as being, like you said, a single force. It generally wasn’t hard to figure out how to drive a scene, because one or several of them could drive the action in that scene. You felt anchored as long as one of those people was there.
**Craig:** There has to be a clear distinction between them. You don’t want repetition. That’s really important. You want to feel like everybody is specifically required. Ocean’s Eleven is a really good example. It has a very classic group dynamic model of we’re going to bring a team together.
Interestingly, there’s not a ton of difference between Rusty and Danny, Brad Pitt’s character and George Clooney’s. They’re both super cool, super calm masterminds who trust each other completely. They function actually more as their own little mini team. It’s like they’re partners, parents. They actually work like parents. Mother-father, father-father, it doesn’t matter. Then everybody else under them has a very specific role to do a very specific thing. Watching how those pieces come together is fascinating.
**John:** Can you imagine an Ocean’s Eleven where that central couple had real tensions or real fights? It would be a very different movie. I don’t know if you’d feel comfortable within the movie. You don’t want mom and dad fighting.
**Craig:** You don’t. One of the things that Ted Griffin did so beautifully in Ocean’s Eleven is place the central relationship tension between Danny Ocean and Tess, Julia Roberts’s character. They were exes. He’s trying to win her back. That’s what the movie’s really about. The whole thing is, how do I steal your heart back? That makes sense. If there’s any tension between Danny and Rusty, it’s, is this about the money or is this about her? You get the sense that Rusty always knows that it’ll work out. He’s just that cool.
That’s a good way of thinking about things. The tension inside of a group is important, but the central tension inside of a group really does need to be limited ultimately to two people.
There’s what I call fake tension. Again, let’s go back to Ocean’s Eleven, since it’s such a good example. You have Casey Affleck and you have Scott Caan. The two of them are basically, I think they’re the vehicle guys. They fight each other constantly.
**John:** They bicker.
**Craig:** They’re constantly bickering, hitting each other. It’s fake conflict. It’s hysterical. You don’t worry. You’re not emotionally invested in that conflict. That conflict doesn’t matter. It’s there for fun.
**John:** We also recognize that dynamic of conflict. They’re doing the thing that they would do. It’s not fake in the sense that it was artificial on the part of Ted Griffin. It was the kind of shit that two buddies do.
**Craig:** Then there was this interesting, I’ll call it a sub-protagonist, with Matt Damon, because Matt Damon’s character was the one guy who was really trying to prove himself. He was the new guy who was getting hazed and who felt like he didn’t belong and was constantly undermined and screwed with, because he’s the rookie. Then he achieves, and he feels like he earns his place in the group. It’s not quite at the level of, okay, Danny Ocean wins Tess back. It was still a satisfying journey for him, because his relationship was actually with the entire group, like, how do I fit into this whole group?
**John:** What we’re describing here is that each of these characters in these group dynamics has to have a clearly identifiable want and need that the audience can pick up on. As a writer, you need to find enough time to service that and service that progress and progression, which is really challenging given all the other story you’re trying to do. It’s one of the reasons why writing movies with a bunch of characters can be so challenging, because you’re just trying to service so many different things at once.
A scene in Charlie’s Angels had to service three different storylines at all times. That’s really tough. It also meant that if one of the scenes didn’t work or got cut out, you’re screwed, because a bunch of stuff was falling away with that scene getting cut out. Everything has to click and work in ways that are less flexible than in the classic protagonist story, where you might say, oh, we can skip over that beat, because we get it. If a bunch of other things are hinging on that moment, that’s a challenge. Ideally, one character’s growth or change is coming in relation to another character’s growth or change. You’re seeing those dynamics shift because they’re both progressing. They’re both moving to a new space.
**Craig:** Always important. To view everything through the lens of a relationship is important. The group is this large relationship. Inside of that group there are little mini relationships. Perhaps there is a relationship between one person and the entire group.
As you go through these things, you need to look out for characters that you start to look at as homework, like, “That’s right, this person hasn’t said anything in nine scenes.” Those characters you do need to think about, do we need them, what are they doing.
That said, there is also value to characters that are very quiet, disappear until the moment they are needed. When they are called upon to do one single thing, you go, “Wow.” Grease man in Ocean’s Eleven. He’s the acrobat who doesn’t speak English. I think that’s what the term is, grease man. It’s the guy that can wriggle into places. He has one thing to do, and he does it, and it’s awesome. That’s totally legal.
