Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 554 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it is a craft compendium. We are going back to previous segments, in which we talk about how to work with groups of characters. We’ll be looking at how pairs or groups of characters can work on separate pieces of the puzzle, then come together at the end, how to manage different storylines and the dynamics in smaller breakout groups, and how we capture the feeling of community and chemistry between multiple characters.

Our guide in this process is Megana Rao, who is not only a Scriptnotes producer but also a listener. Megana, help us out. Where are we starting?

Megana Rao: We’re starting on Episode 360, called Relationships. Craig often talks about how the most important thing is the central relationship in this story.

John: Not one character, but the relationship between those two characters.

Megana: Exactly. It’s not about the main character. It’s about who that main character’s central relationship is with. In this segment, you guys first of all talk about how to set up characters and establish backstories and the challenge of locating characters and introducing the dynamics that existed before the movie began. Then you get into how you actually evolve those relationships on screen and you go into some technical scene work.

John: Relationship between two characters is almost always about conflict. What is it that they are coming into the scene? What is the problem between the two of them? How are we seeing that grow and evolve and change? How are we exposing the inner life of not just the individual characters, but what their relationship was like before this movie started?

Megana: Yeah, and how you convey that through dialog and how people actually speak to each other.

John: Great. We have that first segment. What’s our next segment.

Megana: Then we get into Episode 395, called All in This Together. In this one, you guys are looking at how you structure a story where the team functions as the central protagonist. There’s a really interesting discussion on POV here where you talk about the challenge of this type of story is that you need to serve several different characters and execute satisfying arcs for each of them.

John: It’s not just The Goonies. It’s any movie in which you have a team of characters who are working together, so the Avengers or the Fast and Furious movies. Yes, each of those characters might have individual arcs or things we know about them, but really it’s the group dynamics that are going to change over the course of the story, so how we handle those.

Megana: Exactly, yeah. It’s not just the individual, but how the whole is going to transform.

John: Fantastic. What’s our third and final segment?

Megana: Our last segment is Episode 383, Splitting the Party. I just want to warn everyone that this is a D and D-heavy chat.

John: As all chats should be, heavy D and D.

Megana: I promise it’s worth it. In this one, you guys are talking about how to split up a group of characters and the questions that writers should be asking themselves so that it’s meaningful when those characters come back together.

John: Fantastic. We will be back together at the end of these three segments to talk about what we’ve learned a little bit but also to do our One Cool Things and all the boilerplate stuff. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we are going to be talking about Stranger Things Season 4.1 I guess we’d call it, which is all about group dynamics. If you’re not a Premium Member, for the love of Steve Harrington, you have to become a Premium Member, because Megana has some very strong opinions about the characters and what’s happened in Stranger Things this first half of Season 4.

Megana: Incredibly strong opinions. By the time this episode airs, everyone should have watched it.

John: You have no excuse for not becoming a Premium Member so you can hear the Bonus Segment. Now, let’s travel back to Episode 360 and get started with our group dynamics.

And so when we first started doing the podcast I remember there was some episode early on where I said like, “Well it’s not like you and I are friends outside of this podcast,” and you were really offended by it. And I remember I was like, oh, I hurt Craig’s feelings. And Craig has feelings. And we’ve become much better friends over the course of doing the podcast, but also–

Craig Mazin: Do I have feelings? I guess I do.

John: You do have feelings.

Craig: I guess I do.

John: But we weren’t playing D&D at the start. Like all that stuff came.

Craig: No, we have become friends through this podcast. I mean, whether I was legitimately hurt or not. You had a fair point. We weren’t really that close or anything. But our relationship is a function of the work that we do together. That’s how it’s happened. And that’s by the way how relationships must happen, if I may Segue Man myself into our main topic–

John: Go for it.

Craig: Relationships have to be functional. I think sometimes people make a mistake and they think a relationship is just two people who like to chat together or sleep together. That in and of itself is not enough function.

John: Yeah. So in framing this conversation about relationships, I think there’s two challenges screenwriters face.

One is how you get the audience up to speed on relationships that began before the movie started. And so this is trying to figure out like literally letting the audience know how these two people are related. Are they siblings? Are they friends? Are they a couple? Are they ex-spouses? Getting a sense of what are the underlying conflicts that started before the movie started. And really who wants what. That’s all stuff that you as the writer hopefully know and you have to find ways to expose to the audience if it’s going to be meaningful to your story.

The second challenge screenwriters face is how do you describe the changes happening in a relationship while the movie is going on. And so it’s really the scene work. What is the nature of the conflicts within the scene? How are we showing both characters’ points of view? What is the dialogue that’s exposing their inner life and exposing the nature of their relationship?

And they’re very related things but they’re not the same things. So what Craig and I just described in terms of our backstory, that’s kind of the first part is setting up the history of who we are. But so much of the writer’s work now is to figure out how within these scenes are we moving those relationships forward and providing new things to study.

Craig: Yeah. That’s exactly right. The screenwriter has certain tasks that are homeworky kind of tasks. You do need convey information. We have this wonderful opportunity when a movie begins to have fun with that. The audience is engaged. They’re leaning forward in their seat. They haven’t yet decided that this movie stinks. So, you can have fun and tease along or misdirect what relationships are. And then reveal them in exciting and fun ways. And that’s I think really enjoyable for people.

So there’s an opportunity to maybe have – maybe it doesn’t have to be quite busy work when we’re establishing how people relate to each other factually. But the real meat of it, as the story progresses, is that fabulous space in between two or three people. The relationship I generally think of as another character. There’s what I imagine this person like alone. There’s what I imagine this person like alone. But when they’re together there’s that other thing between them. And if you think that sounds a little foofy, well, just consider the word chemistry and how often we use it to apply to actors who must perform these relationships. Because when it’s there what do we describe it as? Sparks, or whatever. It’s that thing in between.

And when it’s not there, there’s nothing.

John: Yeah. Chemistry is fundamentally the mixture of two elements that by themselves would be relatively stable. And you put them together and they create something new. And that’s what we’re really talking about in a relationship is that new thing that is created when those characters are interacting and challenging each other.

So, let’s talk about establishing these characters and I think you’re right to describe at the beginning of the movie the audience does lean in because I think partly they’re trying to figure out who these people are and sort of what slots to put them in. People approach movies with a set of expectations and there are certain kind of slots that they want people to fall into. And they’re looking for like, OK, well what slot are they falling into? And if you are aware of what the audience’s expectations are that can be really helpful.

So, some of the slots people are looking for is, well, who is the hero, the protagonist? Who is the love interest? Who is the best friend? Who is the rival? Who is the mentor? Who is the parent? That’s not to say you should have stock characters, but it’s to be aware that the audience is looking for a place to put those folks essentially. A sense of the relationship geography of the central character and the people around them.

And so be aware that the audience is trying to find those things and help them when you can. And if you need to defeat those expectations or change those expectations be aware that’s a job you’re assigning yourself.

Craig: Right.

John: That you have to make sure that the audience understands this isn’t quite what you think. You think that this person is the father, but he’s actually a step-father who has only been married to the mother for a year. If that’s important, you’re going to have to get that out there quickly so we understand.

Craig: That’s exactly right. And similarly there are times when just like you and the audience, one of the characters onscreen will also not quite understand the nature of the relationship, and so it’s important then to tie back to our perspective and point of view episode. If I’m in the perspective and point of view of somebody who has a basic understanding of what a relationship is, and if I want to subvert that I first must lay the groundwork for their wrong understanding. And create their expectation.

So, in Training Day, we have an understanding because we share a perspective with Ethan Hawke that he’s been assigned the kind of badass older veteran character who is going to train him and be his mentor. And so that’s his understanding. And then the guy just starts doing some things that are a little uh, and he goes eh, OK, and we’re all a little bit like uh. And then it gets much, much, much, much worse. And we understand that we, like Ethan Hawke, completely misunderstood the nature of this relationship. And then a different relationship begins to evolve.

John: Yeah. So, let’s talk about some of these expectations. So Ethan Hawke had a set of expectations going into it. I think so often as I read through Three Page Challenges or moments in scripts that aren’t really working I feel sometimes the screenwriter is trying to do a bunch of work to explain something that could have just been done visually. And so they’re putting a lot of work into describing something that could be done as sort of a snapshot, as an image.

So, I want to give a couple snapshots of things you might see in a movie and as an audience you see these things and you’re like, OK, I get what’s going on here, so all of that work is being done visually and therefore the dialogue can just be about what’s interesting and new and is not establishing these relationships.

So, here’s the first snapshot. You see four people seated at a table in an airport restaurant. They’re all African American. There’s a woman who is 35 and putting in eye drops. There’s a man who is 40, a little overweight, who is trying to get a six-year-old boy to stay in his seat. There’s a girl who is nine and playing a game on her phone.

So, you see these four people around a table, you’re like, OK, they are a family. They’re traveling someplace. That’s the mom. That’s the dad. Those are the kids. That’s your default assumption based on the visual I described. So therefore anything you want to do beyond that, or if you need to clarify exactly the nature of these relationships between people, that there’s like a step relationship or one is actually a cousin, you can do that but that visual sort of gave you all that stuff for free. And so therefore you can spend your time in dialogue on doing interesting things with those characters rather than establishing that they’re actually a family and they’re traveling someplace.

Craig: Yeah. You suddenly don’t need to do things like have a character say, “Mom, or “Son,” or any of those annoying things that people do to hit us over the head with this sort of thing. But you’ve put some thought into how to create a relationship in a realistic way.

The fact of the matter is that many writers who struggle with this only struggle with it when they’re writing. If I take any of those people and bring them to an airport and walk them through the airport and just say you quietly look around and then describe to me the relationships you infer from what you see, they’ll get it almost all right.

John: Yep.

Craig: That’s how it works as humans. Therefore that’s what we need to do when we’re writing. I wish that writers would spend more time in their visual minds, I guess, rather than trying to just begin or stop with words, if they could maybe walk through the space in their heads and experience it. It’s amazing what you see when you do that. And then you don’t have to use dialogue.

John: Yeah. All right, so here’s another snapshot. So, next table over there’s a man and a woman. They’re sitting across from each other. They’re both early 30s in business suits. He’s white. She’s American-born Chinese. He wears a wedding ring which we see as he drinks his scotch. His eyes are red and puffy, maybe from crying. She doesn’t look at him. All her attention focused on the spreadsheet open on her laptop. So that’s the visual we’re giving to an audience at the very start.

We know there’s a conflict there. We know that something has happened. Something is going on. The nature of their relationship between each other is probably fraught. There’s something big happening there. And I think we’re leaning in to see what is the first thing that somebody says. What just happened that got them to this place?

Are they having an affair? Are they business colleagues? Something big has happened there. And you have a little bit of an understanding about their jobs, or sort of that it’s some sort of work travel. So that visual gives us a sense of who those two people are before we’ve had any words spoken.

Again, if you saw those people at the airport you would probably get that basic nature of their relationship and you’d be curious. And so I think the thing about sort of establishing people visually is that you want there to still be curiosity. You’re not trying to answer all the questions. You’re just trying to give a framework so that people are asking interesting questions about these characters in front of them.

Craig: You’re building a mystery. Right? You’re giving us clues. I have clues here. OK, these are the clues you’ve given me and I’m looking at the situation here. OK, I’ve got this man, I’ve got this woman. He’s wearing a wedding ring. He’s drinking scotch. He’s crying. He’s sad. She doesn’t seem sad at all. That’s a huge clue to me. Whatever he’s crying about, it’s not about her, because she’s looking at a spreadsheet. It’s not that she’s looking down nervously and shutting him down. She’s busy. She’s looking at a spreadsheet. This guy seems pathetic. I’m guessing his marriage has blown up and he’s crying about it for the 15th time to his associate who is subordinate to him therefore can’t tell him to shut the hell up.

She meanwhile is trying to get the work done that they need to get done so they both don’t get fired by the boss above both of them. I don’t know if that’s true. And I don’t know if you even thought it through that far.

John: I haven’t.

Craig: Right. It’s just that’s the bunch of clues there. And that’s how fast we start to assemble clues. Here’s the good news for all of you at home. What I just did is something that you can use to your advantage if you want people to get what you want them to get. It’s also what you can use to your advantage if you want people to assume something that is incorrect.

For instance, in the first scenario we see a man, a woman, two kids, they’re all sitting together in the airport, playing on a game. They’re all the same race. They all therefore technically can be related. It feels like a family. And that’s a situation where at some point you could have the nine-year-old, turn, wait, see somebody pass by and then hand 50 bucks to the man and the woman and say, “Thanks. We weren’t here.” And then she takes the six-year-old and they move along, right?

Like what the hell? Who is this little spy? But that’s the point. By giving people clues we know reliably we can get them to sort of start to think in a way. We are doing what magicians do. It’s not magic. It’s misdirection and it’s either purposeful direction or purposeful misdirection. This is the way we have fun.

John: Absolutely. And so the example you gave where they pay the money and leave, it would be very hard to establish the normalcy if you actually had to have characters having dialogue before that. We would be confused. And so by giving it to us just as a visual, like OK we get the reason why everyone around them would just assume they’re a family. But if we had to try to do that with dialogue or have somebody comment on that family, it would have been forced. It would have felt weird.

So, you have to think about sort of like what do you want the audience to know. What do you think the audience will expect based on the image that you’re presenting and how can you use that to your advantage?

Most times you want to give the audience kind of what they’re expecting so the audience feels smart. So they feel like they can trust their instincts. They can trust you as a storyteller. And maybe one time out of five defeat that expectation or sort of surpass that expectation. Give them a surprise. But you don’t want to surprise them constantly because then they won’t know what to be focusing on.

Craig: Right. Then they start to feel like this really is a magic show and they lose the emotional connection to things. So, in the beginning of something you can have fun with the details of a relationship because those are somewhat logical. And you can mess around with that. The more you do it, the more your movie just becomes a bit of a puzzle. And, by the way, that’s how whodunits work. But those are really advertising nothing more than puzzles. And that’s why I recommend all screenwriters spend time reading Agatha Christie. Just pick a sampling of two Poirots and two Marples. And just see how she does it. And see how clever she is. And see how much logical insight and brilliance is involved in designing these things, particularly in such a fashion where it works even though you are trying to figure it out while it’s happening.

John: Yeah. And so it’s not like those characters are realistic, but those characters are created in a very specific way to do a very specific function. And they have to be believable in doing their function the first time through and then when we actually have all the reveals you see like, OK, that’s what they really were doing. And I can understand why everybody else around them had made the wrong assumptions.

Craig: Well, that’s the beauty of it is that you start to realize by reading those whodunits how much stuff you’re filling in that isn’t there. You make these assumptions that that girl must be that woman’s daughter. That’s just a flat assumption you made and at no point was that ever stated clearly and why would you believe that? So, it teaches you all the ways that our minds work in a sense. So, that’s always great. But I think once you get past the technicals of portraying and conveying relationships, then the real magic and the real fun is in watching two people change each other through the act of being together, whether it is by talking, or not talking, or fighting, or regret. Whatever it is, that’s why I think we actually go to see these stories.

I don’t think we go to movies for plots. I think maybe we show up because the plot sounds exciting. We stay in our seat for the relationships. Lindsay Doran has an amazing talk about – did we – that’s going to be my One Cool Thing this week for sure. I mean, I’m sure I’ve said it before, but Lindsay Doran has a Ted Talk she’s done. It’s available online for free. That goes to the very heart of why relationships are what we demand from the stories we see.

John: Yeah. And too often you think about like is this a character moment or is this a story moment. And, of course, there is no difference.

Craig: Right.

John: You have to make sure that the character moments are married into fundamental aspects of story that are moving the story forward. Because if you have a moment that is just like two character having a witty conversation but it doesn’t have anything to do with the actual forward trajectory of the plot, it’s not going to last. And if you have a moment that just moves the plot forward but doesn’t actually have our characters engaging and interacting and changing and their relationship evolving, it’s not going to be a rewarding scene either. So, moments have to do these two things at the same time. And that’s the challenge of screenwriting. It’s that everything has to do multiple things at once.

Craig: That’s why they’re doing them, right? I mean, the whole point is you’re in charge. You can make anything happen. You can end the movie right now if you want. So, why is this happening? And if your answer is, well, it’s happening because I need it to happen so that something else happens, no. No. Stop. Go backwards. You’re in a bad spot.

John: So often I think we have an expectation of what the trajectory are going to be for these characters also. Because we’ve seen movies before, so we know that the hero and love interest will have a fight at some point. They will break up. They’ll get back together. We can see some of these things happening. And that doesn’t mean you have to avoid all those things happening but you have to avoid all those things happening but you have to be aware that the audience sees it coming. And so if the audience sees it coming and kind of feels that you’re doing that beat just because you’re doing that beat, like, oh, now they’re going to break up because of this misunderstanding and, ugh, I saw that happening way ahead of time, that’s not going to be rewarding.

They’re going to have an expectation that attractive people will fall in love. That families will fight and splinter but ultimately come back together. So, all that stuff is sort of baked into our expectation of these stories from the start. So, be aware of that and so if you get to those moments understand what the stock version of that moment is and figure out how you push past that. How do you get to a new moment between these two very specific characters, not the generic archetypes of these characters? What is it about them that makes this scene, these two people being in the scene, so unique and special?

