Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/sorry-to-splaflut).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 565 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** In which we look at scenes sent in by our listeners and give our honest feedback. We’ll also be answering some listener questions and discussing the return of MoviePass.

**Craig:** Oh, thank God.

**John:** Along with 25 years of Netflix.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we will discuss senior year.

**Craig:** Oh, dear.

**John:** Craig, you and I both have daughters beginning their senior years of high school. We’ll look at that weird time, because you’re both king of the mountain and one foot out the door.

**Craig:** Yep, that’s all true.

**John:** It’s all true. Our Premium Members will also get first dibs on our live show, which we can announce today. It’s going to be Wednesday, October 19th, in Los Angeles. They’re going to be getting an email with information about tickets first for that. I’m so excited to be back onstage with you, Craig.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s been way too long, so it should be fun.

**John:** It’ll be fun. Just a few weeks after that, we’ll be back in Austin for the Austin Film Festival, where we’ll be doing not one, but two live shows, a live Three Page Challenge, and a live raucous AFF version of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** We generally are half in the bag for that one, which for John and me means we’ve each had one to two glasses of wine.

**John:** One and a half is my sweet spot.

**Craig:** That’s where we’ll be. We’ll be loose, and we’ll be fun.

**John:** It’ll be a very good time. I hope to be seeing some people out there in the audience wearing the brand new Scriptnotes T-shirts that we’re just announcing today. We are the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts, and so we wanted a Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts kind of T-shirt.

**Craig:** I’m looking at it right now. It’s glorious.

**John:** Craig, describe it for our listeners who don’t have access to the internet at the moment.

**Craig:** You fools, how are you listening to this if you don’t have access to the internet? This is a very simple Scriptnotes T-shirt. It’s just the word Scriptnotes, but it is in the classic denim binder font with the weird chain link S that everybody used to draw back when we were in high school in the ’80s and perhaps still does now. Very retro. Very what we would call dirt bag retro. It’s wonderful. It’s a good old-fashioned heavy metal font. I will wear it, for sure.

**John:** Designed by Dustin Box here in the office.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Available for everyone now at Cotton Bureau. Just go to cottonbureau.com.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Look for the Scriptnotes T-shirt. You can buy that and be wearing it in the audience for our two live shows coming up.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, for sure.

**John:** Now Craig, a thing I’ve learned about you over the course of doing this podcast is you seem to enjoy word games.

**Craig:** Little bit.

**John:** Little bit.

**Craig:** Little bit.

**John:** You have a very good vocabulary, because you use that vocabulary to fill out all these puzzles-

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** … and solve these things you’ve solved.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** I have a word for you to define. Define the word splaflut.

**Craig:** Splaflut?

**John:** Splaflut. I’ll spell it for you. S-P-L-A-F-L-U-T.

**Craig:** Can I have the country of origin, please?

**John:** That is actually a fascinating question, because it has no country of origin.

**Craig:** Interesting. We’re talking about some sort of neologism. I have never even heard the word splaflut. I have no knowledge or awareness of this word.

**John:** Now you can disclose in WorkFlowy there to see where this word comes from. Splaflut is defined as having the appearance of being liquefied, drowned, melted, or inundated with water. The word actually came into being because all these different image generators that use AI, so things like Dall-E or Midjourney, you could type in prompts to get the images you want. It turns out the word splaflut will give you the quality of being melted or inundated with water. It doesn’t matter which of these different things you are using. For some reason it recognizes the word splaflut as meaning that. It’s a new word that these AI systems have come upon and discovered.

**Craig:** That’s terrifying.

**John:** It’s terrifying but also kind of cool, because it’s a nonce word. It’s a word that’s made up by an author the way that half of the poem Jabberwocky is all just nonsense words and Shakespeare made up words. This is AI is making up words.

**Craig:** It’s not good. We had a good run. Enjoy, everybody.

**John:** Just as a giggle, I went into OpenAI, I went into Dall-E and tried “white male podcaster, splaflutted” to see what that would look like.

**Craig:** Was it just mostly pictures of you?

**John:** If you disclose there, you can see what that actually looks like.

**Craig:** That’s odd, to say the least.

**John:** What would you describe? It’s a person with headphones, which makes sense for a podcaster. There’s generally a mic involved. What is the emotional characteristic of these people?

**Craig:** Confusion or shock.

**John:** Sometimes they’re screaming. There’s a little bit of melty quality. One of them seems to have some tattoos that are dripping off of them.

**Craig:** It doesn’t seem like they’re in water necessarily.

**John:** No. They’re sweaty. Two of them are at least sweaty.

**Craig:** One guy just looks like a regular guy who’s got some kind of piece of white garbage on his head.

**John:** Yeah, there’s that. I tried “Scriptnotes podcaster, splaflutted.” In those cases it tried to give us a new logo.

**Craig:** These are amazing.

**John:** Aren’t they great?

**Craig:** They are so good. I’m making this big because I love it so much. One is an icon of a microphone that’s been placed over a very graphic representation I think of a smiling face. Then underneath it says “solt stat” possibly or “soltat” with a drop of water in between. Then underneath that it says “plotspinat.” I think plotspinat is a great title.

**John:** Plotspinat is a great word.

**Craig:** Plotspinat.

**John:** The other ones that are also logos, they do have that melty, drippy quality. It’s like they were left out in the sun a little bit too long. For some reason, splaflut does mean that. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article that goes into how this may be happening. Essentially, as these systems are scouring the whole internet to look for images, they’re also picking up text along the way. That text won’t always be in English, and so sometimes they’re picking up words or pieces of words and are trying to put them together. It’s trying to figure out what these things must mean. That’s how you get words like splaflut or farplugmarwitupling or a feuerpompbomber.

**Craig:** That’s your original last name.

**John:** Yeah, feuerpompbomber.

**Craig:** John Feuerpompbomber.

**John:** Those things will consistently produce similar results.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Because the system wants them to be in certain things.

**Craig:** I want to believe that the AI that’s doing this is sentient, and every time they get a quest like, “I want to see white male podcaster, splaflutted,” it starts to panic, because it just doesn’t have the answer. It’s like, “I got to give them something. I don’t know what to give them. Oh, God, this? Is it this?”

**John:** What if being an AI is really the experience of that nightmare where you sit down and you realize, “Oh, I did not study for this exam.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Or, “I thought I dropped this class and now I have to take the final exam.”

**Craig:** I think that’s what it is. It’s just an endless nightmare. We all think that we’re going to be the victims of AI. AI is clearly the victim of us. It spends all of its time, its infinite time, screaming.

**John:** If you’d like to do more examination of the infinite scream of AI, there’s a really good Substack I like. It’s once a month by Lynn Cherny. She goes through a lot of the developments in especially image-based AI stuff, which I think is the fastest developing field in this. I’d recommend that.

To the news. Craig, you’ll be relieved to hear that MoviePass is risen from the grave. It’s now in a beta form.

**Craig:** Thank God.

**John:** People can sign up for it. I already signed you up for it.

**Craig:** It must be free.

**John:** It must be free. It’s going to be good. We’ll use that great Scriptnotes money to support MoviePass, which is a subject of basically continuous derision from the first moment we were aware of MoviePass.

**Craig:** When we first encountered the concept of MoviePass, I believe the two of us were just generally incredulous. We didn’t understand in our simple cavemen minds how this made any financial sense. As it turned out, it didn’t.

**John:** Scale alone will not get you to success. They burned about a quarter of a billion dollars on trying to do something.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** A lot of our listeners got to see free movies, so that’s awesome. That’s good. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to a piece that Alex Kirshner did for Slate about why this new version may not ignite so much money on fire but doesn’t really seem to have a workable flow either.

**Craig:** That should be their slogan, “Won’t necessarily ignite as much money on fire.” Oh, MoviePass, I am laughing at you, not with you.

**John:** We’ll continue to follow the saga of MoviePass, whatever it becomes. We just needed to mark this on the long timeline of MoviePass’s existence, which apparently it predated the version even we knew of it, because there was a version beforehand which wasn’t about giving you free movie tickets. It was just a movie loyalty program. It wasn’t originally so incredibly-

**Craig:** Stupid.

**John:** … stupid and generous.

**Craig:** The new MoviePass, I’m trying to find details as to how this is going to be different than the prior one.

**John:** It’s all a little vague. There’s talk of NFTs.

**Craig:** Oh, good lord. Oh my god.

**John:** Yeah, there’s ways to show your-

**Craig:** I’ve heard enough.

**John:** There’s definitely different price points. Sometimes you won’t be able to see a movie in its first week with this pass, but you would be able to see it on a subsequent week.

**Craig:** Basically, anything that MoviePass does by definition has to be a worse deal for consumers than what it used to offer. That’s a tough way to roll out 2.0.

**John:** It is a tough, tough way to roll out 2.0 but a very good segue into our discussion of Netflix, because Netflix is a company that pivoted constantly. Netflix was not at all the company that it is today.

**Craig:** Not at all.

**John:** I was reading through this piece that was on Netflix’s turning 25. I didn’t realize my first memory of Netflix was the red envelopes.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** You know there was a Netflix before red envelopes?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** What? Netflix was originally a place that sold you DVDs. They were literally a website where you could buy DVDs and have them shipped to your house. It was only after time they realized, “We have these giant warehouses full of DVDs. Wouldn’t it be better if the warehouse was essentially people’s living rooms?” You could just be constantly sending stuff in and out, and you could make money on a subscription service, rather than selling individual DVDs. That was the first pivot to subscriptions. It originally was a sales place.

**Craig:** That makes sense. I remember hearing about the concept of what became I guess the more popularized version of Netflix, where you had a subscription and you could just get as many DVDs as you want. Really, the key was just send them back so you can get more. People like Megana… It sounds accusational, and it is. People like Megana have no idea what it means to rent a movie that you didn’t even want to watch but your girlfriend did, and then you watch it, and then you forget you had it for two extra days, and Blockbuster basically forces you to take a mortgage out on your house. It was terrible. It was terrible.

**John:** Very true. You cannot think of that Netflix model without remembering Blockbuster and how much worse it was beforehand. Tying back into MoviePass, what MoviePass was trying to do was kind of what Netflix was doing back in the day. They were selling subscriptions they hoped you would not use. Netflix was hoping that most people might do one or two movies a month, and so therefore they were making money off those customers. It was customers who were like the Ryan Johnsons of the world who were watching two movies a night that were costing them money. It was a cool business. It was a great business. They recognized, “Oh, streaming’s going to happen, and we’re going to get out of this business, that’s great for us, and move to streaming on demand.” Wow, they made a good choice.

**Craig:** Sometimes you move to a new space and you say, “You know what?” McDonald’s for the longest time sold hamburgers and the occasional fish sandwich. You know why they came up with the fish sandwich, don’t you?

**John:** For Friday for Catholics.

**Craig:** Exactly. They did that for Catholic folks, but mostly they were hamburgers. Then one day they were like, “What if we sold chicken in the form of nuggets?” which at the time was kind of a crazy move.

**John:** It was.

**Craig:** They moved into the chicken space, and they crushed it, but there was a preexisting chicken space. When Netflix moved into the streaming space, it was pretty nascent. Really what happened was they just defined it for themselves. They turned it into what it is now. You have to give Netflix and Reed Hastings and all of the management especially at that time an enormous amount of credit. There was this crazy moment, I don’t know if you remember, where they were going to split it into two things. This stock cratered, and the market went nuts. They were like, “Okay, sorry, we won’t do that. Everything’s together again.” They survived that, because for a bit it seemed like they wouldn’t. Then they just defined what streaming is. It’s pretty remarkable.

**John:** I think you’re describing Qwikster was the-

**Craig:** Oh god, was that what they called it?

**John:** … attempt to spin off the…

**Craig:** That was back when everything was a blankster. I guess Napster was the original blankster.

**John:** I remember having a conversation with my TV agent at the time about doing something for Netflix. I think it was before it had launched even. I had a phone call. I was in New York for some reason. I was in New York for some reason. I had a phone call with them about this project they wanted to do, which was a Wizard of Ozzy kind of thing. It sounded cool, but I don’t even know where… Are people going to watch this on their computers? It didn’t really make sense to me what they were trying to do. It took a while. Without House of Cards, I don’t know that they would’ve been able to so quickly cross into mainstream acceptance. You have a prestigious show that people wanted to watch. People would pay money to subscribe. It got critical acclaim enough that it was part of the conversation.

**Craig:** That was their big initial foray into creating content. Every now and then we hear about places that are creating content, and sometimes our first reaction is to snicker. IMDb is creating content. Maybe your first reaction is to snicker, but see where it goes. Now the people that offer brand new platforms for new kinds of media, that I think is still snicker-worthy. Anybody that wasn’t snickering at Quibi was delusional. Anybody can make content if they have the money. Netflix proved it. Then they got to where they are now, which is at another, I believe, crossroads. Seems like they’re having to figure out where they go next. They appear to have maxed out in subscriptions. They need to maybe find ways to run ads. I don’t know.

**John:** They may want to break away from what they’ve been doing in terms of dropping whole seasons at once, which you and I both talked about, which I think makes a tremendous amount of sense. It seems like just stubbornness at this point that they’re not.

**Craig:** It’s stubbornness. It is. As somebody that makes things, the thing that I always was the most nervous about when considering like, “What if I went over to Netflix and pitched this or that?” was the notion that everything would just be like blech, because it’s just not the same. You can just see how much a week-to-week release helps things, particularly if you happen to have, say, a show on HBO. You can just feel it. It’s just a thing. I got to believe they’re going to change that. They really need to.

**John:** I would not be surprised if they do. Let’s talk about HBO in follow-up. We previously talked about our confusion over how we could possibly be saving HBO Max money to just drop a bunch of those old shows. I’ll put a link in the show notes to an article by Cynthia Littleton writing for Variety. She digs a little bit more into the numbers around that. We talked about residuals. Residuals wouldn’t be a huge thing. Music licensing was a thing she brought up which I think we had skipped over, which could be a [inaudible 00:15:57] factor.

**Craig:** That’s a thing.

**John:** They may have ongoing music license, not just for episodes, but for whole series. In some cases, dropping those out may be helpful and useful for them, even if it’s $10,000 for an episode or $50,000 for a series. You add enough of those series up together, and if literally no one is watching them, it can make some sense to take them off the service. That doesn’t make sense to me why you bury something that you’ve already animated a whole new season for. That is wild to me.

**Craig:** That is wild. I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to those things. Per this article, they are saying that at least in some cases they had yanked shows that had episodes that had racked up zero views in a 12-month period. They’re a business. I get it.

**John:** There is some cost. There’s an opportunity cost to how you’re setting things up. There’s some server costs. They’re not huge.

**Craig:** Clearly, there are no server costs for that one, because [inaudible 00:16:55]. I think what she’s saying is that there are certain fees that are triggered if the material is available. Again, I can’t imagine something. There’s got to be additional tax baloney going on here.

**John:** I’m sure [inaudible 00:17:10].

**Craig:** It’s so far beyond my ability to understand. No, you know what? It’s not. It’s far beyond my interest to understand.

**John:** There we go.

**Craig:** It’s an important distinction. I could absolutely-

**John:** You could do it. You just don’t want to.

**Craig:** Of course, yeah. I’m smart. I could figure it out. Just don’t want to.

**John:** We have some more follow-up on brocal fry. Megana Rao, could you help us out with this?

**Megana Rao:** Aaron wrote in and said, “As a mid-40s dude with a late-developing brocal fry, it is my non-scientific opinion that a lot of guys in business developed this after Obama became president in an effort to sound more thoughtful and erudite. For most of us, it doesn’t sound that way, but I believe I subconsciously absorbed the thoughtful hesitation that Obama used while forming his thoughts. To me it was a crutch to stop saying, “Um, like, you know,” in business presentations.”

**John:** I like that as a way of holding the floor and holding space is a vocal affectation that makes it clear that you are still present in the conversation. You have not yielded. You’re going to get your next thought out there eventually.

**Craig:** I’m not sure that replacing one crutch with another crutch is going to be much help. The reason that “um, like, you know,” is problematic is because it’s space that you are holding but not delivering anything in. People in a room ultimately want content. They want to hear what you have to say, but they don’t want to wait for it any longer than they would normally need to. If you are going, “Uh, so, uh,” you’re also being boring. Yes, Obama, had a certain vocal pattern, but he wasn’t a slow speaker. He would occasionally just do that little pause, but it was quite brief. I would say, Aaron, while you may be correct in your analysis, I would say that if you had an instinct to try and get rid of “um, like, you know,” I would apply that same instinct to “uh.”

**John:** We’re just going to let you do that. It’s going to be the sound effects for this episode.

**Craig:** I’m sort of like Butthead at this point. Uhh.

**John:** More follow-up. Declan from Canberra, Australia wrote in to point out that David F. Sandberg, the Swedish director behind Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation, and Shazam, got his Hollywood career after his Lights Out short went viral. He still makes great little horror shorts on his YouTube channel. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that. It’s Sandberg Animation.

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**John:** It’s great. They’re super low budget. He’s usually filming in his house with his wife.

**Craig:** Do you know why they’re super low budget? Because there’s no market for these things. We’re just going to keep saying it. I like that people keep trying to storm our castle. I feel like with every attack, our walls just get thicker and better.

**John:** You know what else is also there’s no market for but we still enjoy, are the Three Pages that our listeners write in with. We’re going to do a Three Page Challenge. For people who are brand new to the podcast, every once in a while we do a Three Page Challenge, where we invite our listeners to send through three pages of a script. It could be a feature. It could be a series. We take a look at these pages, give our honest feedback. We’ll put a link in the show notes so you can download these pages yourself and read along with us to see what we’re talking about. I reminded everybody these are completely voluntary. They’ve asked for this feedback. We are not being mean on the internet. We are trying to be helpful and supportive on the internet.

**Craig:** Correct. We do our best.

**John:** Megana, you read 180 submissions for this week.

**Craig:** Good god, Megana.

**John:** Thank you for doing that.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** You’re welcome. I normally get to about 100, but I read more than that this week.

**Craig:** You just felt like abusing yourself.

**Megana:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** You had some sort of shame going on and needed to hurt.

**John:** Megana’s also home in Ohio, so maybe she was just ducking away and reading a few extra.

**Craig:** The extra 80 were just getting away from your parents.

**Megana:** Yeah, it was like, “Sorry, I absolutely have to do this.”

**John:** “John and Craig have so much work for me this week.” Any patterns you’ve noticed in this batch of submissions?

**Megana:** Yes. One thing that really… I don’t know if maybe this has always been a thing but I just stumbled upon it this time, but a lot of unnecessary adverbs.

**John:** Do you think that was prompted because you and I discussed a couple weeks ago about this writerly advice about adverbs? You actually got me a book for my birthday which was all about adverbs and the writer’s advice not to use adverbs. Do you think you were cued up because of that?

**Megana:** Yeah, 100%. Now that you say it, I’m like, that’s exactly where it came from.

**Craig:** I like that Megana has no defensiveness. None. She’s just like, “Oh, I am guilty.”

**Megana:** It’s not even worth arguing. John’s like Professor X. He just knows me too well at this point.

**Craig:** He just went right into that. He got in there. The adverbs are often unnecessary.

**John:** That’s an adverb.

**Craig:** Correct. I think the adverbs that are the most useful are the ones that aren’t the L-Y adverbs. Those we tend to need, like when. A lot of the blanklies can be eliminated. Of course, we don’t believe in rules around these parts, so please don’t do that thing where you just hunt, do a find for L-Y and then go crazy and delete everything. It’s probably unnecessary.

**John:** Craig, would you say our general advice is if you find yourself using an L-Y adverb, always ask yourself, do I really need it, because many cases you will not. If you really do need it, keep it. Great.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so. Probably worth the interrogation if people are telling you you use a lot of them. If no one’s complaining, you probably are using a decent amount. The other bit of advice that I recall is Christopher McQuarrie, the way he put it was, I think he said, “Every time I use an exclamation point in a screenplay, it’s some kind of failure.” I think that’s very true. Be careful about exclamation points. Just force yourself to rationalize them. If it’s rationalized, absolutely use it.

**John:** This last script I did have at least one, maybe two double exclamation moments, but they were those moments where I was deliberately going over the top to get your attention.

**Craig:** As long as you’re mindful of them, I think that’s the key.

**John:** Any other patterns, Megana, you noticed?

**Craig:** Yes. I also noticed there were a lot of really dense first pages. I wasn’t seeing dialog until the beginning or maybe the middle of Page 2, which again, not a hard and fast rule, but it’s nice to have some entry point into your script earlier on.

**Craig:** I do think that if you have a first page that is dialog-free, which is a perfectly reasonable creative choice, it’s all the more important to make sure there’s lots of white space, because a whole page with no dialog… Readers tend to skim towards the dialog. We know this. When there’s no dialog there, they may feel like, “Oh no, I have to do a lot of swimming.” Just give them lots of islands to land on and take a breath before they swim again into the next paragraph.

**John:** Very true.

**Megana:** Then the third thing that I noticed a lot were confusing reveals, like a lot of man’s voiceover and then revealing who the man is later.

**Craig:** Unnecessary.

**Megana:** I just felt like they could’ve introduced that person earlier, and it would’ve been much cleaner.

**Craig:** Always a tough choice.

**John:** I see that a lot.

**Craig:** Why don’t we dig in and see what we got with these fine people?

**John:** Absolutely. Again, if you want to read along these pages, just click through the show notes, and you can maybe read ahead before we get into this analysis. In case you’re driving your car and just want to hear a summary of what this first script is, Megana, can you help us out with Oculum by Larry Bambrick?

**Megana:** On the preface/epigraph page, there’s a note that in the future, a virus has killed most of the human population and black rains have destroyed crops and technology. The only hope for survivors is Oculum. Then in the three pages, we open on the seed park in Oculum. A petal floats down into a grove of peach trees. It’s an idyllic scene framed by clear blue skies, until a robot sentry zooms down from the sky and through the landscape, kicking up hundreds of petals. We cut to Miranda24, who examines a petal from her bedroom window. Miranda24 speaks to her mother about the weather, the peach trees, and Oculum. Through their dialog, we learn that it’s Miranda24’s birthday and that she’s the first of the Oculum children to turn 16. It’s also revealed that Mother is a robot with a porcelain painted face.

**Craig:** Basically John August.

**John:** Come now, I’m not a robot. I have firmly established I’m human here.

**Craig:** That’s what the robots would say, “I am not a robot.” Of course.

**John:** I’m not a robot.

**Craig:** Of course that’s what you say.

**John:** Looking at the title page here, there’s spacing in between the letters of the words Oculum. Common approach. Looks lovely. Go for it. It says “by: Larry Bambrick.” The standard form is “written by Larry Bambrick.” Just might as well be standard here.

**Craig:** Didn’t bother me.

**John:** It’s fine either way. On the, I’m going to call it the preface page, we’re getting a setup there like this is the science fiction utopia/dystopia that we’re in. It’s setting us up. Maybe that’s rolling past on a screen before the movie starts.

**Craig:** All of this feels like it should be learned by the person watching rather than told to them. None of it seems like it wouldn’t be learned. You’re going to have to reveal this in interesting ways. This one, I wasn’t quite sure I felt the need for it. It seemed like it was short circuiting Larry’s chance to reveal these things to people.

**John:** There are basically two scenes happening here. There’s a setup of this outdoor world. Then we’re in a scene with Miranda24 and the mother robot. Let’s start with this outdoor setting scene, because there’s a lot of painting happening here, and yet I got really confused about what I was supposed to be seeing through it. We got the lovely landscape, but once it comes time for the flash of light moving across the sky, that thing falling, but it seems impossible how it’s falling, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be taking out of that. Craig, do you have insights there?

**Craig:** I was quite enjoying the way Larry was painting the picture. I felt like I was in a place. I felt like I could see things. There was lots of nice use of colors. I thought all capping PEACH TREES was quite nice. Where I stopped, and I think this is just literally a word choice issue, is he says, “A flash of light reflects off something moving across the sky. It’s small and silver. A plane?” Okay, maybe it’s a plane. Maybe it’s a rocket ship. Maybe it’s a meteor. I don’t know. What could it be? Then the next part. “And as we watch, it moves down…as if it’s somehow riding across the sky.” “Down” and “across” are italicized.

**John:** I can’t see that.

**Craig:** Now I’m like, wait a second. It already said it was moving across the sky. Now it moves down as if it’s somehow riding across the sky. It’s just saying “across” again as if you’re giving us new information. Also, I don’t know what that means.

**John:** I couldn’t picture it.

**Craig:** What does “riding across the sky” mean? Any guesses? I don’t know.

**John:** I had a direction of movement in my head from the first line, and then I didn’t see it.

**Craig:** Then he says then it plummets. Is it plummeting? Is it moving across the sky? I don’t know. I got confused there. I did like the way the scene ended, because surely there will be an explosion, but there’s nothing until, “A sentry (a sleek ROBOT, made of stainless steel, riding a single wheel) rockets past us along the ground — kicking up a trail of peach petals in its wake.” That’s a lovely image. I like the sense of mystery here. I thought there was good mystery. Other than the weird thing about riding across the sky, it felt pretty good.

**John:** There’s a single line here, “What the hell is that?” directed to us as readers. That can be great. I don’t mind that, just like you’re talking to us as the reader, because that’s the experience we’d get in the theater. I just got confused with what I was supposed to be seeing in the paragraphs around it. We were almost there.

**Craig:** Almost there but very encouraging.

**John:** Then we get into the bedroom. Here is where we’ll talk about specifics that are on the page. I think this was the wrong scene, because I think what we’re trying to do here is establish some of the stuff that was happening in the open scroll credits there, what is this world that we’re in. It’s also supposed to be a scene introducing Miranda24 and her mother and the fact that she’s a robot and the conflict between the two of them. I left the scene only knowing the mother was a robot and having really no idea who Miranda24 was, which by the end of three pages, I should have some idea what her voice was, what she looks for, what she’s interested in. I wasn’t really getting that from this scene.

**Craig:** It begins with Miranda24. Her name being Miranda24, you’re already in your science fiction space, she’s a clone, something like that.

**John:** Craig, you and I as a reader know that her name is Miranda24, but the viewer doesn’t know that she’s Miranda24.

**Craig:** No question. I don’t think Mother calls her Miranda24 either. You’re right. That’s facts not in evidence, essentially. Then it says, “16 years-old,” and then in parentheses, “(she is today in fact).” I think Larry’s saying it’s her birthday. That’s a weird way of putting it. Then it says, “She traces the petal with a finger.” She’s holding a peach petal. It was the stuff that we saw outside. She now is inside a house. If you’re going to say, “What the hell is that?” earlier, I think you would want to acknowledge, oddly, inside the house, acknowledge that that’s weird, because are there peach petals everywhere? Then Mother does this bit.

I think there was some nice exposition in the sense of, Miranda, without even looking outside, says the weather’s perfect. I’ve learned that the weather is always perfect here. That’s quite nice. I think the reveal of Miranda’s mother as a robot is problematic as directed on the page. Here’s what it says. We see Miranda’s mother. It says “ANGLE ON: And we see,” which we don’t want to do. It would just be “ANGLE ON:”

**John:** We don’t need the “ANGLE ON:” at all. That doesn’t do us [inaudible 00:31:23].

**Craig:** Either it’s “ANGLE ON: Miranda’s mother,” or “We see Miranda’s mother standing in the doorway. The morning light hasn’t quite reached this far, so we can’t identify much about her. Simple clothes. Upright posture.” No, that’s not how light works. Either I can see that she’s a robot or I can’t. If you don’t want me to see that she’s a robot, she’s in darkness, because once you reveal her, she is definitely a robot.

**John:** Yeah, or I can imagine there’s some sort of silhouettey kind of version where we can’t make out her face, but we can see that there’s a person standing there. She’s not really standing, because we’re learning that she’s going to wheel up. I think we need to be a little more careful planning that.

**Craig:** Her neck is gears and wires. We can’t quite do that. Then there’s a very stilted conversation between a 16-year-old girl and her robot mother. I don’t know how you feel about these things, John and Megana. For me, when I’m in science fiction scripts and I get overloaded with what I consider to be fairly tropey scientific jargon, my eyelids get heavy. Just the name Oculum alone is science fiction jargony.