In The Hangover, there were a lot of scenes where Zach barely said anything, but he would say one little thing at the end, and it would make it awesome. That’s okay too. You just make sure that you don’t have a character that feels like they should be talking a lot, but they have nothing to say. That’s problematic.
**John:** Then you run into the Patton Oswalt problem, where he’s standing in the scene and-
**Craig:** Oh my god. I wish we had talked about that when Patton was on the-
**John:** We did. We talked about it.
**Craig:** We did. Okay, good.
**John:** We did, yeah.
**Craig:** I’m glad, because that is one of the… If people haven’t seen it, I guess we must’ve referenced it then with a link, so that’s good. That’s a great example of, there’s just no reason for that person to be there.
**John:** Even in stories where you do have more of a classic protagonist arc, something too like Top Gun: Maverick, it is Tom Cruise’s story fundamentally, and yet the group plays an incredibly important role. Do we get to spend a lot of time individually with some of those pilots? No, not really. There’s the one guy who’s quiet and has glasses, but we still love him, because we get what his role is within that group, and we’re rooting for him.
Those were all very crucial choices made early on in the process and during shooting to figure out how do we understand all these characters and what their deal is, even though we’re not going to have a tremendous amount of screen time to support those. They make really smart choices. It was so rewarding to see them succeed down the road or really felt it when they would have a setback. That’s crucial. Even though the central relationship is really Tom Cruise and Miles Teller, the other people, we understood their dynamics. They weren’t just glorified background players.
**Craig:** Exactly. If you are thinking about writing a movie or a television show that is based around a group dynamic, I urge you to watch some of the better sports films, because movies about actual teams are the purest example, I think. Heist movies come pretty close, because it’s also a team. Watching movies about teams teaches you so much about how to make that work. Have you ever seen Slap Shot, John?
**John:** I’ve never seen Slap Shot. I assume it’s a hockey movie.
**Craig:** Nailed it. Fantastic film. A great movie. Just wonderful. Paul Newman holds down the center of it. Anyone who’s seen Slap Shot is familiar with the Hanson Brothers. The Hanson Brothers are a fantastic example of just employing the characters with a specific skill that makes you go, “Oh, awesome.” Go ahead and we’ll throw a link on to the Hanson Brothers.
**John:** Fantastic. Let’s move on to some listener questions. Drew, what do you have for us?
**Drew:** Leanne from Burbank writes, “I’m currently writing a script completely free of any WGA signatories, where two characters rehearse a scene from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. I would like to use a 1961 translation from an Oxford University Press compendium of Ibsen plays. Of course, A Doll’s House itself is in the public domain, but the Project Gutenberg translation isn’t quite as sharp as the Oxford one. Do I need permission to use a published translation of a public domain play in my script? If so, do I reach out to the publisher, and are they likely to give me the green light without a price tag?”
**John:** Great. The answer is yes, you would have to have permission to use that in your produced thing. Could you include that stuff in your script without that? Yes, but that could be a problem down the road.
Leanne, I worry that you’re creating problems for yourself that you don’t need to create. I think you’re using a public domain play. There’s existing translations. How much of this play are you actually including in your film? I think you could write your own version of those scenes, and we’re not going to know the difference. I think you’d make a better choice than to open yourself to any problems of using something that is not free and clear. Craig, what’s your thinking?
**Craig:** Certainly, translations are copyrightable. You do need permission for those. I think since it’s just a scene, you could reach out to the translator. It’s not the publisher. It’s the translator that has the copyright. You could reach out to the translator and say, “Hey, would you be willing to just license this to me for five bucks, just because I really, really like it? We would give you credit in the credits.” They may say, “Yeah. It’s just a scene. Sure.” They may be flattered, because they probably agree that their translation is better than the Project Gutenberg one.
If they say no, good news, you’ve got a public domain translation that you can lean on, and then you can tweak it as you wish, because you can adapt public domain works as much and as significantly as you like. I would reach out to the translator, not the publisher.
**John:** I agree. The translator is the way to go there. I think it’s a smart choice. I do ultimately though wonder, Leanne, is that… You’re using that scene for a specific reason. It’s going to have some resonance to what the other characters are doing in the moment. Your version of that scene may be more appropriate than the official Oxfordy kind of translation.
**Craig:** All true.
**John:** What else you got for us?
**Drew:** Jess in the North of England writes, “I’m finding the process of jazzing up pitch documents or accompanying slides for pitch presentations is becoming increasingly elaborate. Is it just me, or is the job of a writer now also to be a skilled graphic designer? I’m genuinely considering taking a design course so I don’t have to rely on a graphic designer every time I pitch. Even if there’s someone in house at the production company who is a competent designer, it’s still such a specific skill to collaborate and get the aesthetic right. Even just the image sourcing is a huge undertaking.