And when you see those things happen, that’s what makes your movie not every other movie.

Craig: It strikes me that nobody really talks about relationships when they’re doing their clunky, boring screenwriting classes and lectures. I mean, I’m sure some people out there do. But so often when I skim through these books they talk about characters and plot. They don’t talk about relationships. And I guess my point is I don’t care about character at all. I only care about relationship, which encompasses character. In short, it doesn’t matter what the character of Woody is until Buzz shows up.

John: Completely.

Craig: Woody, until Buzz shows up, is – well, his character I could neatly fit it on a very small index card. Woody is the guy who is in charge and has sort of a healthy ego because he knows he’s the chosen one. So he’s kind of the benevolent dictator. OK. Boring. Don’t care. That’s why movies happen. We don’t want that to keep on going. What we want is for Shrek to leave the swamp and meet Fiona. Then the characters become things that matter because there in – go back to our conflict episode. Everything is about relationship. They should only talk about plot and relationships as far as I’m concerned. We should just stop talking about character. It’s a thing that’s separate and apart.

I think a lot of studio executives make this mistake when they take about character arcs. I hate talking about character arcs. The only arcs I’m interested in are relationship arcs.

John: Yeah. Shrek is not a character, but Shrek and Donkey together is a thing. Like that’s–

Craig: Right.

John: There’s no way to expose what’s interesting about Shrek unless you have Donkey around to be annoying to him. So you have to have some thing or person to interact with. Yes, there are – of course, there exceptions. There are movies where one solo character is on a mission by him or herself and that’s the only thing you see. But those are real exceptions. And I agree with you that so many screenwriting books treat like, “Oh, this is the hero’s journey and this is the arc of the hero,” as if he or she is alone in the entire story. And they never are. And it’s always about the people around them and the challenges.

Craig: Or an animal.

John: Or an animal.

Craig: You know what I mean? There’s some relationship that mattes. And the only place I think you can kind of get away with learning and experiencing something from a character in the absence of a relationship in a kind of impressive way is in theater and on stage and through song, but in that sense you’re there with that person, the relationship is between – so when Shrek sings his wonderful song at the beginning of “A Big, Bright, Beautiful World,” the beginning of Shrek the Musical which as you know I’m obsessed with, he’s singing it to you in the audience. And you’re with him in a room. So that’s a different experience.

But on screen, then when you watch – OK, great example if I can get Broadway for a second, Fiddler on the Roof opens in the most bizarre way any musical has ever opened. The main character walks out and starts talking to you in the audience, immediately breaking the fourth wall. And he does it occasionally and then sometimes he talks to God. And he’s alone. And then there’s the song If I Were a Rich Man. He’s alone the entire time and he’s singing it to himself and to God, who is not visible.

And when you’re in a theater watching it it’s fun, and it’s great, and you get it. Then you watch the movie, which is not a bad movie at all. I like the Fiddler on the Roof movie, but when that song comes around you’re like what is happening.

John: Yeah. Who is he talking to?

Craig: Why is he? Who are you talking to? Why are you doing this? Why are you standing in a field singing? It’s bizarre. It doesn’t work in a movie. You need a relationship.

John: Yep. You do.

John: So our main topic this week came up because yesterday I did a roundtable on a project and this project we were working on had not one hero but a big group of heroes. Or, not a big group, but four people who were sort of the central heroes of the story. And that wasn’t a mistake. That really was how the movie needed to work.

And it got me thinking that we so often talk about movies being a journey that happens to one character only once, and we always talk about sort of that hero and that hero protagonates over the course of the story and sort of those things. Even though we are not big fans of those classic templates and sort of everything has to match the three-act structure that tends to be the experience of movies is that you’re following a character on a journey. But there are a lot of movies that have these groups of heroes in them and I thought we’d spend some time talking about movies that have groups and the unique challenges of movies that have groups as their central heroes.

Craig: Smart topic because I think it’s quickly becoming the norm actually as everybody in the studio world tries to universe-ize everything. You end up, even if you start with movies with the traditional independent protagonist, sooner or later you’re going to be smooshing everybody together in some sort of team up. So it’s inevitable.

John: We’ve talked before about two-handers where you have two main characters who are doing most of the work in the movie. And sometimes it’s a classic protagonist/antagonist situation. So movies like Big Fish, Mr. And Mrs. Smith, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Romancing the Stone, Chicago, while there are other characters there’s two central characters you’re following and you could say either one of them is the main character of the story.

But what you’re describing in terms of there’s a big group of characters is more on the order of Charlie’s Angels, The Breakfast Club, X-Men, Avengers, Scooby Doo, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Lord of the Rings, Goonies, Go, all The Fast and Furious movies. These are movies where characters need to have journeys and make progress over the course of the story but they’re a part of a much larger team. And we really haven’t done a lot of talking about how those teams of characters work in movies.

Craig: Yeah. I actually wasn’t really a team movie writer until I guess The Hangovers, because those three guys kind of operated as a team. And then when you throw Mr. Chow in there it’s a team of four. It’s a crew. Now you’ve got a crew.

John: You’ve got a crew.

Craig: You got a crew.

John: We’re putting together a crew.

Craig: And you got to figure out how that crew works, because it is very different than just – even like a typical two-hander like Identity Thief. I mean, there are other characters but it’s just the two of them on a road trip. That’s pretty traditional stuff.

John: The movie is about their relationship. And so I’m sure people can argue that one is the protagonist and one is the antagonist. And, great, but really it’s about the two of them and how they are changing each other. Wicked is a two-hander.

Craig: Right. When you say, OK, now it’s really about three, or four, or five, or in Fast and Furious there’s like 12 of them at this point now, you kind of have to present them as this team. It’s a team sport now. So writing for a team requires a very different kind of thinking I think than writing for a traditional protagonist and let’s call them a sub-protagonist or something like that.

John: Yeah. So if you think about them as a group, if you think about them as one entity this should still be a one-time transformational event for this group of characters, for this team of characters, for whatever this party is that is going through this journey that has to be transformational to them as a group.

But within that bigger story there’s probably individual stories. And in those individual stories those characters are probably the protagonist of that subplot or at least that sub-story. So they’re all going to have relationships with each other, with the greater question, the greater theme, the greater plot of the movie, and it’s making sure that each of those characters feels adequately served by what the needs are. Bigger characters are going to have more screen time and probably take bigger arcs. Minor characters are at least going to enter into a place and exit a place that they hopefully have contributed to the overall success or failure of not just the plot that the characters are wrestling with but the thematic issues that the movie is trying to bring up and tackle.

Craig: Yeah. There’s a kind of a Robert Altman-y trick where you take an event and he would do this a lot in very good Robert Altman movies, but we see it in all sorts of movies, where there’s an event. And the event is so big it encompasses everyone. And so we kind of – we play a little bit of the soap opera game. So soap operas traditionally would have about three or four plots going at once. You would see a little bit of one, then it would switch over to the next one. And you’d have to wait to get back to the one you liked. At least that was my experience when I was home sick with grandma.

So in say a movie like Independence Day there are multiple stories. There is a president. There is his wife. There’s an adviser to the president who has an ex-wife. There’s his dad. There’s Will Smith. There’s a bunch of stories going on. And each one of them gets a little slice of the story pie, but ultimately it’s all viewed through the prism of this event. And in the end everybody kind of comes together in some sort of unifying act which in Magnolia was a frog rain.

John: Yes. Yes.

Craig: And we see that in fact as different as all these stories were everyone was connected and kind of working as a team. So individuals are the heroes of their mini-stories. And that’s in fact how those movies tell the story of the big story through mini-stories.

John: Yeah. Now, in some of these stories the characters enter in as some kind of family. They have a pre-existing relationship. In other movies they are thrown together by circumstances and therefore have to sort of figure out what the relationships are between them. In either situation you want those relationships to have changed by the end of the story. So just like as in a two-hander, their relationship needs to have changed by the end. In a team story the relationships need to have changed by the end and you need to see the impact they’ve had on each other over the course of this. So independent of a villain, independent of outside plot, the choices that they individually made impacted the people around them.

Craig: And that’s the matrix of relevance. So in a traditional movie it is about me. I have a problem. And I go through a course of action and at the end of the movie my problem is solved. In this kind of story the group has a problem. And what we’re rooting for is the group to survive. And in that sense very much it is a family. And we know that about the Fast and Furious, because they’re always telling us.

John: [laughs] It’s family.

Craig: They always tell us. This is a family. But it is. And so the hero of those movies is the joined relationship of them all in the family. And what the problem is in the beginning of the story is not a problem with one individual. It is a problem of family dynamic. And that is what needs to be figured out by the end of the movie.

John: Yeah. So let’s talk about the real pitfalls and challenges of doing a story with a team protagonist or with a big group at its center. The first and most obvious one is that sometimes certain characters just end up being purely functional. You see what their role is within this group and what their role is within this plot, but their character isn’t actually interesting in and of itself at all. And sometimes if it’s a minor character, OK, but if it’s a character who we’re putting some emotional weight in that we actually want to see their journey at all, they have to be more than purely functional.

The challenge is the more you – in a normal movie you can say like, oh OK, well I need to build in some back story for this character. I need to see them interact with other people and get a better sense of who this person is and what they’re trying to do, but you can’t do that for every character because the movie would just keep starting again and again. It would never get anywhere. So, finding ways that one character’s progress is impacting another character, which is sending the next thing forward. The jigsaw puzzle aspect of getting all those characters’ changes to happen over the course of the story can be really difficult.

Craig: It can be. Because, you know, the movie starts to turn into a stop-and-start. Action, quiet talk, backstory, my inner feelings. Action, quiet talk, backstory, your inner feelings. And it’s one of the reasons by the way these movies are so long. They are so long because everybody needs a story. It’s hard to justify why you have seven characters when only three really have lives and inner worlds and the other four are standing around doing stuff.

John: Yep.

Craig: So everybody has to have it. And they can get really long. You know, it wouldn’t kill these people to maybe, you know, kill one of them. If it’s not going well we’ll just kill them. No big deal.

John: I’m going to argue without a lot of supporting evidence that Alien is essentially one of these kind of group movies, and a lot of horror movies are those kind of group movie, and they winnow down the characters so that one person is left standing. But you couldn’t necessarily say that that person was the protagonist at the very start of the story.

Aliens is not really kind of what we’re talking about with the team movie. Even though there’s a team of great people in it, it is Ripley’s movie and it is her journey. You can clearly see her protagonist arc over the course of it. So, that’s a distinction. Even within the same franchise those are two different kind of setups. I would say – I’m arguing that the first Alien movie is kind of what we’re describing in this episode whereas Aliens is much more a classic, here is one character on a one-time journey.

Craig: Yeah. Don’t be afraid, if you need to write fodder characters you write fodder characters.

John: Oh, go for it.

Craig: I mean, people need to die. Somebody has to be the red shirt. But when you think about – Star Trek is a pretty good example I think of a kind of team story. All their movies feel like team stories to me. And in part it’s because, I mean, take away the science fiction aspect, they’re just sailors on a boat. And so we’re rooting for the boat to survive. That means everybody on the boat is important. However, if something blows up, a few people on the boat can die and we won’t miss them. It’s the people that we have invested in emotionally. Those need to be justifiable to us. They all need to be important. They’re all doing jobs that are really important. I don’t care about the janitor on USS Enterprise. They do have an important job. Really important. But not during your crisis.

John: Absolutely. And we should distinguish between, in television shows by their nature tend to have big casts with a lot of people doing stuff, so Star Trek as a TV show you say, oh well of course, there’s a big cast, there’s a team. But the Star Trek movies which I also love, that is what we’re talking about here because it’s a family. It is a group of characters, the five or six key people. They are the ones that we care about. And we don’t care about the red shirts. We want to see them come through this and survive and change and interact with each other. That’s why we’re buying our ticket for these movies.

Craig: You know what? I just had an idea.

John: Yes?

Craig: You know, so occasionally we do a deep dive into a movie. And I do like the idea of surprising people. I don’t think we’ve necessarily been particularly surprising in our choices. They’ve all been kind of classics. But you know what’s a really, really, really well-written movie?

John: Wrath of Khan?

Craig: It is. But that’s not the one I’m thinking of.

John: Tell me.

Craig: Star Trek: First Contact.

John: Oh great.

Craig: First Contact is a brilliantly written script. It is a gorgeous story where everything clicks and works together in the most lovely way.

John: Nice.

Craig: I would deep dive that. I’d deep dive the hell out of it.

John: It’s on the list. Nice.

Craig: Put it on the list. Put it on the list.

John: Put it on the list. Getting back to this idea that there’s sort of a jigsaw puzzle, there’s a lot of things happening at once, you and I have both worked on Charlie’s Angels films. I found that to be some of the most difficult writing I ever had to do because you have three protagonists, three angels, who each need their own storylines. They need to be interacting with each other a lot. They have to have a pretty complicated A-plot generally. So every scene ends up having to do work on more than just one of those aspects. If it’s just talking plot then you’re missing opportunity to do Angel B-story stuff, but you can’t do two or three Angel B-story scenes back to back because then you’ve lost the A-plot. They’re challenging movies for those reasons. And more challenging than you might guess from an outsider’s perspective.

Craig: Well, you’re spinning plates, right?

John: Yeah.

Craig: You watch them when they’re actually spinning plates. They spin the plate and then they move over and they keep this plate. This plate is slowing down, spin that one faster. The one you were just spinning, it’s in middle. That one over there is slowing down, get to that one. It’s the same thing. You kind of service these things in waves. When you feel like you’ve had a good satisfying amount of this person, leave them and move onto another side story or another aspect of this group. That person can hang for a while.

If you have left somebody for a while when you come back to them it’s got to be really good.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You’ve got to go, oh, you know what, it wasn’t like we were away from that person because there was nothing for them to do. We were away from them because they have a bomb to drop on us. And so that works, too. But just think of it as just servicing plates. Spinning plates and looking for the ones that have kind of been a little bit neglected for a little too long. Because you can’t do them all at once. It’s not possible.

John: Yeah. And so this, we talk about art and craft a lot. Some of that is just craft. It’s recognizing having built a bunch of cabinets you recognize like, OK, this is what I need to do to make these cabinet doors work properly. And I can’t, if I don’t measure this carefully those cabinet doors are going to bump into each other and you’re not going to be able to open them. It’s a design aspect that’s kind of hard to learn how to do until you’ve just done it a bunch. And recognizing the ins and outs of scenes and how long it’s been since we’ve seen this careful. What are we expecting to happen next?

And while doing all of that remembering like, OK, what is it thematically these storylines are all about. What is the bigger picture that these can all – how are we going to get everybody to the same place not just physically but emotionally for this moment.

Craig: Yeah. You find as you do these things that you can get away with almost nothing. I think early on you think, well, it’s been a little while and this person hasn’t said anything, but whatever, it’s fine. These scenes are good. And then you give it to people and they go, “So why is this dead weight hanging around here? That was weird.” And you go, well, you can’t actually get away with anything.

John: Yeah. We talked before about how a character who doesn’t talk in a scene can be a challenge, especially if they haven’t talked – if they’re just hanging in the background of a scene for a long time and haven’t said anything that becomes a problem. But if a character has been offstage for too long and then they come back it has to be meaningful when they come back and you have to remember who they are. There’s not a clear formula or math, but sometimes you will actually just do a list of scenes and recognize like, wow, I have not seen this character for so long that I won’t remember who they are. And so I’m going to have to remind people who they are when they come back. It’s challenging. And you’re trying to do this all at script stage, but then of course you shoot a movie and then you’re seeing it and you’re like, oh man, we dropped that scene and now this doesn’t make sense. That’s the jigsaw puzzle of it all.

Craig: Yeah. It’s why writers should be in charge of movies.

John: Yeah. I think so.

Craig: Just telling it like it is.

John: Well, we go back to the sort of writer-plus that you’re always pitching which is that aspect of writers sort of functioning as showrunners for films is especially important for these really complicated narratives where there’s just a lot of plate-spinning to be done.

Craig: Yeah. I think television has proven this. Really it’s empirical at this point. The other thing I wanted to mention, one last pitfall, when you’re dealing with a group dynamic and you’re writing for a family you have to make sure that no one person – no one person’s personal stakes outweigh the group stakes. We want to be rooting for this whole team to survive. And they’re working together. But if you tell me also that one of their little mini-stories is that they’ve discovered the cure for cancer now I just mostly care about that person. That person has to get out of the burning building. Everybody else should just light themselves on fire so that person can get out.

So you just want to make sure that no one person’s stakes overshadow or obliterate the other ones in the group. And really the biggest stake of all which is us staying together.

John: Yep. 100%. So some takeaways. I would say if you’re approaching a story that you think is going to be a team story I would stop and ask yourself is it really a team story or is it more Aliens where it’s one character’s story and there’s a bunch of other characters as well? Because if it is one character’s story that’s most movies and that is actually a good thing. So always ask yourself is there really one central character and everyone else is supporting that one central character? If that’s not the case and you really do genuinely have a family, a group, a series of characters who are addressing the same thing you’ve made your life more difficult but god bless you. That could be a great script. But recognize the challenges you’re going to have ahead for yourself and be thinking about how do you make this group feel like the protagonist so you feel like there has been a transformation of this group by the end of the movie.