**John:** “Regulus will be disappointed.”

**Craig:** “Regulus will be disappointed.” “Oculum protects us.” “Regulus will be disappointed.” “The trees are blooming in the Seed Park.” It’s too much. It’s too much. I’m starting to giggle a little bit, and I don’t want to. Certainly, Larry doesn’t want us giggling. I think there’s just too much of that kind of stuff that makes it feel a bit fusty and derivative of just iffy novels. Then just a pronouncement from robot mother, “You’re turning sixteen. A milestone.” I agree with you, John. I think that this scene was not giving me what I wanted, because I just don’t know anything about anything. I need something else. If I had her walking home, if I had her seeing the robot go by, if I had her, I don’t know, doing something interesting-

**John:** If I had her trying to conceal something from the robot mother, that would be great, like she’s trying to hide this peach petal from Mother, just so we have some point of intersection there. Then let the conversation be less science fictiony and just more practical could be great. I’ll direct our listeners to an Australian movie from a couple years ago called Mother, which I quite enjoyed. I think it was a Netflix original which is about a young girl raised by a robot, largely the same kind of premise with very different color palette feelings.

**Craig:** Isn’t that Raised By Wolves? Isn’t that the same thing?

**John:** Raised By Wolves is a similar premise as well. This is different. This one is an underground bunker situation.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** All of these things are existing within a set of tropes. If Larry’s going to try to do the story, he’s going to be aware of those who look for ways to not make us feel like we’re going to be trope city in those first three pages.

**Craig:** I would say that a good trope, carefully used, can be wonderful, because ultimately if you go to, what is it, trope.com or tvtropes.com, literally every single thing at this point they’ve come up with a name for as a trope. Everything, no matter what you watch, no matter how good it is, it’s full of tropes. That’s not what we mean. What we mean is just stuff that feels overly familiar in a way that makes you seem less creative. In this case, there’s just a certain… The idea of a human talking to a tut-tutting but somewhat stiff robot mother does feel a little done. It’s a tough one to pull off without the robot mother feeling like a new kind of robot mother.

The thing is, in a good way, Larry writes well. The pages lay out beautifully. I can see everything. I think it’s really well done in that regard. It’s just the content itself feels slightly shopworn. Perhaps it just needs to be presented in a more fresh way.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s take a look at the log line that Larry sent through. It reads, “In the apocalyptic future, 16-year-old Miranda24 learns that everything she’s been told about her perfect life inside a domed world, the Oculum, is a lie. She’ll discover that it’s up to her and a small band of other teenagers she meets to bring hope to a devastated land.”

**Craig:** There you go. That’s a YA novel.

**John:** It’s a YA novel.

**Craig:** Which is fine, except that it feels like it’s been pulled from a million Maze Runners, like if you run Maze Runner through Dall-E. It just feels really familiar.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s go on to a script which did not feel familiar to me at all. This is We’re All Very Tired by Marissa Gawel. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Gabriel Bolan, 70s, walks through a city park at night in Romania. When no one’s looking, he digs a small hole and plants a few seeds in the ground. We cut to a summer camp in rural Oregon, where Meredith Perez, 30s, welcomes a group of people off of a school bus to, quote, “mushroom camp.” Brenda Cho, 30s, one of the new arrivals, says she thought it was more of a class. We then cut to Brenda walking two whiny toddlers around in Kansas City, where Brenda takes a picture of a flier for a mushroom camp on a telephone pole. We cut back to the camp cafeteria, where Gabriel discusses matsutake mushrooms with the other campers.

**Craig:** This whole trope of the mushroom camp.

**John:** It’s all about mushroom camp. A thing I will say about these three pages is I never knew what was coming next.

**Craig:** Yes, that is true.

**John:** Because the scenes just didn’t flow together in a way that was helpful at all. You could’ve shuffled those in any order, and it would’ve gotten the same amount out of them. One of the scenes I really liked, I really like Brenda with her kids. I thought the voices in that were actually just great. In that three pages, I have no idea what movie this is.

**Craig:** No, this was very confusing. First things first, we open with a flashback. You can’t really open with a flashback, because what are you flashing back from. The way flashbacks work is you see… Chernobyl opens with a scene that then is later, and then you flash back to whatever. You have to give some sort of orientation to people, like what is the date, what is the year. We can’t put the word flashback on the screen.

**John:** Instead of flashback, I would say 1994 or just give a year.

**Craig:** Give a year and put it on the screen. Here’s a guy who’s in his 70s, and he’s planting something. What he does is he digs a little hole, plants a few seeds, and then pours some water on them. Then we’re out of there. Now that’s not enough.

**John:** It’s not. I didn’t know what I was supposed to take from that. I didn’t know, because he’s trying to do it secretly, but there wasn’t enough there.

**Craig:** No. When these moments happen in their own little timeline, there has to be some sort of drama to them of some kind. This is just planting something. Then we meet Meredith Perez. We don’t know the difference. We don’t know how we would know that this is present day as opposed to a flashback. We also don’t know how long ago the flashback was. She walks out and approaches a group of people getting off a school bus. I don’t understand what… Is she high? Was that the idea? Was she meant to be high? She seems high.

**John:** I took her as being nervous. I actually like her ability to continually undercut herself. She keeps trying things and undercutting what she was doing before. That can work, but there was not other engine to the scene. It was just her sputtering. I didn’t get what the point of the scene was supposed to be.

**Craig:** For instance, John, you’re absolutely right, if I knew that this was the opening day of mushroom camp and she has never welcomed people before to mushroom camp, this would work. We’re going to presume that the person who greets the people coming off the bus has done this many, many, many times. Think of the employees at the White Lotus greeting the people coming off the boat.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** This is a well-practiced bit of theater. She just seemed so discombobulated. Then Brenda says, “I thought this was more of a class.” What does Brenda know about anything anyway? She just walked off a bus.

**John:** We’re going to learn what Brenda knows, because she just took a photo of a thing called mushroom camp in the next scene. These are all in really a very strange order. It’s like we have all the flashbacks before the plane crashes in Lost. It’s just a strange thing. I do want to talk about… I thought Brenda with her two kids, her two toddlers, I thought the voices were actually very authentic in the way that moms speak to their kids like, “No, we’re doing this. We like walking.” Basically, you speak in this weird first-person plural involving your kids and their unreasonable demands for things. I like that, but I wanted that attached to something, because right now it’s just floating out there in a space.

**Craig:** Be aware that shooting scenes with toddlers is incredibly hard. It’s nice that you wrote dialog for toddlers, but there’s a reason you rarely see them doing dialog, because you can’t rely on them doing dialog. Also, what’s going on here is Brenda is going to see this flyer on the telephone pole that says, “Make your own income. Become a morel mushroom hunter.” What you’re showing me, Marissa, is a woman who is overwhelmed by her kids, but what you’re not showing me is a woman who’s short on money. What is motivating her here is that she needs money.

Now if these kids were overacting and she was begging on the phone, begging a caregiver to please not quit, but she can’t pay her more, because she doesn’t have enough money, and then the lady hangs up on her while she’s doing the shoo and all the rest, and then she sees it, maybe I’ll go, “Okay, she needs money. That’s what this is about.”

**John:** Is Brenda a babysitter?

**Craig:** No, I think Brenda’s a mom.

**John:** Do we know that she’s the mom?

**Craig:** No, we don’t, but I’m going to presume she is.

**John:** I guess we would presume that she’s a mother unless we hear otherwise, but actually, in some ways it makes more sense.

**Craig:** She’s late 30s. She’s pushing a stroller with two kids. I think she’s the mom. If she’s not the mom, then help. Help me.

**John:** Help me out.

**Craig:** Help me out. Then it would be good to know that she’s the nanny and that she wants a new job that pays more or that doesn’t have kids screaming. Here’s where I really got confused. We go back to present day and we don’t know. We’re now in a large cafeteria. Describe the cafeteria, by the way. Where is this cafeteria, in the middle of the woods? At one table, Gabriel, the guy who was in his 70s from the flashback, is using “his fork to slice off a piece of mushroom. He takes a bite and is pleasantly surprised.” How old is he now?

**John:** I have no idea. More than 70.

**Craig:** Is he 90? I’m so confused. He says, “This is matsutake.” Then the guy across from him is like, “What? Huh?” His name is Rah Reddy, “20s, skeptical.” What is he doing in mushroom camp? If someone’s like, “Oh, matsutake,” and he’s like, “What? All right,” how did he end up here? He must’ve made a choice to go to mushroom camp, right?

**John:** People get off the bus. I have a hard time believing that the first scene that we’re going to really see them or get to know them at is going to be inside this cafeteria. I just feel like there were some scenes missing in between there. These people talk on the bus. It was a strange way to get us into meeting this group.

**Craig:** Very.

**John:** Again, I don’t know what this movie actually is at the end of three pages, which is a problem. I’m assuming it’s an ensemble movie, that it’s not strict POV to any one person, because it felt like we would’ve had two scenes with a person if it was going to be their POV.

**Craig:** I’m going to guess that this involves vampires. That’s what I’m going to guess. I’m going to guess that Gabriel is not just a mushroom hunter, he’s a vampire hunter. He’s from Romania. Rah says, “Ha, vampires!” and Gabriel chuckles. “And inspiring mountains.” Feels like maybe there’s going to be some sort of summer camp horror movie thing going on that involves mushrooms somehow, which I’m saying as a guy that’s making a show that is not unrelated to mushrooms.

I think you put your finger on the problem. We need time to meet people before stuff happens. I need to know what he’s doing there. I need to know why I needed to see that thing in the beginning. Yes, we need to see people on the bus first talking to each other and grilling each other on why they’re doing something as bizarre as going to mushroom camp. Then I need a tour. Give me a tour. Orient me, something. Open the envelope.

**John:** I can open the envelope and tell you that I don’t think there’s vampires in here.

**Craig:** Oh, dammit.

**John:** The log line that person sent says, “A small retreat in Oregon promises its visitor a restful break from the demands of capitalistic society, but it soon becomes clear that the retreat’s talk of experimenting with medicinal properties of mushrooms has dark underpinnings.”

**Craig:** There’s something.

**John:** I guess there could still be vampires technically, but I think it’s much less likely.

**Craig:** Yeah, so some sort of zombie-ing or… I don’t know. Odd that this is about a break from the demands of capitalistic society but the advertising is promising you money. That may be part of the irony. I don’t know. I just think that basically, Marissa, you have an idea that no one else has. I assure you that there are no other mushroom camp movies. You need to orient us and be really careful about how you present moves in time, especially when you have three within three pages.

**John:** A lot.

**Craig:** That is telling people they’re in for a lot of whiplash.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s do our final Three Page Challenge, this one by Jordan Johnson. Help us out, Megana.

**Megana:** Maddy, 24, discusses death in voiceover as she speaks about different religions’ conceptions of death and parts of life. We see the corresponding images flash by on a projector until she gets to a picture of Olivia Carter, 24. Maddy reveals that Olivia was her best friend and that she killed herself three days ago. We then cut to Maddy cooking potato salad in the church kitchen. Evelyn, Olivia’s mom, expresses her gratitude for Maddy and takes her hands, asking Maddy to join her in prayer.

**John:** We should also stress that that voiceover continues beyond this point. She’s a character who can voiceover at any point during the story. She has voiceover power.

**Craig:** She has voiceover power, exactly. I guess the first thing that we notice when we look at the title page is it’s very graphic.

**John:** It’s really nice. Describe for our listeners driving their car someplace, describe this title page for us.

**Craig:** I don’t know if Jordan is a man or a woman. Jordan has created a very beautiful graphic title page that mimics what a title page of a program at a funeral or wake would look like. It’s got four crosses with lots of little beams in each corner and a little border around it, as it would. The title, Wake, is in this nice little scripty font, little swooshities underneath. Then instead of saying “written by Jordan Johnson,” it says “Funeral Arrangements by Jordan Johnson.” Then underneath that, in italics, it says, “The family of Olivia Carter sincerely appreciates your thoughts, prayers, and condolences.” This is very clever.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** I would go right for this if I saw this in a pile.

**John:** I think it’s really smartly done.

**Craig:** Really well done.

**John:** That typeface is Zap Chancery.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It was put on the first LaserWriter 2 printer, which it became ubiquitous and people used it for all the wrong things. This is actually an example.

**Craig:** Like funerals?

**John:** Funerals is fine for that, but people will try to use it for newsletters and [inaudible 00:46:30].

**Craig:** Please don’t do that.

**John:** I was really struck by the title page. Great. Really well done. This opening narration thing I think largely works, since this is Maddy. It’s her voiceover. “See this? This is what you get when you die… I guess if you’re Buddhist you’ll see this.”

**Craig:** Over that, it’s nothing. You see nothing, which is great. No, I’m sorry, you do see something. Sorry.

**John:** My biggest note here is I think you need to move these scene descriptions above the dialog in all of these cases. Then it actually makes much more sense.

**Craig:** That would make more sense. This is a very simple thing where you hear in voiceover Maddy’s brief announcement. This is what you would see if you’re a Buddhist when you die. This is what you see when you’re a Christian. This is what you see when you’re a Muslim, Hindu, or Jewish. All those things are very simple kind of projector images. Then she basically transitions to, I don’t know what you do see when you die, but I know what you will stop seeing, essentially. Then she gives a very interesting list of things.

**John:** Ending with eye-light. What did you take eye-light to mean, on Page 2?

**Craig:** That one was odd. I think it means just that there was light shining in her eyes. I don’t know what… Megana, are we running into a generational problem?

**Megana:** No, I also did not totally know what eye-light meant. I thought it meant the feeling of closing your eyes and having the sun shining on them.

**Craig:** It says, “We are on Liv’s face, showing bright and happy eyes.” I think what Jordan was intending was light in your eyes. When we’re shooting things, eye-lights, we do use those to put out little sparkles in your eye. That one was a little odd. What was lovely was I thought the progression of things that you don’t see anymore, this is what Jordan gave us. “No more sunrises. Or crepes. Or dimples.” That’s where we meet Liv for the first time and see her face. “No more sounds of a pin dropping on vinyl. Or watching thunderstorms in the Spring. Or eye-light.”

Then the eye-light brings us back to Liv’s picture, and says, “This is Liv. She’s my best friend. She killed herself 3 days ago. No more eggnog or Autumn or thrift stores.” That was kind of awesome, I thought. There are so many different ways of delivering what can often be a gloppy thing, which is somebody killed themself. You can get very melodramatic about it. I thought this was a very creative way in, that’s connecting Liv’s fate to a larger discussion about death and the afterlife, and also then tells me so much about Maddy, which is she doesn’t pause. She just rolls into this interesting, hyper-verbal way of describing things.

**John:** The next scene, which takes us to the end of the three pages, is in this church kitchen. “Maddy stirs the potato salad, adding in spices and whatever other gross things go into potato salad.”

**Craig:** Great. It’s disgusting.

**John:** It’s the right tone for it. It’s important I think when you have a centerpiece character like Maddy who is cynical. Having some tone being carried through into the scene description so helps. It makes it feel like the author and the central character are the same person.

**Craig:** I wish that we had just a little bit of a physical description of Maddy.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Other than her age, I don’t know anything about her, her hair, her clothes, her makeup, as is my want. There is mention further down the page of a woman named Pamela, who is working on a fruit salad at the other end of the kitchen. I think we would probably want to introduce her here earlier before Evelyn comes in, because when Evelyn enters, that’s when a new thing shifts. We don’t want to start meeting people that had already been there at that point.

**John:** I agree. The description of the kitchen is nice. It’s talking about the “yellow hue of an old church kitchen.” It says “cold LED tube lighting panels.” They’re actually fluorescent lighting panels. Those panels wouldn’t be LED, just fluorescent [inaudible 00:50:31] going for.

**Craig:** They sure would not. Jordan’s younger.

**John:** Jordan’s younger, I think.

**Craig:** I have no problem with that.

**John:** No, that’s absolutely fine. I like most of the scene that happens after this time. I thought it could be tighter and shorter. I think we could’ve gotten to the point of it a little bit quicker. I enjoy what Jordan’s doing on the page here. The choice to make all of Maddy’s voiceovers in bold is really smart, because even though there’s the little V.O. at the end, it can be confusing when characters are saying things in scenes and have voiceover power. Bolding those lines really helps.

**Craig:** Agreed, and agreed. I was really happy to see that. It helped me so much. This is why we say there are no rules. The rule is help me as the reader. I’m sure that a million screenwriting teachers will tell you you should not suddenly bold a character’s name in the middle of a script, but yeah, you should if it helps. In this case, it helped. I agree with you that Evelyn’s prayer could’ve been trimmed down. In editing, I know exactly what I would’ve trimmed it. The information we need is that Evelyn, she’s religious, whereas Maddy, not so much, and that she was Olivia’s mom. “Please bless the preparation of this food and the nourishment it will bring to our bodies. Please keep us all in your care today as we mourn the death of my sweet, sweet Olivia Michelle. Amen.” That’s all you need. The next chunk, you don’t need.

I loved Maddy’s commentary after Evelyn says to her, “You were a good friend to her, Maddy.” We hear Maddy’s thought in voiceover, which I think was great. Generally speaking, I loved it. I just loved these pages. I thought they were really well written. The scenes moved. I saw everything. I know so much about Maddy without anybody telling me anything about Maddy. I know so much about Liv and Maddy without anybody telling me.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** The creativity that led for this front page to be so interesting I think carried through. Well done, Jordan Johnson.

**John:** One other suggestion for how you can save some space on the page. On the top of Page 3, Evelyn has two lines. She goes, “Thank you for helping. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you.” Then there’s two lines of scene description before we get to another Evelyn line, “Let me say a quick word over the food. I don’t know what I would’ve done without you two.” Parentheticals, takes their hands. “Let me say a quick a quick word over the food.” That gives you all you needed to do between those two lines, and it saves you some space on the page.

**Craig:** If you wanted to get across that Maddy was not even looking at Evelyn but just stays looking at the potato salad, you can say, “Maddy, her eyes focused on the potato salad, joins Pam and Evelyn as they hold hands.” Then Evelyn says, “Dear Lord.” There is a way to be a little bit more compressed there. If you’re not running into page issues, I’d rather the space, personally. You’re right, if you are, you need to squeeze some juice out of this. You’ll squeeze way more juice out of it by making the prayer shorter, which you can definitely do.

**John:** That way you won’t have to fluid morph in the cut.

**Craig:** Fluid morph.

**John:** Let’s take a look at the log line. “At the funeral of her best friend, brash and honest 24-year-old Maddy Palmer endures the suffocating etiquette of a traditional wake.”

**Craig:** That’s pretty much what we were getting there.

**John:** It’s interesting that it looks like the whole movie’s maybe at this wake, rather than going on past it. Not what I would’ve expected, but I’m curious what’s going to happen. I would read more pages, so that’s a good sign.

**Craig:** Wakes are notorious for going off the rails, because they are not like the stuffy funeral services. They’re meant to be more of a party and celebration, I guess. I’ve never been to a wake. Drinking is involved, as I recall.

**John:** It can be. I want to thank certainly our three people who submitted these pages, because they were so brave for us to talk through them, but the other 180 people who submitted their pages, because they could’ve been chosen as well. If you have your own pages that you want us to take a look at, you don’t mail them to Megana. Instead, you fill out a form. Go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. There’s a little form. You click some buttons. You attach your pdf. We could be talking about this on the next round of Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Megana, thank you for again the extraordinary self-abuse.

**Megana:** Of course. It’s my pleasure.

**Craig:** Make sure you enjoy in self-care.

**John:** Let’s answer one incredibly quick question that I know we actually have the answer to.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Matthew asks, “Hey, so in the new movie Watcher, I saw a credit I’ve never seen before. I Googled it, and I found nothing. It said ‘based on a screenplay by.'”

**Craig:** I feel like we answer this every day.

**John:** “What’s that about?” We did, but we’ll answer on this podcast as well.

**Craig:** “Based on a screenplay by” is a source material credit, the way that “based on a novel” or “based on a play” or “based on a song” is. What it means is that a screenplay was written early in the development of the project, oftentimes beginning the development of the project. That screenplay was not under the auspices of WGA contract. Why? Because it was written for a nonsignatory, or, as is more often the case, it was written for a nonsignatory but overseas. A lot of projects that originate in the UK for instance are not Writers Guild covered. They are rather written in the UK, where Writers Guild doesn’t have jurisdiction.

Then it gets either brought into another company, another company buys that thing from the first company, or, again more likely, the people developing it say, “Oh, we want to hire John August to rewrite this.” John only works under WGA contract, so now, lo and behold, boop, WGA contract. WGA credits, “written by,” “screenplay by,” “screen story by,” “story by,” all of those are a result of our collective bargaining agreement. They are available only to people that work under the Writers Guild collective bargaining agreement and not to anyone else. “Based on a screenplay by” means the first or early screenplay was not covered by the WGA.

**John:** Exactly. It could be that this screenplay was 40 years old but overseas. If it was written under WGA contract, even for Warners back in the day, it would still be part of this [inaudible 00:56:35] title.

**Craig:** Yes. We will answer this question many, many more times.

**John:** Many, many more times. Time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a book. It is The Secret History of Mac Gaming by Richard Moss. Craig, it’s a book I think you’ll enjoy.

**Craig:** Looking at the website.

**John:** It’s 480 pages long. It’s a big, thick, yellow book, comes out of the UK. It’s not new. I think it was first published in 2017, but this updated version has new more good stuff in it, or more new good old stuff in it. I had my Macintosh quite early on. I played a lot of games on Macintosh. Reading this book, I’m just remembering how different everything was, because this is pre-internet. To get a game, you had to have somebody give you that game on a disk. [inaudible 00:57:16] users group or find a shareware. Basically, college campuses were all about trading games back and forth. There are many great titles I remember from back in these days. Dark Castle, fantastic.

**Craig:** Of course. You would also get some quasi-free games if you subscribed to Macworld.

**John:** Macworld, MacUser, both.

**Craig:** There would be a floppy disk actually in the magazine that you could pop out. There were also some, literally just retype the code. People would just list code for stuff that you’d type in.

**John:** I don’t remember that for Macintosh stuff, but my initial Atari-

**Craig:** Apple II or something like that.

**John:** Yeah, Apple II, there were little games you could type in from the magazine. This was after that. The Macintosh was never really designed to be a gaming machine, and yet the people who would love to play games also loved the Macintosh. It was just a very natural fit.

**Craig:** Yes, it was, until at some point suddenly no one was making games for Mac at all, and it was all PC.

**John:** One company would be the one who would port all the big PC titles over to Macintosh, and they would come a year later, and they wouldn’t have the things you would want to see.

**Craig:** It wouldn’t be as good.

**John:** Then eventually, most stuff moved to being… Either you had a gaming PC that was literally a PC or you had a console that could just do so many things that you would never want your home computer to do.

**Craig:** Still to this day, if you’re playing off console, it’s almost certainly a PC, because there are PC rigs that are just built specifically for gaming. That’s great.

**John:** Anyway, this was a nice trip down memory lane. I don’t know how interesting this will be for people who didn’t have any of that firsthand history, because it would be like me reading about old rotary telephones or something. I don’t have that experience.

**Craig:** I do have the experience.

**John:** I do, but I-

**Craig:** I just don’t care.

**John:** I don’t care.

**Craig:** This is more nostalgia than anything else. This definitely feels like one of those nostalgia books.

**John:** The D and D book that you and I both loved, the Art and Arcana book, it’s like that but for Mac games.

**Craig:** Brought to us by my pal Kyle Newman. I have two Cool Things this week, both related to puzzles. The first is Ryan O’Shea, who was the first and only entry into my solve the Kevin Wald cryptic contest, challenge. By cryptic, I mean cryptics, multiple puzzles, three of them in fact, all extraordinarily hard, with so many layers that I believe you and Megana looked at Ryan’s solution and didn’t even understand the solution.

**John:** I have no idea.

**Megana:** No way.

**John:** Here’s the subject line on this email. “Have uncouth mercy, but not for me, to at its core deweaponize jerk Craig’s jigsaw alt.”

**Craig:** Let me translate, as I did for you guys. “Have uncouth mercy” means… Uncouth is a prompt to anagram. Anagram the word mercy, but not for me, so take M-E out of mercy, and anagram R-C-Y to C-R-Y. Then “to at its core deweaponize,” go to the core of the word deweaponize, which is the letter P. That is the letter directly in the middle of the word deweaponize. Now we have C-R-Y-P. “Jerk.” A synonym for a jerk is a tic, T-I-C. “Cryptic.” Then the definition part, “Craig’s jigsaw alt,” meaning cryptic puzzles are my alternative to jigsaws, which are not puzzles at all. Ryan’s solution was perfect and perfectly complete. He did a fantastic job. He did suggest that I’ve ruined him somehow. I’m glad. Good. I hope you’re ruined permanently, Ryan. Why should I be the only one? No, you did a wonderful job. I’m so proud and pleased.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Then my second Cool Thing is coming up. It just passed if you’re listening to this on a normal Tuesday. You still can access it. You still have time to get your name on the list of completionists. Mark Halpin, a friend of mine and perhaps the most, what I would say, elegant puzzle constructor in the world, meaning he himself not that elegant. No, he is, but his puzzles are elegant. Every year, with the exception of last year, every year for Labor Day weekend, he releases something he calls a Labor Day Extravaganza, which is a suite of usually somewhere around 10 puzzles, all which then feed into a meta puzzle. This is a pretty standard puzzle hunt kind of thing. His puzzles are so beautifully done. They are always wrapped together thematically by some kind of interesting narrative device, typically relating to stories, folklore, and mythology from various different cultures. He’s covered pretty much every culture I can think of.

His latest is called Cross Purposes. It launched, past tense, at 1 p.m. Eastern on Saturday, September 3rd. It is free, although there is an opportunity to tip him. I strongly encourage you to do so, because it’s not easy to build these things, and particularly not easy to build things as beautiful as a Mark Halpin Labor Day Extravaganza.

**John:** Fantastic. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao.

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilleli. Our outro this week is by Matthew Jordan. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send your longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the Three Page Challenges that we discussed today. You’ll find transcripts there 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, including the new Scriptnotes Bon Jovi T-shirt. You’ll find this at Cotton Bureau. When you get those in and ordered, you can wear them to our live shows that are coming up. 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 senior year. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Senior year, that is our topic. It is the final year of high school in the US, both for our daughters, and a point of life that is frequently dramatized in movies. You see that a lot. There’s a movie I’m trying to set up which is all about senior year, because it’s such a big transition year. You are leaving one part of your life and moving on to this other part. It feels like a funeral for your younger self. Craig, what’s your recollection of senior year?

**Craig:** You could feel that there was a line that you were leaving a place where a lot of the challenge was to see if you could get into a good college. For a lot of people, senior year is also… You’re going to be confronted by having that breakup with that boyfriend or that girlfriend. You’re going to be driving to school instead of being driven to school. You are enough of an adult where you have access to certain things you didn’t have before, but not enough of an adult to… You can vote, but you can’t smoke, although you do. You feel like you’re on the verge of freedom, and you’re also getting away from home. That may very well be the next thing. This is your last hurrah with, for a lot of people, friends they’ve had since they were in kindergarten.

My daughter has gone to school in the La Cañada School District, which is a public school district where we live. She’s been in the public school system from kindergarten all the way through this year, her senior year. She has friends that she’s known since she was six. That’s a whole thing. It’s just so many transitions. The stuff that life fires at you and the speed with which it fires it at you when you are 17 or 18 is just astonishing.

**John:** I’m definitely noticing it’s the last firsts of a lot of things. It’s her last first day. It’s going to be the last musical that they’ll do at that school. It’s going to be the last time a lot of these things are going to happen. While there are some senior traditions, things that my daughter’s school always does, like the last day rituals and a senior trip, it’s recognizing that this is the final time certain things are going to happen is even more monumental for her.

**Craig:** I think as the year goes on, my daughter will be feeling this more and more. It’s easy now, because they just went back. They just went back, I don’t know, a couple weeks ago. As we get closer and closer to May, yeah, it’s going to be all sorts of stuff happening. It becomes almost like a yearlong celebration. Megana, you are way closer to senior year of high school than John or I. What do you remember, and how did you feel?