“My question is, how much of this is the job of a writer? On one hand, I think I might be going to too much trouble. Shouldn’t it just be all about the words? On the other hand, maybe this is the work. Maybe I just learn Adobe InDesign and stop being a baby.”
**John:** This is a thing that’s changed in the time that we’ve done this podcast is that pitch documents, pitch decks, art boards going into things were not nearly as crucial or as fundamental of a thing you did for writers 10 years ago when we started this podcast. Now they’re really common. If I’m pitching on Zoom, I’ll definitely have a deck, and I’ll have negotiations with the rights-holders about what can be in that deck sometimes.
For this series I’m doing, there’s been just a whole long process, which we’ve brought an outside designer to do this essentially glorified pdf that is presenting this piece of IP. It’s a big thing. I hear you, Jess. We’re all encountering this as a new thing.
**Craig:** This is one of those questions where I’m hesitant to give a hard opinion, because like John, I came up in a time where this simply just didn’t occur. The pitching was entirely a verbal exercise, and nobody expected anything but.
May very well be that taking a design course is helpful to you. If you’re paying money to people, I get nervous, because we shouldn’t be paying money to pitch things on spec. A design course may not be necessary, but it’s possible that perhaps there’s a good ole design for dummies book that you can pick up, because the elaboration of the graphics themselves isn’t really I think what ultimately adds value as much as the thought and concepts that you put into things.
I’m hesitant to tell people, “You don’t need to do that,” because maybe you do now. Maybe the people who hear pitches are like, “Wait. What? Where’s your-”
**John:** “Where’s this?” Yeah.
**Craig:** “You’re just talking to me? Get out.” I don’t know.
**John:** The last couple projects I’ve had to go out and pitch on, I put together a deck. Actually, in putting together the deck, I really did figure out the story much better, because I had to think what would I actually show here, what is the thing I’m trying to communicate here, what is the tone of this, what things can I pull from other interesting films and movies that are useful here, that can really show this.
It’s been a useful process for me, and yet I am still conflicted, because after going through this whole campaign of No Writing Left Behind, here I’m doing all this stuff that’s not quite writing, but it’s like writing. I’m telling the story with visuals here. It’s just a lot more work going into these things.
It’s setting an arms race for what is expected going into one of these sessions, and yet I just know for a fact that it is easier to have a conversation with a creative person, an executive, when you have something to show them.
Going in to pitch Aladdin at Disney, I just brought in these art boards that showed this is how I see a live-action Aladdin looking, and this is how I see Jasmine. This is how I see a very different version of the genie. I could talk through my story, but I could also point to boards, and the executives can flip back to that board and really dig in on a thing. It was incredibly helpful. I probably will never pitch without visuals again. That’s just the reality of the world we’re in right now.
**Craig:** So interesting, because in reflecting on this, it seems to me that I really ought to have done this to pitch Chernobyl or to pitch The Last of Us. The Last of Us in particular, I had an entire video game that I could’ve just taken stuff from, and I just talked. I talked for both of those. It worked.
**John:** It worked.
**Craig:** Look, I think part of it may also come down to two factors. One, Jess, is how comfortable are you talking? I love talking. I’m a big talker. I like to talk. I like to engage people with my talking. That’s probably why I default to that. The other factor is who are you pitching to, because if they’re younger, they may indeed expect these things, where if they’re older, they may have quite a few years of just hearing verbal pitches and may not need it.
The biggest factor, I think, and my guess is you like having those things, because you’ve been using them, and you must be finding them useful. You’re just trying to figure out how to mitigate the cost and the effort.
I would say the only advice I could give you is don’t spend too much money on a course. Maybe buy a book. Don’t worry too much about the beauty. The content I think is more important, the intention.
**John:** It’s crucial. I’m sure this has been a previous One Cool Thing, but I’ll put another plug in for ShotDeck, which is shotdeck.com. It’s a really good website that takes pretty much any movie you’ve ever loved and pulls stills from them that you can actually search for the terms that are in there.
As I’ve been putting together decks for things, it’s so, so helpful to say, “I need medieval castle,” and here are 30 really good stills from other movies of medieval castle, because you can find other images on the web that’ll sort of get you kind of there, but they won’t look like a really high quality movie or TV show. ShotDeck can be a really good choice for you for there.