Craig: Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. And I do believe that after this episode people should be able to do this. All of them.

John: Oh, all of them. Easy-peasy. Nothing hard to do there.

Craig: I mean, what else do you people want? We’ve almost done 400 of these.

John: Wow.

Craig: They should all be at the top of their game. There should be 400 Oscars a year for screenplay as far as I’m concerned.

John: Moving on, our feature topic today is splitting up the party, dividing the party. It’s that trope that you often see in – well originally in sort of Scooby Doo things. Let’s split up so we can cover more ground and so therefore everyone gets into trouble because they split the party. But it also happens a lot in D&D where it’s that idea of you don’t want to divide up the party because if you divide up the party you’re weaker separately than you are together. And it’s also just really annoying for players because then you’re not – you’re just sort of waiting around for it to be your turn again.

But as I thought about it like dividing the party is actually a crucial thing that we end up having to do in movies and especially now in the second Arlo Finch just so that we can actually tell the story the best way possible. So I want to talk about situations where it’s good to keep characters together, more importantly situations where you really want to keep the characters separated, apart, and why you might want to do that.

Craig: Yeah, it’s a really smart idea for a topic because it’s incredibly relevant to how we present challenges to our characters. And the reason that they always say – and it’s maybe the only real rule, meaning only real unwritten rule of roleplaying games – is don’t split up the party. Don’t split the party is really in response to just a phalanx of idiots who have split the party in the past and inevitably it doesn’t work because as you point out you are putting yourselves in more danger that way. But that is precisely what we want to do to the characters in our fixed concluding narratives because it is the very nature of that jeopardy that is going to test them and challenge them the most. And therefore their success will feel the most meaningful to us.

John: Absolutely. So let’s talk about some of the problems with big groups. And so one of the things you start to realize if you have eight characters in a scene is it’s very hard to keep them alive. And by alive I mean do they actually have a function in that scene? Have they said a line? What are they doing there? And if characters don’t talk every once and a while they really do tend to disappear. I mean, radio dramas is the most extreme example where if a character doesn’t speak they are not actually in the scene. But if a character is just in the background of a scene and just nodding or saying uh-huh that’s not going to be very rewarding for that actor. It’s going to pull focus from what you probably actually want to be doing.

Craig: Whenever I see it it kills me, because I notice it immediately. And it’s so fascinating to me when it happens and I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this great video. Patton Oswalt was a character on King of Queens. He was – I didn’t really watch the show, but I think he was a neighbor or something, or a coworker, so smaller part.

So there were many times I think where he was included in the scene in their living room, which was their main set for the sitcom, but other than his one thing to say at the beginning or the end he had nothing to do. And he apparently did this thing where through this very long scene he held himself perfectly still like a statue on purpose in the background. And you can see it on YouTube. It’s great. He’s amusing himself because the show has absolutely no use for him in that scene other than the beginning or the end.

John: That’s amazing. A situation we ran into with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is in Roald Dahl’s book Charlie Bucket gets the Golden Ticket and you’re allowed to bring two parents with you. And so Charlie only brings his uncle, but all the other characters, all the other little spoiled kids bring both parents. And that would be a disaster onscreen because you would have 15 people at the start of the factory tour. And trying to keep 15 people in a frame is really a challenge of cinema and television. There’s no good way to keep them all physically in a frame.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And that is a real problem. So what we did is basically everyone could bring one parent and it turned out the original Gene Wilder movie did the same thing. We made different choices about which parent. But then even when you get into like the big chocolate river room I’m splitting up those people and so they’re not all together as a pack because you just can’t keep them alive. You can’t get a group of more than four or five people together and actually have that moment be about something. And so they’re immediately splitting apart and going in different directions just so that you can have individual moments.

Craig: Even inside a group of characters where you haven’t technically split the party in terms of physical location, as a writer you begin to carve out a weird party split anyway because someone is inevitably going to lean in and have a quieter exchange with somebody else, or whisper to somebody else, or take somebody aside, even though they’re all still in the same room, because ultimately it is impossible to feel any kind of intimacy when you do have 15 co-equals all yammering at each other. Or, god forbid, three people yammering at each other and then 12 other people just standing there watching. That’s creepy.

John: Yep. The last thing I’ll say, the problem in big groups, is that there are conversations, there’s conflicts that you can really only see between two characters, maybe three characters, that just would not exist as part of a larger group. You’re not going to have an argument with your wife in a certain public place, but you would if it’s just the two of you. And so by breaking off those other people you allow for there to be moments that just couldn’t exist in a public setting.

And so that’s another reason why big groups just have a dampening effect often on what the natural conflicts you really want to see are in a story.

Craig: Even beyond the nature of certain conversations, there are certain aspects of basic character itself that change based on the context of who you’re around. Sometimes we don’t really get to know somebody properly until they’re alone with someone else. And then they say or do something that kind of surprises us because they are the sort of person that just blends in or shies away when there’s a lot going on. And they only kind of come out or blossom in intimacy.

Quiet characters are wonderful characters to kind of split off with because suddenly they can say something that matters. And you get to know who they really are. By the way, I think people work this way, too. We are brought up to think of ourselves as one person, right, that you’re John. But there’s many Johns. We are all many of us and we change based on how big of a group we’re in and who is in the group. So don’t be afraid to do that with your characters.

John: Yeah. So that ability to be specific to who that character is with that certain crowd and sort of the specificity of the conflicts that’s something you get in the smaller groups. But one of the other sort of hidden advantages you start to realize when you split the party up is that enables you to cut between the two groups. And that is amazingly useful for time compression. So basically getting through a bunch of stuff more quickly and sort of like if you were sticking with the same group you would have to just keep jumping forward in time. But by being able to ping pong back and forth between different groups and see where they’re at you can compress a lot of time down together. You can sort of short hand through some stuff. Giving yourself something to cut to is often the thing you’re looking for most as a screenwriter.

Craig: It is incredibly helpful for the movie once you get into the editing room of course, because you do have the certain flexibility there. You’re not trapped. There is a joy in the contrast, I think. If you’re going back and forth between let’s call them contemporaneous scenes. So they’re occurring at the same time, but they’re in different places, they can kind of comment on each other. It doesn’t have to be overt or meta, but there’s an interesting game of contrasts that you can play between two people who are enjoying a delicious meal in a beautiful restaurant and then a third person who is slogging her way through a rainy mud field. That’s a pretty broad example. It can be the tiniest of things.

But it gives you a chance to contrast which movie and film does really well and reality does poorly, because we are always stuck in one linear timeline in our lives. We never get that gift of I guess I’ll call it simultaneous perspective.

John: Yeah. So I mean a thing you come to appreciate as a screenwriter is how much energy you get out of a cut. And so you can find ways to get out of a scene and into the next scene that provide you with even more energy. But literally any time you’re cutting from one thing to another thing you get a little bit of momentum from that. And so being able to close a moment off and sort of tell the audience, OK, that thing is done and now we’re here is very useful and provides a pull through the story where if you had to stay with those characters as they were moving through things that could be a challenge.

But let’s talk about some of the downsides because there’s also splitting up the party that’s done poorly or doesn’t actually help.

Craig: Right.

John: So if you have a strong central protagonist, like it’s really all on this one character’s back, if you’re dividing up then suddenly you’re losing that POV. You’re losing that focus of seeing the story just from their perspective. And so the Harry Potter movies, the books and the movies, are all from Harry’s perspective. He is central to everything. And so if they were to cut off and just have whole subplots with Ron and Hermione where they’re doing stuff by themselves it would be different. There’s a way it could totally work, but it would be different. You know, if you’re making Gravity you really do want to stay with Sandra Bullock the whole time through. If you cut away to like on the ground with the NASA folks that would completely change your experience of that movie. So, there are definitely times where it does make sense to hold a group together so that you can stay with that central character because it’s really about his or her central journey.

Craig: Yeah. In those cases sometimes it’s helpful to think about the perspective character as a free agent. And so you still get to split the party by leaving a party to go to another party. And going back and forth. So Harry Potter has the Ron and Hermione party, and he has the Dumbledore party. And he has the snake party. And so he can move in between those and thus give us kind of different perspectives on things which is really helpful.

I mean, I personally feel like any time you’re writing about a group of people, basically you always are even if it’s a really small group, you should already be thinking about how you’re going to break them apart. Because it’s so valuable. It also helps you reinforce what they get out of the group in the first place. Because a very simple fundamental question every screenwriter should ask about their group of friends in their show or the movie is why are they friends.

We are friends with people who do something for us. Not overtly, but they are giving us something that we like. So, what is that? What are they doing for each other? And once you know that then you know why you have to break up the party. And then if they get back together what it means after that has been shattered.

John: Yep. I think as you’re watching something, if you were to watch an episode of Friends with the sound turned off most of the episode is not going to have the six of them together. They’re going to go off and do their separate things. But generally there’s going to be a moment at which they’re all back together in the course of the thing and that is a natural feeling you want. You want the party to break apart and then come back together. You want that sort of homecoming thing. That sense of completion is to have the group brought back together. That is the journey of your story. And so you’ll see that even in like Buffy the Vampire Slayer is another example of like let’s split up, let’s do different things. But you are expecting to see Xander and Buffy and Willow are all going to come back together at the end because that’s sort of the contract you’ve made with your audience.

Craig: Exactly. And that is something that’s very different about recurring episodic television as opposed to closed end features or closed end limited series. You can’t really break up the party in any kind of permanent way. Whereas in film and limited series television sometimes, and a lot of times, you must. You must split up the party permanently. I mean, there’s a great – if you’re making any kind of family drama it’s really helpful to think about this, the splitting of the party concept. I’m thinking of Ordinary People. Ordinary People ultimately is a movie about what happens, you know, the party and whether or not the party is going to stay together. And, spoiler alert, it breaks up. The party splits up permanently and you understand that is the way it must be.

John: You know, Broadcast News. And so if you want to take that central triangle of those three characters, they could stay all working together as a group, but that would not be dramatically interesting. You have to break them apart and see what they’re like in their separate spaces so you can understand the full journey of the story.

Craig: Precisely.

John: So let’s talk about how you split up a party. The simplest and probably hoariest way to do it is just the urgency thing. So the Scooby Doo like we can cover more ground if we split up, or there’s a deadline basically. We won’t get this done unless we split up. There’s too much to do and so therefore we’re going to divide. You do this and then we do that. The Guardians of the Galaxy does that. The Avengers movies tend to do that a lot where they just going off in separate directions and eventually the idea is that they’ll come back together to get that stuff done.

Craig: Yep.

John: That works for certain kinds of movies. It doesn’t work for a lot of movies. But it’s a way to get it done. But I think if you can find the natural rhythms that make it clear why the characters are apart, that’s probably going to be a better solution for most movies. You know, friends aren’t always together. Friends do different stuff. And friends have other friends and so they’re apart from each other.

People work. And so that sense of like you have a work family and a home family. That’s a way of separating things. And there’s people also grouped by common interest, so you can have your hero who is a marathon runner who goes off doing marathon-y stuff, marathon people, marathon-y stuff, who goes running with people which breaks him off from the normal – the group that we’re seeing the rest of the time. You can find ways to let themselves be the person pulling themselves away from the group.

Craig: Yeah. There’s also all sorts of simple easy ways where the world breaks the party apart, walls and doors drop down between people. Somebody is arrested and put in prison. Somebody is pulled away. Someone dies. Dying, by the way, great way to break up a party. That’s a terrific party split. Yeah. There’s all sorts of – somebody falls down, gets hurt, and you have to take them to the hospital. There’s a hundred different things.

And I suppose what I would advise writers is to think about using a split method that will allow you, the writer, to get the most juice out of this new circumstance of this person and this person together, which is different than what we’ve seen before. So where would that be and how would it work and why would it feel a certain way as opposed to a different way.

And you can absolutely do this, even if you have three people. I mean, you mention Broadcast News so let’s talk about James Brooks and As Good as it Gets. Once you start this road trip it’s three characters and the party splits multiple times in different ways.

John: Yeah. The reason I think I was thinking about this this week is I’m writing the third Arlo Finch. And the first Arlo Finch is a boy who comes to this mountain town. He joins the patrol and there are six people in his patrol. His two best friends are sort of the central little triad there. But there’s a big action sequence that has six characters. And supporting six characters in that sequence killed me. It was a lot to do.

In writing the second book, which is off in a summer camp, you got that patrol and that is the main family, but I was deliberately looking for ways to split them apart so that characters could have to make choices by themselves and so that Arlo Finch could have to step up and do stuff without the support of his patrol. But also allow for natural conflicts that would divide the patrol against themselves and surprises that take sort of key members out of patrol.

And that was the central sort of dramatic question of the story is like will this family sort of come back together at the end.

And then the third book is a chance to sort of match people up differently. So you get to go on trips with people who are not the normal people you would bring on a certain trip. And that’s fun to see, too. So, you can go to places that would otherwise be familiar but you’re going into these places with people who would not be the natural people to go in this part of the world.

Craig: Yeah. You get to mix and match and strange bedfellows and all that. That’s part of the fun of this stuff. We probably get a little wrapped up in the individual when we’re talking about character, but I always think about that question that Lindsay Doran is lobbing out to everybody. What is the central relationship of your story? And thereby you immediately stop thinking about individual characters. OK, this character is like this and this character – that’s why maybe more than anything I hate that thing in scripts where people say, you know, “Jim, he’s blah-blah-blah, and he used to be this, and now he’s this.” I don’t care.

I only am interested in Jim and his relationship to another human being. At least one other and hopefully more. So, I try and think about the party and the relationships and the connections between people as the stuff that matters. Because in the end mostly that’s what you’re writing.

John: Absolutely true.

We are back now in 2022. Craig is gone, because Craig was never actually really here. He just, through the magic tape, was here with us. It’s time for our One Cool Things. Megana, do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us?

Megana: I do. My One Cool Thing is the Hydroviv under-the-sink water filtration system.

John: Fantastic.

Megana: I drink a lot of water.

John: I can testify you do drink a lot of water, which is good. It’s healthy.

Megana: I do, yeah. My favorite type of water is room temperature tap water. Living in LA, it’s sometimes hard to drink straight from the tap.

John: To clarify, it is safe to drink from the tap. Sometimes it’s just not what you want.

Megana: In my new apartment, I was drinking from the tap, and it just tasted like I was drinking from a pool. I feel like I always had this metallic tang in my mouth. I was like, “Oh, it’s not great.” I was looking at different options. The Brita filter is just one step too many for me.

John: Absolutely. That’s where you’re filling the pitcher again and again. We used to have those in the house.

Megana: There’s just never enough water. I was looking at under-the-sink systems, because that seemed like the best option. I found this company. I originally found out about them on Shark Tank. Because of that, I wasn’t going to go with that.

John: I wouldn’t.

Megana: After doing research, I felt like they were the best option. They’re a little bit pricier. Their pitch is that they design filters that respond to city-specific needs. I put in my zip code, and then they would send me a customized thing back. I installed it myself. It’s been a couple of months. My water’s delicious.

John: That’s great. How often do you change the filters on this system?

Megana: Every six months.

John: That’s not so bad. That’s not bad at all. Here at the house, the whole house is on one water filter system, which has been really nice and convenient. We used to do Brita filter pitchers, and we don’t need to anymore. The water in our house though is okay for you, right?

Megana: Yeah, it’s so delicious. It’s one of the many reasons I look forward to coming to work.

John: My One Cool Thing is called BLOT2046. It is a manifesto. I’m really not sure what this website is I’m sending people to. It’s mysterious. There’s a signup for a mailing list. I haven’t signed up for it because I’m not sure if it’s a cult or what it is. Basically, on this page there are 46 bullet points. They were intriguing and sometimes opaque and mysterious. I’ll give you a sampling of three of them. Point 16 is, “Hypnotize yourself or someone else will,” which I get, is that if you’re not able to introspect and see what is it that you would get yourself to focus on, someone else is going to take that attention and pull it through.

“Work in the semi-open. Translucency, not transparency,” which I think is actually applicable to a lot of stuff we do in film and television is that you cannot be completely transparent about the things you’re working on, because they’re not ready to be seen by the world. Yet if you’d want to lock everything down where it’s completely opaque and impossible to see too early on, no one’s going to have a sense of what it is you’re working on. Translucency feels like a good word to be using there.

The final point, point 42, “There’s no away, no elsewhere, not really.” We think, “Oh, if I could ever get away,” but you really can’t get away. You have to find a way to get away within yourself.

Megana: I feel like that’s a strong theme in film and TV. Is this a manifesto for how to live your life, or is that unclear?

John: It’s really unclear. I think some of them are actually about manufacturing and sustainability. Really any of them felt like good prompts for writing, actually, that you could take any of these ideas and use them as a thematic touchpoint for a piece of storytelling.

Megana: Cool. It’s a cool, spooky website.

John: It is a very spooky website.

Megana: I would recommend the click.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is a vintage track by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We also have hoodies, which are lovely. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 Stranger Things.

Megana: I cannot wait.

John: Megana Rao, thank you very much for joining me and for putting together this episode.

Megana: Of course. Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: Speaking of group dynamics, there is one group we love more than any other. It is our Premium Members, so thank you for supporting the show. We are joined for this segment by Drew Marquardt, who is helping us out this summer working on the Scriptnotes book. Drew, welcome to the podcast in audio form, not text form like you’ve been dealing with.