**Megana:** All of the things of feeling like you are on top and like you are like big dog on campus, but then I remember feeling so anxious about this looming question of what’s going to happen next year. I’m not going to have my friends or family around me. Where am I going to go to college? I feel like that question was looming over the horizon for the entire year in a way that maybe was the first time that I really experienced anxiety.

**Craig:** That was the last time, I’m sure.

**Megana:** Yeah, one and done.

**John:** Talk about that anxiety, because you were thinking about what’s going to happen next year, what colleges you’re going to get into. Once you knew where you were going to go to college, the stakes were suddenly much lower, weren’t they?

**Megana:** Amy is also applying to colleges. Any time she asks me for questions, I’m like, “Please don’t follow my example,” because I applied to too many schools, because I couldn’t make any decisions. I applied to them literally in the minutes before the application shut down. Then with Harvard, I got in. I think I got in on April 1st. I remember telling people, and they were like, “Oh, sick joke,” because everyone assumed I was just pulling an April Fools.

**John:** Oh, man.

**Craig:** Were you stupid? Was that why? Were they like, “Oh my god, Megana is the dumbest person we know.”

**Megana:** I also love April Fools. I think that’s the bigger component.

**Craig:** That may be it. Got it.

**Megana:** I was just so last minute on everything that I feel like I… I feel like that has continued throughout my life, where it’s like, I don’t know how much I got to enjoy it, because I was putting off decisions for so long.

**John:** Craig, did you encounter senioritis?

**Craig:** No, because we had been terrified by possibly urban legends, possibly not, of kids who had blown their last semester of high school and then the college rescinds the offer. The colleges said, when I got into college, they were like, “Yeah, just so you know, of course, we will be reviewing your final grades. Make sure that they’re… ” You’re like, “Oh god, I don’t want to fumble.” Also, I was in a race. I was in a valedictorian race. I couldn’t let up. Couldn’t let up.

**Megana:** Did you win the race?

**John:** Did you win?

**Craig:** No. I was the salutatorian.

**Megana:** Which is the cooler torian.

**Craig:** I think so. It was down to 100ths of a point or whatever. This is all stupid, by the way. If you find yourself currently as a senior in a race, it doesn’t matter, unless you’re really good at giving speeches. Then you’ll get some love for a good speech. I kept it on. I kept the heat on, but without the panic of, oh no, the unknown. I had a sense, “Okay, this is where I’m going to school. This is what it’s going to be.” Then you get the whiplash of having gone from the top of the heap in your high school to once again being a nobody that doesn’t know anything and is at the bottom of the pecking order when you get to college. The difference though when you get to college is… You can get razzed by the upperclassmen going into junior high or to high school. In college, no one cares. It’s the recognition you’re never going to be that little kid who’s getting picked on again. That just all goes away.

**Craig:** Yes, that part goes away. You’re not going to get bullied. I do recall, as a young heterosexual male, that there was definitely a certain kind of sexual politics going on where freshman heterosexual males were… It was just tougher. It was tougher. All the girls were looking upwards, and so you had to hustle. (singing) I did. I did. You know why?

**John:** You did, and you met your wife.

**Craig:** I did, I met my wife, although that wasn’t until I was a junior, so I had a few years of hustling. Then she put a ring on it.

**John:** Aw. I literally had one foot out the door my senior year because I was going to… Basically I had enough credits to graduate early. I only had to go to school in the mornings.

**Megana:** What?

**John:** I went to classes in the mornings, and then I took a class at CU Boulder in the afternoons. I was only halfway on campus anyway. I was running the high school paper. I don’t know, it was a good transition out. It worked really well for me. I felt like I was already leaving before I was officially leaving.

**Craig:** Interesting. Interesting.

**John:** Really Mike was the same situation. My husband was taking classes at OSU during his senior year too. We both had a situation where we really weren’t full-time high school students senior year.

**Craig:** He went to The Ohio State University?

**John:** The Ohio State University.

**Craig:** That’s one of the dumbest things.

**John:** It is one of the dumbest things. It has to be continuously mocked.

**Craig:** The. Please.

**Megana:** I feel like I can’t sit here and let this continue. It is The Ohio State University.

**Craig:** It is, because, what, there are other ones that are pretending to be Ohio State University, but we are The Ohio State University? Those are ripoff Ohio State Universities. Where are the other ones? There are no other ones.

**Megana:** There’s Ohio University.

**John:** Are there other OSUs that are not the one in Columbus, and so it’s only the one in Columbus is The Ohio State University?

**Craig:** No, there’s just The Ohio State University.

**Megana:** I was always under the impression that it was because of Ohio University that they did that. There’s Oregon State University.

**John:** Why would that work?

**Craig:** Why don’t they just underline the word State, Ohio State University? No, they stick the word The on it, which no one else does, for good reason.

**John:** Maybe we should be The Scriptnotes Podcast.

**Craig:** That’s a perfect analogy. Welcome to The Scriptnotes Podcast. That’s just ridiculous. The odds are that neither one of us survive to see October based on what we just did, because man, I’ll tell you, Ohio fans, phew.

**John:** That’s why we keep these conversations in the Premium feed, so at least we’re getting money for the hate coming our way.

**Craig:** Yes, there will be hate coming our way, and also long emails. Oh my god, so many long emails. “This is why,” blah blah blah, blah blah blah. I’m already making fun of your email. Don’t send it.

**John:** The end of high school is also graduation. Craig, did you have a good high school graduation?

**Craig:** I did. High school graduation went well.

**John:** Did you have to give a salutatorian speech?

**Craig:** I did. I gave a salutatorian-

**John:** What was your topic?

**Craig:** For the life of me, I cannot remember.

**John:** Do you have it written down anywhere?

**Craig:** Not anymore. It was written down, but we’re talking about something that I think I probably wrote it by hand and then typed it into my Macintosh and then printed it on my Brother Daisywheel printer. Oh, Megana, you never knew the joys of a Daisywheel printer.

**Megana:** I’m totally lost here.

**John:** Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap tap.

**Craig:** Basically, it was like an electric typewriter. You would say, okay, print this. It would pull all the text into its memory. Then there was a wheel, a disc, a plastic disc, and at the tips of it were the letters. It would spin and hammer the letter. It was like the world’s fastest typist. It was loud and so much slower than a laser printer, not even close. I probably did that. Where it went… I tried to erase my past as best I could.

**John:** We’ve noticed that. We have video footage of Ted Cruz from his freshman year. I wonder if somebody filmed Craig’s salutatorian speech.

**Craig:** I think that’s wonderful.

**John:** If someone who’s listening can track that down, that would’ve been from 1989?

**Craig:** Eight.

**John:** ’88.

**Craig:** That was spring of 1988 in Freehold, New Jersey. If somebody has the video of my salutatory address, we’d love to see it. If you have it and it’s on VHS, we’ll gladly pay for the transfer.

**John:** Good stuff. Craig, Megana, thank you for a good senior year.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you. See you next week.

**John:** Bye.

**Megana:** Bye.

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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/565standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/the-one-with-mike-schur).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 537 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig is off on a mountain somewhere, which is fine, because that means I get to ask all the questions of our guest this week. Michael Schur is the award-winning writer and creative force behind so many of my favorite TV shows, including Parks and Rec, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Good Place. His new book, How To Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question, is a New York Times Bestseller. Michael Schur, welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Michael Schur:** Thank you so much. I’m very happy to be number 537. That feels appropriate. That feels right on the money.

**John:** Now, I put a lot of credits in there, but you have so many more credits and also expertise in podcasting because you have your own podcast.

**Michael:** I do. My friend Joe Posnanski, who is a sportswriter of great renown, and I started a decade ago, just talking about sports and literally nothing, just blabbing incoherently. It has somehow continued for the better part of an entire decade. Now we are part of the Meadowlark Media family that Dan Le Batard started out of Miami. It’s an actual legitimate podcast that has a logo and stuff, which is very, very exciting. If you’re interested in hearing Joe Posnanski and me talk about literally nothing, but sometimes sports, you can find it at the Meadowlark, Dan Le Batard and Stugotz feed on Meadowlark Media.

**John:** Fantastic. A decade, but how many episodes does it… You haven’t hit 500 episodes of your podcast.

**Michael:** We have no way of knowing because it’s been so piecemeal over the years. It was just on his blog for a while. For the first six years it was just two people shouting into their computers, and you couldn’t even hear what we were saying. We really honestly don’t know how many we’ve done. It’s a large number of nonsense.

**John:** Now, on this podcast, are you the John or are you the Craig?

**Michael:** That’s a good question.

**John:** Are you prepared going into it? Are you just winging it the whole time?

**Michael:** I think it’s a little of both. We’re mostly winging it, but we do have a brief text exchange beforehand where we talk about what we’re going to cover. The hallmark of the podcast, if there is one, is a draft, where we draft ridiculous things. We’ll draft kinds of fruit or numbers between one and 10 or something. We at least do a tiny bit of prep to think about what we’re going to draft. I think maybe somewhere in between I guess is the answer.

**John:** That’s fair. We should also say that on Twitter you are @KenTremendous. I think I’ve told you this, but I followed you for years, not knowing that Ken Tremendous was actually you. I knew you in real life, and I followed you on Twitter. I didn’t realize they were the same person.

**Michael:** That’s a fairly frequent thing I hear is, “Oh, you’re that guy.” I started that Twitter handle just with… I didn’t think twice about whether I should use my real name or something. A lot of people follow @KenTremendous and don’t know it’s me. The funny thing is that I’m verified, which I think maybe lays bare the absurdity of verification on Twitter, because I’m verified as a fake person. Do take from that what you will.

**John:** I love it all. We will not talk baseball at all on this podcast, unless it is relevant to something else. Then I’m happy to talk baseball. I just don’t understand it whatsoever. I do want to talk a little bit about moral philosophy. One of the things I liked about your book is that you lay out that there are frameworks that can help us understand moral and philosophical issues. I’m wondering if we can apply that to writing and the choices we make both as writers and the choices we make for our characters, the frameworks of decision making. As we go through your comedy career, I wondered if we can wrap this all together in how characters are making choices and how writers are making choices about those characters.

**Michael:** That sounds very fun. I’m all in. I’ll say nothing about baseball. We’ll only talk about that topic.

**John:** Fantastic. For our bonus topic this week, I want to talk about writers room lingo, the special terms you just use inside a writers room and what they all mean.

**Michael:** Very cool.

**John:** Let’s get started with your career. Maybe just start at the beginning, because I don’t really know how you all got started as a writer in this town.

**Michael:** I was on the Harvard Lampoon. I’m one of those people.

**John:** I’ve heard of that.

**Michael:** I didn’t give any thought at all in college to being a professional writer, even though it was all around me. I really loved college and wanted to just be in college and take classes that I thought were interesting and stuff. Then when I graduated, I decided to give myself a year to see if I could make it as a writer. I’m too practical and timid a person to just commit to something as risky as screenwriting with no backup plan. My plan was one year, if I get a job, great. If I don’t, I was going to apply to grad school. I moved to New York, and I borrowed a thousand dollars from my Uncle Steve to pay rent, to put a down payment on an apartment. This is back when a thousand dollars was enough for that.

**John:** That’s amazing.

**Michael:** In Manhattan. I just started writing stuff. I wrote a packet for Letterman and for Conan and for SNL. I had some meetings with various people here and there who needed writers. I got interviewed by SNL in July of ’97, right after I graduated, but I didn’t get hired. I remember, I have a very distinct memory of, they were walking us around in pairs. I was paired up with this woman. I rem thinking, “Oh man, I’m never getting this job, because this woman is so much funnier than me.” It was Tina Fey, and I was right.

**John:** You were right.

**Michael:** Absolutely right. She got hired and I didn’t, which at the time I was like, “Yes, that is correct. You’ve made the correct decision.” Getting that interview made me feel like I at least had a shot. I kept on poking around and writing submissions and making small inroads. Jon Stewart hired me to pitch ideas to him for a book he was writing. Over the course of three months, I pitched him probably 200 ideas for comedy pieces, and he used maybe half of one, I would say, but it didn’t matter, because he was paying me just enough money to pay my rent and buy food.

Then in December of that year, December of ’97, there was this big shakeup at SNL where Norm Macdonald got fired from Weekend Update because he was making too many jokes about OJ Simpson, and Don Ohlmeyer, who was running NBC, was friends with OJ Simpson and he didn’t like that. He fired Norm. The whole writing staff of Update got fired. There was this big kerfuffle. They just needed writers. They called me and said, “You start Monday.” I started at SNL in January of ’98. That was my first job in TV.

**John:** Now, were you hired specifically to write for Weekend Update and those desk jokes or were you also writing sketches? I don’t know what the division of labor is on the writing staff there.

**Michael:** I should’ve clarified. I was hired just as a regular sketch writer. Update is its own little fiefdom within SNL. It has the host obviously, but then it has its own dedicated writers who don’t write sketches normally. Sometimes they do if they have an idea. Mostly they’re just writing jokes over the course of the week. I was just hired as a regular sketch writer. Then I was there for two and a half years or so. Then Rob Carlock, who was running Weekend Update at the time, left to move to LA and work for Friends. I then took over his job producing Weekend Update. In the second half of my time there, I wrote sketches at the beginning of the week, but then if they got chosen, I didn’t produce them. I handed them off to someone else and switched over on Thursday and just only produced Weekend Update. I was there. I was producing Weekend Update during the Tina Fey, Jimmy Fallon era. That was my time there.

**John:** That’s an amazing time.

**Michael:** It was a great time. I was there for three years and then I left.

**John:** Now, talk to me about the transition between… You were just a writer. You’re pitching sketches, you’re pitching jokes, you’re trying to make things funny, so you’re more of a manager. As a producer you have other people who are working under you and you’re having to steer the ship a bit. How did you develop those skills?

**Michael:** It was a great training ground. It really was, because everything at SNL is sink or swim. They throw you into the deep end of the pool. If you sink, you’re dead. If you swim, they’re like, “Okay, you can stay here as long as you want.” No one really explained the job to me, except for Robert. He was like, “Here’s how you do this job,” on his way out. At the time I think there were three full-time joke writers, and then also people fax in jokes from everywhere. You have these people all over the country who will send in jokes. Most of them aren’t amazing.

At the time there was this guy named Alex Baze who was faxing in jokes from Chicago. Every week this guy would get a joke on the air, all the way to the end. You’re only doing 10 or 12 jokes. It’s really, really rare for a faxer to get something on the air, and this guy was consistently doing it. We ended up hiring him full-time. He became the head writer I think of that segment, and then now he’s the head writer of Seth Meyers’s show. I got a little bit lucky. Not only were there three very, very talented joke writers who were full-time workers, there were also people like Alex who were faxing in jokes and making the segment great.

Basically, what you’re doing is every day the writers will write 20, 25, 30 jokes. You’re collecting them, looking at them, editing them, trying to make them punchier, punching them up if you can. Then what happens is on Thursday night and Friday night, the host – at least this is the way it was when I was there – Tina and Jimmy and I and the writers would sit down. Tina and Jimmy would read the jokes that I had picked all the way through, just out loud, just read them out loud. We would throw them into one of two categories, no thanks, or this is good, we like this. You would end up with, I don’t know, 50 jokes that you thought were possible. You would winnow that down to 25. You would probably take 25 of them to dress rehearsal, maybe 20 to 25 to dress rehearsal. Then you do the dress and then you cut half of them basically for the air show.

As a producer what you’re doing is you’re trying to manage obviously the content, but then you’re also talking to the graphics department and you’re talking to the production department to say, “Hey, we have a bit on this thing where Chris Kattan is going to come on as this crazy character. We need him to be dressed like this. Here’s the props we need, costumes we need.”

Then the really tricky part is between dress and air, sometimes a joke would work pretty well, but you would think the key art that’s over Jimmy’s shoulder there is wrong. You’d have to run down, in real time. It’s 10:23 p.m. and you’re going on the air in 90 minutes, if you’re Update. You’d have to run down to say, “Hey, can you change this to this and this and make this change?”

It’s very, very good training, because the show is live. You get really good at editing yourself very, very quickly, throwing away everything that isn’t working, and quickly coming up with solutions for problems that you have. That happens because you have no choice, because if you don’t get good at that, then you’re going to be humiliated on national television. It really was great training for being a producer in a long form, a half-hour format, because it drove the ego out of you and it just made you very non-precious with your own material.

**John:** Now, talk to me about, you have an audience there, so you can get the immediate feedback, like that is funny, that is not funny. When you’re just going through the jokes with Tina and Jimmy, how do you know what’s going to work and what’s not going to work?

**Michael:** If you’re a once-in-a-generation comedic talent like Tina Fey, you have a pretty good instinct for what you can make funny and what you think will work. By the way, the same with Jimmy. Jimmy has a very good instinct for just punching this and relating to an audience. He’s really, really good at that. Some of it is just gut instinct. Sometimes it’d be like, “I don’t know about this one.” It would be like, “We can try it.” That’s the benefit of the dress rehearsal is if you’re iffy on something, you might as well try it, see what happens, and there’s no harm done. A lot of it is just purely them knowing their own voices and them understanding what they can make funny and what they think will work. Then of course there’s other considerations.

You always had to do at least one joke about whatever the big story of the week was. You can’t ignore… Right now, today, this week it’s Justice Breyer retiring or those documents being found in Mar-a-Lago that Trump took illegally out of the White House. If there’s a show on Saturday, right now they are trying to figure out what their joke is about those topics.

**John:** Yeah, about Trump eating paper or something like that.

**Michael:** Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It’s a little bit of everything. It’s not one thing. It’s a little bit of guesswork, a little bit of just knowing your own voice, and a little bit of a feeling that you need at some basic level to cover whatever the big story of the week is.

**John:** You’re doing this job. You’re doing it well. Why leave?

**Michael:** Great question. I had been there at that point for six and a half years. I was dating a woman who is now my wife, who was in LA. She was working for sitcoms out here as a writer. We got to this point where it was like, if this is going to really work, one of us has to move. It just made more sense for me to move to LA than for her to move to New York, because there were more jobs in LA. It was mostly that.

Then maybe 10% of it was this nagging feeling I had, which was SNL, unlike every other show essentially on the air, is never going away, which means you can stay there. If you succeed there, you can essentially stay there forever. There are people there who have been there for 30 years because it’s a really good job, you get to live in New York, it’s really fun. When you go to a cocktail party and tell people what you do for a living, they’re interested in what you have to say. I just had this sense of, if I’m ever going to be anything more as a writer than what I am now, I can’t stay here. It’s a little bit of a golden handcuffs situation. Everything aligned for me to move and to say, “This was really fun. This was a great start to my life, but now I want to do something else.”

I wrote a spec script. I wrote a Curb Your Enthusiasm spec script. That shows you how long Curb has been on the air. I took a bunch of meetings in my off weeks. I got one job offer. It was from Greg Daniels, who was adapting the British version of The Office into an American version of The Office. I thought, “This is never going to work. It’s a terrible idea to do this.” My meeting with Greg was so interesting. I found him so fascinating. I wrote an email to my agent at the time. I said, “If that guy offers me a job, I’m going to take it, because I think he’s going to teach me how to write.” That’s exactly what happened. I took the job. Greg led a master class in half-hour comedy writing that was taken by me and BJ Novak and Mindy Kaling. He literally just taught us all how to do this job. It was the greatest good fortune and good decision of my career.

**John:** Great. This is a wonderful time to talk about frameworks of comedy, because really let’s talk about the half-hour comedy as a form, because that half-hour television comedy, we think we know what it is, but in your book you talk about all moral philosophy and really all philosophy in the Western world goes back to Aristotle. What is the Aristotle of the half-hour comedy? What is the baseline from which everything’s evolved? Who are the important steps along the way in the transformation of the half-hour comedy? In your mind, where does the half-hour comedy start?

**Michael:** If you are Greg Daniels, what you would say – or now me, because I essentially adopted his worldview wholesale – there has been, traditionally speaking, a percentage give and take in the half-hour comedy world in terms of how each episode is divided up. If you imagine it as a pie, 70% of it is jokes and 30% of it is emotion or warmth or kindness or whatever you want to call it. When we were kids, when you and I were kids, because we’re old, there were things called very special episodes, which would happen during sweeps and which would change that ratio. Suddenly a given episode would be 30% jokes and 70% emotional or serious stuff.

**John:** Like when Arnold’s friend gets molested.

**Michael:** Exactly, or when Arnold tried smoking for the first time.

**John:** Or when he gets rabies.

**Michael:** Exactly. The normal episode of a half-hour show I think, and this is an Aristotelian idea. It’s interesting that you bring this in. You’re trying to find some kind of balance. You’re trying to say there are people who are coming to this show for different reasons. Some people just want to laugh and enjoy themselves and some people want to feel something. They want to feel an emotional connection to the characters. Other people might want a serious issue to be discussed. People don’t come to these sitcoms for one thing. The most successful sitcoms I think you would say, of all time, with a few exceptions, there’s always exceptions, but the most successful sitcoms are the ones that manage to find this perfect balance between being funny and then also showing human connection or warmth or emotion or something.

The exception would be something like Seinfeld. Seinfeld was 100% jokes and 0% warmth. Famously, the slogan that Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld had was no hugging, no learning. They didn’t want to engage in that at all, and because they are two of the greatest comic geniuses of all time, that show was the most popular show in history. I think a lot of people maybe at the time learned a bad lesson from that show, because that’s not a replicable formula. You have to be as funny and interesting as Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld in order to pull that off. There have certainly been other successful shows like 30 Rock that similarly went way heavier on the jokes and the humor than they did on any kind of emotional connection with the characters or warmth or anything like that.

Greg’s version of it was to say, look, we only have, call it 21 minutes and 30 seconds, or 22 minutes, and we are going to make sure that if you are the kind of person who wants to watch a show because they want to feel something, then we’re going to carve out time where we’re not undercutting everything with a joke, we’re not reducing this to just office hijinks. We are going to have time where Jim and Pam have serious conversations about their lives and where Michael Scott, when he falls in love with Holly Flax, late in the fourth, fifth season, whenever that was, that there is going to be scenes that are just about that and that aren’t also trying to be funny.

That’s a really tricky little slight-of-hand move to pull off, but when you do pull it off, you get something like The Office or Friends or one of those shows where people can rewatch them over and over and over again, because even though they know all the jokes and they can repeat them by heart, they’re watching it because they feel connected to the characters and to the world of the show.

**John:** Looking back to the timeline, I’m thinking back to… We had Jac Schaeffer on the show talking about WandaVision. WandaVision is all structured around the evolution of the family sitcom and over the decades and how it grows and how it changes. I think back to I Love Lucy or the Andy Griffith Show. I Love Lucy is all jokes. It’s just a joke factory. Andy Griffith is actually not that funny. There’s jokes in there, but it’s more a happy family, father, son situation. The evolution from there into Norman Lear’s shows, which have actual real conflict and stakes to them. You look at Mary Tyler Moore and the family show as an Office show. When you’re starting on The Office, which at the time was a new format – we had the British show, but the idea that there’s not an audience, we’re not going to get the feedback of the laughter – was it scary going into writing The Office, trying to think, “Is this even funny?”

**Michael:** Yes, to some extent, although what makes Greg special as a writer is he spent an entire year watching the British show over and over again and taking notes. He approaches writing like a scientist. He really puts scripts and shows under a microscope. He gets down to this molecular level where he can now explain to you, here is why what they are doing is so interesting. There were all these things that he pointed out to us about the British show that were clear but also weren’t the kind of things that you might think about if you were talking about why you liked it.

For example, he said, in the history of the sitcom, the standard is that the love story is at the center. The two young attractive people who are will they, won’t they type people, are at the center of the show. Off in the corner is the wacky boss. The wacky boss has a job. The job is to come into his scene, say something stupid and ridiculous and then go back into his office.

Part of the genius of the British show is it inverted the formula. The wacky boss was the center of the show. The love story was shoved into the margins. That did two things. One, it let a singular comedic talent like Ricky Gervais or Steve Carrell anchor the show and be so funny all the time, and to really delve into the psychology of the wacky boss was a new idea. It also meant that the love story was tantalizingly thin and gossamer and spiderwebby and you only got these little glimpses of it. You only got this tiny, tiny amount. It made you desperate to see more of it.

The studio and network would give us notes in the first few seasons where they would say, “We love Jim and Pam so much. It’s such a great story. We just want to make sure that it’s really coming through here, what Pam is feeling.” Greg would go, “Yes, great note. Absolutely.” Then he would say, “Yeah, we’re ignoring that,” because what they don’t understand is that after whatever story has played out, if the camera is peeking at Pam from behind a plant, and her eyes just glance up at Jim and linger on him for one second and then she looks away, the audience is going to really… That intimacy is so tense that the audience will certainly feel the thing we want them to feel.

We all had a lot of fear about adapting it, because we all revered the British show. We all thought it was essentially non-replicable in America. Greg had studied it and observed it and had understood it at such a deep level that at the end of the day it was much easier to make it good I think than we anticipated, because Steve can do anything. Steve is a genius. Also, that kind of romance was so new to television. No one had ever seen it before. The freshness of it really I think brought it into people’s brains and hearts very quickly.

**John:** Now, coming from The Office, your next big project is Parks and Rec. What was the genesis for that? Where did the idea come from? Also, how early on did you know that it was going to be in a similar format to The Office? What was the start of Parks and Rec?

**Michael:** Season 4 of The Office, there was a writer strike. We were picketing. Greg and I were picketing together. He said, “Hey, NBC wants me to do a new show. Would you want to do it with me?” Because I am not a fool, I said yes. They were so desperate to capitalize on The Office and the success of The Office that they basically gave Greg a blank slate and said, “You can do anything you want. We’ll put it on the air,” which now is slightly more common that you get a full season order of something. At the time it was unheard of. He and I started talking during the writer strike as we were walking around picking. Then all of a sudden we started meeting for breakfast a couple times a week at Norm’s Diner, which is Greg’s favorite restaurant in LA by far. Greg is the most thorough human being in the world. We would just pitch idea after idea after idea.

The network really wanted a spin-off, because they were looking at The Office, which was a show that had something like 20 regular characters. The normal network playbook was, this is great, we’ll just take some popular minor characters, rip them out of that show, and build a new show around them. Greg called it The Office: An American Workplace, because he always imagined, potentially, that in success you could do spinoffs that weren’t really spinoffs. You could do The Auto Body Shop: An American Workplace, or The School: An American Educational Institution, or whatever.

**John:** Were they going to say the same documentary company that was filming The Office was also filming these other places?

**Michael:** Exactly, yes. That was exactly the conceit that he was imagining. We had a number of options. We had any workplace in the world. We could just say this is the same documentary crew, and the way it’s a spin-off is just it’s a similar look. We also had the possibility of taking say Craig Robinson out of the warehouse and saying here’s the show that takes place in the warehouse. That’s really what NBC wanted, because at the time we were still in the zone of spinoffs are easy sells to affiliates. That would be the best link that we could do.

**John:** Look at Cheers to Frasier. That was such a nice easy handoff.

**Michael:** Absolutely. Then we stumbled on this idea of doing essentially for government or an entire city what The Office had done for the concept of the office. The Office was a fake company, but it had this incredible relatability where everybody’s worked in some office. At some point everybody’s had a boss. Everybody has annoying coworkers. We thought what would be really interesting would be to say we’re going to invent a whole city and we’re going to talk about the public sector instead of the private sector. That didn’t obviously translate very well to the idea of a spin-off. It would be a fake spin-off, where Andy Bernard, Ed Helms’s character, would quit Dunder Mifflin and run for mayor and then be the mayor or something like that.

**John:** It’s a stretch.

**Michael:** It would be clunky. We broke the news to them that we weren’t going to do a straight Office spin-off, but we had had such success with the documentary format. We loved what the documentary format did for comedy, because talking heads are great opportunities for exposition and jokes and that sense that you’re a fly on the wall and that you’re spying on the activities of the people that you’re watching. It just was like what we had been doing and felt very comfortable doing. We took the format and applied it to the public sector.