**Craig:** Love it.
**John:** Love it.
**Craig:** Love it.
**John:** I think that is it for our questions. Let’s do some One Cool Things. Craig, what do you got?
**Craig:** My One Cool Thing today, Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, but very specifically the Center for Trans Youth Health and Development. Los Angeles Children’s Hospital, or I guess, sorry, they do go by Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. I wish it were the other way around, because then you could call it LACH as opposed to CHLA.
Regardless, they I believe are maybe the second most advanced and respected center for gender-affirming care for young people in the world. I believe the preeminent facility is in Amsterdam. If you are here in the United States, or if you’re lucky enough to be here in Los Angeles, you’ve got this incredible place here. Now, they are both pediatric, but also I believe they also take in young adults all the way to 26.
Right now, in our country, there is an effort, an ongoing effort in the states you would think it would be happening in to literally criminalize gender-affirming care for children, adolescents, young adults. The existence of a program like this is so important and profound. It also just makes me proud of my adopted city here in Los Angeles that we’re so out in the forefront.
If you are somebody who is looking for this kind of care, if you have a family member who is looking for this kind of care, just know that they not only take care of the patients, but they also talk with the families. They have every kind of care there is, emotional, mental, physical. Definitely take a look at the Center for Trans Youth Health and Development, if for no other reason than to be defiant on behalf of those who deserve it.
**John:** It’s such a frustrating moment we’re living in as we’re recording this in 2023 because things that should be just so fundamentally obvious, like that trans kids exist and that you need to protect them, are being questioned. I’m hoping that this will pass and we’ll just move on to the next thing that certain people will be outraged about. It is such a dangerous time to be messing with these kids who need help and support.
I also get so frustrated that if you talk to a person who is upset about trans kids, that they will say, “Oh, all these structures should be put in place.” Then you’ll tell them those are exactly the structures that are in place to make sure that everyone’s making smart choices.
**Craig:** The Center for Trans Youth Health and Development is not a place where you walk in and go, “Hi, I’m 10. Can you please remove my penis?” No. This is not how it functions at all. I think people have all sorts of crazy notions about how gender-affirming care functions.
I do think that this will pass. I agree with you, but it’s going to take time. I don’t know what the next panic will be. I remind myself that when you and I were young, John, people were literally suing heavy metal bands because they were Satanists who were causing suicide. There was a Satanic panic going on, not to mention just the general normal, I don’t know, criminalization and rejection of just good old-fashioned homosexuality.
We will get through this, and we will all be better for it, but until that day, it is good to know that while… People listen to us from all over the world. They may think that America is defined by its worst, which is in deranged and unfettered gun culture and hatred of people who are not straight or cisgender. America is kind of two Americas. That’s what’s happened. Used to be one, sort of, kind of. We did have Civil War.
**John:** There was that.
**Craig:** We might’ve just been whistling past the graveyard for a long time. Really, there’s two Americas, and they’re wildly different. I am very proud to live in an America that has something like Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. You can donate to them, which is important. Obviously, they are a nonprofit organization. When you donate, you might want to make one of the conditions be that they just reverse that name so that it is Los Angeles Children’s Hospital.
**John:** My One Cool Thing is so trivial by comparison that I… Maybe I should just celebrate that.
**Craig:** Did I shame you?
**John:** You did shame me. Mine is a silly game that is a Breakout-y game that’s on all the platforms. I’ve played it on iOS, on my iPhone, called Holedown, which you can giggle. It’s a silly name. It’s like Breakout, where you’re trying to smash a bunch of blocks, except that you’re moving from the top down to the bottom. It’s just a very well done, very sticky kind of dynamic there. It’s just very satisfying to smash things in it. I just really loved it. During some of the long, boring waits during the negotiations, I can pull this out and just spend a happy five minutes smashing some blocks in Holedown.
**Craig:** Wait a sec. Is that why we’re on strike, because you’ve been playing Holedown?
**John:** That’s what it’s been. It’s really pretty much all my fault. If I just focused a little bit more, I’m sure I could’ve come up with the one persuasive argument that would’ve changed the entire course of negotiations, but no, I was playing this.
**Craig:** But no, Holedown. What a brilliant idea to just go, “Let’s reverse the flow of Breakout.” I’ll check it out. That sounds like a fun game.