Drew Marquardt: Thank you so much, both of you, for having me.

John: Great.

Drew: Am I Craig now?

John: You are in the Craig spot, so you have to have a lot of umbrage about all things. That’s good. That’s a good sigh.

Megana: That was a great impression.

John: It’s nice. We all just finished watching the first half of Season 4 of Stranger Things. Relevant to this episode about group dynamics, there were a lot of group dynamics at play within this first half of the season. There was a lot of place setting. There was a lot of just groups being put together and pulled apart and spread out all over. I thought, let’s talk about what we think so far of the show. Maybe start with a thumbs up, thumbs down. Megana Rao, are you thumbs up or thumbs down for this first seven episodes?

Megana: I am two thumbs up.

John: Two thumbs up. Drew, where are you?

Drew: I’m more of a single thumbs up, but I’m thumbs up.

John: I’m maybe one and a half thumbs up, if you can split a thumb, if you can divide a thumb. I liked a lot of this. I felt like the episodes were long, and longer than they needed to be in cases. I felt like they could’ve cut many of these 90-minute episodes down into 60 minutes and they would’ve been better episodes. Still, I wasn’t upset with the episodes I was watching.

Megana: I don’t know, it still felt like not enough for me.

John: You want more and more.

Megana: More and more. I love hanging out with these characters.

John: Let’s talk about the characters we’re hanging out with, because obviously this is going to be spoiler-heavy throughout. If you haven’t watched it and you aren’t planning to watch it, maybe pause this right now and come back after you’ve watched 19 hours of television. We start the season with our characters really spread out in very different places than we’ve seen before. They’re not all in our little town of Hawkins. Some are in Hawkins. Some are in California.

Megana: Some are in Russia.

John: Some are in Russia. People are spread out. Megana, controversially, you did not like any of the Russian segments?

Megana: Oh my gosh, I don’t know if I’m ready to publicly air that.

John: I think you were talking about friends of yours who had fast-forwarded through all the Russian stuff.

Megana: Friends of mine did. I watched everything. I did not fast-forward through any of the Russian plot lines. I don’t know, just where we are right now, I’m just not really interested in Russia as a villain. I just wanted everyone to be back together in Hawkins.

John: Drew, how much did they need to catch you up on who the characters were and where they were at the start of the show?

Drew: A little bit. It’s been three years or something like that.

Megana: Oh my gosh.

Drew: I felt like they did a good job jumping you right into the story. I initially felt like I was going to be confused by why Hopper was still alive. Even when Papa comes back, I thought there was going to be quite a lot of… They did a good job, I thought, of just giving you enough information to justify why it’s there and then move the story along, because we don’t really need to dwell on it.

John: I think I had a hard time remembering why was Eleven with Winona Ryder’s family and all that stuff. I knew they had left. That first episode was a lot of just putting the pieces on the table…

Megana: Totally.

John: …and reminding, okay, all these characters are still alive, and this is why they’re spread out. I thought centering it around spring break made a lot of sense, which was great. It was a lot of just reminding us who these characters were and where they are and the dynamics.

Megana: Who’s died and who’s recovering from what trauma.

Drew: I thought Jonathan had died, for some reason. I knew that Billy had died in Season 3. When he was back, I was like, “I thought he was long gone.”

John: I was ready for Jonathan to be long gone. Let’s jump forward then to the end of these seven episodes. One of the things I was talking with Megana about at lunch was I was really impressed by, when we get into Episode 7, the reveal of who the big bad is and how the big bad came to be and all that stuff. They’re actually doing the reveal split across two different plot lines and different timelines.

Megana: And dimensions.

John: And dimensions, basically, just to really expose who this character was and that this character was created by Eleven, and some strong misdirects along the way that Eleven was responsible for this horrible massacre that starts everything off this season.

Megana: I really loved the villain of the season. I think previously the villains from the Upside Down had been just these generic monsters. I love how personal this one is.

John: Keeping the characters separated though, from California to Hawkins, has been a little awkward. Eventually, it looks like they’re going to be trying to bring these characters back together. We have the California crew. Eleven is split off from them and is in a completely different environment. We have the main Hawkins group that’s sometimes in groups of two or three, small groups within there. We’re going to the sanitarium or places. Then we have all the Russia business, which is self-contained, the Alaska Russia business. It was a lot of juggling. I was noticing that most episodes would try to touch on every plot line except for one. There’d always be one group that was dropped out of it. There’d be episodes in which none of the California crew were part of it.

Megana: The one thing that I… Maybe you guys can explain this to me. I had trouble locating the Will-Mike relationship and why there was so much strife there and felt so bad for Will, because he’s been gone in the Upside Down for years.

John: He wasn’t gone for years though. Will? No.

Megana: Wasn’t he gone in the first and second season? Am I misremembering?

Drew: I think just the first season. Then he was a shadow walker in the second season, where it’s going mentally back and forth.

Megana: Got it.

Drew: I think he has a crush on Mike, right?

John: Yeah.

Drew: That’s what I was being telegraphed.

John: I think they’re trying to tap dance around his being gay or not being gay. It’s left up for audience interpretation. It feels like it’s inevitably going to come out. They’re not afraid of having gay characters, based on other gay characters they have in the show.

Megana: Then why do you think Mike was such a jerk to him?

John: I’m not quite sure why Mike is the way he is in this series at all?

Drew: That was less motivated to me. Mike hasn’t had as strong of a character, but maybe because I felt like they had abandoned Will or they didn’t know what to do with Will after Season 1 for quite a long time. At least in this, there feels like there’s much more a thrust for his character, and he’s going after something. Mike is good. Mike is moving along the plot, but he’s not really.

John: He’s not moving along the plot very much. Curious what he does in the second half of this. Let’s talk about the new characters who were added, because it’s already a giant cast, and they add just a lot of new people in. Some of them are going to be like, oh, you were established in this episode, and therefore you’ll be dead by the end of the episode, which is a classic trope. Some of those people look like they are going to be sticking around, which is surprising to me, and yet this is where we’re at.

Megana: I love Argyle. I know some of you have very strong opinions on him.

John: Argyle is pizza guy?

Megana: Pizza guy.

John: I cannot stand Argyle.

Drew: I like Argyle.

John: You like Argyle?

Drew: Yeah.

John: To me, he feels like just the broadest stereotype.

Megana: He’s California.

John: He’s California. Tell me why you like Argyle, Drew.

Drew: It might be a fondness for the actor. He was in Booksmart too. He’s great. Something about his personality I just enjoy. For some reason, he feels like a nice foil to that, because they really do make that plot line, especially when the soldiers come into the house in Episode 4 or something like that. It’s nice to have him having a bit of levity, because otherwise I think that would be very heavy.

John: It can be very heavy. I thought these soldiers storming into the house was actually one of the most effective things they’ve done all season, where they’ve established a plan for what they’re going to do, and then suddenly all bets are off, and then suddenly there are people storming in. The thing you did not expect to happen at all suddenly happens, which is nice to see. Do I believe that the army is after their own people in that way and that that one guy’s being tortured? Not really. I did like the surprise of suddenly there’s armed weapons in the house.

Drew: I may be most confused by that little bit of storyline. Then the torturing, the one survived, the guy afterwards, I’m not quite sure what that’s all about.

John: I wasn’t expecting for them to be burying bodies in the desert, that our little high school kids are burying bodies in the desert. That’s a shift there.

Megana: They seemed to move on really quickly from that.

John: These kids have been through a lot of trauma. I think there’s just so much to work through. A thing we were talking about is that in shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, there’s a metaphysical explanation for why no one in Sunnydale ever talks about the weird stuff that happens in Sunnydale. There’s not a lot of acknowledgement in Hawkins that they’ve been through a tremendous amount. Somehow, nobody recognizes that something horrible is happening here. The biggest we have is the angry pitchforks mob meeting that happens. It doesn’t feel like they’re acknowledging all the stuff that we’ve seen happen in Hawkins.

Megana: I feel like if I were one of these characters, I would have a harder time keeping up all these lies that my friends and I are telling the rest of the town.

John: It’s true. Also, what’s happened to the mall? Did they rebuild the mall? What’s going on there? We never get back to the mall.

Drew: They mention the mall fire a few times. I couldn’t even remember how Season… I remembered Billy died at the end of Season 3, but I didn’t remember that that burned down.

John: Also, this season, I was impressed by… I felt like Eleven in California was really awkward. It was useful to see that she can’t do normal teen things, and she’s actually not perceived as being gifted there, but actually being slow, and so she’s undereducated and really struggling. The stuff once they actually brought her back into the lab was impressively handled. The handoff between her and the little actress who’s playing the younger version of her was very smartly done.

Drew: Do you feel like they’re challenging her character in a way that they haven’t done before? That was something that struck me but I didn’t remember in Season 2 or Season 3. It feels like this is a good escalation for her character between Vecna and all of these different things and bringing Papa back too.

Megana: I feel like I was most interested in her at school struggling, because I think the stuff with Papa and all of that… I love that she is facing and unearthing that stuff, but it feels like a place we’ve seen her before, where she’s isolated from the rest of the group, figuring stuff out with her own powers.

John: Drew, because we have you on the show, you are an actor, and so you are young enough that you could play one of these teenage characters.

Drew: That’s being very kind.

John: Are you noticing any things that they’re doing to try to seem young? They are considerably older than the characters they’re supposed to be playing.

Drew: I haven’t picked up on anything. I haven’t been acting for a while. I see them as the professionals and letting the professionals do that. I’m trying to remember. I’m really impressed with Lucas’s little sister, who I forget her name.

Megana: Erica.

Drew: Erica.

Megana: Love her.

Drew: She rules. She’s not trying to play… She’s clearly not 11 or however old she’s supposed to be in that. She’s just playing it as her age, which I think is smart, because I think to an 11-year-old too you are at the top of your intelligence all the time. She’s the person who’s coming to mind as an example of doing it correctly. I don’t really notice anyone playing younger in an awkward way or bumbling way.

John: One of the things they have to do in that first episode too is establish the baseline of this is how the characters are and how they’re going to act. We’re getting set that these characters are this age from the rest of this on. The fact that Steve seems a lot older than the rest of them, but he’s only supposed to be two years older than the rest of them, which is just… We’re going with it, for me.

Megana: He’s a couple years out of high school now.

John: He’s that old, supposed to be?

Megana: I thought so, because he graduated and is now working around town, or am I misremembering?

Drew: I’ve also lost the timeline on Steve and on Nancy, because I assumed that she had already graduated, she graduated with him, but that is totally wrong.

Megana: I think she’s still in school.

Drew: She’s still in school, because she’s doing the paper.

John: She’s still supposed to be in high school or in some sort of local college?

Megana: That kid Fred is definitely in high school, the one that she works with. I also have no idea how old Robin is. Do we ever see her at school?

Drew: That’s a good point.

Megana: I love her character.

John: I don’t know if she’s still in school or not. I don’t think we’ve seen her at school at all. We’ve seen her at school, because she is in the marching band. She’s still in school. We’ve now stalled long enough that Megana can talk about Steve Harrington and why the show should entirely be about Steve Harrington and everyone else is just there to pass the time.

Megana: I feel like I had a major funk last week where I was reading fan theories and people were like, “Steve is definitely going to die.” I’m embarrassed by how I processed that. I love Steve Harrington. I think he’s so charming. As I was telling John, he’s a big part of maybe the biggest reason that I watch the show is to get to a Steve scene.

John: Are you hoping that Steve and Nancy get back together? Is that a goal for you, or you just want Steve and whatever?

Megana: That’s interesting. I don’t know. I think Nancy and Jonathan are a good fit. I just love Steve’s friendship with Robin. The Steve-Dustin relationship/Steve and Eddie fighting over Dustin is now my favorite thing to watch.

John: Can you explain Jonathan and why Jonathan’s a character that anyone cares about?

Megana: I don’t know how I’ve gotten myself into this position. He’s a loyal older brother. I think that he’s burdened with this responsibility of taking care of his family, and he’s struggling to do that. He was more of a creep in the first season. I found him really compelling for that reason, just this misunderstood, lovesick boy who’s taking these creepy pictures of Nancy. I feel like we’ve lost that bit. Maybe him being a protective older brother.

John: I get that. Let’s wrap up with our Deadpool. Who do we think is not going to make it through the end of the full Season 4? I’ve got my opinion, but I’m curious what you think.

Drew: I hope we don’t lose Eddie, but I think we might. They’ve done a great job. I don’t know, I fell in love with him from Episode 1. I’m a big Eddie fan. I think that’s only to rip my heart out, which would be too bad, because I think he’s a really good addition to the cast. I might say Steve.

Megana: No.

Drew: I know. I’m so sorry. I think they’re going to go for it.

Megana: I think so too. I think that’s why I’m so heartbroken.

John: I’m going to guess Mike, who hasn’t done a lot this season, but I think will actually pick up a little bit. I feel like he wants to leave the show too. It doesn’t seem like he’s going to be sticking around.

Drew: That’s good.

John: I don’t know. We’ll see.

Megana: Anyone but Steve.

John: Anyone but Steve. Dustin they can’t lose. It would be very surprising to lose Dustin. I think they could lose Eleven. It would be a big shock to lose Eleven, but you could.

Drew: Maybe Will, because I think they’ve been vamping with his character for a few seasons. Now they have a little bit, but if we-

John: The problem is, you kill Will, then you’re back into the kill your gays meme, bury your gays, and that’s not good.

Drew: That’s [inaudible 01:19:15].

Megana: I did read an interesting thing about maybe Jonathan dies and then Will becomes evil or turns evil. I think that also would fall into the same meme of having a gay character as the villain.

John: That’s Willow from Buffy.

Megana: As long as Steve’s there.

John: As long as Steve’s there, it doesn’t really matter what happens to the rest of the group. Just the Steve show. Thank you guys.

Megana: Thank you.

Drew: Thank you.

John: Bye.

Links:

• Scriptnotes Episode 360: Relationships
• Scriptnotes Episode 395: All in this Together
• Scriptnotes Episode 383: Splitting the Party
• Stranger Things on Netflix
• Hydroviv Water Filter
• Blot 2046 Manifesto
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao (ft. our summer intern Drew Marquardt and segments by Megan McDonnell) and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/making-the-modern-comedy-series).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August, and this is Episode 551 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’re going to the writers room to discuss the making of two of my favorite comedies of the last year. To do so, we have two amazing guests. John Hoffman is a writer, producer, and actor whose credits include Grace and Frankie and Looking, but most recently was also the co-creator of Only Murders in the Building, starring Steve Martin, Selena Gomez, and Martin Short. Season 2 premiers in June, but we have him here right now. John Hoffman, welcome to Scriptnotes.

**John Hoffman:** Thank you, John August, very much. It’s so nice to be here. I’m a big fan.

**John August:** Thank you very much for coming on the show. I loved your show. I was excited to see it beforehand because of the cast. What you were able to build that we’re… I really want to dig into the strange, very specific tone you got to and where that all came from. I’m hoping we can explore all that.

**John Hoffman:** Thank you. It’s a favorite topic. I love it.

**John August:** We also have Brittani Nichols, who is a writer, actress, and organizer, known for Suicide Kale, A Black Lady Sketch Show, and the phenomenal Abbott Elementary. Welcome, Brittani.

**Brittani Nichols:** Hey. Thanks for having me.

**John August:** Now, I want to talk to both of you about going from the whiteboard to a finished episode, about alt lines, tone, table reads, what you learn as the season unfolds, so just a few things. In a Bonus Segment for Premium Members, if you’re up for it, I want to talk about the pressures and possibilities of being openly queer writers, because all three of us on this call are, and something we don’t get to talk about a lot. If you guys are game for that, we can do that as a Bonus Segment. Sound good?

**John Hoffman:** All in.

**Brittani:** Sounds great.

**John August:** Fantastic. Now first, you guys, we’re all working on acclaimed shows that got second seasons, so congratulations. This past week was a bloodbath for a few shows that didn’t make it to their second seasons or didn’t make the cut. Seventeen shows canceled in 48 hours, which is so brutal. Now, Brittani, you’re on a network show, so it’s a reminder that there still is a season to network shows. In the spring, a bunch of shows don’t make the cut. When you were working on Abbott, at what point in the process did you start thinking, worrying about a second season? Did you know early on, okay, our show is doing great, we’re going to be able to go back for a second year?

**Brittani:** I think we were all pretty confident from the first moment that we saw the cuts of the early episodes coming in, and so we were like, if we’re able to just get this out there, we feel pretty good about it, which was definitely a unique position to be in. I think that second-guessing varies a bit within a room, and the people at the top are a little more hesitant to be confident. Us lower-level, mid-level writers are very much like, “We think we’re going to be okay and feel pretty safe.” We’re not going to be out shucking samples, looking for something else to hop onto.

**John August:** Now, you got your renewal notice. Were you still working on the show when you got the call that you were going to have a second season?

**Brittani:** No, we were out of the room. We just were playing the waiting game and hearing about all of the backroom details that go into renewal, and based on if the studio has other shows that haven’t been renewed and if it’s a shared production and all the sort of stuff that I never really knew about, I learned about as we were waiting for something that we knew was going to happen and hadn’t happened yet and we were trying to figure out why.