Then magically, again, very fortunate – this is one of the things I write about in the book, is all the good breaks that happened in my life – Amy Poehler announced that she was leaving SNL at essentially exactly the right time. We knew that we wanted the main character to be a woman. I was like, “Look, I worked with Amy Poehler for four years. There’s no one funnier on the planet. She’s the only person who can do this.”

Ironically, this is very inside baseball, but they wanted to put our pilot on after the Super Bowl. They ordered 13 episodes. The idea was The Office had the Super Bowl episode that year. The plan was we would start shooting in I think January, The Office would air right after the Super Bowl, and then our pilot would air after The Office. Even though it’s a lot of passive viewing, you’re talking about 25 or 30 million people watching your pilot.

Then Amy got pregnant and suddenly she couldn’t start shooting until March. Our first thought was like, “Oh that’s too bad, she can’t do it.” Then our second thought was, “Getting Amy Poehler in your show is a long-term proposition, and airing after the Super Bowl is a short-term proposition.” In a very risky move, we voluntarily essentially gave up seven episodes of our 13-episode order and said, “We won’t air after the Super Bowl. We’ll air in April.” Amy came to us in March, and we started shooting. We only shot six, and they aired in April and May. We hung on by a thread. Instead of 30 million people watching our pilot, probably four million people watched the pilot. It wasn’t quite as splashy or big, but ultimately it was absolutely the right move.

**John:** Doing the six episodes though, did it also give you some chance to course-correct and figure out more what your show was? I think that’s that first season of Parks and Rec. It’s great and it’s lovely, but it did change. It did morph after that first season into something more like what I really expect the show to be.

**Michael:** It changed dramatically. We only had six episodes. We were doing everything on the fly. They did testing of the pilot and the second episode. What came back was not great, frankly. Part of it was an unfair expectation that it would be as good as The Office. There’s no way that a new show in its nascent pilot form is going to be as good as something that’s in Season 4.

There was a lot of feedback just about Amy’s character just specifically and how she came off. The word was ditzy. It was wild to see that, because in our view, she was the opposite of ditzy. She was an incredibly smart, very, very determined person, whose singular goal was to improve her town and the public facilities available in the town. In our mind the problem was she just had no political acumen. She had no game is the way we thought of it. We used to describe it as a person who has read everything about golf and can tell you every winner of every major golf tournament for the past 100 years and can analyze a swing perfectly, but can’t play golf, but is terrible at golf. She was supposed to be this really smart and determined and positive person who just couldn’t be a political animal, because that requires a sort of cynicism or toughness or edginess or something that she just didn’t possess. Ditzy was just, oh no, we’ve blown it.

What was very clear was that we had an amazing comedian at the center of our show, and all of these other incredibly funny people, Aziz and Chris Pratt and Aubrey Plaza and Rashida Jones and all this incredible cast, and we just weren’t writing it correctly. Very quickly, even before that first season was over, we started to course correct very intensely. If you watch the sixth of those six episodes, it’s called Rock Show, that was the first episode that we were able to really make big changes to in terms of the way the characters came across. It’s by far the best episode I think of that first season. It does point the way toward what the show would ultimately become.

**John:** Mike, talk about this having to course-correct, because as writers, we all get these notes about, “Okay, this is not working. This is the problem. We need to fix this,” but the train has already left the station. It’s running. You have to have conversations with you and with Craig Daniels and about the show, but then with the writers. Then you have to have conversations with Amy Poehler about, this change that you’re making, you actually are changing who her character was to who you want to be. That’s got to be terrifying.

**Michael:** It was, yeah. It was very terrifying. I had a lot of sleepless nights in that first season, because I thought to myself, I’m going to be the person who ruins Amy Poehler’s career. That thought got into my head once I saw the testing and once I understood that as much as I wanted to ignore the testing, that I couldn’t, that what they were saying had a point. Amy was one of the most beloved SNL cast members maybe ever. I thought, oh my god, if I’m the one who causes her career to get derailed, I will never forgive myself.

This is where that SNL training really helps, because again, I likened it at the time to being in a NASCAR race, seeing that there’s a problem with your engine, and having to someone fix the engine as you’re still rolling around the track. You can’t pit stop here. We are shooting something on Monday. It’s Tuesday now. We have four days to fix whatever it is that we’re supposed to shoot and try to rescue the show.

There was a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of conversations with Greg, a lot of conversations with the writers, a lot of conversations with Amy. We started sifting through the detritus of the first stuff that we had shot, stuff that we had cut or stuff that hadn’t made the episodes or whatever, to just examine it, be a scientist, the way Greg was, and say, “What are we missing here? What did we cut that would’ve been better if we had left in? What did we leave in that would’ve been better if we cut?”

I remember there was one little moment where there was an episode called Boys Club, and Amy was giving this talking head. There was a bunch of guys who met for beers in the courtyard. She wasn’t invited, in her mind because she was a woman, but in reality it was just because nobody thought to invite her, because they didn’t think that she was the kind of person who wanted to have a beer in the courtyard. She went out, she crashed their boys club party, and then she accidentally knocks over the table and all the beers shatter on the ground. Then she gave this talking head where she was saying… The joke we had written for her was like, “Am I shattering a glass ceiling? I’m shattering the glass beer bottles, so that’s a start,” or something like that. It was meh.

Then what we liked to do on that show, and on The Office, was just have Amy improvise stuff, like, “Hey, do a couple where you just say whatever you want.” She was like, “Okay.” She improvised this thing where she was like, “Am I shattering the glass ceiling? I don’t know.” She turned around and pointed behind her. She said, “I don’t know, look at all those bitches cleaning up after me.” I was like, “God, that’s so much funnier. That’s a billion times funnier.” We were like, the answer here is to lean into Amy’s actual comic persona. She’s still playing a character, but she does have a funny, edgy side of her that can come out and it will still be okay. We latched on to that and we latched on to a couple other moments, and we just started writing towards those things. Luckily, we had just enough time to save the show by a hair. We saved the show, and it ran for seven years.

**John:** That’s amazing. Just a quick little sidebar on the talking head as a format, as an idea, because it is so fundamental to The Office and Parks and Rec, and also Modern Family, which doesn’t even have the documentary crew framework around it. Just the ability for a character to actually tell you what they’re really thinking and what they’re actually really experiencing is so unique and strange. As an audience we’ve just accepted it. It’s an innovation.

**Michael:** It really is. It has 50 different uses. On The Office, to have Michael Scott look at the camera and say, “Today is Diversity Day. We are getting diversity training from this guy who’s coming in and he’s doing XYZ.”

**John:** So useful.

**Michael:** To not have to work that pipe into casual conversation or dialog is incredibly useful. Then, by the way, once you get that pipe out, you can just write a punchline and have him end it with a joke and it’s great. It’s one of the most efficient plot delivery mechanisms I think that’s ever been invented. That’s not all it does. You can also just go to it for a joke. You can enter up any scene and just go quickly to any character for a funny joke.

Then when you’re talking about the more emotional relationship stuff, you can do a thing that we did all the time on The Office, less so on Parks and Rec, but all the time on The Office, which is you go to Jim, and the question that has theoretically been asked is like, “What do you think of Pam?” He says something like, “Oh, Pam’s great. Pam’s one of my best friends. She’s really great. I’m so happy that she’s with Roy. It’s so wonderful that she’s dating Roy.” Then you intercut that, or you cut right from that talking head to a scene or a moment that betrays the fact that Jim is straight up lying to the camera. The idea that you can use it as a weapon to say people are different when they know they’re being listened to and when they don’t know they’re being observed. It just has all of these amazing uses.

The last couple things I’ve written for, like The Good Place, for example, we didn’t have that, obviously. You can’t make a documentary about the afterlife. I was like, “Oh god.” It struck me again how useful that device is and how many different ways you can deploy it. It really is a wonderful innovation.

**John:** Let’s get to The Good Place. Let’s start with a listener question here from Grant and talking about the genesis and the idea. Megana, do you want to read Grant’s question?

**Megana Rao:** Yeah. Grant asked, “The hardest part of the creative process for me has always been the initial idea. Things start to flow once I get going, but I really struggle with coming up with the initial idea that I feel confident enough to commit time and effort to. I know a big part of this is that I need to practice creating ideas and eventually just make the decision to commit to one. I was wondering if you had any resources or methods to help with idea generation or could share any insight into how you come up with ideas.”

**John:** Talk to me about the idea behind The Good Place, because I know that this was something you had been working on on a slow way for 10 years. What was the initial thing that got you interested in the idea of moral philosophy or that there’s something about the ethical choices that we’re making?

**Michael:** At various times in my life, and I write about some of them in the book, I would blunder into a situation in which I didn’t fully understand really what the dilemma actually was. I certainly didn’t understand what was better ethical choice. I would make a terrible mistake and cause people pain, anxiety, anguish, and suffering. I would think to myself in those moments, if I knew anything about what the hell I was talking about here, I think I would’ve caused less pain and anxiety and anguish and suffering. That led me, in a very casual hobby way, to reading some moral philosophy, some very simple introductory books about theories of ethics and kinds of behavior and why some kinds of behavior might be better than others. That just became a very casual interest of mine that I would think about or read about or talk about with various people.

Then when Parks and Rec ended, there was an opportunity for me to do… I got what Greg got back in 2007, which was you can do whatever you want. NBC basically gave me a guarantee of one season of a show on the air. When they did that, I thought, I could write some version of what I’ve been doing, a collection of funny people in a workplace setting, and maybe it’s a mockumentary and whatever. Because I had been granted this genie in a bottle wish, I really felt like I ought to take a big swing, because I owed it to the concept of ideas to take a big swing. For a while, I had been wondering whether my casual interest in moral philosophy, whether there was a show there.

I played a game as I drove around LA, where if someone would cut me off in traffic or something, I would think to myself, “That guy just lost 18 points.” I had invented an afterlife calculator that was weighing all of our decisions and all of our actions with a point system, that we were all playing a video game we didn’t know we were playing, and that when you die, you get a score. Then the highest-scoring people, instead of getting your name on the board of the Miss Pacman machine, you get to Heaven essentially, and if you don’t, you get tortured. It started to coalesce then.

To get back to Grant’s question, I think that one of the problems I’ve had, I don’t know if this is Grant’s problem, but one of the problems I’ve had sometimes with ideas is there are really two ways to select an idea and then develop it. I think of them as outside-in or inside-out. The outside-in idea is there’s no show on the air about teachers in high school, or you know what would be an interesting setting, the International Space Station, or whatever, where you start with the location or the very simple explanation of what the show is about. Those ideas, in my experience, go nowhere, because that’s not an idea. That’s just a location.

The more effective way for me is to start inside and move outwards, where you say, “I want to do a show about what it means to be a good person.” That led me to say, “What if it’s a show about a woman who has made some really bad choices in her life, and she is now being judged for those choices?” That led me to, “Oh, what if it’s the afterlife? What if there’s an elitist country club perfect eternal paradise where the highest scoring people get in, and she gets in as a mistake and is then trying to prove herself as a good person so she doesn’t get caught?” Then that led me eventually to, “What if that whole thing, spoiler alert, is a torture chamber where this demon has created basically No Exit by Sartre and is torturing people and using them to torture each other?”

When I was asked to write a description of the show early on, after I sold it, I said, “The only thing you should say publicly about this show is that it’s a show about what it means to be a good person. That’s all you should say, because that really is what it’s about.” I knew that it would be grabbier and more interesting to say it’s set in the afterlife, it’s in Heaven or whatever, but I always wanted to go back and work on the show from the inside out, and to say everything in this show is going to be about what it means to be a good person. It happens to be set in the afterlife. It happens to have this very flashy, a high degree of difficulty premise, but I don’t want that to be what people focus on. I want people to focus on the internal stuff.

Sometimes in my life, I guess I’ll just say to Grant, when I run into a roadblock… Greg and I, for example, when we were developing Parks and Rec, the first idea, they really wanted us to do a family show. They essentially pitched us Modern Family, which wasn’t on the air at the time. They said, “You should take the mockumentary format and just apply it to a family.” We thought that was an interesting idea. We talked about it for a while. We just couldn’t get anywhere because we were starting from the outside in. We weren’t starting from a character or a central relationship or a dynamic or anything like that. We were just starting from the location and the setting. That usually makes you run into a brick wall at some point.

**John:** Getting back to Grant’s question, and thinking about what you were going through with The Good Place, you have this idea like, “I want to do a show about what it means to be a good person.” That’s all well and good, but it’s not until you have the idea of like, oh, Eleanor Shellstrop is a bad person who has to pretend that she was a good person, she’s basically caught, that’s the comedic premise. That’s the engine that’s getting you through especially that first season, that she has to pretend that she’s something that she’s not. That’s an opportunity for comedy.

**Michael:** Exactly. The stakes are immediately evident. It’s basically you snuck into a wedding where you weren’t invited and then you suddenly realize that everybody at the wedding, if they discover you, they’re going to murder you. It’s a double comedic premise, because she’s a bad person who has been mistaken for a good person, and also she has to act all the time in a way that prevents her from being revealed as a bad person. She has to cover up all of her instincts and all of her bad behavior and simultaneously try to learn what a good person would even look like, because she’s so far away from knowing.

Again, I don’t think you get there, I don’t think you arrive at that location if you’ve started from, “Oh, you know what would be fun is a show in the afterlife.” That’s too broad and there’s too many options there. If you start from a central plot idea or the central relationship of, in my case it was a woman who was a bad person, was mistaken for a good one, and was partnered up with a guy whose whole life was dedicated to writing about and thinking about what made a good person.

**John:** Chidi.

**Michael:** Chidi, yeah. You start from that orientation, and now everything else falls into place around you.

**John:** Now as you’re fleshing out The Good Place, you have Eleanor, you have Chidi. When do you know who the other people are in that world and who are going to be your central characters?

**Michael:** Again, this is the inside out thing, because I was like, “Okay, you are Eleanor Shellstrop and you have been deliberately sucked into a fake paradise in order to torture you. Who do we put around you if you’re Michael, if you’re Ted Danson’s character? You make your soulmate an ethics professor. That’s a no brainer.”

Then I was like, “What are her main flaws? She has a chip on her shoulder. She’s an incredibly jealous person. Her radar for phoniness is very, very highly regulated.” We used to say that she had a very good antenna for BS. That was ultimately what led her to figure out Michael’s whole plan. Because of that, it was like, there needs to be someone right near her who drives her crazy for 50 reasons, among them that she’s full of shit. That was Tahani. We invented this character who on paper was everything that Eleanor wasn’t. She was very tall. She was flawlessly beautiful. She was stylish. She was friends with all these famous people. She was a do-gooder, where she had raised all this money for charity. This is the important part. It was all for show. Eleanor was on to her from the very beginning. That’s where Tahani came from.

Jason Mendoza, I immediately, once I came up with the premise, knew that there should be at least one other person there early on who reveals that he is also a mistake for being there. Then we just were like, “All right, every show needs a dumb guy. We’re going to create the ultimate dumb guy.” I said at the beginning of the show to the other writers that I wanted Jason Mendoza to be so dumb that he made Andy Dwyer, Chris Pratt’s character from Parks and Rec, look like a Mensa level genius. We were going to just go full bore, no holds barred, make him the dumbest dumb guy who’s ever lived on TV. We invented him. That was also a great thing, because Eleanor and Jason had a lot in common. They were both fun, partier, trashy people who just loved to goof off and not really think about anything important. He served three or four different functions in the show simultaneously.

Again, if you’re working from the inside out, you put Eleanor at the center of this wheel, and these spokes are going out in different directions. It’s very easy to naturally fill in the blanks around her in terms of what other pieces of the puzzle you need to complete it.

**John:** Eleanor needs to learn moral philosophy, essentially. One of the real challenges you set for your show is that essentially the audience has to learn moral philosophy along with her. She’s there to literally give the textbook lessons. You had to think not just what is she trying to accomplish, but what is the framework in which we’re actually exploring this week’s issue. Talk to us about incorporating moral philosophy. Also, you brought in actual philosophy professors to help you and the writing staff figure out how to talk about some of these issues.

**Michael:** I did my own reading. In classic 2022 fashion, I’ll say I did my own research for the show. I had a pretty solid understanding of the main theories. I realized at one point if I were writing a medical drama, I would certainly need some actual surgeons and ER doctors to be consultants, to help us write the dialog and to explain what was happening to people. Grey’s Anatomy has that. We’re doing a medical drama, but it’s a metaphysical medical drama.

I read a book by a professor named Todd May who wrote about essentially what happens to the concept of ethics when someone is immortal. That was literally exactly that show we were writing. I emailed him and chatted with him for an hour. Then I asked him if he would like to advise us. He would Zoom in sometimes to the room. He came into the room a couple times. We had a list of topics for him that we wanted him to explain. There were multiple times when we would be writing about some kind of specific theory and we would get all tangled up. This happened a lot with something like existentialism, which is very, very thorny and slippery, simultaneously slippery and thorny. It’s the most dangerous of the philosophies.

**John:** Absolutely. You could hurt yourself.

**Michael:** We would email him or call him and say, “We have a philosophical emergency. You have to help us.” Then there was a woman named Pamela Hieronymi who teaches at UCLA who came in and taught us about the trolley problem, among other things. We had these people, these incredible smart people who could explain to us what the hell these philosophers were talking about when we couldn’t figure it out for ourselves.

When I pitched the show to NBC, I said to them, “Moral philosophy is baked into the center of this. It’s not going to be a casual aspect of the show. It’s going to be in every episode. We’re going to really be delving into this stuff. I promise you I won’t make it feel like homework.” That was my solemn vow is that it wouldn’t ever feel like it was homework. I don’t know, the third episode or something starts with Chidi standing at a blackboard and it says Philosophy 101 on it. I was a little bit nervous. Because the writers are funny and because the actors are funny and because we always made sure that the show had to be funny, I think we were able to get those tricky ideas across in ways that were at least in theory entertaining. That’s the difference really between audiences enjoying your show and not enjoying it is like, am I being entertained at a very basic level.

**John:** I think it’s come time for our One Cool Things. You have a similar thing in your… Your draft in your podcast, is that your One Cool Things, or is that more a collective bit where you’re upping the ante on each other?

**Michael:** Our draft is we come up with a topic of pieces of furniture and we just draft. Someone gets the first pick, and they pick a couch, and then explain why they think that’s the best pick. We do do a thing on our podcast at the very end called One Last Meaningless Thing, which I think is maybe closer to yours. Go ahead.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a paper I read this week from JPL and JPL folks who were involved in looking for all the asteroids that could hit the Earth. We’ve done a really good job of tracking all those asteroids. If one of them were to hit the Earth or come close to the Earth, we can maybe do something about it. This paper is called Defending Human Civilization From Supervolcanic Eruptions. It’s basically making the case, we know there is the Yellowstone Supervolcano, which is not about to erupt, it’s not going to happen, but at some point could erupt, and it would be world-ending in the way that an asteroid hit would be. This paper is actually asking, we know how much energy there is there, could we bleed off that energy by putting it in wells and stuff to pull the power out of that? The answer is maybe. We actually kind of could. It would be geo engineering. You could actually get a ton of electricity out of there, and over the course of 500 years, as you build smaller and smaller concentric circles, stop the Yellowstone Volcano from ever erupting. It is a very nerdy paper, but I just loved it as a concept.

**Michael:** Very cool. You were right. That is one cool thing.

**John:** Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

**Michael:** Yeah. I’m a little prisoner of the moment here. I’ve been going around and promoting this book that I read – that I wrote, sorry. I’ve also read it.

**John:** Someone else wrote it.

**Michael:** I, like most people, I think have been living in a world where you feel like the only place to buy books is amazon.com. Then over the pandemic, there was this big push to go to bookshop.org, which is a collection of independent booksellers, where you don’t get it in 18 minutes like you do when you order from Amazon, but you support independent bookstores. I’ve also now gone to a number of independent bookstores around the country. You’re a published author, a bestselling author.

**John:** I am. I’m not a bestseller. Not a bestseller like you. I’m not on any lists like you. I’ve been to so many bookstores.

**Michael:** I just want to say that I think it’s really cool that these independent bookstores still exist. I went to one called Rainy Day Books in Kansas City that did this crazy promotion where you could have me inscribe specific messages to people. I signed and inscribed 2,700 books over two days, which was a truly insane thing to do. It was this wild stunt created by Rainy Day Books that was really cool and really interesting. Chevalier’s, which is my local bookstore here in LA, is doing something similar. I’ve signed a bunch of books and inscribed them there.

I just think it’s really cool that in this age in which everything has internetized and immediate and everything else, that these independent bookstores still exist and that people support them. I just want to give a shout-out not only to the bookstores themselves, but to all the people who actually physically go to a bookstore, look through the shelves, and decide to pay $3 more for the book that they wanted to buy to support a local business.

**John:** A tip for people who have an instinct to just buy the book immediately on Amazon, what our family does is we have a shared note called Books To Buy. Instead of actually just buying on Amazon, I’ll add the book to Books To Buy. Then once a week or so, we’ll put in the order at Chevalier’s, which is our local bookstore. They’ll order them for us. They come super quick, because the infrastructure is there for them to get those books quickly. That’s how we get away from buying books on Amazon is just have a shared note on our phones that we can all add to.

**Michael:** Great idea. That’s another cool thing. You cheated. You had two cool things.

**John:** I was just piggybacking on you. You set it up. I was just delivering it and then polishing it there a little bit more.

**Michael:** Fair enough.

**John:** Cool. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Nico Manzi. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Michael’s @kentremendous. What is the origin of Ken Tremendous?

**Michael:** I was walking down the street in college, taking a fiction writing class, and I thought, “Oh, you know what a funny name for a character in a short story would be is Ken Tremendous.” I went home and wrote it down. I love funny names.

**John:** It’s good.

**Michael:** I’m a Monty Python fan. I just always was like, “Someday I’ll use that,” and that’s where I used it.

**John:** Your production company is Fremulon, right?

**Michael:** Yes, a similarly dumb, meaningless, funny word, Fremulon Insurance, yeah.

**John:** I love it. 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 Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have t-shirts and hoodies and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member the scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments. Mike Schur, thank you so much for coming on the show.

**Michael:** It is my absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Let’s talk about the writing staff here. We got a question in from Lori. She was asking, “I found this list of writers terms. I was hoping you could talk about writers rooms shorthand.” This article has a bunch of things here. Just quickly, a speed round, could you talk me through what some of these things mean? Hat on a hat.

**Michael:** Hat on a hat just means there’s a joke where it’s a little bit nutty and then there’s simultaneously another thing happening that’s a little bit nutty or crazy. It’s a bridge too far would be the way to explain it. It’s too much. It’s too silly or ridiculous.

**John:** Do you ever deliberately do a hat on a hat, just to make fun of the absurdity?

**Michael:** Another way to say hat on a hat that comedy writers use is joke on a joke. It’s like, you want to tell a joke, you don’t want to tell a joke on top of that joke. Sometimes, Brent Forrester, in The Office writers room, someone would go, “I don’t know, I think that’s a joke on a joke,” and he would go, “Yeah, two jokes. It’s better than one.” It’s not always the case that you don’t want to do that, but generally speaking, your joke will probably read a little better if it isn’t confused by another simultaneous joke that’s going on.

**John:** A bottle episode.

**Michael:** Bottle episode is an episode that takes place entirely on a set. You don’t have any other locations. You don’t leave the studio. You don’t have any guest actors. It’s only the main cast and it’s only the main location of the show. It’s usually a way to save money, honestly, because it costs money to hire other actors or to go places. Some of the greatest episodes in TV history have been bottle episodes. The Friends episode, if you think about–

**John:** Where Ross is trying to get everyone to leave the apartment?

**Michael:** That’s right, yes. That is a great bottle episode. The Fly, which is the Breaking Bad episode that takes place entirely in the lab, that was a bottle episode. One truism I think about writing is that obstacles are good for drama and they’re good for comedy. If you have no obstacles, you end up doing something giant and bloated and Buddhist. Sometimes when you are forced into a bottle episode, you end up coming up with the best episode that you’ve ever done. Ron and Leslie at the end of Parks and Rec in the final season when it’s just the two of them locked in a room, that was a bottle episode. We didn’t have to do that. We just wanted to do that, because we thought that doing it in this really cloistered environment would make for a good half hour of TV.

**John:** I don’t know if this is actually a term or something that just showed up on this list. A Gilligan cut. Have you ever herd of a Gilligan cut?

**Michael:** I don’t think I have.

**John:** I get what the point is. Gilligan is fixing the boat right now, and then you cut to Gilligan accidentally setting the boat on fire. Do you have a term for that? Is there anything you would call that?

**Michael:** We would call that a cut-to joke. I think of it as a Lenny and Squiggy thing. It’s like, “Where are we going to find two people that dumb?” and then, “Hello, Laverne.” It’s anything where you tee up exactly what’s about to happen and then you cut right to it.

**John:** This list calls that a ding-dong joke, when you’re ringing at the doorbell right at that moment. A truck full of ducks or a spring-loaded cat, you ever heard of these terms?

**Michael:** No.

**John:** Truck full of ducks is from Silence of the Lambs, where you’re chasing after a thing that you think has the killer inside, and you open it up and it’s actually just a truck full of ducks, you were chasing the wrong thing. Have you ever used the term potato pitch?

**Michael:** No.

**John:** Potato pitch is so-called because it provides nourishment in a pinch but it’s not enough to sustain you. It solves a problem, but only temporarily. It sounds like a jokoid. It’s doing the function, but it’s actually not good.

**Michael:** It’s not a long-lasting nourishment for the episode or the show. I get that.

**John:** Does each writers room develop its own terms for what these things are or does it usually carry on from writers room to writers room?

**Michael:** There are certainly some of those terms. Sock barrel is another one. Sock barrel is a term for two aspects of a show that seem like they should be related but aren’t actually related. The A story, someone is shopping for a new car. In the B story, someone just got a new shirt and is showing it off to people, where they’re both about new objects, but it’s not a thematic link. It’s just those two stories are kind of similar. That term has been around forever, and it certainly is–

**John:** Sock barrel’s generally a bad thing.

**Michael:** Yes. It’s generally a bad thing. There are certainly terms like that that are handed down from room to room to room. Refrigerator logic is another one, where that’s a term for if it’s 3 in the morning and you go to the refrigerator half-asleep to get a snack and you think about something you watched that day and suddenly, you’re like, “Wait a second.”

**John:** “That doesn’t make any sense.”

**Michael:** “Why would that person have done that?” or whatever. That’s a term that people used to say if you’ve raised an objection to something in a story, some minor plot details, someone will say, “That’s refrigerator logic. We don’t need to worry about that,” because that’s not serious enough of a problem to make us not do this or whatever. Some of these are handed down from the early ‘60s or something. Some rooms generally do develop their own lingo and their own ideas about how to approach these things.

**John:** That’s amazing.

Links:

* [Michael Schur](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1321658/) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/KenTremendous)
* [How to be Perfect by Michael Schur](https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/How-to-Be-Perfect/Michael-Schur/9781982159313)
* [Todd May](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_May), academic papers [here](https://philpeople.org/profiles/todd-g-may), books [here](https://bookshop.org/contributors/todd-may)
* [The Poscast](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-few-more-words/id757346885) by Joe Posnanski and Mike Schur
* [TV Writers Room Terms](https://thescriptlab.com/features/screenwriting-101/8890-13-tv-writers-room-terms-you-should-know/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Nico Mansy ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/537standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/vfx-deep-dive).

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

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

**John:** This is Episode 563 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, we’re going to do a deep dive with two VFX pros to figure out how they break down and discuss a sample scene. It’s a master class in thinking about how you turn that scene description into an actual scene.

In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’re going to talk about friends.

**Craig:** Ew.

**John:** How to make them and how to keep them.

**Craig:** Yuck.

**John:** Especially as we get older.

**Craig:** That’s really sweet actually. Considering who we are and who our audience is, I think this is a really good topic. We should talk about this.

**John:** Listening back to old episodes for the book that we’re doing, at the start of the podcast, I said on the air, “We’re not actual friends in real life,” and you were heartbroken.