**John:** It’s a good game. Holedown.com so you can see all the different versions that are out there for the game. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
**Craig:** If you say.
**John:** Our outro this week is by Duke. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.
We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We will have a 600-episode T-shirt before too long. Check those out. 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 how to get started in a role-playing video game, how not to mess it all up.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** Craig, thanks for a fun show.
**Craig:** Thank you, John.
[Bonus Segment]
**John:** Craig, so my Instagram stories have been dominated by people who are playing the new Zelda on the Switch. Have you started Zelda?
**Craig:** No. I must admit that even though I’m a big gamer and have sunk god knows how much time to games like GTA or Elder Scrolls or Fallout, Breath of the Wild, I just… I, by the way, loved old Zelda. Ocarina of Time, great, and Twilight Princess. I just didn’t love Breath of the Wild. I didn’t connect with it.
**John:** I have a Switch too. I played it a little bit. It never bowled me over. People love it. That’s fantastic. I do remember Ocarina of Time. It wasn’t pre-internet, but I just lost my way in it and didn’t really finish it or follow it that closely.
**Craig:** The Zelda games are very comforting in one sense, that there are certain things that are always there no matter what, and if you enjoy them, you enjoy them. I do. I enjoy going into a temple and figuring out the puzzles. I enjoy opening up the chests. I enjoy the (singing). I love fighting the bosses. I also like going to the different groups of people. There are the fish people. There are the rock people. I love that.
Breath of the Wild was so big. It’s a little thing. It’s a little, tiny thing. I understand it is continued in this new one. That is that your weapons would break. I just couldn’t handle it. It just was making me nuts. It was making me nuts. In Fallout, your weapons do wear down, and you can patch them up. It’s just a much better crafting system. I was like, “Oh my god, I got a sword, and the sword broke? I can’t. I can’t.”
**Drew:** That feels like it defeats the point of Zelda, which is going around and cutting grass for hours at a time.
**Craig:** I know, exactly, or just like, I’m going to wander through this field of easy guys and just chop chop chop. It’s just so satisfying. Then like, oh, no, or like, I’m going to climb up this cliff, and then there’s a guy up there that immediately, bop, and my sword breaks instantly, and I’m screwed. What am I going to do, punch him, spit at him? I don’t know.
Look, people love Zelda. My oldest kid played all the way through Breath of the Wild, loved it. I don’t mean to take anything away from people. People love that game. It’s just really I did not connect with it, so I probably will not take on this new one.
**John:** I’ve played Dragon Age and finished Dragon Age. I’ve done Elder Scrolls, and I love that very much. I’m looking at the new Diablo 4 coming out. In all those games, you create a character, and then you have to make some decisions pretty early on that determine your class or your tree, which skill tree you’re on. I just don’t want to screw up, Craig. I ended up having to look online and see what people are loving or not loving. These games should be pretty well balanced so that you could do things multiple ways, but if you try to follow two trees, death, doom.
**Craig:** Here’s what I would say. This is where the life lessons come into play.
**John:** Please.
**Craig:** There is an anxiety about making the wrong choices that are going to set your character on a path that is less than optimal. In Dungeons and Dragons, which we both play, there is a concept called min-maxing, where you try and throw all of your ability points into the thing you know you’re going to be using, and you don’t put any points into the thing you think you won’t be using at all. You don’t have to worry about being really smart if you’re going to be a barbarian. You just have to put everything in strength, all of it, strength.
Min-maxed characters, while efficient and successful in combat, are not always the most interesting characters. There is something interesting about a flawed character who is sort of good at a couple of things but not great at anything.
One of the things that I found with these games is that all of my anxiety early on ultimately didn’t matter, because I would start to play in a way that made me happy. That was the thing. I was like, “Oh, you know what? I actually way prefer shooting arrows than swinging a sword. It’s okay. You know what? I wasted a bunch of time. I wasted 10 levels of throwing stuff into swordplay. I don’t care. Fine. Whatever.”
Life is not efficient. We waste time in our lives trying all sorts of stuff. People go to school, and then they give up on it. People pick up a guitar, and they never learn how to play. That’s our lives. It’s okay. It’s okay. You will find what you really love, and then you start investing in that. By the time you level all the way up into the big boy zones-
**John:** You’ll be fine.
**Craig:** … doesn’t even matter. It doesn’t matter that you wasted a few points early. You’ll max out your archery thing anyway. The game that really blew my mind on that one was Elden Ring.