**John August:** Now John, for your show, I went into watching the show thinking it was just going to be a limited series. I really thought there would just be one season. Did you know going in that you wanted a second season, that there was more to do? What was your process about thinking about a second season, and when did you know that it was a possibility?

**John Hoffman:** I actually did want and assume there would be a second season, I think because of the auspices around it and the desire to dive in and explore these characters and this world in the way that we were talking about in development. I think there was the sense like, okay, I think there’s a good shot. It’s how we went into a second season which was concerning to me. That was the big question mark of whether the show would be embraced, whether everyone involved with the show, who I loved and respected so much, would feel good about it. These are the questions that I obsessed on and just thought, oh god, what a nightmare if this doesn’t get received well or what a nightmare if Steve, Marty, Selena aren’t having fun or enjoying it or thinking it’s worth their time. That was where I was thinking more, and just entirely on story and entirely on fulfilling that crowd.

**John August:** Your shows are so different in a sense of Abbott Elementary is like a classic sitcom. It is an engine that can keep generating story. It can just keep going in a way that’s so nice and refreshing, we don’t see as much anymore, as opposed to Only Murders in the Building, which resolves. There’s a murder, and the murder is resolved. I guess it wasn’t until those last episodes I realized, oh, you were setting up hooks for a second season. That was always part of the plan.

**John Hoffman:** Yeah, it really was. It was the pitch from the beginning. When we sat down with Hulu, it was in the pitch, at the end of Season 1 we have three newbie true crime podcasters who find themselves suddenly the suspects in a new murder and the subjects of a new podcast that’s being done by their beloved mentor. That was really where we were aiming. I think when you’re making a murder mystery, you have to know where you’re aiming, to twist your way there. I felt, I know where we’re going and I know how to set it up so that it doesn’t belie the truth of what really happened in this mystery, but also it was just necessary in some way for the storytelling to have it be satisfying reveals and a leap forward into, oh god, now what, that takes you beyond how many people can die in one building.

**John August:** Now Brittani, you’re back in the room on the second season of Abbott Elementary, so obviously you can’t give us any spoilers, but as you were writing that first season, did you have a sense of like, okay, this is the territory we want to cover in this season, this is where we want to leave characters at the end of this season? Did that change at all during the time you were in that room?

**Brittani:** Quinta came in with a pretty good idea of where she wanted things to start and where she wanted things to end. It was really on us to fill in that middle and figure out how we got from point A to point B. It feels a bit like that this season as well, where she has what happened over the summer planned out and where we’re starting the characters and we’re figuring out where we want them to end up now, especially with… We’re hoping to have more than 13 episodes this season, so seeing what we can do with a little bit more time to play.

**John August:** You say you’re hoping for more than 13 episodes. That just gives me a panic attack. I can’t imagine doing 13 episodes, much less 18 or 22. It just seems like so much. Yet as we were talking before we got on the call, you were able to shoot your episodes in five days, which is just terrific. It’s so smart that you can do such a great show in such a limited period of time. John, I see you nodding here. Do you want 13 episodes? Do you want 20 episodes?

**John Hoffman:** No. I’m right with you in that. I admire so much. I talked to Quinta about this too. I’m like, “God, the idea of it seems so daunting.” To keep it alive and as fresh as you guys are doing on that show, and knowing the work that goes into the 10 that we have to do, and to feel like it’s fulfilling and deep and funny and all of those things it has to be, yeah, it makes me sweat.

**John August:** Brittani, you first came onto my radar because you had a tweet that showed some of the handwritten alternate jokes from one scene on Abbott Elementary. Can you describe what we saw in that tweet? Because it was just such a revelation to me, all the different ways you were trying to get out of that scene or what the anchor points were for that dialog. Talk to us about that tweet.

**Brittani:** We are lucky enough that we’re not under the gun constantly. We have a little bit of time to play with alts. We also are lucky enough that when you’re the writer of the episode, you get to be on set for your episode, which I think was really touch and go during COVID. We felt so lucky that we got to be there and also that we were given the opportunity to do that, because I know a lot of shows, if the showrunner’s there, if the upper-level producers are there, just because it’s your script doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to be able to talk to the actors, look at the director, and figure out spots where you can play with things, play with lines. Actually, when I was on A Black Lady Sketch Show, we certainly did not have time to do that, but I would still prepare each day or have alts and just show up with alts.

With Abbott, I tried to do the same thing. I would have alts prepared, and I would also be writing while I was on set, depending on the blocking, depending on how things felt, on the tone, on what was hitting, what wasn’t. I tweeted a list of alts for a joke, because I thought I had some pretty good ones that didn’t make the cut and just really wanted to share them. I thought it was fun. That’s I think a practice a lot of the writers here do, just trying to make ourselves laugh, keep it fun on set, keep the actors surprised, guessing. Also, it encourages them I think to have some fun as well. We’ve definitely had a couple of lines from this past season that the actors came up with themselves. It’s been really fun, especially with some of the inspirations for me, like Parks and Rec and Community, where I know some of the famous lines from those shows were alts or were improvs.

**John August:** We had Mike Schur on the show recently talking about Parks and Rec. That mockumentary format is so handy for being able to just throw out ideas. The camera’s rolling, you pitch a thing, and they could say that thing, and you could see what actually lands, as opposed to I’m guessing Only Murders in the Building. It’s a really tightly shot, cinematic show. Are alts a thing that happen on your show, John?

**John Hoffman:** It’s so funny. Marty and I were just talking about this last week and dinner. He said, “I get asked all the time about improvving and alts and things like that.” He said, “Honestly, it’s so rare.” As you point out, it’s necessarily so in certain ways, because it is very densely plotted. Also, what I love is that I get the benefit of Marty Short’s phone calls after a script lands in his laptop, I want to say 45 minutes after we sent it. He’s already pitching on… “There’s just two lines, John.” I get one-sentence emails from Steve, always, three times a week, which I love. They’re either ideas for the show or there’s one line. Steve will walk onto set, ready to do a scene, and inevitably, “John, John, there’s just one line.” I’m like, “I know. I’m sure there is. Let’s make it better.” That will happen. In general, the other thing that happens is Selena, every now and then… They’re all just lovely, generous, open people. Selena, when she feels something is not right or false or this doesn’t feel… Nothing is better for me than hearing her say, “This is what I think I would do,” and we have a good phone call or two about it. It’s great. That’s really the limit. Sometimes for alts, I’m reaching or thinking or popping another line just to button a scene or something like that. Otherwise, it’s pretty straight to script.

**John August:** Let’s talk about the script and the actors encountering the script. Do you guys have table reads for Only Murders in the Building? Do you table read each script?

**John Hoffman:** We have blessing of table read over Zoom that’s only for cast and myself and for Dan and Jess, Dan Fogelman and Jess Rosenthal. We don’t have studio or network there for that. It’s very familial and very Zoom-like, Hollywood Squares with a ridiculous cast. It helps them tremendously on a Saturday afternoon to read through it and hear it. Then many times the actors will make appointments on Zoom with other actors to say let’s go over our scene. It’s great, and yet there is a freedom that doesn’t put the angst around a table read as much either. Everything’s been signed off by the time we have them.

**John August:** Now Brittani, for Abbott, do you guys table read?

**Brittani:** We do, yeah. We do Zoom table reads. The actors have their videos pulled up. When you are the writer of the episode, you’ll cast the day player parts with the other writers. That’s always fun. You might get your feelings hurt a little bit if you’re not cast. Then we’ll have network and studio folks on the call as well, but without their videos on.

**John August:** Let’s talk through the whole process for coming from the whiteboard, the start of the season, blue sky, we could do anything, to a finished episode. John, for yours, you started with, I assume, a pilot script and then went to a room to figure out the rest of it. What was the process for you?

**John Hoffman:** That’s exactly right. This one, I just felt the onus immediately of being as prepared as I possibly could. I did have a full three-act structure to the whole season. I had a real sense of how it would move. I had the main thematics of the character arcs across the season, and a pilot, a pilot I worked on with Steve and got great input from Dan Fogelman and Jess Rosenthal as well. All of that was in plan in a big pitch. Then got together with the writers and tried to make sense of the pilot, because I had certain specificities in the pilot which posed questions that I didn’t quite have the answer to yet, one of them being who is the ultimate killer. I knew I would need that pretty quickly. The writing team and everyone else got in there, and we sorted out how that would make the most sense and how that would make the most bang for our buck.

**John August:** It sounds like the pilot was asking provocative questions, and then it was the job in the writers room to find provocative answers.

**John Hoffman:** Yeah, I saddled them with that. I was definitely like, “Yeah, we got to figure that out.” I was happy to have a group to work some stuff out that way. It was all strangely though infused, I should say. Also, just on a personal level, I had been through this very profound year before this show landed in my lap, a personal experience around the murder of a friend of mine that I had been out of touch with for a while. I found myself investigating and getting involved in that in a way that was revelatory to me. I’ve had a very personal connection to the kind of story we’d be telling in this show. A lot of it was guided by the underlying truth that I had experienced in that journey. That helped guide us a bit into the-

**John August:** John, let’s dig deeper on that, because I think those writers, as they’re approaching a piece of material, the question you’re always asking them is what is your personal connection to this. It sounds like your personal connection to this was you had the experience of being a person investigating a murder or asking people questions about a murder. Your assumptions of what you did, what you didn’t know, and the ethics of what you’re doing in terms of this investigation, how much of that carries through into the script, and how much of your quest is really the quest we see the actors going on, the characters going on?

**John Hoffman:** I think the spirit of what I had experienced is in the show. It was something Dan… I don’t know why I told this story in the first meeting with Dan Fogelman, but I couldn’t not, because I was so deep in it. It made us connected. I think that was the core of the show. That became the core of the show. The funniest moments can come at the most traumatic. The best laugh is at a funeral. The best laugh is at the most inappropriate time. The most bonding moment can be in the most shocking moment that you share with people that you may not know that well, and therefore your vulnerabilities are stripped bare and you are investing with people and around people that you wouldn’t normally.

All of those things felt like a basis of where I wanted the funny to live in this show and where I wanted the poignant to live in this show. It’s very much what I was experiencing. I was taking big leaps in my own life to go and meet people I didn’t know around my friend’s death, his family, his children. I didn’t know they existed before I found myself in Wisconsin meeting them and being completely charmed and having huge laughs with them out of this huge traumatic moment that they had all experienced. There’s that that feels to me connective tissue that we could play with. It felt like a bit of a guiding force for how to best play the comedy and the drama in our show while trying to keep it all fairly buoyant.

**John August:** Brittani, Abbott Elementary exists in a world that has The Office and Modern Family, so this convention of characters acknowledging the camera’s established. For that aspect of tone, you had it. Yet Abbott is so specific and uncomfortable at moments. We’re seeing things we don’t normally see on screen. Can you talk to us about when you’re in the room pitching on an Abbott Elementary or pitching an idea for that, what does that feel like? Because it sounds like [inaudible 00:17:34] that you were probably describing some really uncomfortable things and trying to find a funny way into it. What is the process of… You are a story editor on the season. What are you doing in the room as you’re pitching an idea?

**Brittani:** Luckily, I’m a producer now.

**John August:** Fantastic. Congratulations.

**Brittani:** Congratulations to me.

**John August:** Second season, love it.

**John Hoffman:** Go get it, Brittani.

**Brittani:** One of the first things that we did the first season was talk about the characters’ relation to the camera. Obviously, Ava really loves it. She brought them there. She is living for them. The rest of them, it varies from tacit acknowledgement to trying to hide to being caught by it constantly. I think even as far as character development, their relationship to the camera I think tells that story as well, so seeing how people are going to be reacting to the camera in the second season. Is there a way to even use the camera against other people or for your own devices? Are there ways to manipulate the camera? That’s definitely something that we are talking about all the time, because we also want to be very careful in how we develop the camera’s relationship outside of the school.

I think with mockumentaries, as they go on, you tend to expand the world a bit. This being set at a school, that will be outside of the school, possibly at apartments. It’s going to be a decision from us about where is it realistic for this camera to follow people. How much are we going to hang on to this convention? Because shows like Parks and Rec, they at a certain point left that behind a little.

**John August:** They can go anywhere.

**Brittani:** I think we just want to be aware of it so that if that ever happened, it’s happening because we’ve made a collective decision to move away from that. Right now, we’re still pretty firmly planted in the boundaries of that reality.

**John August:** I’m thinking back to The Office. This may not be the first time we really left The Office, but I remember the Diwali episode was one of the first times where we seen people outside of their normal space and comfort zones and you get a sense like, oh people go home to a place after they leave work, and they have a whole other life. It hadn’t even occurred to me that we really have not seen outside of the walls of the elementary school in that whole first season, but we really have been locked in there. I guess we go to the zoo in the last episode, but it’s literally a field trip.

**Brittani:** Yeah, we go to the zoo and we go to the nail salon.

**John August:** That’s right.

**Brittani:** At the nail salon, it is very much a topic about the school. We still buy why we’re there. We still get why we’re there.

**John August:** Let’s talk about the topics you do get into in Abbott Elementary, because especially in those first couple episodes, the stakes feel a little bit higher than most of these mockumentaries in the sense of there are kids who you want to see getting a good education, yet the system seems stacked up against them. The first episode is about literally getting rugs for the classrooms and the shenanigans you have to go through to get them. As you’re discussing those, do you bring up the uncomfortable idea and everyone kicks around trying to find the funny? What is the pitching process in the room about it, that goes from here’s a general idea to this becomes a center of an episode?

**Brittani:** We don’t pitch lesson-first. It really is what do we think is funny, what is the situation, and then from there we will layer things on or we’ll find things. It’s just an inherently political show, I think just from the fact that it’s at a public school, and we do have a very contentious relationship with public schools in our country right now. All of those things I think are really naturally interwoven, and it’s really easy for us to organically find those tie-ins that I think a lot of the time just come from a moment of dialog, a scene here or there. It’s not what is driving the story. It’s the background. It’s something that is constantly present and that we acknowledge when we have to. There is no separating the show or the characters or the situation from reality.

I think that’s something that makes some people a little uneasy if that is something that they’re facing in their real lives. It could be a pretty hard show to watch because we are having people not laugh at the situation, but laughter and humor is a coping mechanism. I think that that’s one of the ways that we want to use the show overall is there’s so much that’s happening constantly. This can be a nice little reprieve from that, while not completely divorcing yourself from what’s happening.

**John August:** Great. I want to talk to both of you about the documents that come along the way. We’ll start with you, Brittani. You’re in the writers room for Abbott Elementary. You’re figuring out an episode. That’s literally done on a whiteboard. I guess probably it’s a virtual whiteboard for a lot of this, because of the pandemic. At what point does it come off that board into an outline form? Are you pitching story areas? What are the documents that happen before there’s a script?

**Brittani:** For us that is a sort of general brainstorm doc of one or two lines of I think this would be funny, what if this happened. We just blue sky that for a bit. Then we’ll identify from within those what seems like an A story, what seems like a B story, do any of these seem like thematically they resonate with each other and trying to pair those together. Then we will do a story area. We’ll do just a few paragraphs about the A and B story. Then after the story area we’ll go to a pre-outline. We’ll have all the scene slugs and just some sentences below that about what’s happening, a little bit of dialog, a little bit of jokes. Then that’s when we’ll go to the outline.

**John August:** The story area is the first document that you’re turning in to other people outside of the room, that’s going to a studio and a network, taking a look at what the general idea of the episode is?

**Brittani:** Yes.

**John August:** John, curious on your side, what does it look like for the documents along the way? You have such a puzzle piece of a show. A lot of stuff can happen in an episode that ties into things two episodes later. What do the documents look like along the way?

**John Hoffman:** It’s so much so early for ours, because in some ways we have to have the whole season mapped out in general terms in order to make sense of episodes. A lot of it is focused early on in the writers room to map out the full thing. Mystery-wise we have what I call clotheslines. We’ve been nothing but a Zoom room. We couldn’t deal with whiteboards on writers room. It’s terrible. I know I should be better about these things, but I was like, no, I can’t. We had no whiteboards. I would call them clotheslines, the mystery clothesline, the character arc clothesline, the bucket of things that we want to do that feel like comedic premises that feel fertile. There was all that. Really, I have to do a full season pitch over Zoom to Hulu and 20th. We work on that pretty quickly to get that together.

**John August:** How long is the full season pitch?

**John Hoffman:** Forty-five minutes to an hour. It’s very visual and slap-happy and gets you all of the things we’re exploring in the season, a general three-act beat of a three-act structure for the season, and then the character arcs for the season. Then we jump into Episode 1, Episode 2. Then we accelerate it through all the things we still don’t know yet to come, but we can give general blocks of areas. Since the show itself is set up so that each episode has its own way in, a perspective through the narration of the podcast that is being done, and the template we now have of walking in from a perspective of a kind of New Yorker that you might not expect to be telling the story, we’re making this little bit of a tapestry of characters of New York through episode per episode. The big arc is laid out, and then each one feels like its own little episode I can hold in my hand is what I keep on saying to the writers, and understand what we’re telling in that story. We actually do not go to outlying stage to present to anyone but ourselves. We only give full scripts into studio and network. It’s painstaking to get there, but they have understood the entire arc of where we’re going by the time they’re getting a first episode.