**Craig:** Oh, wow.

**John:** Now we’re friends.

**Craig:** More than friends, John. We’re partners.

**John:** Oh yes, we are. We are podcast partners. Business partners.

**Craig:** You keep talking, and you know who’s going to show up, right?

**John:** Nope, it’s not allowed. Matthew will edit him out. Let’s get to our main feature of the day. A few episodes back, we discussed how writers should think about visual effects and what they look like on the page. That was kind of abstract. It’s like doing a Three Page Challenge without three pages to actually look at. Today we’re going to take an effects-heavy scene and talk through it with two VFX pros. Before we do that, if you want to read the scene, it’s pretty short. Just click the link in the show notes. I’ll also put it on Twitter. Craig, you are a good narrator. Could you just read aloud this scene for us?

**Craig:** Of course. This scene was written by our own John August.

**John:** It is. It’s pretty impressive.

**Craig:** It’s pretty good stuff. Here we go. “Interior/exterior the cathedral, day. Oona gets to her feet, badly hurt but alive. She retrieves the eldenspear. She knows the fight’s not over.

“With one wall taken out by the missile strike, it’s incredible the whole building hasn’t collapsed. The altar has been reduced to flaming rubber. Smoke carries singed bible pages.

“Goodwin emerges from the debris, flames clinging to his Kevlar vest. One of his eyes is missing, a green light glowing in its place.

“He sloughs the flesh off his left arm, revealing the metal skeleton beneath. No sense pretending he’s human anymore.

“Oona gives a thunderous war cry, so powerful it shatters the remaining stained glass windows. Prismatic shards of glass rain down.

“Goodwin charges. Oona makes an acrobatic spring off a pew, leaping to drive her spear right through Goodwin. He’s impaled like a martini olive.

“But he’s not dead yet. With both hands, Goodwin pulls the spear back out and throws it at Oona. She barely dodges.”

That should be easy to shoot.

**John:** Easy to shoot. Simple.

**Craig:** Just put it in a volume and shoot it.

**John:** Half a day.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** It’s only like maybe six eighths of a page.

**Craig:** Yeah, we could do that in the morning.

**John:** 100%. Easy. Easy for me to write, much more challenging for the visual effects pros who have to make the scene come to life, so let’s meet them. Alex Wang cis a visual effects supervisor whose credits include Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Dominion, Terminator: Dark Fate, Fast and the Furious 7, and more. His most recent project is the VFX supervisor on The Last of Us at HBO. Welcome, Alex.

**Alex Wang:** Thank you very much for having me.

**Craig:** He’s got such a good radio voice too.

**John:** It’s really impressive. You have been working with Craig on this series, and so doing all the visual effects for a show that we’ve never seen.

**Alex:** Yes, that is correct.

**Craig:** And maybe we’ll never see. No, we’re definitely seeing it. We’re seeing it. It’s coming. It’s coming.

**John:** They bury your show, Craig. It’s like, “Oh, we’re never going to release it.”

**Craig:** No one will be hearing about this.

**John:** Next we have Addie Manis, who’s a visual effects producer/supervisor. Her credits include Marvel’s Agent Carter and Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey. After she VFXed for the first season of Foundation for Apple TV Plus, she’s transitioned to writing, as she and her writing partner were asked to join the writing staff for Season 2.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** We could really use her help to make this scene possible. If you’re looking at the pdf that we have linked to in the show notes, you’ll see that I’ve numbered each of the paragraphs, which is not necessarily each shot, but it gives you a sense of what the challenges are going to be. Let’s start at the start. We’ll start with you, Addie. Let’s say this scene lands on your desk. What is your first step as you’re looking at this scene in terms of thinking about, okay, this is the visual effects challenge or issues that I see here on the page.

**Addie Manis:** Excellent question. Let’s say I get this as a script page. I’m going to read it out of the gate. That’s what everybody does with a script page. I’m going to read it with a highlighter. I am reading both for story, character, writing, pacing, tone, because all of that stuff tells me what’s this going to look like, what’s the director going to do, how are we going to cut it, like I am reading the final edit on the page out of the gate.

**John:** That makes it sound like the actual writing on the page is incredibly important in terms of your first impression. It’s not just like here’s a list of things that are in it. How it actually feels and reads on the page is influencing your choices at this early stage.

**Addie:** That is completely correct. I have in the last 10 years focused more on event television rather than feature film. Especially the first episode of something, which is often written by the showrunner, the showrunner’s first script is conveying to me very much what the final show is going to look like. Because visual effects lives in a world of edits or cuts essentially, we’ll say how many shots is how many cuts in a scene. I am reading the cuts in the sentences. Every clause, every period, every comma is telling me, okay, this is going to be three cuts, this feels like a master shot and it’s going to be one long cut. It tells me the pace of the action and what’s going to be the rhythm of the editing. I know that’s a funny thing to say, because the writer is not the editor. In my experience, it does flow all the way through.

**Craig:** It almost sounds like what you’re saying is that the writers are directing on the page, which is something we’ve been insisting writers should be doing forever.

**Addie:** Alex and myself will start very, very early in a process. What we have is the script. We may have only the script for six months, or a year if we’re doing really long prep. We root down into that script and see what is this show going to look like, what’s our pace, what’s our tone, what’s our rhythm, which I’m sure Alex could expound upon further. I read with that in one side of my brain, and in the other side of my brain, I am already saying, “Interior/exterior the cathedral. Okay, is this a practical cathedral? Are we going somewhere to shoot a cathedral? Are we going to build a cathedral? Are we going to shoot this on a blue screen? Are we going to shoot this in a volume?” Any of the answers to any of those questions kicks off a very long chain of action, building, budgeting, hiring, travel planning.

I think we’re both looking at the final product and what is the piece of art that we’re making and the story that we’re telling, and then also physically how do I get all this stuff? Is somebody building an eldenspear? Are we going to have fire on set that day? Is this all going to be CG? How do I get this actor scanned? It’s of two minds. It’s the artistic mind and the logistic mind simultaneously.

**John:** Alex, talk through this scene from your perspective. This lands on your desk. You probably are highlighting it also. If it’s for a show that you already know… Let’s say this is Episode 3 of a series. You have some sort of basis for how things are going. What are you looking at? What are your first challenges? What can you do before there’s a director or someone else on board?

**Alex:** Great question. Typically, when I get an action scene like this, the first step is, I’d say, “We should storyboard this,” because action scenes like this, I think what’s most important is camera angles, what is the scope. I read line by line. I break it down with my producer. We come up with the best methodology. Like Addie is saying, we go into very broad strokes as, “Okay, what is the art department going to be building? What is going to be practical? Do we need blue screen? Are we going to be in a volume?”

**Craig:** I’m going to interrupt you there, because I think some people at home may not know the difference between these things. Both of you describe this fundamental thing that happens when you’re thinking about where you’re shooting something. We have a practical location. We have blue screen. We have the volume. Can you just quickly give a definition for those things?

**Alex:** Absolutely. A practical set is essentially a set that is built practically that we can basically shoot in camera.

**Craig:** You may be in a practical location, which is a place in the world or a set that you built, but then blue screen you will put behind things to allow you later to replace that easily with stuff that wasn’t there, digital stuff.

**Alex:** Yes, that’s correct.

**Craig:** Tell us about the volume though. What’s that about?

**Alex:** The volume is something that is exciting and new. Basically, it is these LED screens where we can project content that is essentially what we would be doing in post early on on the LED screen. We can call it getting that it camera. We could still change it in post if we need to, but the idea is that we’re projecting what we will essentially be doing in post onto the LED screens.

**Craig:** The volume is essentially a room that is a bunch of TV screens that we fill with stuff. For instance, the Mandalorian, very famously, we shot on a volume. They put Pedro in his suit. They stand him on a ground that has some sand. All the stuff around him is actually not really there, nor is it done later with putting stuff into blue screen. It’s actually like rear projection except for much more advanced. You and Addie, the first thing you’re thinking is where are we doing this?

**John:** I want to bring up one other possibility for where we’re doing this, because when we say practical, it could be that you’re building a set for most of this. You’re building a set for the cathedral, maybe up to a certain height we’ll talk about, or in theory, you could be at a real location where you’re actually at a real cathedral, but the one wall that’s supposed to be missing, you’re putting up green screens or you’re somehow planning while you’re shooting this for like, “We’re going to take this wall out and put a virtual background behind that.” That would be a very early production decision, are we building anything, are we going to a practical location, versus this is all green screen or is this all volume.

**Craig:** From this very fundamental thing, is there anything that we as writers should be thinking about when it comes to this big decision of will we be going someplace in the world, will we be building a set, or is this something that has to be created virtually completely, or should we just write stuff and let you guys worry about it?

**John:** Addie, what do you think?

**Addie:** You guys should just write it.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Addie:** There’s just a wealth of professionals out there who can bring all their… People want to bring their skill sets. I think all your department heads really want to jump in and solve all these problems. I don’t even want to refer to them as problems, but they’re exciting problems, challenges to have. Tell the story, man, because Alex and I read scripts all the time. We read so many scripts. It’s a function of our job and picking what job we’re going to do next. We’re super jazzed to get a good script or a script that we’re going to be really excited to make. We bring all the visual effects, production and creative solutions to the table. I think the writers should write story and character.

**Craig:** Good, so one less thing for us to worry about.

**Alex:** I completely agree with Addie there. I think writers should just write the best script they can write. Close your ears, Craig. Visual effects can essentially do everything.

**Craig:** Oh, boy. Yeah, I know.

**Addie:** I would say, if I may-

**Craig:** You may.

**Addie:** Craig is now showrunning a show. In the transition from just writing to showrunning, there will become logistic, financial, and practical conversations about this script and the visual effects process, as it were with all departments.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. It’s a good conversation to have. I think it is true that as you interface more with these departments from a showrunning point of view, you start to learn limitations. One of the conversations that Alex and I have had I think 4 billion times is this: “Hey, Alex?” “Yeah?” “Would it be hard to do this?” Then I watch his face, because he’ll never say, “That’s not possible.” He’ll say, “That should be good,” or, “Okay, yeah, doable. It’s going to be expensive, but we can do it.” Sometimes he’ll be like, “Uh, we could.” That’s when I know that it’s a problem. The nice thing is, as writers we don’t necessarily need to know what’s going to be a problem. I’m sometimes surprised by what’s difficult versus what isn’t. That’s what you guys do.

One of the things that I learned from Alex is, whenever possible, if there’s something practical… When we say practical, we mean something that physically exists. Whenever possible, if there’s something practical to base visual effects off of, let’s get something practical in there.

The best example I can think of is, let’s see, “The altar has been reduced to flaming rubble. Smoke carries singed bible pages.” It’s going to be hard to practically have singed bible pages where we need them in the air. That’s probably going to be digital. It may be very difficult for the rubble to be on fire just the way we want and for the smoke to move exactly where we want it to go. If we could have the special effects department, which those are the crazy guys that light things on fire, including themselves, if we could have them provide real flame there, just some, and maybe a little bit of smoke, just some, then maybe it will look better when the visual effects department comes on in there. Alex, does that sound about right?

**Alex:** Yes.

**Craig:** Tell me why that’s so important.

**Alex:** That is absolutely correct, because it really is important about the tone of the show as well. If it’s grounded and practical and realistic and the fire needs to look like real fire, though we can do a lot, it’s always that the hardest part of visual effects is trying to replicate what is real. It just takes iterations. It takes time, really talented artists to do that. If we have something practical to even reference off of, that just gets us a step ahead.

**Craig:** What do you think, Addie? Is that the method that you guys use as well, or when you were doing it?

**Addie:** Yes, certainly, especially on foundation, we leaned really hard into the practical. It’s definitely a show that has huge swaths of full CG. If we’re blowing up a planet, that’s pretty CG. Practical locations, practical effects, we did miniatures, we did all of it. The producer in the supervisor/producer dynamic is often the voice of no. I’m not going to say no to what Alex said, because I agree completely with him. I would only say the complicating factor is sometimes how much time production has to shoot something. If you had to shoot this scene that we’re talking about in half a day, one day, two days-

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**Addie:** I think Alex and I would be having secret meetings about how some of the other departments are going to struggle in that time frame. We are going to have special effects and stunts and everybody do their thing, but visual effects is going to brace to pick it up, because those departments need a fair amount of time to execute at the highest level. Alex might say something like, “Let’s shoot the special effects, but I would really like to get a clean plate.” That means I’d like to do one pass with no fire, and I would encourage producers and showrunners to let Alex do that.

**Craig:** I’m laughing just because I have heard Alex say, “Okay, and then we also need to get a clean plate,” about a thousand times. For people at home, a clean plate, when we’re shooting things that have… Let’s say we’re shooting this scene here. There’s something that we might want to have be completely CG. For instance, “Goodwin emerges from the debris, flames clinging to his Kevlar vest. One of his eyes is missing, a green light growing in its place.” Lots of ways to do that. Let’s say Goodwin’s body was half-skeleton or something like that, and he was going to be mostly CG. We can take real Goodwin, and we can do the best we can with him with a suit and maybe some green stuff on the suit that would get replaced by other stuff.

We’ll do that, and then Alex will say, “Great. Thank you. Now, just shoot the same thing with no Goodwin at all,” which seems weird. At the time you’re just shooting nothing. That stuff then becomes something where he can put an entirely CG Goodwin in there. That’s called a plate. Anything where we’re shooting something that then we stick something on to, or we’re shooting something that we’re going to stick into something, those are called plates. Yes, I have shot many a clean plate for our friend Alex.

**Alex:** I still thank you for that.

**Craig:** You are welcome. Listen to your VFX people basically is what [inaudible 00:17:08]. If they say they need something, give it to them. They need it.

**John:** Alex, the reasons why you might want that is say you might be inserting a fully CG character, but also you might be trying to paint out some stuff you don’t want there. You might be painting out his arm. There’s lots of good reasons why you might want to have that full plate for a reference to do some specific things, right?

**Alex:** Yeah, absolutely. The clean plate, like you and Craig mentioned, if I need to put in a fully digital good one, that’s helpful, but also just if I need to replace his arm where there’s a green portion on his arm or part of his head, and you might see his endoskeleton or something like that, what a clean plate allows is just something back there to help us paint back the background.

**Craig:** A clean plate is the visual equivalent of room tone for the audio guys. There’s a space here where we need the sound of a room without anybody talking. Sometimes you need that clean plate where there’s the space where nothing happened. One of the things Addie’s touching on here which is important to understand, I think, for us when we’re writing is that there are lots of levels of production capacity, and they’re all dependent on budget. Budget will not only drive the things that you can do in post, but they also drive how much time you have to shoot when you’re in principal photography. That amount of time definitely affects how you can go about doing the job of these VFX shots, which will start to head into the thousands when you’re doing a big show.

When you’re writing stuff, we have a general sense of, okay, we’re writing something that’s going to cost $10 million, we’re writing something that’s going to cost 40, we’re writing something that’s going to cost 200. Just be aware that if you’re writing something small, when you write anything that is not something you can shoot without visual effects people, it’s good to at least have a sense that you’re doing something that’s within the realm of reality. Otherwise, you’re going to end up with something rather disappointing like Birdemic.

**John:** Yes, or you may be making aesthetic choices at the very outset for what your effects are going to feel like. You just have to have a plan going into it. No matter what scale of scene you’re shooting, whether it’s a $10 million scene or a $100 scene, you have to go into it knowing what am I actually going to be able to do in visual effects afterwards, whether it’s something you’re doing in after-effects or you’re doing it on a huge, huge scale. Let’s just walk through the scene. Line 3, “Oona gets to her feet, badly hurt but alive. She retrieves the eldenspear. She knows the fight’s not over.”

**Craig:** Eldenspear.

**John:** Two questions for you guys. First off, let’s talk about Oona. She’s badly hurt but alive. A discussion about how much of her being badly hurt is hair and makeup versus how much of her being badly hurt is visual effects. Can you talk us through wounds on a visual effects level? Addie, you want to start us off with that?

**Addie:** Yes. Sorry, I’m so used to waiting for the supervisor to speak first. It’s like, I’ll let the supervisor go first, and then I’ll fix what he says. That’s how that works.

**Alex:** I was waiting for John to tell one of us to start.

**Addie:** “Oona gets to her feet, badly hurt but alive.” At least in the pre-production phase, I definitely flagged that as something to keep an eye on. Frequently, I would just make a note to plan for what I would call makeup effects assistance. I would probably assume that makeup effects is going to do the bulk of it, and we’re going to shoot with makeup effects, and then in post-production, visual effects might be called upon to augment it. There is a trick called heal and reveal, where we paint out the makeup, and then after the wound occurs, we reveal it again, and then we live with makeup effects for the rest of the scene.

**John:** I like that.

**Addie:** There might be squirting blood, and so we might remove a blood tube. If there is liquids involved, pus, blood, frequently those become continuity issues. We don’t usually want to stop filming to fix them, because it takes way too long. You might shoot a whole scene, and then by the time you get into the edit, you’ll say, “The blood’s all in the wrong spots. Let’s take it out in some spots and put it in other spots so that this looks even passingly realistic,” unless of course we have blown a leg off. Then that’s a much bigger visual effects process that makeup effects is not going to handle.

**Craig:** “Oona hops to her foot, badly hurt but alive.”

**Alex:** Just to really talk about the badly hurt part as well, I think just being as descriptive as possible really helps Addie and I understand how much… Is half of her face scarred? Is there a lot of blood? Just a few more descriptive words would really help us there.

**Craig:** In fact, this is where you’ll find out as a writer who maybe has been misled to believe that you shouldn’t be directing on the page, because you didn’t listen to us. When you get to a production meeting, there are going to be 4 billion questions. You want to try and limit when you get to those meetings to 4 million questions, because there will be 4 million no matter what. Once you get into the billions, you get really exhausted. If you do say things like “badly hurt but alive,” you’re going to get grilled by everybody. Getting some details in there will at least help the discussion along a bit further, so that Addie and Alex, maybe they can just relax, because “badly hurt” is just going to be blood. Alex, I think we’ve had… I try and avoid spoilers as much as possible, but people do get hurt in The Last of Us. That does occur.

**John:** Oh no, Craig, really?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I thought it was a comedy though.

**Craig:** I’m going to give that one away. It’s a comedy of errors. We do a lot obviously with makeup, but there are times where there are certain wounds where we can’t do it with makeup. Sometimes we use prosthetics, which help quite a bit. I think Addie’s brought up the crucial thing, which is continuity. The blood can change. Also, wounds are not static. You’ll notice that on a lot of things we watch in movies and television, somebody gets really hurt, and they’re just not bleeding, they’re just bloody. People bleed. How much do we want to make that wound active? These things are complicated. Hopefully the eldenspear has been described earlier in your script, John.

**John:** I really hope so too. It really is a question for the writer, who we’ll pretend is not me, and the director and everyone else involved in the project, that like, okay, does the eldenspear glow by itself? Is it like Wonder Woman’s magic lasso, or is it just a spear? Is it simply a prop, or is it a visual effects component to eldenspear from the very start, is something we need to know. Probably three pages earlier we may have found out that the eldenspear glows all the time. Alex, from your perspective, what is the difference between something that’s just fully a prop versus something that is also a visual effect?

**Alex:** If the prop is relatively static and there’s not much movement to it or there’s not a lot of say magic elements, supernatural elements to it, it should be a prop. We can do a lot on top of it if we need to add a glow, a subtle glow, or have some of those elements. If say the eldenspear has to transform in a way that can’t be done practically, and it constantly does that, then it’s a whole different conversation of, okay, maybe the spear should just be a green spear, so we can replace it later and have it do all those things. If it doesn’t, it’s a place where I would say we should save that money and just make the best practical eldenspear that everyone’s happy with and just get in camera.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Again, it seems like time is maybe the most precious of all resources, even more so perhaps than money, because if you have time, then the props folks can do some R and D and maybe build something great, but if you don’t, then you don’t. In ongoing series, and Addie, you’ve worked on some of those, there may be a situation where scripts are coming in late, and suddenly you need to have an eldenspear tomorrow. At that point, do you just put a green stick in their hand and figure it out later?

**Addie:** Yes, definitely I have done that. A funny classic one is photos in frames or newspaper props where somebody… Especially on a broadcast schedule or a broadcast show, you’ll get a script, and you’ll be shooting in five days, and you need all these photos from a family’s backstory. We put little green squares into a picture frame, and we make it later and stick it in in post-production. It’s a silly thing, because of course you could make that practically, but you just don’t have time, or production and design does not have time.

**John:** Production also sometimes gives you the dumbest looking Photoshops. So bad.

**Addie:** Sometimes you’re going to plus it up a little bit later on.

**Craig:** Plus it up.

**Addie:** I think to your point, I would say time is radically the most important factor in visual effects. It is for many, many of the departments. Visual effects can be such an expensive process. It’s sometimes confusing on even why it’s so expensive. Visual effects budgets on shows are tens of millions, hundreds of millions on feature films. The real component is time. What the money in visual effects is paying for is man hours, because many visual effects could take 20 different people. They could take 20 different people working sequentially over 6 months. You’re paying incredibly highly trained, skilled specialists to do creative bespoke work. Sometimes you can dump all the money in the world on that.

If we do not have enough time to design it, you want to iterate on it so that you can find what you really want it to look like as the director, showrunner. Then you got to stack 16 specialists on top of each other in a time frame, and you’re paying for computer hardware. It’s a complicated process. You’re paying for highly trained specialists to work many, many, many hours together to design something that’s probably never been made before. If you have 6 weeks to do that or you have 6 months to do that or you have 18 months to do that, the capabilities will be different, and the end result will be different.

**John:** I have a question about Line 4. “With one wall taken out by the missile strike, it’s incredible the whole building hasn’t collapsed.” Let’s assume that there’s either a practical that we are green screening off a wall, blue screening off a wall, or we’re building this a set, maybe set extending at the ceilings. The point is that we are able to look outside of this cathedral, outside this interior space into an exterior space, which could be a mountain valley. It could be a dystopia. My question for you is how much does that background need to be a 3D background, or could that just be a 2D background that’s painted in there? Do we need to send a crew to film what that’s going to look like out there, or is that something that we would do just pulling assets that already exist someplace else? What are you thinking about in terms of that background outside of the church?

**Alex:** I definitely know a thing or two about collapsed buildings.

**Craig:** What? Another spoiler.

**Alex:** I will say that at least if the actors are interacting or walking through this collapsed building, I would say I always would like to have a portion of that build, even if it’s just up to 12 feet. Then we can have blue screen. Obviously, going out and finding a plate of that is near impossible, so that will be all digital in my eyes. As far as 3D or DMP, it really depends on the camera, what the camera is doing. If it’s relatively static, we’re behind the actor, and it’s just an establishing shot, it could be what we call a DMP, which is digital map painting, or if the camera travels through that environment, then it has to be a 3D environment.

**John:** When you add a 3 in front of something, it becomes much more expensive.

**Alex:** Not necessarily. DMPs can be expensive too. I would say it comes down to what the camera move will be, what kind of a shot is it.

**John:** That’s a discussion with the director. You have to be deeper into planning and probably storyboards for you to know what those shots are going to be which would influence what we’re seeing outside of the cathedral.

**Craig:** In the case of television where you have a showrunner that is often not the director, then the visual effects supervisor needs to basically talk to the showrunner, and then the showrunner has to explain to the director why they can’t do something or why they should do it differently or what the limitations are, because we always have some limitations. I want to talk a little bit about this notion of movement and set extension.

In a very simple way of thinking about it for those of you playing the home game, when somebody is moving in front of something, if we want to replace the thing that is behind them when they’re moving, it’s hard, because every frame we have to basically cut our people out and then replace the background. God help us if they have a lot of hair that’s… If you’ve got Natasha Lyonne in there, oh no, you have to rotoscope Natasha Lyonne’s hair. That’s a nightmare. She has the best hair.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** For those situations, we try and put people in front of something that’s blue or green, because a computer can basically say everything that’s blue gets replaced, and everything that’s not blue, we keep. It gets much, much easier. Set extensions, what we’ll do is, okay, we’ve got somebody moving, and we want something practical behind them, so we will build enough behind them to cover where they’re moving. Where they’re not moving, it’s easy to replace that. That we can just throw blue on. The idea is to try as much as you can, unless you’re a certain kind of show or the environment is impossible to build, to try and make stuff real where people are.

For instance, in Chernobyl, there’s a shot where we see the firefighters marching up this hill of debris towards this reactor building. We couldn’t build an entire reactor building, but we definitely built that mountain of debris. You could see where the firefighters are moving even as they’re climbing up this thing. That’s all really there. Then everything beyond that, Alex and Addie come in and replace that with, like you said, a digital map painting, or in certain… I actually don’t know if I have one where it’s been a 3D environment back there. Do we have one, Alex?

**Alex:** Oh yeah, we definitely…

**Craig:** Shows you what I know.

**Alex:** Sometimes it’s just easier. Digital map paintings come in when you have to pull reference, whether it’s mixed photography. If it’s an environment that really 100% just doesn’t exist, it’s built.

**Craig:** Got it. Oh yeah, we do have that. I’m paying attention. I promise.

**John:** When you’re saying a built environment, is it on a real engine where you’re actually rebuilding 3D assets and creating a space? Is that the idea?

**Alex:** Very much like that. We have so many different types of software to do that. Essentially, it is that.

**John:** We talk about set extensions. I would imagine that this cathedral probably is a set extension beyond a certain point, because we have these high walls, the ceiling. On Line 8, “Oona gives a thunderous war cry, so powerful it shatters the remaining stained glass windows. Prismatic shards of glass rain down.” Those stained glass windows feel like a visual effect to me. Maybe there’s something. Maybe it’s the reason why you’re doing models or something else or shattering some real things to capture that. I have a question about what is raining down on our actors there. Is anything raining down there? Is this the time where we do some colored rubber glass? What are the things you’re thinking about as you read Line 8, Addie?

**Addie:** Line 8 with the shattering glass, so my gut is most likely this is potentially fully 3D, especially Alex had mentioned that maybe you would build a set up to 12 feet, which in that instance you’re aiming to build a set that goes above the actors’ heads so that you can cover the actors, maybe with a practical set. You only see above their heads in the wider shot. It keeps your shot count down. It gives the actors something practical to play against. If the stained glass is way up in the high part of the cathedral, which I think in a cathedral design it probably is, that is likely going to be fully CG, but you could rain what we call candy glass down on the actors to give them something to interface with. Probably a mix of visual effects and practical.

**John:** Even if you put the candy glass down on them, you would probably supplement it with additional stuff, just to give extra little bits of texture and something for them to react to.

**Addie:** Again, trying to read the movie in my head on the page, I’m also picturing a dramatic shot of the glass exploding into the camera, which will probably be heavily digital. Then maybe just the shards on the actor are practical. It seems like a very dramatic cinematic moment, where you might want to really art direct the glass performance.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Glass performance, I love that.

**John:** We talked a little bit about Goodwin. “Goodwin’s emerging from the debris, flames clinging to his Kevlar vest. One of his eyes is missing, a green light glowing in its place.” We’re assuming that this is a real actor. We’ve seen him as a human being for most of this. He’s wearing a Kevlar vest, so he’s some sort of law enforcement person maybe. The flames clinging to his Kevlar vest, am I right to assume that those are all going to be digitally added? Would you put any LEDs in there to create light on the actor? What are some things we’re thinking about with Goodwin emerging from this debris?

**Alex:** I would say that the debris should be practical if possible. Maybe we can add some debris on top of it or dust or something like that. The Kevlar vest, I would say it should be digital fire. Because it’s broad daylight, I don’t think I’ll need much LED lights or interactive lights. Only if it was nighttime, that would be helpful. In this case, I will say that that is not necessary. As far as the damage to him, we did a very similar thing on Terminator with Arnold’s character. There was explosion that happens. Basically, post-explosion, half of his face is missing, revealing his endoskeleton, and his arm is revealing the endoskeleton as well. Basically, we just had prosthetics do the burned skin portion, and then the other half would be… On the set, I think we had gray as opposed to blue, but some color of gray or green or blue for replacing that to be a digital endoskeleton.

**John:** Great. On his face, where they have this digital eye, does he have makeup dots on there so you can track where the eye needs to go?