**John:** Yeah, Elden Ring. We talked about Elden Ring and how maddening that was. The other thing, lesson you could take from this is that, in real life you don’t get to set the difficulty level, or the difficulty level is set for you, based on circumstances in which you’re born. In these games, you could choose that difficulty level. I would say just maybe don’t be so ambitious if you just want to have a good time and have some fun. Maybe leave it at normal rather than going to hard or extreme difficulty. You don’t have to prove it to other people.
**Craig:** That’s right.
**John:** Maybe when you go back and play it again, then you can choose the hard setting.
**Craig:** Absolutely. What do you get out of these games? Where is your enjoyment? Is your enjoyment is mastering combat, then yeah, boost it up. If your enjoyment is in discovering the world and working your way through the narratives, you can go all the way down to story mode, where it’s really hard to die, and you’re really there to just enjoy time. Now, the aforementioned Elden Ring does not give you a choice whatsoever. There is one difficulty, and it is, oh my god, hard.
**John:** Insane.
**Craig:** They provide you with a choice of archetypes in the beginning that you don’t know what they do. They don’t tell you anything, which is horrifying but also exciting.
When I start one of these games, I really try and avoid looking for optimizations. I don’t mind getting some clarity on things like, how the hell does my inventory work, which in Elden Ring was so confusing, or what does this letter mean, like, “Oh, I’ve got a sword, and it’s an S. What does that mean? It’s a B.” I don’t know what these things mean, so I can look that stuff up. In terms of like, here’s how you make the best Elden Ring character, meh.
**John:** Meh.
**Craig:** Meh.
**John:** I will look up online just to get a sense of what the basic play styles are, because I know what I tend to enjoy and what I don’t tend to enjoy. I’ve been going back through and playing some Diablo 3, I guess. There was a witch doctor character class that I’d never really understood before. I was like, “I’ll give it a shot.” Now I actually understand how you do that and how you survive in that. It’s more fun.
**Craig:** One of the things that’s nice about Elder Scrolls is there are multiple storylines that require different skills. You can become a battle champion. You can also become a master thief. You can also become a master magician. You can also become a master assassin, or if you’re like me, all of them. Becoming all of them requires you to balance yourself out in fun ways, where you start to shift how you play and where you put your resources and your points.
I’m talking with my kids about this. When you start these games, you’re so scared. You don’t know what you’re doing. You stink. You have very little health. The world’s incredibly scary and foreign. You don’t know where you are or how to get back to anything. Eventually, you are the master of that world. You are the most powerful, knowledgeable person in that entire world. You just have to remember that you gotta go through some scary, confusing, bewildering, and disorienting times to get to a place where you are the boss.
**John:** Agreed. If I could also make one more plea to the people who are designing these video games, is I know you have crafted these very clever ways of getting people up to speed and how to do things and how combat works and how to build up inventory and stuff like that. You have these introductory things that take your hand and lead you through that. Once we’ve done that once or twice, I don’t want to do that again.
Elder Scrolls, if you want to start a new character, Jesus, you’re looking at just a very long slog of like, okay, now the dragon’s going to attack, and now I have to run through this whole falling down castle. Give me a thing that just lets me pop out and be at the end of that.
**Craig:** One of the things about FromSoftware that makes Elden Ring is they don’t give a sweet damn what you want. In fact, if you want something, they’re not giving it to you. It is a sadism factory. I salute them. The game is beautiful. Such a beautiful game and so frustrating.
**John:** You’re talking Elden Ring. I’m talking Elder Scrolls.
**Craig:** Oh, Elder Scrolls. In Elder Scrolls, yes, there are some very-
**John:** You’re the prisoner and then you’re there. It’s just a long slog. It’s great the first time you’re going through it. It makes you very reluctant to start a new character.
**Craig:** If you could possibly hold down the triangle button to skip all that, that would be great.
**John:** Love it. That’s our advice. More triangle buttons in life and in video games.
**Craig:** Exactly.
**John:** Thanks, Craig.
**Craig:** Thank you, John.
Links:
* [Study: Both Binge, Episodic Release Models Have Their Benefits, but Have to Be Deployed Strategically](https://thestreamable.com/news/study-both-binge-episodic-release-models-have-their-benefits-but-have-to-be-deployed-strategically) by Matt Tamanini
* [Patton Oswalt stands still for an entire scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NA90rOwmkJ4)
* [The Hanson Brothers in Slap Shot](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUbn5ss8j9c)
* [The Center for Transyouth Health and Development](https://www.chla.org/the-center-transyouth-health-and-development)
* [Holedown](https://holedown.com/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Duke ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/599standard.mp3).