**John August:** This presentation which is taking the place of the outlines, how far are you into your writers room by the time you’re putting together this presentation?

**John Hoffman:** It’s been at least two months, two and a half. It’s the most painstaking part of it. You make commitments to it that you have to be able to toss away. You also have to be prepared to fulfill them in better ways than you pitched them in that 45 minutes to an hour, for sure.

**John August:** Is Only Murders in the Building block-shot or are you shooting it episode by episode?

**John Hoffman:** We shoot two episodes in a block. We have one director handling two episodes. They’re always back to back, or have been so far. We have it mapped out in twos.

**John August:** Brittani, you were saying earlier that your episodes shoot in a five-day week.

**Brittani:** Yep, Monday through Friday.

**John August:** Wow, such a dream. We were also saying that that set that we’re seeing in the school is truly a set, and so you guys can do whatever you need to do in that one standing set, which is just remarkable.

**Brittani:** Yeah, we’re on a four in, one out schedule, or we were the first season. I think we might get a few more days out this season.

**John August:** Four in, one out means that four days you have to be on your sets and one day you can be out in the fields with trucks and trailers and doing all that stuff. That’s to get your exteriors for places that couldn’t be on there or if you need to go inside some place. Before this, you were working on A Black Lady Sketch Show. Is that entirely out?

**Brittani:** The season I was on, which was the first season, we were completely on location for everything.

**John August:** With Abbott, John’s talking about one director’s doing two episodes back to back, you’re mixing in scenes. With you guys, how far ahead of the episodes shooting do scripts tend to be?

**Brittani:** I think we’re going to have turned in maybe 10 episodes I believe is the goal before we start shooting the first episode.

**John August:** That’s fantastic. That’s great. I want to talk a little about career trajectories. We got right into the shows you’re making and not where you came from. John, what’s your origin story? I know you’re an actor as well as being a writer. How did you come up the ranks to be doing what you’re doing?

**John Hoffman:** I know, I make no sense when I look at my own IMDB or whatever it is or any resume I look at. I started as an actor in New York after college and then found myself working really hard to get cast in plays that I was then embarrassed to have people come and see. I thought why not try and write something. I found myself writing for myself as an actor. When I wrote, I wasn’t just writing monologues or one-man shows. I was writing plays. I found myself learning structure in certain ways. I’ve always been a storyteller, I think when I was a young person. That segued into coming out here to Los Angeles and getting work as an actor in TV shows, many TV shows that weren’t very good in certain ways. Some were wonderful experiences. It was again that muscle in me that was saying I think I do better with the things I write than it was a crazy ride of screenwriting for me where my writing got picked up by certain producers, certain studios.

At the time when writers got deals at studios, I was getting deals at Disney and Warner Brothers and writing screenplays and learning how to do that while being able to make a living. I segued that way, mainly into growing into more deeper love with storytelling that way, but also finding myself picking the projects that were harder to get made and finding my way into getting very close to getting certain things produced that felt very close, and after years of work and things like that, challenges all around, and finally relented and joined a team at HBO where I’d been developing many shows for them.

They finally said, would you like to join this new show called Looking? I thought, I’m going to have trouble hitting someone else’s target for a show. They know what they want. Let them do it. I consulted on it, because I loved the people that were involved. I remained great friends with them to this day. It allowed me to feel myself as like, oh I could be valuable in a room. I learned a lot and very quickly moved through the television world to land in this crazy place.

**John August:** Now, Brittani, you are an actor as well. What was your journey coming up as a writer?

**Brittani:** I started as a PA, background actor, writer for a website called Autostraddle just to make a few pennies here and there as I was trying to become a writer, because I really was steadfast that I was not going to work in a service industry. I just was going to be broke until I wasn’t broke. I did a web series called Words with Girls. Then I wrote a pilot version of that. I was part of this Listserv for Black people in the industry. Denise Davis, who was one of Issa Rae’s producers at the time, and continues to be, sent out an email, and I cold responded with a pilot of mine. Issa ended up independently producing it alongside two other pilots. Right when we were going to try to take those out on the town, Insecure got picked up. That was enough to give me a little bit of credibility.

I ended up working on a BET variety show. I ended up doing Billy On the Street in one of the earlier seasons, and really just through luck and randomness and being prepared, just continued to I guess somersault from one thing to the next, until I made a feature called Suicide Kale that did the LGBTQ film circuit, won a bunch of awards there, audience awards, comedy awards, etc. That is ultimately what landed me my first scripted job, which was Take My Wife on Seeso, RIP.

**John August:** Oh, Seeso. It sounds like you say lucky, but also you were putting yourself in positions where luck could strike, having the courage to blind submit to Issa Rae’s producer. You’re making those choices. You had the material that you could send, and you weren’t afraid to share it with people. It sounds like you were happy to work for people who wanted to employ you. Didn’t matter whether Seeso was a real network or not, you were there and eager to do it, ready to step up and show that you could do these things. We have a couple questions from listeners. Most of our listeners are aspiring writers and writer-directors. Maybe you guys could weigh in on what you think they should do. Megana, do you want to start us off?

**Megana:** Great. We got a question from Tim from Washington, D.C. who asks, “I’m an East Coastie writer-director who moved to Los Angeles from 2016 to 2021 after having made an indie film that sold at Sundance. Though I improved as a writer and improved my network, I had so-so relationships with my reps and wasn’t really able to get anything going during my time in LA. My question is whether I’d be better served living in LA year-round versus instead living where I would like and visiting Los Angeles for a few weeks or months out of the year. I’m trying to cobble together one of those careers where I can write feature scripts for myself to direct, occasionally write features for hire, develop television, and occasionally direct for TV.”

**John August:** John, what’s your instinct? Do you think that Tim from DC should come to Los Angeles? Should he go to New York? Right now in 2022, what should Tim be doing?

**John Hoffman:** It’s hard to say for Tim personally. I don’t know what his life is like. It is hard for me to imagine a place, I hate to say this in this way because it sounds so corny, but more embracing of talent than Los Angeles. New York is tough. New York was tough for me. New York is theater-based. I love the theater. I found it hard to break into television and film through New York. People do. I know they do. I think in general the swath, the breadth of opportunity in Los Angeles is just greater for what it sounds like Tim wants to do. In the world of film, independent film, you can find your way easily. I was just talking about Looking and talking about my friend Andrew Haigh who broke in by making an independent film in England for $45,000.

**John August:** That’s Weekend.

**John Hoffman:** Exactly. That’s a great model. Not to say you can’t do it. It can happen anywhere if you’re working at your craft and making it in the way that you want, bring yourself to it. I do think there’s no way to get around the fact that there is more work, more opportunity, more people in the business, more conversations you can have with people that can lead to opportunities.

**John August:** Brittani, what’s your instinct for Tim?

**Brittani:** I can’t speak to the feature aspect of it, because that just might be something that’s completely different. As far as the jobs that I’ve gotten and the friends that I’ve made that have helped me make my feature, that was all a product of being in LA. Every job that I’ve had I can connect back to a chance meeting or a random text or some event rather than I can trace it back to me being incredibly talented, which I am.

That is an additional thing that never would’ve been any use to me if I hadn’t been out there making connections, making friends, and just being around. I tell people this all the time. I hear people when they’re hiring. I hear people when they’re casting. So much of it is, oh, I just saw so-and-so at this coffee shop. Oh, I just ran into so-and-so at the movie theater. There’s so much just recency bias of the last person I saw is the person that I’m thinking of and the person I’m going to hire. If you just do not show up and be in people’s faces, it’s just easy to forget you, no matter how talented you are, unfortunately.

**John August:** I’ve said this on the podcast several times. I bumped into Melissa McCarthy at Starbucks. She’d been in Go. She’d had a tiny part in Go. She was great in it, but the movie hadn’t come out yet. I bumped into her in Starbucks off of Melrose and said, “Oh, you’re amazing in the movie. I’m going to write something for you.” Then I did. Then we ended up writing a bunch of stuff together. She ended up being in my little short film, and our careers grew together. Being in the place where people are trying to make film and TV is really helpful just for the accidental overlaps of interest. I think, Tim, if you have the opportunity, if you didn’t like LA the first time, maybe give it another shot and maybe just find ways to put yourself out there more so you’re bumping into people the way that I bumped into people and Brittani bumped into people. Megana, do you have another question for us?

**Megana:** Yeah. Jason asks, “I understand that new writers are generally expected to specialize if they want to get anywhere with their career. How do you choose which path to take when, for example, your first love is feature comedy but your idea generator tends to produce six times as many pitches for TV dramas? Assuming the quality of my writing in both is comparable and at a professional level, and that I would enjoy drama television writing only slightly less than feature writing, would I be better off investing in writing this one comedy feature idea or pursuing several drama samples?”

**John August:** Brittani, what do you think, sample-wise? You were writing samples I’m guessing for years. Were you trying to specialize? Were you trying to just write a huge variety of things?

**Brittani:** I knew I wanted to work in comedy, but even comedy right now, there’s such a diverse set of what is considered a comedy. You got hard comedies, you got drama comedies, you got mixed genres. I think honestly, it being good matters more than it necessarily falling into any specific bucket. I’ve been writing off of the same sample for, I’m not kidding, probably four years at this point. It’s just because it’s really good. It’s just the one that people gravitate towards the most. Though I have a large selection, it’s really just getting it to the point where you feel like it really exhibits your voice and really is something that only you could write. That should come across no matter what genre it is.

**John August:** John, what’s your instinct? Do you think Jason should try to specialize or branch out?

**John Hoffman:** I agree with Brittani. I came at this, as I said, as an actor. My path to what scripts I wrote, the genres and all of it, was wildly an actor’s point of view, like I want to play every part and be comedic and be dramatic. I confused a lot of people, truthfully, in the screenwriting world when I was doing a World War II epic and then I was doing a really straight down the line comedy. Then I directed and wrote a family film for MGM. It’s all over the map. I agree with Brittani. You find the thing that is the great story and tell it the best way you can. That’s going to be the ticket I think more than anything, than genre or anything like that. I think the most personal and the most connective to what you do and what you love and what you respond to or what you recognize out in the world as a great story that no one’s told yet or a great story no one’s told in the way that you want to tell it, that’s the thing that ultimately will feel signature to you. That’s everything.

**John August:** I’ve said before on the podcast that I got pigeonholed really quickly as a guy who does kids movies. My first two paid jobs were A Wrinkle in Time and How to Eat Fried Worms. I was just getting sent material that was about gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. I was just very much pegged as a safe family guy. Writing Go was really helpful for me, because that became my sample for years. You could look at Go and see it as a comedy. You could look at it and see it as a drama, an action movie. Whatever you wanted to see in that movie, you could see. Writing something like that that can serve more than one purpose can be really helpful as well. It’s time for our One Cool Things, where we recommend things that people should check out. Brittani, do you have anything you want to recommend our listeners investigate?

**Brittani:** I want people to check out the Knock LA Voter Guide because we have an election coming up on June 7th.

**John August:** I had a hunch that you were going to talk politics. Tell us about this guide. Tell us what are some races that we really need to be keeping our eyes on.

**Brittani:** The races that I think people should really be paying attention to are the mayoral race. We have a billionaire who is running, Rick Caruso, not great. I don’t know if you’re a billionaire yourself.

**John August:** There are no billionaires on this Zoom.

**Brittani:** Then maybe that might be your guy. If you are not a billionaire, then I would caution against supporting his candidacy. The sheriff’s race, our sheriff currently, Alex Villanueva, is the laughingstock of the nation. Actually was just on John Oliver’s show. He has been putting out some really, I think, hilarious while also deeply disturbing ads, if you haven’t had a chance to check those out. They’re very cinematic. If you’re a filmmaker, they’re worth checking out. Paying attention to the sheriff’s race and seeing who else is out there that you might consider supporting, because those are the two really big ones. The Knock LA Voter Guide if you are progressive, which I think most people in LA consider themselves to be, even if that’s not necessarily the case. You should check it out.

**John August:** One thing I would stress is that this election could be a preliminary election. There could be runoffs for mayor and for sheriff, but not if either of these candidates get over 50%. You may have different opinions about who you want to be the mayor that’s not Rick Caruso, but if you really don’t want Rick Caruso to be the mayor, just don’t vote for Rick Caruso, but definitely vote, to keep him below that threshold, same for sheriff. We can have a whole other podcast about why we vote for sheriff, which just seems really crazy, something you’d want to appoint and then be able to fire when they are terrible. That’s a whole different podcast on law enforcement. John, do you have anything to share with us? Do you have a One Cool Thing?

**John Hoffman:** I love that we go political deep, because it’s all I can think about these days. I do think that we’re in a time, we’re heading to a time, it’s the most tumultuous time I’ve known in my life. I think any time you’re wondering what to do with yourself as a writer or a creator, if you’re not looking to tell the stories that are happening now in real ways, that I watch what’s happening in the Ukraine and recognizing that’s a camera sitting in someone’s house that’s changing the world right now. The personal stories are going to be the ones that make the most impact. To me, that’s everything right now is to look to ways to lean into making the world better. It’s our vote. It’s our activism for the things that matter most to us right now. Find the ones that feel straight to the heart for yourself, and don’t hesitate to get out.

**John August:** Sounds good. My One Cool Thing is an article by Ameena Walker, who’s writing for a newsletter called The Prepared, which is actually a really great newsletter you should also subscribe to. Basically, it talks through the logistics industry and how products go from place to place and how things get made. This article that she did was about… The headline is, “Each year, millions of barrels are shipped from New York City to the Caribbean. Here’s why, how, and the economics behind it.”

She’s talking about how people from the Caribbean Islands who live in New York City are always sending stuff back to home. They’re always sending stuff back to the islands. The way they do this is they buy these barrels that are about 40 bucks, and they pack it full of all the stuff that they can find to stick in there. It could be toasters. It could be rice. It could be whatever. They seal it up, and they take it to a specific delivery place that just ships stuff on boats to the Caribbean Islands. Then it carries from there to individual homes. It’s just such a specific thing that I’ve never seen before, because I always think about sending money home. I always think people who live here are sending money back to the countries they come from. In this case it literally is a barrel.

It just felt like such an amazing story opportunity for getting that barrel, what you’re putting in that barrel, that barrel gets lost. It just felt like a very cool story area that I’ve never seen before. It’s a good reminder to me about why it’s important to try to make sure we get writers on staffs who have a range of experiences, because I wouldn’t know this was a thing that existed. It just feels like such a great comedic or dramatic potential that I wouldn’t know about if I hadn’t found this article or if someone hadn’t pointed me to it. This is by Ameena Walker in The Prepared. We’ll have a link in the show notes to this.

That’s our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Daniel Mix. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. Brittani, what are you on Twitter?

**Brittani:** @bishilarious.

**John August:** It’s true, B is hilarious. John, are you on Twitter?

**John Hoffman:** I am, yes, @johnnyhoffman.

**John August:** Fantastic. We have T-shirts. They’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 being queer in Hollywood and queer stuff, queer stuff in general. John, Brittani, an absolute pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me.

**John Hoffman:** Thank you.

**Brittani:** Thank you so much for having me. Really would be wild to go back to 2010 me and say this is happening.

**John August:** Why so? You read my blog, didn’t you?

**Brittani:** I did, yes. I credit your blog for really teaching me a lot of the underpinnings of screenwriting.

**John August:** Fantastic. Makes me feel so happy and so old.
[Bonus Segment]

**John August:** There are three queer writers on this Bonus Segment for the podcast. I guess I just want to start, I was out really from the very start of my career. Was that true for the two of you as well?

**John Hoffman:** Almost. I would say because I started as an actor, it was a tricky moment and a tricky time for me. I was very cautious about that, because clearly I’m leading man material. No. It was all that dance. It was just a different decade. I came out probably very shortly after I realized I don’t want to be an actor. I actually wondered if the last part I got on a television show is actually a replacement happening that never happened. It was a question as to whether I was going to get replaced, because I was supposed to be a character that was deeply invested in women. I don’t know that I was pulling it off as clearly as I could’ve been. That was a moment.

**John August:** You were Frasier Crane-ing it a bit there?

**John Hoffman:** Exactly.

**John August:** Or Niles maybe, a little too Niles?

**John Hoffman:** Yeah, a little bit of Niles. That was for a moment. Then it was just the greatest relief and creativity just opened me up completely to be able to just own everything and be honest about it.

**John August:** Brittani, how about you?

**Brittani:** Yes, my professional career, was out the whole time. I think when I first started writing plays in college, I was definitely still grappling with some things. I think the arts is how I figured some of that stuff out.

**John August:** John, I would say your show, there’s not a lot of directly queer content. I would say it has a queer sensibility. I’m not even sure why to say that. I guess there’s a New Yorker quality. The aesthetics of it feel kind of gay. To what degree do you think your show has queer elements to it?

**John Hoffman:** I hope it does. I think all the things you point out, like New York, the theatrical way we’re telling the stories.