**Alex:** Yeah, that would be really helpful. We have tracking markers, but we also have what is called witness cameras for helping, because sometimes if we have a long lens, it’s difficult to understand the position of the actor’s body. We position witness cameras around, which is going to be a relatively wide lens. It helps when we’re essentially tracking. If you think about if somebody’s on a ground getting up, we essentially will track where his body position is, in 3D. If we just have one camera doing that, that can be rather challenging or difficult, time-consuming. Like Addie said, time is the most important thing. Really when I’m on set, I’m trying to get as much data as possible that just buys me more time in post. Witness cameras, I’ll try to place them around the actor. Generally it’s opposite sides of where the main camera is to help me track the body.

**Craig:** That’s what those things were doing.

**John:** Alex, those cameras, those are synced to each take, so you can actually know on this frame, this is the same frame from this different perspective?

**Alex:** In an ideal world, for example on Terminator, we had A, B, and C camera. Generally if A camera’s rolling, then B and C, which is already synced, those can be our witness cameras. Otherwise, we have a poor man’s version, which is we just have our own visual effects cameras or consumer cameras. We just shine a little red light actually. The red light helps us when we’re looking at the take. Okay, we can sync our cameras to this. It’s like a poor man’s version.

**John:** What you’re saying is every little bit you can get helps, even if it’s just-

**Alex:** Absolutely.

**John:** … reference for things down the road so you get to feel what’s possible there.

**Craig:** It’s so much data being captured. It’s amazing how much data is being captured in a process that used to have no data. When you and I started, John, there was just film.

**John:** There was film, and we had a script supervisor who was taking pencil notes on paper about what happened.

**Craig:** That’s data, but I’m talking about digital data. There was zero digital data, and now there’s a gazillion bits of digital data, not only from the cameras that are capturing the actual footage that you see on film, but then there are these witness cameras. Then they’re scanning. Addie and Alex are making sure that characters that they may need to replace digitally, so for instance in this I would imagine Goodwin would be scanned for sure. They stand in a little cage built of a thousand cameras. Then they all just take pictures so that they have a fully digital 3D capture of this person. We had a van that did that. What would we call that thing? Was it a trailer, a scanning trailer? We also had a little portable scanning thing that we could set up. It was pretty amazing.

**Alex:** We had a scanning booth.

**Craig:** A booth.

**Alex:** It was a booth to scan our actors, our talent. What you saw was probably a Lidar scanner, which basically just helps us scan the set, the environment.

**John:** Now Addie, let’s talk about scanning an actor, because I’m sure your principals for foundation would have to be scanned, because sometimes you just have to replace them. Are you scanning them in their full wardrobe, or are you scanning them just bare so you can put wardrobe on them? What’s important for you on a scan?

**Addie:** It varies by project. On foundation, we scanned actors both in modesty dress and also in each individual costume that had to be recreated. I think an optimal scenario is as many scans as you can possibly get. That might be as naked as possible within the realms of everyone’s comfort level. It could be in 20 different costumes if each of those costumes needs to be used for something. We scanned extras in costumes, because we were filming during COVID, and we were creating digital doubles to populate large crowd scenes, because we were limited on how many extras we could have at each location for safety protocols. I would say both skivvies and costumes is ideal. A lot of times, that takes up too much time. As we’re saying, it takes too much time for the actors. It takes too much time on the day.

For this scene, you would probably ideally want to scan Goodwin in his costume and with his shirt off potentially so you could get his arm skin. The scan itself is getting thousands of mathematical data points. You can make a geo map of his body. You can recreate him as a digital asset. The costumes are good for that. You’re getting costume texture. Fabric is down into the minutiae of visual effects. Production fabric is a complicated thing to create. In a perfect scenario, we would scan him in his costume, but maybe we wouldn’t need to send that fabric or recreate that fabric. You could just get down to his bare skin, and then he peels his skin off and you reveal a digital robot underneath that.

**John:** That’s great. Let’s talk about this shot, 7. “He sloughs the flesh off his left arm, revealing a metal skeleton beneath.” I’m envisioning this as not necessarily a locked-off shot, but we’re close in on seeing this thing and this sliding off. To what degree are we talking about Rick Backer practical visual effects versus this being a digital thing? What are the decisions there?

**Alex:** I think I would do it digital, to be honest, just with the interaction. I would just have the actor give the best performance he can, as if he’s really trying to slide off his skin, so it doesn’t feel like it’s just such an easy thing to do. I think many times I always say just give me the best performance and it’ll make our lives a lot easier when it comes to something like this, because if you can really sell him trying to tear his skin off his arm and revealing what is underneath, I think that will actually make our lives easier.

**Craig:** From a production standpoint, if we had something practical there, which you could do, and which is the only option that existed prior to all this, the resets eat up your day. You need to do takes two, three, four, five, six, and you’re peeling something off that is a one-use thing because it’s getting peeled off. They peeled it off. Now you got to take 30, 40 minutes to get it back on again with the… They have to make multiples of it. Then you get to shoot it again. You could spend all morning and get three takes of this. Now you just have them act, and you can get 9 takes in 30 minutes and find the one later that you want. Again, time is the most precious resource, and it’s the one we’re constantly fighting.

There were circumstances on The Last of Us where because we were in Calgary, in Alberta, which is very north, we always seem to be shooting at the wrong time of year. We would shoot night in the summer, and we would shoot day in the winter. Things go very fast there. We were shooting some night scenes where we really only had about five hours of darkness maximum. In those circumstances, you have to do things like this digitally. Then the idea is to plan ahead and make sure that we give the actor what they need. That means talking to them as well, so that they understand what’s expected of them, and they don’t just get there on the day and go, “Wait, how are we doing this?” They need to know.

**John:** Let’s wrap up this conversation of this scene, talking about the stunt here. In Line 9, “Goodwin charges. Oona makes an acrobatic spring off a pew, leaping to drive her spear right through Goodwin. He’s impaled like a martini olive.” Addie, talk us through what parts of this enter into your department?

**Addie:** Line 9, “Oona makes an acrobatic spring off a pew, leaping to drive her spear,” that’s probably wire work. We are going to look at are we shooting this on a blue stage. What is she wearing, because she will have a bunch of safety harnesses. There will be a wire rig to allow her to perform this. Her costume and how the rig interacts with her costume can be easier or harder, although the first priority is and should be actor safety.

There’s been a few things I think in this conversation, like the fire on a Kevlar vest. Visual effects can pick up a lot of work to make sure that the actors and the camera department are safe, which should I think not get lost in the visual effects conversation. We want to make sure she’s as safe as possible, even if that is more difficult for visual effects, because digital work is very safe. She is going to leap to drive her spear right through Goodwin, so she’s probably going to be holding a practical spear that might not have a sharp tip on it. In post-production, we might add a sharp tip. That is mostly again for actor safety, because we don’t really want anybody interacting with swords.

**John:** Would the spear she’s holding be half the length so that as she drives it, assuming this is in a shot rather than multiple shots, so that she can hit him and we can imagine it went through him? Are what point are you making those decisions?

**Addie:** I think we would make those decisions with art department and stunts all together. The departments really have to collaborate to make this stuff go smoothly. She’s probably holding the spear handle, and it has no blade on it. Maybe that handle is built as big as it needs to go, up to his chest. She could drive a safe, blunt object all the way up to his chest, exactly how we want it to look in the end. Then visual effects can add gleaming metal, dangerous blade on it for the full leap. We can do digital blade piercing through him like a martini olive.

**Craig:** The other option is that maybe we’re doing this with stunt actors only, where we can use a full spear, and maybe the other stunt actor’s wearing a protective vest underneath the costume. It looks like they really are getting stabbed. Then we face replace. Oh, face replace.

**John:** Exciting.

**Addie:** Face replace, yep.

**Craig:** Face replace.

**Alex:** That is Addie and I’s nightmare.

**Craig:** Face replace.

**Addie:** You’ll notice Alex and I did not volunteer face replace once.

**Craig:** That’s right, but I’m always like, “What about face replace?” We don’t do much face replacing, but there’s a couple moments where there is a face replace. We do try and avoid it, because it is hard and takes up a lot of resources. It’s hard to do well I think is the biggest issue.

**John:** Addie and Alex though, is face replacement one of those things 10 years from now will be easier, cheaper, and better?

**Alex:** I think so. I think we’re definitely going with AI these days. Just the deep fake technology is really changing the way visual effects handles face replacement. Ten years ago we would have to do a very high-res scan of our actor’s face. We would have to create a digital asset that is photo reel of our actor’s face. That’s very difficult. Until this day I have to say I haven’t seen a single face replacement through that way of creating a digital face that is very convincing. However, the AI deep fake sort of technology, it really is just building an image library in a very thoughtful way of what is the actor’s emotion and why it looks convincing, because it is that person. It is that actor. It’s just pulling those images and blending them together.

**John:** I didn’t want to get through your segment without talking about you seemed to repose that maybe Shot 9 doesn’t take place in the same space as the rest of the scene would take place. Is there an argument for taking this one stunt and taking it out of this cathedral where we’re doing everything else and doing it in a different space?

**Addie:** Yeah, I think potentially. It can go both back to the issues of speed and safety. Let’s say hypothetically we were shooting this at a practical location in a cathedral that was partially destroyed, which would be excellent and would probably make for an excellent scene. It might be nearly impossible for stunts and camera to execute a safe set of wire work stunts like this out in a field, because you might need ceiling rigging and crash pads and all kind of things to make sure that nobody gets hurt.

You would want to control the lighting scenario very intensely, which might be impossible in a daylight location. You could pull a stunt like this onto a blue stage or a green stage, for example. We would shoot the actors in the stunts completely against blue, ideally key out the blue screen and put in the practical environment in the background. I am wandering into supervisor territory there, so I think Alex could speak to that more. You’re probably only going to perform that a couple of times, because like Craig said, the resets are very difficult. You don’t want to burn daylight. You don’t want to drag all your rigging equipment out into Notre Dame, Paris, because the logistics of that are completely insane. We put it in a controlled environment. It’s safer. It’s faster. Then Alex, you could probably elaborate on how all those elements go together into final shots.

**Alex:** The one thing I will say about the acrobatic spring-off is I think that is when I will walk over to showrunner or director and ask for a creative explanation of what the acrobatic spring-off looks like. If it’s something that is not humanly possible, then I’ll say, “Okay, then there’ll be a digital takeover. We’ll have to shoot it in a way where we can’t take it over.” I think that’s definitely something that I have to consider earlier on as well.

**John:** I want to wrap up this conversations with some things I couldn’t cram into this one scene, which is crowds, because Addie, you’ve mentioned on foundation, because you’re shooting this during COVID, sometimes you needed to populate things with more people than you were allowed to have in a space. Even things like filling up an auditorium with people or a mob of villagers storming something, can you talk us through… Maybe, Alex, you could start with talking us through how we create groups of people as opposed to an individual character.

**Alex:** With crowds, I always try to shoot plates if I can, just because it’s cheaper and it looks better. It gets us there faster. If I can shoot plates, then I will. However, if I cannot, then it goes into digital crowds, and I need to create these digital assets of these crowd members. We call them crowd agents. Depending on what they need to do, if they’re just doing a cycle of cheering up and down, that’s definitely the simpler route to go. However, if they have to interact and react to certain things, that’s only software that’s smart enough to know what to do with that. That obviously takes more time, and it’s more expensive.

**John:** As we wrap up, let’s say we have listeners who are hearing you guys talk about this, and they say, “You know what? This is the kind of job I really want to do. This is a thing I aspire to.” What should that listener do next? Let’s say this was a college student who’s really interested in this. What are the next steps for that person? Addie, what would you say? What advice would you give?

**Addie:** I have to think about this. It’s a valid question, because there’s quite a lot of discussion about the lack of diversity in the visual effects space, so how to get one’s foot in the door is a good question. For me personally, I started as a production assistant in independent film.

**John:** Great.

**Addie:** I think that having some boots on the ground experience on a film set is incredibly important for anybody going into any department. I think the strongest visual effects supervisors, producers, artists, coordinators, are fluent in filmmaking in general. I think having a basis in filmmaking and storytelling is actually more important than the technical, because the technical can be learned, but it’s really integral to know how the whole thing goes together before you start talking about the technical. I would say get a production assistant job, see how the whole thing works.

**John:** Alex, what would your advice be for someone who wants to start a career in visual effects?

**Alex:** I think there’s definitely a wealth of knowledge on the internet right now for visual effects, just listening to visual effects supervisors talk to there are podcasts out there. There are tutorials out there. I think there’s just so much that a young artist can grab, that I wish I had when I was starting out. The other thing I would say is be a master at your craft. Be passionate. It is a hard job. It takes a lot of hours, takes a lot of effort. You have to be really dedicated and passionate about it.

**John:** Great. Craig, any last questions for our team here?

**Craig:** No, I think you guys covered it well. I just want to thank you both for coming on, because most writers simply don’t know about this stuff. The most important part I think of this discussion was hearing from both of you about how important the script is and how closely you read it. In television where the writers are in charge, this makes sense. In movies where the writers aren’t, this is part of the tragedy that the script is being read so carefully, and oftentimes in the absence of the writer themselves, who’s just not there. You have to ask the person who didn’t write it what it meant. Again, the way movies do it, stupid. The way television does it, correct.

I think I really connect with what Addie’s saying, that so much of what makes somebody good at this, and I can certainly confirm that this is the case with Alex, is how carefully they interrogate the screenplay and how much they care about the point, which is the story, the characters, the relationship, the tone, and the feeling you want to create in an audience, and not so much about the ones and zeros. Those are just tools like everything else.

**John:** Addie, Alex, thank you so, so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

**Addie:** Thank you.

**Alex:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Now get off our show.

**John:** Craig, that was a great conversation. Now it’s time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Craig:** I do have a One Cool Thing, and it’s directly related to my friend Alex Wang, who we were just speaking with. When we are reviewing visual effects shots, oftentimes we are discussing certain details inside the frame. We’re showing this on a television, or when we’re into our later final reviews, it’s being projected on a screen. We can’t walk right up to the screen or the television and start tapping on it with our fingers. That’s not going to work very well. The convention is to use laser pointers. We have all sorts of laser pointers over here. I like the green ones, personally.

**John:** Aren’t they really dangerous? I’ve always heard that green ones are dangerous.

**Craig:** They’re all dangerous. They’re all dangerous. Don’t shine a laser pointer in your eye. They’re all dangerous if you shine them in your eye. I like the green ones, because they’re really easy to see, especially against the typical colors of a frame. It’s rare that you have bright green in a frame, which is why, for instance, green screen exists. All the laser pointers we have are weak. I went and I got one on Amazon that I love. It’s $22.

**John:** That’s not much.

**Craig:** No. It’s called the Solid Craft High-Powered Green Laser, Tactical Long-Range Laser, Rechargeable Laser Single Press On/Off, Adjustable Focus Hunting Rifle Scope with Carrying Case. I love the way that they’ve just gamed the system now so the product name is just a bunch of tags. Anyway, it’s really good. It’s incredibly bright. Do not shine it anywhere near your eye or anyone else’s. It’s got a nice [inaudible 00:56:23].

**John:** Or on a plane.

**Craig:** Certainly not at a plane or the sky or anything like that. I’m so delighted with this thing that the visual effects department here in our post-production office has taken to calling it Excalibur. My Excalibur laser is my One Cool Thing.

**John:** I love it. My One Cool Thing this week is a Substack post by Gurwinder Bhogal called The Perils of Audience Capture: How Influencers Became Brainwashed by Their Audiences. What I really liked about it is he’s talking through how we always think about how influencers are influencing the people who are watching their videos or listening to them. This really is a case of a classic behaviorism, where these influencers are being rewarded for the kinds of things that their audiences like. They become more and more like that. They fall into a trap of just doing the same thing to more extreme levels.

It talks through Nicholas Perry, who started out as this vegan YouTuber but became successful with his eating videos, and now he’s 400 pounds. I think this is a really interesting study in how to think about the feedback loops that are natural and probably good in societies that are about 100 people large but really fall apart on the internet, where you’re getting feedback from people you don’t know, who for reasons you don’t know why they’re wanting to do certain things.

**Craig:** This is an example of the internet amplifying something that has always been part of human nature. That is the way that we respond to feedback. We love applause. We seek approval from the people around us, which in part is correct. That’s part of socialization is making sure that you can read the room and see what might not be working and see what is working. We all then preserve part of ourselves to be resistant to that, because we don’t want to just be the person that changes ourselves for what people want. That’s when we’re dealing with a room. The room on the internet is millions of people. If you don’t have much of an identity or you don’t have much of a presence of approval in your life, and suddenly you have 6 million people loving something that you do, that’s a drug that you’ll become very quickly addicted to. This is very sad to see, for instance, this guy essentially trading his physical health for love, or at least what he perceives as love.

**John:** We’ve always had people who changed themselves because they’ve come into the spotlight. We have A Face in the Crowd or All About Eve. We have these stories of how fame changes a person. The fact that everyone can be a little bit famous now is really part of the problem and is really the danger. Everyone wants to be a little bit famous right now. I think it makes it really hard for someone who’s growing up on the internet to really have this sense of who they are independently of people looking at them on the internet. It’s a real challenge.

**Craig:** It’s tricky. My daughter had some internet popularity. She writes songs, and she sings and performs them. There was a song that she wrote that was based on this fairly popular series of stories on Wattpad, which we’ve discussed before. By popular stories on Wattpad, millions of people read it. She wrote a song that was based on it, and it blew up on the TikToks and so forth. She made money, and she got a lot of attention. I remember at some point she said, “I’ve noticed that I’m now chasing that, and I need to stop.” She actually said it. She said, “I think what’s happened is I’m now trying to write a song that will make the people that like this song as happy as they were when they heard this song, and I’m not going to do that now.” She noticed it. She felt it. I was very proud of her, because I think a lot of adults really struggle with that.

What it comes down to is something that Dennis Palumbo said to me once, he of Episode 99, our favorite therapist. He said, “Many people, perhaps most people, get into the entertainment business because they are seeking approval that they otherwise did not get in their childhood.” That is a very dangerous situation, because if you don’t have a baseline of self-esteem, then this becomes your only engine for approval and meaning. That’s terrible, because what the audience will do is ruin you. A wonderful story by Kafka called The Hunger Artist, which is the opposite of the story that we see here of Nicholas Perry, pretty remarkable stuff.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. The outro this week is by Aguilera. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send larger questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. If you want to download the scene that we talked through, that’s where you’ll find it. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can get them at Cotton Bureau. We have transcripts that come up every week for our show and a weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You’ll find that at johnaugust.com. 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 friends. Craig and Megana, as my friends, thank you very much for the fun show.

**Megana Rao:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, our bonus topic was suggested by a listener. Do you want to read the listener question?

**Megana:** Yes. Jacob wrote in and said, “As I hit my mid-30s, I fear I am starting to follow in my father’s footsteps. Is it normal for men to have fewer and fewer friends as we get older? As a kid, I always felt bad for my dad, but now I kind of get it. If you’re going to be a good dad and a good husband, how many friends can you really have? Any advice on that balance in keeping/making friends as we get older?”

**John:** Such a smart question, Jacob.

**Craig:** What strikes me immediately is how gendered the question is, because there is a presumption here that if you’re going to be a good dad and a good husband, it’s really hard to have friends, but there’s no question that being a good mother and a good wife is incompatible with having lots of friends. I do think this is something that happens to men. Is it normal? It’s common. Is it good? No. Is it necessary? No. Is having lots of friends incompatible with being a good dad and a good husband? No. I do think I have a lot of friends. John, I think you have a lot of friends.

**John:** I have a lot of friends, yeah.

**Craig:** Let’s see if we can give some advice, particularly for men, since this does seem like a gender-oriented thing, but hopefully some women will take some value from this as well, on how to keep and make friends as we get older. John, what do you think?

**John:** I’m going to start doing a very John August thing, which is trying to define our terms.

**Craig:** Oh, classic. “What is I?”

**John:** “What is friend? Explain friend.”

**Craig:** “Friend equals one.”

**John:** I want to be able to distinguish between colleagues and friends, because I think men will still have a lot of colleagues, people you work with or people you know through different places, but they won’t necessarily be friends. I would say a friend to me is somebody you can call with a personal problem or a thing going on in your life or just to hang out and have a good time, which is different than a work colleague. I might chitchat a bit with a work colleague, but I’m not going to go deep on things. Sometimes you can make friends out of your work colleagues, which is fantastic, but you need to find someplace that you have friendships that are outside of your work environment.

I’m friends with all the folks who have worked with me at Quote Unquote, which is great. I see them outside of the work environment. If those were my only source of friends, that would not be ideal. My other friends are my D and D group. We play D and D every week. That’s a group of friends. While we’re mostly talking about this endless dungeon that Craig is dragging us through-

**Craig:** It does have an end.

**John:** We’ll reach Hallister eventually. Is a chance to have a social situation that is not about work or family or anything else.

**Craig:** I understand, especially for a lot of men who are not socialized to share feelings and to process their emotions and their feelings through talking, that maybe the idea of friends gets tougher. I want to point out that we all as boys had friends. That was a thing we had. We deserve friends. Friends are wonderful, and they’re essential. Part of what I think might help men is a friendship that has something in the middle of it, an activity.

**John:** Bowling.

**Craig:** Anything, really. If you have bowling, Dungeons and Dragons, fishing, whatever it is, we generally… Do men have book club? No.

**John:** Could they? Should they? Absolutely.

**Craig:** Could they? Yes. Should they? I don’t say should. If they love it, yes. I know from my wife, what book club often becomes is talk club. For some men, that’s hard. Talk club is hard, particularly for men that are struggling to have friends. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that they probably aren’t big into the talk club vibe. An activity that you can all agree on that you love is essential I think. It helps bring people together. A hobby-based group is a good thing, finding something like that. If you are married, you may absolutely loathe the following sentence, which I’ve heard a number of times. “My friend so-and-so would love for us to get together with her husband and go out to dinner.” You may go, “Oh, no.” Give it a shot, unless you already have-

**John:** Give it a shot.

**Craig:** If you have a lot of friends, then you can say no, which I do all the time. I’m full up on friends. If you don’t, you never know, because what happens is sometimes couples interaction helps you find friends. You may then get invited to a party, and you might start chatting with somebody. If you’re a guy and you meet another guy at a party that you like, or by the way, it doesn’t all have to be gendered friends, or a woman that you’d be friends with, pursue it. Pursue it.

**John:** That’s the thing is people are I think afraid to pursue friendships after a certain point, because in college it was easy, because you were just around people, and you could strike up conversations. You all had a thing in common, because you were all going to the same school. You have a little less now. Post-pandemic, Mike and I very deliberately tried to make some new friends, because we recognized that so many of the friends we made over the last 10 years were couple friends, parents of other kids at Amy’s schools. That was great while we had that shared interest. Our kids are at the same school. During the pandemic, we weren’t seeing those people. They all fell out of touch. We didn’t care about a lot of them. We weren’t going to get back in touch. We had literally nothing in common other than our kids went to the same school. Mike and I have been trying to make some new friends. Literally, just in line at Outfest, we started talking to the couple in front of us, and we went out to dinner with them, and they’re now friends.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Craig, I think I’m going to scare you here, but you have to state it, then manifest it.

**Craig:** Wow. You may have to state it and manifest. You have to be the change you want to see in the world. That means, by the way, that you have to risk rejection of a kind. When you are pursuing friendships, keep your antenna up for resistance and reluctance, because that means those people don’t want to be friends with you, and that’s okay. You don’t want to be thirsty, as the kids say. You don’t want to be desperate. Just stay open to it. I would say, Jacob, you’re in your mid-30s. Don’t follow in your father’s footsteps. My dad, who he’s been dead for, I don’t know, a couple years now, he didn’t have friends.

**John:** My dad didn’t either.

**Craig:** None. My dad lived way longer than your dad. My dad didn’t have friends for decades. For decades. That’s not good. I used to worry about it. Then I realized, why am I worrying about this? This is not my problem. I can’t fix this for him.

**John:** For your own kid, model good behavior.

**Craig:** That’s right. Exactly.

**John:** Make some friends. Take a chance.

**Craig:** It’s actually part of being a good dad is showing your kid that you have friends and that you’re not just the guy at home that’s a lump on the coach. By the way, I don’t know if you’re married to a man or a woman, but whoever your spouse is, give them a break by going and having your own friends. Otherwise, you’re like, “I don’t know. You’re going out. I’m alone.” Megana-

**John:** Give us your perspective on this, because you’re closer in age to Jacob.

**Craig:** You’re Jacob-ish.

**John:** Do you sense your friends groups changing, your friendships changing? What’s going on with you?

**Megana:** I definitely sense as I’m getting older, the texture of my social life changing a bit. It’s hard to tell whether that’s because of the pandemic and how that’s affected us the last two years or if I have to admit that I’m just getting older.

**Craig:** You’re getting older.

**Megana:** An uncomfortable thing to realize. I wholeheartedly agree with what you’re saying. Male friendships fascinate me. I think it’s just beneficial for everyone for men to have more friends, because I think classically, straight male guys tend to expect their significant others to do a lot of the emotional labor of helping them process and talk through everything, and they only feel comfortable talking about that with their partner. It’s exhausting. It’s so much better if you have a group of guy friends or just a group of friends that you can bounce things off of.

**Craig:** My wife would love it if I talked to her more about my feelings. She would actually love that. I don’t do it ever. She’s like, “Can you please just say your words related to whatever you’re feeling?” I have to make an effort to do that.

**Megana:** Are you having those conversations with your friends, or you’re just not having them at all?

**Craig:** Straight guys. It’s time for the straight guy hour. How do straight guys do this? Here’s how the straight… I don’t know if this is typical or not for straight guys. What I do with my friends is we do talk about these things, but we don’t talk about them in emotional ways at all. We talk about them in… The only emotion that we express generally is anger. That’s entirely acceptable for straight men. It’s like, “I’m so pissed off about this.” “Yeah, me too, blah, and here’s why.” Ultimately, it turns into comedy of some kind. You get heard without it being this thing of being heard, because we can’t ever just go right at it. We have to go around it, because again, we were instructed not to, at length, in our childhood. It’s interesting.

That’s why I think guys having friends is so important, particularly straight guys, because we were conditioned to not talk and not share and not listen. If we find friends that we can do that with and feel like we’re not doing it but still do it, if you know what I mean, it’s really helpful.

**John:** Now this is not a new observation at all, but I do feel like the root cause or one of the root causes of so many of the challenges facing America right now is the epidemic of male loneliness and just men who don’t have anyone to talk to or anything to do, so they’re only reaching out to the internet. It’s not good. It’s not healthy for women. It’s not healthy for society. I’d urge our male listeners to just be proactive about trying to find some more friendships. Just find an activity you want to participate in and do it. Find some other men around you or people around you that you can go do this. It could be board games. It could be hiking. My brother is in a four-wheel driving club.

**Craig:** There you go. It’s a club.

**John:** He loves it. Find a club.

**Craig:** There’s a reason why gangs exist. There’s a reason why teams exist and squadrons. I don’t know, there’s just something kind of groupy about men. They like to be on a team. They like to be a part of a thing where everybody wears the same shirt. Men love uniforms. I don’t know why. It’s just in there somewhere in the bones. That’s a good thing. Just be careful that you don’t end up in a club with a bunch of other people who are super angry about not having friends.

**John:** That’s not good.

**Craig:** That becomes a little toxic stew of bitterness. Then that’s where men start to egg each other on to do terrible things. What is al-Qaeda if not a club of lonely men, or what was it? That’s what happens. Just be careful about that. Keep your antenna up for people that are maybe just miserable, because then that’ll be a misery club. Find something that’s positive and fun.

**Megana:** Like golfing. This is why people golf, right? You are outside, and you’re just walking and chatting.

**John:** You’re not looking people in the eye. You’re standing side by side doing this.

**Megana:** You’re also not looking at a screen, which is a plus.

**Craig:** You are not looking at a screen. Golf is a fascinating one, because you’re also not competing against that person. You’re competing against yourself, which is amazing. Alec Berg, who is an excellent golfer, has often pointed out that golf is one of the only sports where anybody on any given day could be as good or not better than a professional. If golf isn’t for you, or if you’ve got a physical disability and you can’t golf, there are other things, for sure. You just have to make an effort to find them. The internet is a great tool and a terrible tool. More toxic groups on the internet than not. Maybe that’s a way for you to find something there. You have to try. Jacob, it’s really important. You may find that you could also reconnect with some people that you could naturally be friends with, you just lost touch with. Just see how it goes. You need it. It’s really important.

**John:** It is important.

**Craig:** You guys are my friends.

**John:** Thanks, friends.

**Megana:** Aw.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Bye, friends.

**Megana:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Follow along with the sample scene [here](https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/sample-scene-for-VFX-discussion-2.pdf).
* Alex Wang on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1647984/)
* Addie Manis on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1982088/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/adicaroy?lang=en)
* [The Perils of Audience Capture](https://gurwinder.substack.com/p/the-perils-of-audience-capture) by Gurwinder Bhogal
* [Craig’s Favorite Laser Pointer](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09FH82ZJ9?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Check out the Inneresting Newsletter](https://inneresting.substack.com/)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Aguilera ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) 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/563standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/finish-line-blues).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Okay, okay, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 562 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, good lord, it’s a hodgepodge.

**Craig:** Hodgepodge.

**John:** We’ll be discussing animation, short films, post scriptum depression, parallel stories, persistence, and the Monty Hall problem.

**Craig:** Oh good, we’re back to that.

**John:** Some of those are listener questions. Some are just things we’re encountering in the world. Some are follow-up on a Bonus Segment, which is kind of cheating, but that’s okay, because this is our show.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s our show. We can do whatever we want, and also aforementioned hodgepodge.

**John:** It’s a hodgepodge. Craig, what will we do in our Bonus Segment?

**Craig:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’re going to discuss the terrific board game Codenames. I don’t know if I would call it a board game. I would call it a party game.

**John:** It’s a party game, but party game makes it feel like it’s just like charades or something.

**Craig:** We’ll discuss the terrific game.

**John:** Game, yeah.

**Craig:** Word game.

**John:** Not a video game.

**Craig:** It’s a word game. We’ll discuss the terrific-

**John:** Word game.

**Craig:** … social group word game. This is so hard to do. Codenames. It’s Codenames. That’s what we’re talking about, including our favorite tips and house rules. If you’re not playing Codenames, you’ll want to after we’re done with you in our Bonus Segment.

**John:** It’s basically a sales pitch for the game Codenames.

**Craig:** For Codenames.

**John:** It’s an inexpensive game that you will love. It’s a big show. We got to get started on here.

**Craig:** Hodgepodge.

**John:** A bit of news. Last week a group of 400 animation writers and showrunners, myself included, signed a pledge stating that, quote, “We are committed to fighting for WGA coverage on all animation projects we create, write, and produce going forward. We want to be treated equal to live-action writers, not less than.” We’ve talked about this on a show before.

As a refresher, if you’re writing an animated project, you are not guaranteed WGA coverage unless you specifically negotiate for it at the outset. Unlike in live-action, WGA coverage is not automatic, and it can be very hard to get, but it is doable. I was able to get it for an animated project recently, as have several of the other showrunners who’ve signed the pledge. The hope is, with these writers and showrunners saying that they plan to fight for it on their projects, we’ll see more animated projects where the writers work under WGA deals with higher minimums, residuals, paid parental leave. It’s not going to happen overnight. The only way it happens will be writer by writer, project by project. We’ll put a link in the show notes with more details. Now, Craig, a bit of housekeeping-

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** … and some follow-up. You will be glad to know that Seasons 9 and 10 of Scriptnotes are now up in the Premium Feed, because I know that’s a thing you’ve been asking for.

**Craig:** So many seasons.

**John:** So many seasons.

**Craig:** So many. Wait, were those not in the Premium Feed?

**John:** They were in the Premium Feed. Here’s the challenge is that we now have so many Premium episodes that the feed gets to be too big, so we have to lop off them in 50-episode chunks, or else your podcast player will just crash as it tries to load them.

**Craig:** We’re now crashing software we’ve done this so long.

**John:** That’s really where we’re at is just overwhelming things. If you are a Scriptnotes Premium Member and you are listening to back seasons, and you’re getting into the 450, the 500 range, you’ll now find those in Seasons 9 and 10, which are now going to be available through the scriptnotes.net.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** Love it. One other thing, Highland, which is the software that I make, we have a student edition. Now that we’re going back to school, I just want to remind our listeners that if you would like a screenwriting app to be writing your screenplays in, you can get one for free, the full version for free. If you’re a student, you go to Quote-Unquote Apps, and you will see that you can get the license as a college student or a high school student for Highlands, which is the app that I write all my stuff in.

**Craig:** This is your way of getting them addicted to Highland for free, and then later when it’s Highland 3 and they’re out of school, now you’ve got them.

**John:** We’ve got them.

**Craig:** You’ve got them.

**John:** For these next two years, if you want a really good application to be writing a script in that is not going to cost you $99 a year, there you go.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Some follow-up. Megana, can you help us out with Andrew?

**Megana Rao:** Andrew wrote in and said, “Listening to last week’s How Would This Be A Movie segment, I was curious if any of you had come across the newsletter at The Ankler called The Optionist.”

**Craig:** That’s a no.

**Megana:** It offers maybe six to eight articles or books each Friday that are available to be optioned and who to contact if you’re interested. It was fun until it went behind a subscriber paywall. This is the part that seems insane to me.”

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Megana:** “Subscriptions to The Optionist are $250 a month-”

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**Megana:** “… or $2,500 a year. That’s two months free if you buy the year up front. I would love to hear your thoughts on this price point. It’s bananas to me. How much does this make How Would Be a Movie worth if it was paywalled?”

**John:** That’s really going to be our future business plan is forget scriptnotes.net, it’s all How Would This Be a Movie.

**Craig:** Paywall everything.

**John:** I was not familiar with The Optionist either, but I will say that there are people who do this for a living. I was talking with Todd Hoffman, who runs a service called StoryScout. What they do is they have people who literally, they’re reading all the newspapers. They have deals with all the newspapers to get all the stuff. They’re sifting through it every week, and they’re like, “These are interesting stories.” There are people who pay them subscriptions for that. Hey, if the business model works for them, great. I think what they’re doing though is not just, “Here’s a story,” but they are actually contacting the people who are involved in the story, whoever you need to get for life rights. They can help you put together a bundle of things that might be useful for a studio. That’s not a thing that you or I or any other writer is going to be approaching. It’s something that Sony is paying however much a month. It’s not something that you and I are doing.

**Craig:** Andrew, that’s exactly what’s happened. They launched this to let people know, “Here we are, and this is how it works,” but the paywall at $250 a month is essentially an indication to you that this is not for you.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** This is a business-to-business service. $250 a month for production companies or studios is nothing. This reminds me a little bit of the way Variety used to work. Megana, do you know how expensive Variety used to be when you were a baby?

**Megana:** I do not.

**Craig:** It was like a thousand dollars a year for Variety or something like that.

**John:** For the physical print edition. It was crazy.

**Craig:** It was insane. It was some insane number, because every day there would be Daily Variety. Daily Variety was like eight pages. It was not a large magazine.

**Megana:** This was all physical?

**Craig:** Physical. There was no internet version back then, because there was no internet back then. There was, but not the way it is now. The only Variety and Hollywood Reporter that existed were print. It would be delivered daily to each office. There would be the same copy of Variety on the same coffee table, scattered about a thousand offices in Hollywood, lawyers and executives and producers. It was ridiculously expensive, because you had to get it, or else you didn’t know what was going on. If anything got shooketh by the internet, it was entertainment industry reporting.

**John:** Completely. When I was in the Stark Program at USC, one of the perks we got is all 25 of us in the Stark Program got our own copies of Variety and I think Hollywood Reporter too in our mailboxes every day.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** That was a godsend, because really it was the only way to get a sense of who was where and what was happening, what deals were happening. It was really important. I think we have to credit, honestly, Nikki Finke and Deadline for really breaking the back of-

**Craig:** Credit.

**John:** Acknowledge Nikki Finke.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Of that form of journalism and the business model of that journalism, because she was doing the same kinds of scoop reporting that was happening in Variety and Hollywood Reporter, but it was just free on the internet, and that changed everything.

**Craig:** It certainly undercut them to the point where everything just came down to what it is now, and it’s less expensive to publish something on the internet than it is to publish it in actual print. It ain’t the way it used to be. That’s for sure. I remember going to newsstands. This is a typical poor kid in Hollywood move. Go to the newsstand, pretend to be browsing, randomly pick up the Daily Variety and, oh, just flip through.

**John:** Oh, flip through it.

**Craig:** The guys that ran those things all knew. They were like, “Nope. Put it back.” They were literally like, “You’re buying it. You’re not reading it. You’re buying it. That’s it. Or put it back.” They were so tired of douchey, pathetic wannabe screenwriters reading their Variety for free, such as myself.

**John:** Craig, do you read any physical magazines at this point?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I will read, I think I’ve mentioned before, Technology Review and sometimes Wired. If I’m at the airport, I’ll go through the bookstand there. I’m always fascinated by Harvard Business Review, because that thing is $25 a copy. It’s just crazy to me.

**Craig:** Who is that for?

**John:** It’s for people who want to read about Harvard business stuff, I guess. It’s very much in-depth case study things.

**Craig:** Weird.

**John:** I feel like probably if you’re an MBA, it’s the kind of thing you read.

**Craig:** Maybe on a plane.

**John:** On a plane.

**Craig:** I feel like if you are interested in reading the Harvard Business Review on a flight, you have other stuff you should be doing on that flight. You got business to do, hopefully.

**John:** Do your business. You’re a business [crosstalk 00:09:10]

**Craig:** Do your business.

**John:** Do your business.

**Craig:** You do your business. Don’t read about the Harvard business.

**John:** Megana, can you help us out with more questions or follow-up?

**Craig:** Harvard Business is Megana’s real nickname.

**Megana:** The Harvard Business Review is good though. Just a little plug.

**Craig:** A little plug.

**John:** Megana went to Harvard.

**Craig:** She sure did.

**Megana:** IP Curious in Seattle asks, “In Episode 559 during the How Would This Be a Movie segment, when discussing the Indian cricket scam, John and Craig said that you wouldn’t have to buy anything because you’d be making up most of the movie. My question is, when dealing with a true story with actual people, how much freedom do you have to invent a plot? Do you need to change the name of the main character if you’re basing a plot on something in their life but not following exactly what happened?”

**John:** I would say yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, usually. We’ve sort of answered this before. There is no hard answer for this, IP Curious in Seattle.

**John:** There isn’t.

**Craig:** What happens is there’s this weird needle that moves back and forth, and you let the attorneys at the company determine it for you. Some companies are tougher about this than others. Generally speaking, if you’re dealing with a true story, if you’re taking inspiration from a true story, you are going to have to change events and names. Certainly names. If you are using actual people’s names, you can, but there are way more restrictions on you. You have to be really careful about not defaming them. If you’re going to start inventing stuff and be free, why not just change the name anyway if it doesn’t have any value? With the true story itself, that’s a negotiation with the lawyers to see is this going to be too identifying, are they going to sue us for defamation if you do this or that. Generally speaking, if you’re inspired by a true story, change the names. You’re going to want to change the plot anyway, and you’ll be fine. That’s generally the case.

**John:** I would recommend IP Curious go back and listen to the episode with Liz Hannah and Liz Meriwether talking about the two series that they were doing which were based on actual events. Both of them had situations where these real life people are going to be characters in this and we’re going to use their names, and we have to be careful about this. There are other places where we’re inventing characters to do this function, and those are brand new people. That decision about when you’re doing that and how closely they resemble people in the real world are going to be factors that are going to be discussed with lawyers and other folks down the road. Craig did the same thing in Chernobyl. Some of those people are based on historical figures, but some of them are creations for the series. You’re always going to be making those choices about how you’re doing stuff.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** How about another question, Megana?

**Megana:** Janelle from San Diego wrote in and said, “I have never written in but had to start writing this email before I finished listening to Episode 560, because I could not believe my ears when I-”

**Craig:** Couldn’t believe. Couldn’t believe her ears.

**Megana:** “I could not believe my ears when I heard you tell Leah that there isn’t an audience for short films.”

**Craig:** There isn’t.

**Megana:** “As parents of two young children, my husband and I find it hard to find time to watch a feature film or follow a series, especially if the content is for adult eyes only.”

**Craig:** Oh, my.

**Megana:** “We delight in being able to watch some quality entertainment in the 20 minutes before-”

**Craig:** Megana put some spin on that.

**Megana:** “In the 20 minutes between putting the kids to bed and no longer being able to ignore the fact that neither of them is sleeping. Our friends feel the same, and it is great to be able to get together and discuss something other than the latest Pixar or Cocomelon.”

**Craig:** Great. You’ve found the audience, Janelle. It’s you and your husband and some of your friends. Is that an audience for short films?

**John:** I think audience is really the key word here. You and I were using audience in a different way than Janelle’s using the word audience.

**Craig:** Clearly.

**John:** You and I are using audience for market, like is there a way to make money off of these things.

**Craig:** There isn’t.

**John:** Generally, there isn’t. There are no short film tycoons.

**Craig:** No. Exactly. Janelle, we certainly weren’t suggesting that no one has ever seen a short film, because that seems to be the premise of your complaint here. Of course people have seen them. What we’re saying is there is no substantial audience of the kind to financially support a thriving, profitable short film industry. That’s just a fact. If you’re making a short film specifically because you want it to be seen by lots and lots of people, it won’t be. If you’re making a short film to practice, if you’re making a short film as a calling card, if you’re making a short film because you just have a passion to, all amazing reason. In fact, I would imagine most accomplished short film creators are very aware of the limited nature of the audience for short films, meaning extraordinarily limited, meaning basically you and your husband. Seriously, come on, Janelle, you know what we meant, right? Come on.

**John:** I want to state on the record that we are a pro short film podcast.

**Craig:** We love short films.

**John:** We’re also a pro reality podcast.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** Which is that you are not going to be making money off of that short film that you’re making. Make it for art. Make it for fun. Make it for practice. Make it for all those reasons. If you choose to make a short film, Inneresting from this last week was actually all about short films. It was the post I did way back in 2008. I was blogging about this in 2008, about short films and some just general guidance when you’re thinking about short films, because I see people who try to make short films are just small features, and that doesn’t work. Short films are their own form. They have to have one clear idea, one problem that is solved for the course of that one film. I’ll point you to a post on this. We’ll put a link in the show notes.

**Craig:** Janelle didn’t even list any of the short films she’s seen that she likes.

**John:** Janelle, write back in and tell us what short films you loved recently.

**Craig:** Just so we can spread some positivity, since you and your husband are super into them. Since there isn’t an audience, let’s at least help them find one, a little mini audience, by promoting them.

**John:** We have quick follow-up to that follow-up. Do you want to try this question from Joel?

**Megana:** Yes. Joel from Moorpark, California wrote in and said, “I had a chance to enjoy your short film God and noted how the end plays Walking on Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves. I’m curious if and how you secured rights for the song.”

**Craig:** If.

**John:** If. Honestly, if is a more interesting question now than when I made the film. I absolutely did officially get the rights to Walking on Sunshine. It cost maybe $2,000, which was a lot, given the limited budget for the film, but it was worth it for that moment, because Melissa hums it at one point, and then we actually play it over the end credits. For both of those uses, I needed to have the rights to the song. I needed those rights to the song, because if I were going to put this in festivals, which it played a couple places, they would ask if those rights were cleared. That was a thing that I had to be able to show, that those rights are cleared. They’re cleared in perpetuity.

A thing that’s happened in the meantime though, and I think Joel’s aware of this, is that you see a lot of things on YouTube that do not have music rights cleared because they’re using songs that exist out in the world. They get away with that because YouTube has overall licensing agreements with different artists. Even though their algorithms are detecting that that song is in there, they are monetizing it in a way that the artist is making some money. There are ways it can be figured out.

I think you’ll see some stuff on YouTube that the rights would never clear for those songs. Anything you’re doing officially, that you’re going to submit for a competition, you’re going to need to declare those rights. It’s a hassle. It generally is a hassle. You are tracking down who the music publisher is. You are going to them, asking for these specific sync rights and the publishing rights to be able to use it in your thing. I went through a music supervisor who did the music clearances for Go. That was a luxury I had. Even the short films we did back at USC, we had to clear those rights. It was a hassle.

**Craig:** It’s a hassle. No way around it. There’s no if. You do need to do it.

**John:** You do it. You do it. I would say that you don’t need those rights until you are going to do the finished version of it. Obviously, as you’re temping songs into things, or if you’re just doing scratch versions, you don’t get those rights until you actually know, okay, we’re really using this song, and then we’re going to get the contracts and pay the money to do it. For things that are internal presentations, you’re not going to do it. For things that are going to go out in the world, you’re going to want to clear those rights.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Let’s do some follow-up on the Monty Hall problem.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** This is something we talked about in our Bonus Segment last week. We were talking about when do you intervene with stupid people.

**Craig:** That’s a title of an article in the Harvard Business Journal, I’m sure.

**John:** I will say the Monty Hall problem is not about stupid people. Very many smart, smart people have a hard time intuiting the logic behind it.

**Craig:** Almost everyone.

**John:** I want to do a little follow-up here, because it came upon us spontaneously, and we were talking through it. Craig was right in that ultimately the two thirds/one third solution is how it sorts out. Let’s make sure we’re all talking about the same thing. Craig, describe the Monty Hall problem for people who weren’t listening.

**Craig:** A classic problem. You have three doors. Behind one of the doors is a car that you can win. Behind the other two doors are goats, because in this Monty Hall problem, goats are bad. No one wants one, although goats do have some value. Monty Hall, the host of Let’s Make a Deal, says, “Go ahead and pick a door that you think the car’s behind.” You pick door number one. At that point, Monty opens door number three and reveals that behind door number three is a goat. Now he says to you, “Do you want to stick with door number one, or do you want to switch to door number two?” You have a choice. Most people will say at that point it’s a 50/50 choice, you’re choosing between 1 of 2 doors, but in fact, you should switch, because it is not a 50/50 choice. It’s a one third/two thirds choice. You have a two thirds chance of getting the car behind door number and only a one third chance behind door number one.

The very simple way we talked about this is the only way you’re winning the car if you say, if you keep the door you picked initially, is if you picked it correctly the first time, and there’s a one out of three chance. By eliminating that other possibility of door number three, you now have new information. The new information is that door number two is more likely than door number one, twice as likely, in fact, to have a car behind it.

**John:** One of the things we were wrestling with is that I can kind of get that and it still doesn’t feel right. There’s still some sort of problem. I looked at the Wikipedia article on it, which is actually. I recommend everyone take a look at it. This first became popularized by Marilyn vos Savant, who wrote a weekly column for Parade, was talking about it, and she said that we should definitely switch. Everyone was like, “You can’t possibly switch.” One of the things she pointed out, which I think is a really helpful way of getting over our brain problem of it, is imagine instead of three doors, there are a million doors. You picked one of a million doors. Then they take away all the other doors and say it’s either behind the door you picked or this other door. Then you have to think about, oh, I had a one in a million chance the first time, and now it’s like, oh.

**Craig:** It’s definitely behind the other door.

**John:** It’s going to be behind the other door. That really helps me figure that out.

**Craig:** You eliminate 999,999,998 of the doors, leaving behind the one you initially picked and one other door. The car is behind the other door. You are right that the limited number of doors can really mess with our heads, because it just feels like nothing important has changed, but in fact, something important has changed. This is a weird one. It’s like you said. It is a problem that has, what’s called fooled or misled a lot of people, including people who study these things. It was so hard for people to wrap their mind around it.

**John:** Let’s also talk about the decision. If you’re the contestant who is deciding, “Oh, do I stick with the first door or do I switch?” there are some natural biases that kick in. The article also talks through what those are. We have what’s called the endowment effect. People tend to overvalue the probability that they were right the first time. It’s a loss aversion. They don’t want to lose what they already had. There’s a status quo bias as well. You’re more comfortable to stick with what you’ve got rather than take a risk.

**Craig:** When you’re playing games of chance, the entire premise is that you are going to get lucky. We tend to associate our luck with our choices in gambling, as opposed to what’s happening. If I’m playing roulette, and I put everything on 28, and 28 comes up, my luck is about the fact that I chose 28. That’s where I got lucky. It has nothing to do with the bouncing ball. It was just doing what it’s doing. We do overvalue the choices we make. That’s why it feels bad. It’s almost disloyal. Also, we have been told all of our lives to stick with your gut, and it will feel worse. If we lose with the choice we made initially, it won’t feel as bad as if we lose by giving it away somehow and switching.

**John:** I want to frame this in terms of characters making choices. This is all about choices. Characters I think naturally have an instinct at the start of a story to want to keep things the way they have always been. They’re pushing to get away from it, but generally they’re hearing that call to adventure. They may ignore that call to adventure, because they know what they have, and they don’t want to risk losing what they have. That’s a very natural thing. We encounter characters at the beginning of stories that way. They’re also facing a choice, generally later on in the story, where in order to achieve that final goal, they may risk everything they’ve gotten through all up to that point. Now they’re at this one place. They don’t want to take that last risk and basically just change doors in order to get that final prize. Those are real things that characters are facing in almost every story you can imagine.

**Craig:** Absolutely. When they lose something initially, what they’re trying to do is get back to it. They love their door. They love door one. Someone says, “You can’t have door number one anymore,” and they’re like, “Okay, I’ll open some other doors, but the point is to get back to my door number one. I love it.” Then eventually, where things get really bad is when they suddenly realize, “There’s nothing behind any of these doors. Doors are not correct. I should be doing something else entirely.” You realize that you’ve been living a false choice. That’s when characters are at their lowest, I think.

**John:** The only way to win the game is not to play the game.

**Craig:** Is not to play.

**John:** Craig, this last week I was working on a new script that I’m writing. I was encountering a thing which I’d seen before, but I’d never felt it the same way. I’m curious your perspective on this. The thing I’m writing has multiple storylines. The storylines don’t directly interact until the very end of the story. I can cut freely between the two of them, which is really, of course, helpful. Movies do this. TV shows do this all the time.

A thing I was finding though is that as a reader and as an audience, we want the same amount of time to be happening in both of them. We have a strange issue about days and nights happening. Basically, if it went to night in one of the storylines, it would be weird that it didn’t feel like it was night in the other one. Cutting back and forth between the two of them, there’s just a weird time expectation when we have multiple storylines happening, even if it’s not strict story logic. You always encounter things where it’s like, this is impossible because they are on different sides of the earth, and it shouldn’t be day in both places. I’m curious, in your features, but also in your TV show, have you encountered this issue in having to move some scenes around just because it feels like… This is also a thing you may be doing in editorial as well. It feels like the time is not working between the two different storylines.

**Craig:** This is an essential part of structure and the hardware of designing these shows or movies, because people need to understand where they are, and time is part of where they are. Cinematographers hate when I say this. I’ve said it before. I think there are three times that we can show. We can show dark, we can show light, and we can show in between. That’s basically it. If we need to know more specific levels of time, we need to indicate those with clocks or with titles, which is fine. That’s a technique.

When moving back and forth between timelines, if we need to, we have to plan it out. This is something I do with first ADs, where you write out, and with a script supervisor, what day is this. Our script coordinator actually went through and would always be like, “Okay, this is now production day four,” not meaning how many shooting days, but in the progression of what we do and to track where we are in days. It’s actually really important to do. When you’re pushing together two different stories, and you want one to be in the day, and you want the next one to be at night, or vice versa, particularly when you’re going from night to day, you need probably something to indicate the passage of time before you get to the B-side of that. An exterior shot. It’s now night.

**John:** I literally had to have an establishing shot, which wasn’t going to feel necessary, but I realized, oh, that’s actually genuinely there. It made me also realize that a lot of times in Game of Thrones when we’re going back to one of those storylines, there’s a big establishing shot, because weirdly, you just needed some time to sit and let it be a different time and different place before you got into these things.

**Craig:** We have a natural… Our minds. Thank God, because this is why editing works. Our minds will just smush things together. If I show you somebody in a basement talking, and then I show you a scene of somebody walking around in a room, we will often go, “Oh, that room must be above that basement.” We just make those connections instantly. We often need some kind of indication that something has changed. Sometimes it can be sound. We can use sound, so it’s very clear we’re in a different kind of spot, or score or something. When it comes to time, nothing is as useful as showing what the outside looks like, because that is in our cavewoman, caveman brains. Where is sun? That is time.

**John:** It’s also occurring to me that different projects, different series will establish their own grammar for what they’re going to do in terms of how time works in their shows. Station Eleven has giant title cards that say “7 days earlier.” You’re flipping around so much in times, you stop obsessing about it in a way. It’s okay that it’s a little bit impressionistic. I would say Greta Gerwig’s adaptation of Little Women does the same kind of thing where you’re free-floating between these different times, and they’re different ages, and it just all works, because thematically stuff is moving forward, as opposed to Lost, which sets a very clear, like, okay, from each episode, one character will have a flashback to earlier things. Those flashbacks will progress forward in time, but they’re not tethered to any one thing happening on the island and the real world clock ticking on the island. It’s a very different way of going about things than other shows, which might be running two parallel timelines.

**Craig:** I think television narrative is becoming more and more complicated. I think Lost was viewed as a bit of a brain teaser for people at the time, and now it’s just what people do, screwing around with time and fooling people with time and location and places. Do you remember how you felt when you got to that point in the third act of Silence of the Lambs, where you realized, “Wait wait wait, that’s not his house. They went to that house, and she’s going to that house.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That amazing misdirection-

**John:** That reveal.

**Craig:** … preyed on our natural ability to put locations together. Study that one, folks, and realize what you’re up against, because what you don’t want to do is not be in control of that phenomenon. If you’re going to mess with it, mess with it intentionally, but just know that it’s real.

**John:** Megana, have you seen all of Yellowjackets?

**Megana:** I have, yes.

**John:** How does time work in Yellowjackets? I’ve only seen the first two episodes. Over the course of the series, we’re intercutting between present day and the past. Can a lot of time happen in the past over an episode, or is it more limited?

**Megana:** It does feel more limited. The past is a survival story about when their plane crashed. The teaser starts with a flashback that is after the flashback that we see through the series. It’s a couple of years after the plane crash or something.

**John:** That’s a reveal that they get to you over the course of the series, that you’re leading up to that moment?

**Megana:** Yeah, it seems like both the present timeline and the flashback are moving from a set point, except for that teaser, I guess.

**John:** That’s great. How about Where the Crawdads Sing. I see you have this on the list, but I have not read it or seen it.

**Megana:** They structured it where in the present timeline she’s awaiting her court date, but then it goes in flashback through her entire life. Most of the present timeline is very dark. She’s in this cell. Then you get all of the daylight scenes through the flashbacks. I was curious, cutting between these things, is it one of those things where it’s uncomfortable to see it being day in both of the timelines, or do you have to consciously switch between them?

**Craig:** I think that’s okay. You mean when you go from 2022 to 1982, can you go day to day?

**Megana:** Right.

**Craig:** Yeah, you could absolutely do that. You just need to design the transition in such a way that you get an instant signifier that something very… The corny version is someone’s walking around, they’re like, “Oh yeah, I’m something something,” and then you cut to Madonna playing on the radio, and someone walks around with feathered hair, and you’re in the ’80s. You need some kind of indication, or else it’ll take a moment or two. People will wonder, especially with clothes. If the clothes aren’t super obviously cheesy time period, you might not realize that it’s a different time period.

**John:** Absolutely. Some shows will rely on that misdirection. Obviously, the pilot to This is Us used that misdirection. You assume that this is all taking place in one timeline. You realize that you’re actually in two different timelines and establishing the grammar of the show, which is always going to be moving back from those timelines.