**John August:** Splash the musical feels like a-

**John Hoffman:** Splash the musical.

**John August:** It’s a very queer idea.

**John Hoffman:** Not to mention the poster of the show I really want to see, which is in Marty’s, Oliver’s apartment, Newark, Newark. All of that sensibility, I can’t help it. It was crying out for everyone I knew in prewar apartment buildings in New York City when I was living there, when I was forming my creative identity there, all of the characters, all of the richness of New York. It’s representation within the fabric of the truth of New York. There are representations, Detective Williams, played by the amazing Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who narrates our Episode 6. She and her wife were struggling with naming their child.

**John August:** I forgot that, but yes, absolutely.

**John Hoffman:** That’s what I hope. It’s almost like you want to blend it all together as New York does. I think that’s part of it is the sensibility and the storytelling feels not afraid to be filled with pathos and filled with struggle and vulnerability and everything that makes people laugh in the deepest way in the queer community for me.

**John August:** Brittani, on the projects you’ve been working on, how often do you feel like you’re able to bring some aspect of queer culture into it, or to what degree do you feel like that’s helped you sell some jokes, make some things work? To what degree are you able to bring that into the room?

**Brittani:** The first couple of scripted series that I worked on both had queer main characters. With Black Lady Sketch Show, definitely was able to get some queer sketches in there. They’ve continued to do that even now that I’m gone, because there are plenty of queer women in that room. Then with Abbott, I think this is probably the first time where there hasn’t been a very obvious queer hook to the show, and so finding moments in Abbott I think has been interesting. I think the moments that we have found, people think they’re really fun. As we grow the world, I think we’ll be able to see more queer characters in ways that I would like to see them more, which is just existing and just living their lives and having normal jobs.

We did have a moment like that in the first season actually, where there’s a delivery woman who is just very clearly a stud lesbian, and it’s very quick, but so many people messaged me just being like, “That person was hot. Is there a way to bring them back? Also, it’s so fun that there’s just a queer person existing and there was no commentary on it.”

**John August:** A person existing on screen is such a signifier. I just remember growing up watching TV shows, and you just see like, oh, that’s an actual person who does that thing. I grew up with… We had Paul Lynde in the center square of Hollywood Squares, but we didn’t have a lot of actual… I think part of the reason why we love Bewitched so much is that, again, you have Paul Lynde, but you have that sense of it has a queer sensibility even if there are not openly queer characters. I feel like the one delivery person in that background shot isn’t a big thing and yet it is for that kid who’s watching that wants to say oh, I see myself in that character.

**John Hoffman:** In the storytelling, I feel that. That’s so right. I was recently talking to someone about What’s Up Doc and how that’s informed our show in a certain way. Again, not outwardly queer characters, but the sensibility in the storytelling, I remember that so clearly opening up my brain and like, why am I into this and why am I so deeply intrigued and all of that, poking around at that to give people the sense of possibility and wonder about a way to tell a story that’s a little bit heightened maybe and connective tissue to more characters than would typically be on your TV screens.

**John August:** One of the things I loved about Looking was that that show was full of gay men and other queer people who were not saints, and they were actually kind of obnoxious at times. They didn’t know what they wanted. There’s that thing, either the gay people have to be funny or they have to be heroic and saintly. In this case, they were neither. That was remarkable in its time.

**John Hoffman:** Not to mention Chris Perfetti from Abbott Elementary.

**John August:** Who is delightful. Let’s get back to Chris Perfetti because he’s great. He reads as gay to a gay person immediately, and yet the show holds off on the reveal until pretty late on that he has a boyfriend. Clearly, everyone else in the universe knows that he’s gay, even though it hasn’t been said. When his boyfriend is revealed, they first mention his boyfriend, that’s news to the characters in the show. Did you guys always know that the reveal was going to come about when it did?

**Brittani:** We did. We talked about it early on, because there are certain things that we as writers know about the characters that we’re just keeping close to our chest. I think for queer people, we definitely were like, oh, obviously this is family. Most of the world is not queer. People were genuinely surprised. We even tried to point to it a little earlier in the episode where he gets roasted. Someone calls him gay Pete Buttigieg, which he says is repetitive. A lot of people didn’t catch that. A few people on Twitter did. I think it’s looking back when you rewatch the season, a lot of people will be like, okay.

They were layering that in without explicitly saying it. We definitely didn’t want to make it a huge moment, because he’s existing in a world that knows that he’s gay and has accepted him. It’s more about what is it about his relationship that is revelatory to his relationship with Janine, rather than it just being a shock that he has a boyfriend, and then being sure to bring that boyfriend in later in the season and not just be something that we pay lip service to and then never really see that relationship.

**John August:** In some ways I think I blame Sheldon Cooper from Big Bang Theory for people being confused about the Chris Perfetti character, because Sheldon Cooper, any queer person can see that’s a gay person, that’s a queer person, and yet the show makes them straight. It always feels off to me that it’s not acknowledging that this character is who we think he is.

**John Hoffman:** I agree.

**John August:** That’s my little rant about Big Bang Theory.

**John Hoffman:** I agree. I also just want to say what I love is the thing that we’re doing now. I don’t know, starting with Looking for me, just because that was something I worked on, but I loved that discussion. I loved so many of the discussions around the writers room on that show and how it always had to be about character. It wasn’t the fact that they were gay that you were talking about by the end of Looking. Maybe that was one of its problems with connecting to the gay community in some ways. I think it was about the character flaws and about other things. Of course they’re all in bed with each other. They’re all looking for people of the same sex and all that. It’s all there. It’s connecting through character and the moves of which, the way in which you approach love and romance and relationships and struggles with your own history that tie in, certainly, but make it more dimensional. That’s all I hope for, to continually make this all the more dimensional and just unafraid.

**John August:** I think what’s crucial about the Chris Perfetti character… I’m sorry, I’m forgetting the character’s name, so I’m just calling him Chris Perfetti.

**Brittani:** Jacob.

**John August:** Jacob. What I love about Jacob is he’s sipping a character independent of his being gay. We can see all of the choices that he’s making and what he wants to do and how he keeps bringing up Africa. Those are all very specific things that have nothing to do with his sexuality, so that he doesn’t have to carry a lot of water for being gay. He doesn’t have to carry that into the storylines.

**Brittani:** Yet we really try to make him being queer inform that specificity. We talked so much about how does that white person become that sort of white person. We’ve talked really extensively about his upbringing and what it was like for him coming out and what are the situations that led to him being the way that he is. I think that it is deeply informed by the fact that he grew up a queer kid. Getting to explore that and finding ways to explore that as the show goes on is something I’m personally really excited about.

**John August:** Talk to us about those conversations. Are those being written down in some sort of bible form? They’re not canon yet, but they’re what you guys are thinking about for his history. You have some sense of who his parents are, what his family is, where he’s from, even though it’s not been established in the show yet?

**Brittani:** Yeah. We just have tons and tons of notes. What we’ll find I think a lot of the times right now in the second season is a lot of false starts where we think this is this story that’s going to bring this to the surface, and then we’ll get to writing it and we’ll go, “No, not yet.” It’s a little bit there, you’ll get a little bit here, but we’re not going full bore into that yet. It’s just I think a lot of excitement about really wanting to explore so much about so many of the characters, but still the confines of a half-hour sitcom. You really only have so much time. Wanting to give it the space that it needs to breathe and really hit I think is just something that we’re going to keep trying to do and keep finding exactly which stories are going to allow us to tell those stories the way that we want to. We’re just tracking all of it, talking about it all the time.

**John August:** Fantastic. John and Brittani, absolute wonderful time talking with you both about queer things. Congratulations to both of you on your second seasons. I cannot wait to see them.

**John Hoffman:** Thank you, John, so much. Great talking to you.

**Brittani:** Thank you.

**John Hoffman:** Great talking to you too, Brittani.

**John August:** Cool.

Links:

* [Only Murders in the Building](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12851524/) on Hulu
* [Abbott Elementary](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14218830/?ref_=nm_knf_t3) on ABC/Hulu
* [John Hoffman](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0388971/?ref_=tt_ov_wr) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/JohnnyHoffman)
* [Brittani Nichols](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4575382/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1) on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/BisHilarious)
* [Remittance by the Barrel](https://theprepared.org/features-feed/shipping-barrels) by Ameena Walker
* [The Knock LA Voter Guide](https://knock-la.com/los-angeles-progressive-voter-guide-june-primary-election-2022/)
* [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 Daniel Mintz ([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/551standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/entrances-and-exits).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hey, Yankee fans. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 550 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, how do you move characters in and out of a scene? Do you even need to? It’s a very technical, crafty, words on the page topic, the kind we haven’t done in a while, because we haven’t had Craig for a while. We’ll also have listener questions on bad behavior by producers, managers, and even good friends.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, do we want to live forever? We’ll discuss longevity and the possibility of never dying. First, Craig, we got two pieces of Craig-centric follow-up for you.

**Craig:** Oh, all right.

**John:** This one goes all the way back to your Q and A episode, which I’m sure you don’t remember. There was a guy who wanted you to convince him to drop out of film school. Megana, we got an update from him, don’t we?

**Megana Rao:** Yes, so Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School wrote back in, and he said, “Thank you so much for answering my question on Episode 544. The first thing I want to do is apologize to Craig. Everything you said made sense, and I couldn’t have agreed with your thoughts more, but unfortunately, I just can’t bring myself to drop out. Given my situation, dropping out would force me to step my part-time work up to full-time and find a new place to live. However, while this would be difficult to do, it would still probably result in a boatload of money saved and give me far more time to work on my writing. The real problem is I just can’t stand the idea of everyone in my life looking at me like I’m an idiot. Dropping out of college, especially when I’m this close to finishing, isn’t going to make sense to anyone around me. While I know Craig might be on my side, it won’t really sway the opinions of my family or friends. It’s not like I have some concrete thing I’m dropping out for to point people towards. Being in school makes it look like you’re working toward something. While in this business, that might not really be the case, people on the outside aren’t going to understand that. I wish I could be the kind of person that didn’t care about this and just did what I knew was right, but there’s something inside of me that just won’t let me.”

**John:** Craig, I listened to that episode, and I thought your advice was my advice. I would encourage him to drop out.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what, Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School. I don’t want you to beat yourself up too much, but do me a favor. Don’t make this a final decision, because I’m not sure everyone in your life is going to look at you like an idiot. In fact, I’m pretty sure that everyone in your life is going to spend about seven seconds on this and then move on with the rest of themselves, because that’s who they’re thinking about all the time. I just don’t know why people will really get that worked up. Your friends are going to get that worked up over it? Really? Because honestly, I didn’t really care whether my friends graduated from college or not. That’s not what I valued about them. Yes, being in school makes it look like you’re working toward something. That’s how they get you. That’s what you’re paying for, an illusion, which you now realize, I think, is an illusion.

I also notice that you said, “Given my situation, dropping out would force me to step my part-time work up to full-time.” Yes. This is okay. Here’s the thing. I think you’re scared, and I get that you’re scared, but take a moment. Don’t necessarily think of this as a final decision. It’s okay if you stay in college. I won’t be angry.

**John:** One additional thing this makes me think of is this theory that you have 4,000 weeks in your life. Basically, if you live to 80 years old, you’re going to have essentially 4,000 weeks to spend. If Please Convince Me to Drop Out of Film School decides to drop out of film school, he’s really basically taking that chunk of time and deciding to do something different with it. I think it’s his time alone. It’s not his friends’ time. It’s not his family’s time. It’s really how does he want to spend that time. If it’s at school, great, but if it’s not in school, that’s also fine.

**Craig:** You get once, one trip. It’s okay if you finish. Go ahead. I’ll tell you, what’s waiting for you on the other side is a lot of other things that your family or friends may not get. This seems like maybe time to start worrying about that, or at least worrying about it but facing it anyway, because nobody really gets what we’re doing over here in this business. Most people in this business aren’t in this business. They try and be in the business, and they fail. Everybody’s going to be looking at you. You’re going to have to face it at some point.

**John:** Megana, we have more crucial Craig follow-up here.

**Megana:** Yes. Andy in New York asks, “I Googled Craig Mazin orthotics to find the name of the product that Craig mentioned as his One Cool Thing in Episode 492, and he said as he unboxed and deployed them that they felt like other insoles he’d used, but that over time he’d see how they worked and report back, which he did a week later but not since then. I’m wondering, what is the long-term verdict now that a year has passed? Are they still holding up and supportive? I’m a runner with high arches and developing a murderous heel problem that some store-bought Dr. Scholl’s type inserts are helping a little with, but I need something more substantial.”

**Craig:** I’m glad that you checked in on this, Andy. They held up. The sneakers that I generally wear right now are pretty supportive for my flat feet. I have the opposite problem that you have. I don’t use them with these, but I will slip them into boots. I will slip them into dress shoes and things. They absolutely work. They are, as far as I can tell, the exact same damn thing that we were paying way too much money for when we went to the orthotic foot podiatrist. I think actually that that’s what they were doing there. You would go to the podiatrist and you would step on something and they would take a thing of it and send it off to some factory. These guys were like, we’ll just give you the box of foam and you can do it yourself, go to the same factory.” The answer is, Andy, yes, I think they are worth giving a shot. They do seem to me like they are pretty much exactly what you would get if you went to a doctor.

**John:** Nice. All right, Craig, it has been way too long since we’ve had you here so we can do a craft episode. I really want to focus in on entrances and exits. I thought we might start with an iconic entrance into a scene. This is from an independent film called The Room. It finds one character coming onto this rooftop and meeting his friend Mark and initiating conversation. Let’s take a listen.

**Johnny:** I did not hit her. It’s not true. It’s bullshit. I did not hit her. I did not. Oh hi, Mark.

**Mark:** Oh hey, Johnny. What’s up?

**Johnny:** I have a problem with Lisa. She said that I hit her.

**Mark:** What? Did you?

**Johnny:** No, it’s not true. Don’t even ask. What’s new with you?

**Mark:** I’m just sitting up here thinking. I got a question for you.

**Johnny:** Yeah?

**Mark:** You think girls like to cheat like guys do?

**Johnny:** What makes you say that?

**Mark:** I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m just thinking.

**Johnny:** I don’t have to worry about that because Lisa is loyal to me.

**Mark:** Yeah, man, you never know. People are very strange these days.

**John:** Craig, there’s so much to unpack here.

**Craig:** There is not.

**John:** It really is a remarkable occasion. Even the most perfectly performed version of this scene has some real issues in terms of characters coming onto the scene. Let’s talk about entrances. Let’s talk about exits.

**Craig:** Oh hi, John.

**John:** Hi, John.

**Craig:** Oh hi, John.

**John:** I’m going to monologue to myself for a second. Then I’m going to notice that you’re there. Then I’m going to start the conversation.

**Craig:** “I did not hit her. I did not.” On a roof?

**John:** On a roof.

**Craig:** On a roof.

**John:** I’m going to throw this football to nobody on a rooftop.

**Craig:** First, I’m going to throw my water bottle on the ground, and then, “Oh hi, Mark.” Entrances and exits are extraordinarily important, and to me, afford you a possibility to find the spine of your scene, the structural aspect. We’re not necessarily talking about all the lovely little bits and bobs that happen through relationship and dialog and thoughts and unspoken feelings, but rather the structure of it all, what does it look like, where are we, what’s the pace and the tempo. One of the things that I think about when I’m directing scenes is entrances and exits and how they occur, from whose perspective, why are people entering, what kind of energy do they have when they’re entering, where are they going, where are they leaving. Entrances and exits will take more time to shoot if you’re doing them properly. Bringing people in and out of spaces matters. Let’s dig in to how we can help shape those moments on the page so that when they get to the screen, they don’t look like what we just saw.

**John:** Let’s go into the history of entrances and exits, because obviously, originally, before there were motion pictures, there were staged plays. Characters need to enter into a scene. You look through Shakespeare’s plays, characters enter and they exit, and that’s great. It’s fine. People are coming in from the weekends or you are lifting the curtain to reveal people already in the scene. Through the wonder of film and television, we can just be in the middle of a scene. We can cut to the middle of a scene, and we don’t need to have characters enter and exit, except sometimes it’s incredibly helpful.

I want to talk about how we make those decisions as writers. I think Craig makes an important point, is as a director you are also making some decisions about shooting those entrances, shooting those exits, making sure you have choices and options. You can be thinking about does the camera find the character there, is the character already there. You’re going to be making those choices from the start. A lot of it is about POV within the scene and also from the audience’s perspective, who is important. A character that we follow coming into a scene, we are with them. We know that they are the person we are centered upon. If we’re just in a scene where a bunch of characters are there, we may not know who is the person who’s our point of view. It may only be when we follow one of those characters out of that scene we realize, oh, this person now is carrying our point of view.

**Craig:** You can obviously make a handoff of POV, where you start with one person’s POV and then it turns to another. The camera just now picks up a new person. Typically, that’s probably not going to happen in a very typical way. Somebody enters a space and ideally, they enter with purpose. This is the most important thing. Obviously, this clip from The Room is really funny because the dialog is ridiculous and the acting is terrible. Underneath the ridiculous dialog and the bad acting, there is a root cause. The root cause is purposelessness. There is no reason for this man to be entering and walking out onto that roof. None. He just does it, because the movie needed him to be on the roof.

While we may think of this as the domain of movies like The Room, I actually see this in writing all the time from people. People just enter. They walk into a space purposelessly, and then something happens. I refuse to do this. Everybody who’s going into a space has a purpose. It doesn’t need to be earth-shattering. Sometimes it’s I can’t find my keys. There needs to be a reason you walk into a room. If you walk into a room without a reason and then something happens, without ever understanding why they don’t like it, the audience will not like it the way you want them to.