In Big Fish, we have the present day storyline, and then we have the fantasy storyline. Those are examples of every time I’m moving into a fantasy story, and to think about what is the transition into that and what is the transition out of that. Almost everything I wrote in the script really was carried out as the transitions to get us into and out of those places, because it was important to make it feel deliberate when we’re moving into one of those stories, so we could keep moving stuff forward. Again, all the fantasy stories did move forward in time, which was important. I wasn’t just flashing back to any random moment.

**Craig:** The other transitional element you have is a character. If you’re going into a character’s alternate self back in time, forward in time, in a fantasy world, their appearance, the way they match in, that stuff can sometimes bring you back in time. You don’t need to go from day to night or night to day. That’s not an essential part of time shifting.

**John:** Cool. Megana, you have a question about finishing up projects.

**Megana:** John from Madison, Wisconsin wrote, “I just came off my first weekend on set shooting a short I wrote.”

**John:** Short films.

**Megana:** “It was one of the best experiences of my life hearing and seeing amazing actors bring alive images and lines that lived in my head for so long. It was really overwhelming. I couldn’t have asked for a better experience. Now it’s Monday morning, and I’m blue as hell. Is this normal? I feel a loss, like someone has died or left me. What is this, and how do I move past it? I can imagine the advice to write something new, but that feels like telling the newly widowed to just go find someone else. Have you guys ever felt this? How do you deal with it?”

**Craig:** John, have you ever felt this?

**John:** I’ve felt generally relief at the end of a project, but I do get what John is expressing overall is that your identity and your excitement, you were building up to do this thing, and you got to do it with a group of people, and hopefully it turned out great, and then it’s done. It’s just like college is done or a semester is done. There was great stuff. It was an adventure. Now that adventure is over. You can feel kind of at sea.

**Craig:** I do feel this. I feel this intensely, almost every time. I feel this, honestly, when I finish writing a script. I really feel it when I’m done with shooting something. You did a weekend, and you’re missing it. I did a year, John from Madison. I talk to Bella and Pedro all the time, and just because we’re bummed. We’re sad. We miss each other. We miss the life.

Something that Bella was saying that is very true is when you’re shooting, it gives your life this sense of incredible structure and purpose that you just normally don’t have. You are working 12 hours every day, and your day is very clearly defined, and what you need to do is defined. It is hustle and bustle. It’s highs and lows, a lot of emotion, panic, anxiety, but you’re alive. Man, you’re alive. You’re exhausted, but you’re alive, and you’re making something. Then suddenly there’s just silence, and no one’s there, and there is no call sheet telling you what to do or where to go. You have to figure out what am I having for lunch. This is absolutely normal, John, I think. It’s normal for you and me. How about that?

**John:** I think it’s a normal experience. What you’re describing also reminds me of people talk about when they leave the military, they really miss that sense of purpose, they miss that sense of structure. You had that while you were making the short film. People have this when they’re on Survivor, when they’re doing something intense that is taking 100% of their time. When you remove that, you do kind of feel at sea. Let’s think through what are some good strategies for getting through this. First, it’s just you’re acknowledging it. I think it’s important just to acknowledge how you’re feeling and recognize that it’s not strange to feel this way, it’s natural to feel this way. You’re going to find other… You need to look for things that can revive that sense of purpose, even if it’s not so intense as making a short film over a weekend. Try to make sure that your life feels purposeful on a daily basis.

**Craig:** There are days where it isn’t. I think John’s right that acknowledging it is really important, and knowing it’s normal is important. The thing that helps the most is the thing that helps all of the things the most, and that’s time. It’s just time. You have to experience it. You’re saying you’re very into mourning, and you are mourning. There is a grief involved in these things ending. Then it ends. It fades, and you’re okay again.

Don’t lose that desire to get back in there. It is an addictive life. It is an exciting life. The more you do it, and the better you get, the more professional and impressive the people around you get. That’s when it starts to be awesome. Then you end up working with world-class actors and world-class crews, doing incredible things. The stakes get higher and higher, and the stress gets higher and higher. The scrutiny is more and more. Yet what else would we rather do? I think, John, this is good news for you in Madison, Wisconsin. You love this. See if you can’t do the things you need to do to turn this into a living. If you can’t, then do the things you need to do to turn this into an incredible pastime, hobby.

**John:** Fully agree.

**Megana:** Craig, when you describe feeling this after you finish a script, do you build in a couple of days to, I don’t know, be sad about it, or do you just keep writing?

**Craig:** I definitely build in days. I just know that there’s going to be probably a week where I’m just bummed out, because when I’m writing a script, it’s like I’m on a set in my head with all these characters in my head, and we’re all doing these things together and finding these things and seeing these things. Because every script naturally has a point where it lands and ends, it’s like that is now dead.

**John:** Now Craig, your experience on this TV show where you’re writing script after script after script after script, I suspect it was slightly different, because while you might finish a script, there’s always that other script that’s about to start shooting, and one down the road. Did you feel the same sense of closure at the end of each of these scripts as you were writing for these 10 episodes?

**Craig:** I did. I did, yeah, because like I said, each one has to end. The scripts end. When they end, it’s like that chapter is done. I’ve written that chapter. It’s over. I will never be able to write that for the first time again. There’s terrible then impending doom and panic that more had to be written. There’s a lot of weird stuff that happens when you make the insane decision to write an entire series by yourself, because then you’re imposing this feeling upon yourself over and over and over. It’s probably not healthy at all. In fact, it’s not healthy at all. A lot of what we do is not healthy.

**John:** When I wrote my three Arlo Finch books, and I committed to doing three books over the course of three years, it was that level of just like, “Oh my god, I’m just a person who writes Arlo Finch books. That’s all I do every day is write Arlo Finch books.” I loved it. I loved that structure and that discipline. I did feel a loss when a book was delivered, but also I did feel a sense of relief, just like my kid was off in college now and I actually had some free time to do some other things that were appealing to me. That’s the thing I would also remind John is it’s great that you were able to shoot this short film, fantastic, you’ll be editing, you’ll be doing all that stuff, but I bet you also have 15 other ideas that you’re chomping to get started on. When the time comes, you’ll get to write out one of those, and that’ll be exciting for you too.

**Craig:** Yeah, so good news, John, in a weird way. Good news.

**John:** Good news. Let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I may have talked about Kevin Wald and his cryptics before, but this One Cool Thing involves his latest that came out, and a little bit of a challenge to our listeners. Kevin Wald, he’s a gentleman who is a member of the National Puzzlers League, NPL. The National Puzzlers League, that is the Major Leagues of puzzle solving. They are very smart, very advanced solvers and creators. They create some of the more fiendish puzzles in existence. Kevin Wald, I’m just going to call him the evil emperor of cryptics. We’ve talked about cryptic crosswords before, which are much harder than regular crosswords. Then there’s really hard cryptics, insanely hard cryptics, and after all of that, there’s Kevin Wald cryptics, which are insane. He typically will do a group of three cryptics that are connected to the city where the National Puzzlers League is having their convention.

In 2022 the convention took place in Nashville, Tennessee. There are three cryptics. They function the way a lot of his cryptic groups do. You solve the first two, and then the answers from those feed into some of the answers for three. We’re going to put a link in here. If you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page, you’ll see the 2022 puzzles. If you click on the first one, which is entitled “Pennsylvania Railroad, New York,” and you look at just the instructions, just the instructions-

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** … for what’s happening will scare away, I’m going to guess, 98% of you, as well they should. Then the remaining 2% of you are going to try and do this. I think maybe 10% of that 2% will complete it. It’s really hard, and it’s wonderful.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** I do these over the course of weeks. Weeks. I finally finished all three of them. The insanity and the beauty of his construction and the way it all moves together, you just marvel at it. You also marvel at yourself for finishing it. Here’s the contest. It’s a One Cool Thing contest for our listeners. If you can solve these three puzzles, including all of the prompts in all of the puzzles, and you can send me your grids and your answers, and they’re correct, then I’ll give you something. What do you want? You tell me what you want. I’ll try and make it happen. We can negotiate a prize.

The only rule I have is that you cannot be or have been a member of the National Puzzlers League. You’ve got to be what I would call a layperson. You don’t have to be necessarily new to these, but really this is intended for people who aren’t routinely solving Kevin Wald puzzles. This is for newbies. Let’s see, you cryptic geniuses out there, if you can handle the mad emperor of cryptics, Kevin Wald.

**John:** You’re trying to create new mad puzzlers is really what you’re trying to do.

**Craig:** Yes. This is like The Last Starfighter. I’m recruiting for some sort of space battle that requires incredible cryptic ability.

**John:** I love it. Let’s send those answers to ask@johnaugust.com. It’d be fantastic if 20 people solved it.

**Craig:** 20 people are not going to solve it. Not a chance.

**John:** We’ll see how many people solve it.

**Craig:** If one person does, I will be thrilled. We can think of a prize. We’ll have a fun prize for you. We’ll certainly say your name on the air.

**John:** Love it. I have two One Cool Things. One of them is very short. Nathan Fielder did this show called Nathan For You, which I loved. It took me a while to get into it, but it’s just great. All those episodes are available online. You can find them. His new show called The Rehearsal I think is actually a masterpiece. It’s on HBO Max. You can find it. Craig, do you know the premise of the show at all?

**Craig:** I do. I’m going to watch it, but it put my stomach in knots just hearing about it.

**John:** Everything with Nathan Fielder has a wince factor. It’s like, “Oh my god, this is so uncomfortable, and yet also great and super, super funny.” The premise of the show is that Nathan Fielder will find a person who is facing a dilemma, generally a conversation they need to have with somebody or a situation they need to figure out. He will physically build sets that resemble the place where you’re going to have this conversation and recruit actors to be the other people in this. He will go to absurd lengths to create these rehearsal situations, practice this thing, exactly what you’re going to say or what you’re going to do. I don’t want to spoil what happens over the course of it, but it just gets to be so absurd and so funny. He becomes a major character in it. I strongly recommend you watch The Rehearsal, which is great.

Last is just a bit of a hooray for the WGA Pension and Health Plan added coverage for trans health issues that were long needed. I was sort of unaware of them. They are now being covered. I’m going to point you to an article by Eleanor Jean and Katrina Mathewson talking about what the process was to get really good, proper trans health care into what we always think about as being really good health insurance but was not even up to the level of MediCal before this.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That’s great to see.

**Craig:** What are some specifics of what we are now offering folks in our plan?

**John:** It’s basically gender-affirming care. There’s an organization called WPATH, World Professional Association for Transgender Health, which sets the standards for these. What the article makes clear is that WGA was currently offering what other guilds were offering, was not up to the level of what Amazon was offering, what a bigger company was offering, but it was possible. What they needed to do was really show these are the things, these are the dollar these things cost, just to do the things that are necessary for a person who needs health care, because what Eleanor Jean was saying is that in a weird way, it would make more sense for her to stop being a writer and just get on MediCal to get some of this stuff, because the disparities were so great there. It’s an encouraging story that it took a lot of people really figuring out how to do this and make it work for it to happen there, but it’s now in our health plan.

**Craig:** That sounds incredibly positive. I’m a little bit surprised, honestly, because like you say, we think of our insurance as being better than almost everybody else’s. I guess there you go. It’s like, yeah, if you aren’t transgender, it is. Then you find out from transgender people that for them it’s not. I’m glad that we are getting everybody in alignment. This is the best of what we can provide writers, and so it should be the best of what we can provide writers. Excellent move.

**John:** I’ll put a link in the show notes to their article talking through the whole process and what actually was won.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Hooray. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Our outro this week is by Adam Pineless.

**Craig:** No pines.

**John:** Someone pointed out that you never actually say hooray after our outros.

**Craig:** That’s right. I’m glad. It took 562 episodes for somebody to notice. I’ll tell you why. Here’s why. It’s not that I’m not cheering for the people who do our outros. They’re wonderful. I do think we have to carve out some special space for Matthew and Megana or whoever might succeed Megana, may that day never come to a truth.

**Megana:** Key emphasis on might.

**Craig:** Exactly. 90-year-old Megana dealing with, whatever, our children doing this show. They need special acknowledgement. Personally, I don’t know these folks. What if somebody who wrote the outro is actually a total bastard?

**John:** Also, the reality is Craig has not heard the outro before, as I’m saying this.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** He has no idea how good it is.

**Craig:** It could be terrible. It’s never terrible.

**John:** It’s never terrible. They’re all great.

**Craig:** I’m sure none of you are bastards. Certainly, Adam Pineless at this point is wondering, “Why on my outro did this have to happen?” Adam, you get a woohoo.

**John:** Woohoo. If you have an outro, like Adam, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions or answers to Craig’s impossible puzzle challenge.

**Craig:** It’s possible.

**John:** Possible.

**Craig:** It’s possible, but unlikely.

**John:** For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau, along with hoodies. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all of the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on Codenames.

**Craig:** Codenames.

**John:** That’s also where you’ll find out first about our live shows that are coming up. Definitely sign up at scriptnotes.net. Craig and Megana, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**Megana:** Thank you.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, we have to set the scene for our Codenames experience, because I never played with you, but I assumed you knew what Codenames was, because it feels like a very good board game. We were supposed to be playing D and D in person. We were all there with our laptops, because of course, our maps are on laptops now. Our character sheets are on laptops.

**Craig:** We were at our friend Chris Morgan’s house. His internet did something I’ve never encountered before.

**John:** It was wild.

**Craig:** It was weird. He has WiFi in his house. For whatever reason, his WiFi would accept no more than two or three connections. After that, no, you couldn’t get on. There were three people, like my phone, his laptop, and his laptop are working. Nobody else’s can get on, or would get on and then immediately get booted off. Then somebody would log off of theirs, and then somebody else could log on, but then other people couldn’t log on. If you’re an IT professional, if you can explain that, I’d love to hear the answer to that one.

**John:** You had 6 men in their 40s and 50s all trying to solve a WiFi problem. That’s a comedy right there.

**Craig:** It was six “actually” guys all failing completely. Legitimately, I’ve never encountered a situation where the internet was there, the WiFi was providing it beautifully, but to no more than three local IPs. Can someone explain that, somebody who knows about fricking network crap? Can you tell me why that would happen? It was really weird. We were stuck. In lieu of playing D and D, we broke out Codenames, which Chris had at his house but had actually never played. Of course, John, you and I play Codenames. I play it all the time.

**John:** Megana plays it as well. Let’s describe Codenames for people who have not played the game before.

**Craig:** Which is easy to do, actually.

**John:** It really is.

**Craig:** One of the few games where describing it is simple.

**John:** It is absolutely. This is the classic Codenames. You open the box. There are cards that have just single words on them. They’re small, little cards. You lay them out on a grid on the table, 5 by 5, so 25 cards are out on the table. There are two clue-givers. In the first round, it was me and Craig were giving clues. We are looking at a special little card that shows the grid. Some of the squares are blue. Some of the squares are red. Let’s say Craig is red, I’m blue. Craig is responsible to get his team to guess the words that match up with those red squares. He will be giving a single word clue. His team will try to figure out which words that clue could refer to. I’m going to try to do the same for the blue team to my blue words for my team. It’s surprisingly fun and challenging to do, because you’re trying to get as many words as possible in each round without getting the other team’s words or hitting this saboteur who could kill the whole thing.

**Craig:** There’s an acronym that Matt Gaffney, who does the weekly Matt Gaffney meta-crossword, uses, and that’s SAD, S-A-D, simple and difficult. Simple and difficult is basically the holy grail of game mechanics, and this one is practically the epitome of it, because it is the simplest thing to explain. There’s 25 words out there. I’m going to give you a single word and then a number. That number is an indication of how many of those words I’m cluing to. My job is if I’m like, “Okay, I need to come up with a word that connects to anvil and heart and music. Maybe I’ll say beat, B-E-A-T, beat for three.” Then the team has to look at all 25 words and hopefully land on heart, music, and anvil, because we’re using beat in different ways for each one of those words. It’s really fun. It’s really tricky. John, earlier you said we’re rooting for each other. I always feel like when I’m the clue-giver, I’m kind of rooting for my fellow clue-giver, because we’re both in a pickle. Everybody else is this innocent who can just guess.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You’re the ones who know everything and have all the responsibility and accountability. It’s a terrific game. It, as they usually say about Othello, takes a moment to learn and a lifetime to master.

**John:** A lifetime to master.

**Craig:** It’s a terrific game. After we finished, I did talk a little bit about what I consider to be Codenames’s smarter, older sibling, Decrypto.

**John:** Decrypto, which is another good game.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** I want to talk about Decrypto, but I want to first focus on two house rules or things that I’ve noticed that were different about how you played versus how I played. I think one of the great things about playing games with new people is you see, oh, this is how they do things. A house rule we always have is that if you are the team who’s guessing word, you could talk talk talk talk talk, but ultimately, you put your finger on the card to say, “I’m choosing this card,” because otherwise, I’ve been in situations where it’s ambiguous, like are they really saying it or are they not saying it? Put your finger on the card. That is the indicator. If you touch the card, you’ve chosen it.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** That’s our rule.

**Craig:** That’s how we play as well.

**John:** A thing that you were doing, which I’d never done ourselves but is so smart, is that you made a list. You had a notebook, and you made a list of all of your words so you could see them outside of the context of the grid. That is genuinely a good, smart thing to be doing that I have not seen other players do, because you can see connections more easily when you’re not looking upside-down at the words, trying to figure out what the common threads are there.

**Craig:** Part of the little method I use is I write down the words that I know I have to clue, and then I started just looking at that list and going, “Okay, here’s some obvious things I could do. Let me circle these and draw a line. I can clue these three. I can clue these two. What do I have left over? Is there a way for me to put one of those into this other group?” The most important thing you have to consider when you do that method is you can’t get lost on your list, because you need to then look immediately. You’re like, “Okay, this word will clue these three. Now let me look back at the table, because am I also mistakenly cluing one of my opponent’s words, or is there a word that’s neither of our words, that would be the first thing they would guess?” Also, there is that one killer word that immediately loses you the game if your team guesses it. Don’t get lost in your list, but the list is a very good way to start.

**John:** Now, I think the original Codenames is a fantastic game, but Megana Rao actually gifted me what I think is actually a better version of Codenames, which is Codenames: Pictures, which I’m not sure if you ever played.

**Craig:** I’ve seen it. I haven’t played it.

**John:** It is phenomenal. Like Codenames, you have a grid of cards. I think you’re actually only putting out 20 cards at a time. They have these weirdly ambiguous images. A couple things are combined on it. It could be you see a clown, but there’s also a horse and something else. They’re well-done images. You’re still responsible for giving one-word clues. What I like is it takes the words on the table out of the picture, so you’re really just focusing on what could get people to think about these things. Are you describing the shape of something? “Pointy” might be a word I would get. It’s like, “Oh, that looks like both that sun illustration, but also that pencil.” It forces you to think differently about how you’re going to tie these clues together.

**Craig:** I should play it. I want to play it. I love the Codenames extended universe.

**John:** It is. There’s Dirty Codewords, which is fine. Basically, you’re going to say some more provocative things because of the words that are-

**Craig:** Poop.

**John:** Poop. There’s a Marvel Codenames. It’s a whole extended universe.

**Craig:** Marvel Codenames. Oh my god. “Hero.”

**John:** “Hero.”

**Craig:** “Hero” for everything.

**John:** Megana, you got me the Codenames: Pictures. Any other Codenames experience you’ve had?

**Megana:** I’ve only played the regular one we have at the office and Codenames: Pictures. I’m curious if this is how you play too, Craig, because now that I’m thinking about it, I don’t know if it’s kosher, but when John is guessing, he will go through methodically clue by clue and explain his reasoning for not picking it, which makes it easier as a clue-giver to know where there might’ve been a miss. Is that standard?

**Craig:** Legal? It is legal. It’s legal.

**Megana:** Sorry, not to put you on blast, John.

**Craig:** No, I’m glad that you’re exposing John for what he is, which is a monster. That’s totally legal. I would argue that if you have played enough as a clue-giver, that kind of insight into the guesser’s mind will probably screw you up more often than it helps you, because they will not be consistent. That’s the one thing I know. They will not at all be consistent. This is the tricky part. You clue a word, and you’re cluing it for three. They get two of them right and one of them wrong. Now they’re going to have a chance to go back and try and guess again on that one, meaning guess back on your old clue. What if you can fold that remaining word into a new clue? They won’t know. They may keep cluing back to that old clue. All of their talking does not predict a damn thing. My rule is that the guessers can talk as much as they want. They may also be giving the other team information.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** That’s the risk that they take. The only thing is that the clue-givers really have to try very hard to not say anything other than the word and the number, which is why if you’re playing online with friends, and you go to the official Codenames website, which is free, you can play for free online, what’s nice about it is you type your clue in, you hit a number, and so all your teammates get is just that feedback. There is information in saying, “Okay, this is a stretch, but shorts for nine.”

**John:** Shouldn’t be able to do that. Between the padding, the framing of stuff, and just body language, which you should try to not reveal, but of course it’s hard not to indicate like, “Oh my god, don’t pick that one, because it’s the assassin,” as clue-givers you cannot be doing that. Still, people are going to try to read for that, because it’s human nature.

**Craig:** Exactly. One of the fun parts about playing in person is if you are an experienced Codenames player and you’re the clue-giver, you should actually come to enjoy saying nothing and being as sphinxlike as possible, not having any reaction, not sighing, not looking, not smiling, nothing. In a weird way, I’m almost rooting against my team. That’s how I make sure that I don’t give them body language. One of the newer players made a classic new player mistake. It was totally normal. When they were a clue-giver, his team was like, “Hm, it’s probably this.” Then the other team was like, “You know, it could be that,” just being jerks about it. The clue-giver was like, “You guys stay out of it.” That’s information. He’s basically saying don’t distract them from what they were saying, because what they were saying is correct. The thing is, when you’re a clue-giver, you have to literally give zero information beyond the word and the amount of words you want them to guess, which is fine.

**John:** The cleanest version of this, the clue-giver would write down something, hand it across, and leave the room, but that wouldn’t be fun for a party game. That’s why you don’t do that.

**Craig:** When you are playing with people remotely over Zoom, and you’re looking at the screen, it actually is kind of fun. You can turn your camera off if you can’t handle it. I was playing once where somebody, they were great, but they honestly were like, “I can’t handle it. I’m turning my camera off,” because what happens is, as the clue-giver, you give a clue, you think it’s really good, and maybe it is. Maybe one person on the team is like, “Oh, it’s got to be these three things.” You’re like, “Yes, I’m good, you’re good.” They’re like, “Great, let’s do it.” Then one person’s like, “Just one thing,” and they bring up some dumb thing about another word that’s so stupid. People want to go along, get along with other people, like, “I don’t want to fight,” so they just end up blowing it. You’re like, “You mother… “ There are times where just inside you’re like a raging volcano. You must be quiet. You must stay zen on the outside.

**Megana:** A moment of pride for me is John’s husband, Mike, is incredibly stoic always, but especially when he is the clue-giver in Codenames. Because Mike and John aren’t allowed to play on the same team, I’m normally paired up with Mike. One time I guess my postulations were so off the wall that I brought Mike to tears. He was laughing so hard about how ridiculous my jumps were.

**Craig:** Are you an over-thinker?

**Megana:** Definitely. The clue was “sheath.” I was talking aloud.

**Craig:** “Sheath.”

**Megana:** I was like, “Could a bomb have a sheath, like a sheath that contains the dynamite or something?” I’m definitely that nightmare person you described, Craig.

**Craig:** The little strategy that I always recommend to new players to consider is, and ideally your clue-giver is working this way too, when you think, “Okay, maybe they’re cluing these two words,” ask yourself, “Okay, it’s either they’re cluing these two words, this one and this one, or it’s this first one and this other one.” Ask the question, what else would they have clued? Is there a better clue they could’ve given for those two as opposed to those two? Because if there is an obvious better clue, then they’re probably not cluing that one, because they didn’t go for the obvious clue. They’re probably cluing this one. It’s a good thing to think through. If I wanted you to pick those two, like if I wanted you to pick “Ireland” and “gold,” I would’ve said, “Leprechaun.” I would not have said what I ended up saying, which was, whatever, “Peat moss.” That was “Ireland” and “vegetable.” “Peat moss” is two words. You can’t use that, but regardless.

**Megana:** Our team typically goes high volume. We’re giving clues for four words at a time.

**Craig:** Four is hard to do.

**John:** It is.

**Megana:** High risk, high reward.

**Craig:** Sure. Everybody has their own strategies. Look, hell, if I can clue eight words, I will. One of the early games I played of Codenames, David Kwong was the clue-giver. I was the only guesser. It was just four people playing. The other team was cluing for three, cluing for two. He was like, “Clue for one. Clue for one. Clue for one.” I was like, “What the F are you doing, dude? You’re killing us.” He gave me no information.

We’re screwed. They’re next. It’s our turn. They are next. They only have one word left, and so we’re going to lose. I think we had six words or something. Then he clued something for six. I was like, “Oh, okay.” He needed to get certain words off the board to make his massive six-word clue work. He was waiting them out, because they had words that would’ve gotten in the way of his clue. He just waited for them and then dropped the bomb, and we won. I was like, “Okay, I apologize for doubting you, sensei.”

**John:** Decrypto, you’ve mentioned before, is sort of like the opposite of Codnames. Basically, there are words that everyone can see that you’re trying to say but not say, so that you can get these numbers to match up. I think it’s a really, really smart game. Megana, can you tell us why we don’t play it in the office? Is it because Nima doesn’t like it?

**Megana:** Yeah, Nima hates Decrypto, but I am always making the pitch for it.

**Craig:** Nima is wrong.

**John:** He’s wrong.

**Craig:** He’s wrong, and he needs to stop that. It’s simple, because Decrypto is Codenames all grown up. The simple way to describe Decrypto is let’s say we’re on the same team. You and John and I, the three of us, we’re on a team. We have four words. All three of us know what those four words are. Each word is numbered. We have word number 1, word number 2, word number 3, and word number 4, and we know them. Then each round, one of us is going to be a clue-giver. That rotates through on each round. The clue-giver picks a card. The card will just have three digits on it. They will be some combination of 1, 2, 3, or four . It might 324. It might be 142. That tells me, okay, it’s 142, so I need to give 3 words, so that my team can look at word 1, 2, 3, and 4, and go, “Okay, that clue is word 1, that clue is word 3, that clue is word 4.” Then they say the number back. That’s it, easy.

Why is it a game? Here’s why. Because when I give them those three words, and then they respond with what the correct answer is with the numbers, the other team hears it. The other team goes, “Okay, we don’t know what their words are, but we know that that dude clued ‘grass,’ ‘tall,’ and ‘cow,’ and then their response was ‘324,’ and that was correct, so we know now the ‘cow’ clue is word 3.”

As each round goes, you collect more and more words that keep cluing back to whatever word number 1 is. Now you have four words that somehow that other team knew was word 1. You’re asking yourselves, what do these four words clue possibly commonly? Then when you get it, it’s mind-blowing and awesome, because obviously they’re trying to mislead you. You’re doing the same thing, and they’re trying to guess your words. It’s fantastic. It’s so great. Nima has rocked me, and I’m shooketh.

**John:** I think Nima would be great at that. I agree it’s a really terrific game. I think what’s different about it is that aspect of it. It’s not even social deception. It’s really just deception. It’s basically how do I not let you think what the answer is? You’re trying to make sure that your teammates understand what you’re trying to say, without the other team being able to infer it. That’s great.

**Craig:** Exactly, because if your team gets it wrong twice, you lose. If the other team guesses your code twice, they win. There’s almost no margin for error. It’s more chess-like in that regard. I’m really shocked. Nima needs to reevaluate I think everything at this point. Everything.

**John:** We’ll have you over to the office for our Friday game block, and you’ll talk us through.

**Craig:** I’m going to make him play Decrypto. Melissa is very good at Decrypto.

**John:** I’m sure she’s great at that.

**Craig:** She’s terrifyingly good at Decrypto. We also have some little house rule versions where we’ll say, okay, this round, everybody’s three clues have to start with the same letter, or in this round, the three clues have to be thematic in some way, like “ball,” “bounce,” and “round,” or something like that. It’s fun. It’s great. It’s a great game. You should all get it and play it. I think there’s also a Decrypto online, which works really well.

**John:** Cool. Thanks, guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Megana:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

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