**John:** 100%. I see this on the page a lot too. I see it in some of our Three Page Challenges. I see it in scripts written by newer writers, where they are constantly having people enter into spaces. Let’s talk about some of the reasons why you might want to have a character enter a space, which I think are sometimes more limited than you’d imagine. Obviously, you’re saying there’s a purpose to it. Obviously, the character has to have a purpose. You as a writer may also want to give them a purpose, because you need that entrance to show geography, to establish geography. It gives you a chance to move from one space into another space and give a layout of what this space is going to be like.

You might have a character enter the scene because you want to build tension, build tension with the other people who are in there, or because in this new space is going to be some danger, some peril, some immediate attention that’s going to be happening. Show that character entering, as I said before, because you want to establish that this next scene is happening from their POV and that you make it clear that this is the central character I want you to be following as this next scene happens. All that only happens if you need to have a character walking in, because you always have the choice to just start the scene with the characters already in it. You could start with just a line of dialog. Characters don’t need to physically walk in in most cases.

**Craig:** That’s really where you can expose that you’re missing something, because if you do imagine starting the scene with somebody already there, you probably start feeling a bit ill as you’re writing it. What are they doing? Because there’s supposed to be a whole scene that happens. There are these meta requirements. I need a scene where Mark listens to whatever the Room guy’s name was, where the Room guy tells Mark about his troubles with his girlfriend that he did not hit. Fine, okay, I need that. Great, that’s what I need as a writer. Now, the characters are not accountable to my needs. They have to present as human beings with their own needs and their own purposes. They don’t need to be there unless I can see them on screen going, oh my god, there’s only one person who could possibly understand the position I’m in. Then maybe I can see it. If you imagine them just starting on the roof together in their weird chairs, it would be a very awkward beginning, because there’s really no reason for them to be there.

One of the things that we have to think about when we are writing is drawing a line between the fact that we need people somewhere and that they don’t know that. You can come up with almost anything. It doesn’t have to be earth-shattering. It doesn’t have to be even impactful as a character. If I needed to get Room guy on the roof, he’s angry, he walks into a bathroom, he tries to splash some water on his face, and no water comes out. He slams his hand on the sink, “Dammit, nothing’s going right today. My girlfriend’s-”

**John:** “I did not hit her.”

**Craig:** “She’s falsely accused me of domestic violence, and also the plumbing is not working. I have to go to the roof and check the water tower,” blah. Then he goes to the roof and he’s like, “Bah!” Then he’s slamming on it. He’s like, “Mah, mah.” Then Mark is like, “Hey, Johnny.” He’s like, “What? Oh hi, Mark.” I understand why he’s there. Now, Mark is going to have to explain why he’s there. That’s the first question. The first thing that should be out of this dude’s mouth is not, “I did not hit her. I did not,” but they need reasons. It could be mundane. It could be anything. It just has to be compelling is the most important thing.

**John:** Let’s talk about if you wanted to remove the entrance of a character. You want to actually start the scene with the two characters talking. How do we do that? It comes from the scene before that. Basically, are you leaving the prior scene with enough of a slant, with enough forward energy that we can come into that next scene understanding what it is that they’re doing? This could be an intervening scene. Basically, when we see those two characters there, do we understand what each of them wants, what their motivation is, and what this conversation or this moment could be about? That’s really what we’re asking. That’s why you don’t have to have characters enter into every scene, as long as we understand what they’re doing there, which is why Mark is on the roof, why Room guy has come up onto the roof. Then it’s fine. We can do it. Otherwise, you’re going to probably need to show some connective tissue to get us up into that space, because otherwise it won’t make sense why we got there.

**Craig:** Roofs are challenging, because people generally aren’t on them. Now, if they were, say, at a restaurant, then you could start it in media res, meaning, for those of you who have saved money and not gone to film school, right in the middle of stuff. Right in the middle of the action, you just cut into the two of them are sitting there at a table, halfway through lunch. One of them is shoving salad into his mouth, and the other one’s like, “I don’t know, I didn’t hit her, and she’s saying that I hit her.” The other one’s like, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” because we understand as human beings, I don’t need to see them enter the restaurant, be seated and all that. That’s okay if the place requires it.

Now, there are places where you must enter. New places. You must enter a new place. When I say new place, I don’t mean a new place like a new restaurant. I mean a new place of significance in your story. You don’t want to just start with people in the middle of, for instance, a basement in a house, where they went looking for a murder victim, and they find bones. They should enter the house. They should look for the basement. They should walk down. It should feel creepy.

**John:** Let’s talk about why you want someone to enter into that basement. You probably want to establish some geography so we know, how do I get from where I am to where I get out, because that could become very important, and also just to establish what is this place. If you just show us this dark room, we don’t know where we are. That’s why it’s so helpful to have a character lead us from a place we do know into this place we don’t know.

**Craig:** Yes. Here’s a little fun technique I use sometimes. I guess I’ll call it the reverse entrance. You do start in a space someone has not entered. They’re already there. We don’t know what it is. We are confused. They have a moment. Then when they exit, we go, oh, that was a basement, or oh, that was a fake thing or whatever. I guess the best example of the reverse exit are all the simulation scenes where something’s happening and then the lights come on. It’s like, you weren’t really in an airplane. It was a simulation. That’s a reverse exit. You can try these things. You just have to give people signposts as you do it.

**John:** Now let’s talk about exits, because so often the standard of screenplay advice is basically get out of the scene quicker. Getting out of the scene quicker often means leaving before the characters are leaving the scene. If you think about how movies generally work, if you and I were having a conversation, we wouldn’t get to the crucial point and then just one of us just leave and physically walk out of the room. Craig and I sometimes, that would happen. Instead, we would keep talking. We don’t want to keep talking. We want to get to the next thing, and so we just cut to the next thing.

There are times though where you may want to show that exit. We talked about that at the start. You may want to hand off POV from one character to another character. You might want to really just make it clear that the scene has ended, that there’s not going to be an ongoing continuation of the dialog, of the conflict that we saw, that it really has ended and one character has left and headed in the direction that’s taking us to the next part of the story. I would suspect that, Craig, even in the scenes you’re working on right now, the scenes you’re shooting, you probably anticipate characters exiting, that you’ll make choices ultimately though in post about whether you’re going to show the exit or not show the exit.

**Craig:** I try and write that in. I try and plan that on the page. If there are two people in a scene or more, the reason to show somebody exiting at the end is to then put the camera on the face of the person who is remaining, so that I understand how they feel about what this person just said. Walking away from somebody indicates finality. It’s a pretty good way of saying you have a choice to make, figure it out, I’m going to walk away from you now, or perhaps it’s I’m leaving you. If somebody is breaking up with you, they should definitely exit the room. That would be a weird… Sometimes on soap operas they’ll do that, where someone’s like, “We’re through,” and then they just cut to the other person’s face, but the other person never leaves, just to save time. If the point is I’m leaving you, leave.

If I want to see how somebody feels by what that other person has said, and they’ve essentially left them in a space where they could go different ways, sometimes, sure, it’s interesting to watch them leave, because their leaving is meaningful to the people who are left behind. If it’s not, then it’s not necessary. Then you absolutely can just end on someone’s face, considering what’s happening. If you are alone in a scene and you leave, the only real reason that I would ever need to see someone leave alone is if something then changed after they left. They’re playing with their puppy, and then they’re like, “Oh my god, I wish you could talk.” Then they leave, and then the puppy’s like, “If you only knew.” Yeah, sure, but otherwise-

**John:** That’s going to be a really unusual situation.

**Craig:** Very, very rare.

**John:** Let’s take a look through some of our own scripts about some moments where we’ve had characters enter and why we scripted them in to have characters enter into scenes, because I think it would be sometimes better to actually look at things on the page. I’ll start with a little snippet from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I’ll just read this aloud. “The front door swings open, revealing Charlie’s father, a lanky, hardworking man in his late 30s, who manages to be grateful for his blessings, however slight they are. ‘Evening, Bucket.’ ‘Hi, Dad.’ Mother says, ‘The soup’s almost ready. I don’t suppose there’s anything extra to put?’ Off her husband’s look, there’s clearly no more food coming. Ever chipper, Mother says, ‘Well, nothing goes better with cabbage than cabbage.'”

This is an example of a scene that’s been happening, and a new character enters into the scene. Father Buckets could’ve already been in the scene, but it’d be very hard to shift our focus to Father Bucket’s if he was already in the scene. Having him come in the door changes what this moment is about and lets him drive the next little bit of conversation. Bringing a new character into an existing scene is a classic example of why you’d have to show the entrance of the character.

**Craig:** Also, sometimes somebody needs to share information with the audience. In this case, there’s information that you are putting out there through some nicely done exposition. The information you’re putting out there is that they’re extremely poor and short on food to the point where there’s no protein to put in their cabbage soup. I say protein because somewhere along the line restaurants started saying protein. They used to just say meat. Then they switched over to protein.

**John:** It can be tofu.

**Craig:** I guess I’m going to go with that, as if Father Bucket was ever going to say, “Oh no, no, I’ve brought tofu.” That’d be kind of amazing actually, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, if he just brought home tofu. You need people to know that. The problem is, if Dad is already there, why would she just suddenly say, “Hey, by the way, now, even though you’ve been here this whole time, I have a question for you.” Because he enters, it allows Mom to ask a question that’s been on her mind. It gives us a chance to have some natural exposition, as opposed to some weird, forced exposition.

**John:** Indeed. Let’s take a look at a little snippet from Chernobyl. Do you want to read this aloud for us?

**Craig:** Sure. “Brazhnik, 20s, enters the control room in a panic. ‘There’s a fire in the turbine hall. Something blew up.’ Dyatlov pauses, lost in thought. His face is unreadable. Agonizing seconds tick by. Then he turns coldly to Akimov.”

**John:** You made the choice to have Brazhnik enter into the scene. Again, it’s an ongoing scene, and a new character enters with new information. That’s crucial. I can imagine a version of the scene where Brazhnik looks at some sort of terminal thing or he gets a call and he says this, but it makes much more sense to have a new character enter into the scene to let us know this.

**Craig:** This was about keeping a sense of panic. People running in and saying things, and that person looks confused, tells us a lot, more so than if someone looked at a monitor and goes like, “Uh-oh, there’s a fire in the turbine hall.” People can go, okay, I guess that’s a fact, but I get to see somebody’s face. I get to see how someone reacts to somebody running into the room, which is interesting. I also get a sense that there’s a world beyond this room that is very different than what’s happening in the room. There’s a lot of information that can happen, but only happens if somebody new can enter and disrupt the conversation that exists.

**John:** Also giving us a sense of geography. We know how do I get into and out of this room, which becomes important. You’re establishing a new character, Brazhnik. This is the first time we’re seeing him.

**Craig:** And the last, as it turned out.

**John:** It gives a moment to put a spotlight on this character, which would’ve been hard if they were all already in the room milling about. A very classic thing.

**Craig:** There was an interesting thing where he runs through and says this. Dyatlov makes a decision. Brazhnik is like, “What do we do about the fire?” Dyatlov says, “Call the fire brigade.” Then Dyatlov walks out, leaving him. This guy came in figuring something would happen, and then somebody walks out and makes an exit, sort of like your entrance changed nothing, my friend, goodbye. Entrance and exit there doing almost all of the work.

**John:** Lastly, lets take a look at a clip from The Nines. This is Melissa McCarthy’s character, Margaret. It’s the first time we’re seeing her. She’s in a police station. It’s again one of those, I guess we could call it a reverse entrance, where we’re not really quite sure why we’re here or who these people are until the second character comes in, which is Gary, played by Ryan Reynolds. “Margaret says, ‘He’s coming. I’ll call you back later.’ She hangs up, wrapping the earpiece around her phone. We reveal Gary being escorted through the glass doors by a polo-shirted parole officer. Margaret moves to intercept them, offering a hand. She says, ‘Hi, Margaret, I work for Lola.’ Gary, ‘I know.’ She says to the parole officer, ‘We need to go out the back.'” We’ve established a new character and that she is going to be interfacing with him and actually has some authority over the situation here. She could tell a parole officer what they’re going to be doing. Again, I’m using the entrance here to allow me to establish this character without getting a full proper introduction and then changed POVs when we finally see this character we’ve already established in the film come out.

**Craig:** In the How to Write a Movie episode, we talk about these different axes of action. One of them is internal, and one of them is interpersonal. Exits and entrances give you a chance to blend both, which is a nice thing. If you think about how we go throughout our day, much of our day is spent with ourselves thinking. We’re in our own heads. Then there’s parts of our day where we get out of our own heads. We have an interaction. The entrance and exit forces somebody out of their internal state.

When Margaret’s on the phone, technically she’s interacting with somebody, but in fact it feels internal, because we’re just looking at her. We’re in her head. We’re thinking about things. She hangs up. In the space between her hanging up and Gary suddenly appearing, there’s this brief moment where she’s in her head, and then boop, you got to get out. That helps actors. It gives them things to do. It gives them changes, which they love. It allows Margaret to move. It says, “Margaret moves to intercept them.” She’s got purpose. She’s driven by the fact that he has entered, as opposed to him just being there and her saying, “Hi, my name’s Margaret. I work for Lola. We need to go out the back.” She wouldn’t feel like much of a person. She has life and existence because she exists prior to his appearance.

**John:** All through these examples the actors who play these characters can know what their motivations are. They know what they’re trying to do in the scene, which I think is so crucial. I think the entrances and exits are helping them there figure out what it is they’re trying to accomplish next, because when you’re on the set as the writer or the director, and they’re coming up to you, it’s like what am I trying to do, here it’s on the page. You can see what it is they’re trying to accomplish in these small moments. Great. Craig, it’s a pleasure to get to do another craft little segment with you here, but we have a ton of listener questions stacked up, so maybe we’ll try to get through some of these listener questions.

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s go.

**John:** Megana Rao, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Can I ask a question about the thing you guys just talked about?

**Craig:** Wait.

**John:** Please, please.

**Craig:** Wait, hold on, so you’re just going to jump the queue, Megana, and put your question first? Fine.

**Megana:** You’re right, you’re right. Fine, we can go-

**Craig:** No, put yours first. I need to know.

**John:** Please do this.

**Craig:** Do it.

**Megana:** This topic came out of a discussion where John was saying that one of the things he’s learned as he’s grown as a writer is to avoid writing characters into scenes where they don’t have anything to do. In a project that I’m working on, I have a few scenes where it’s about a girls cross-country team, and so they’re traveling. They’re on a bus. They’re in locker rooms together. The dialog is mostly between one or two teammates. Occasionally someone will jump into the action of a scene by interjecting. That feels true to just flitting in and out of conversations and jumping in. I guess I’m reluctant to block or stage it too much, because I don’t want to over-describe and make it difficult for the reader to follow. That feels like a more directorial thing for me. I’m curious if you think it’s easier for the audience and the medium if I show these characters physically moving in and out of a space more. Does that make sense?

**John:** It does. The scene you’re describing is on a bus, you said?

**Megana:** Or let’s just say it’s in a locker room.

**John:** Obviously, we talked before on this show about how in a bigger space you’re going to still have smaller spaces, and you’re going to have groups of people together. People can move between those groups if that’s helpful. I think finding a way to describe this place versus that place, this larger space is going to be your friend. If you need to have one of the characters move from one group to another group, that’s great. You try not to make it too complicated on the page, and really just focus on probably just the dialog, the conversation between those people, and not have it be a big thing. If it was on a bus or in a locker room, up with Cheryl and Sandy, then back with Robin and Kennedy, as they’re talking, their things. You can move back and forth between them. It can be pretty natural. Craig, any more thoughts for Megana there?

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t worry too much about this sort of thing. If you have a couple of people talking and then you just needed one chime-in line from somebody, just say so-and-so passes through frame, tosses this line out, and then they’re gone. You actually use the frame as your exclusive aspect. In this way, we’re not staring. We don’t have to look at the people not doing something. They can go not do something outside of the frame of what we’re looking at. Then what I try and think about is geography and where two people might be and why other people aren’t right next to them, listening to them. If other people are right next to them, listening to them, then they are doing something. They’re listening and they’re reacting and they’re feeling. If you want one of them to vaguely overhear, drop a little thing, you can also just hear them start the line from across the room, and then the camera cuts and shows them across the way. They have been listening, ha ha. Lots of ways to do it. Is it a comedy?

**Megana:** It has comedic moments, but I wouldn’t say it’s a comedy.

**Craig:** Little more leeway in comedies, but honestly if there’s a vaguely comic moment, that gives you more leeway. Even if there isn’t, just think of the frame of what you’re showing the audience as the space. And any character that’s not in the frame, you’re not accountable for in that moment. If you want to bring them in, you can. You can always bring them in just by having them enter.

**John:** Craig, I have a question for you. Because you’ve been doing this show and directing things or working with other directors, if you have a character exiting the scene and probably exiting frame, if they’re exiting on the right, what is your expectation about where in the frame that character will enter the next time we see them? Is that a thing that’s top of your mind or just whatever works works?

**Craig:** No, unless we’re continuing with them. If they exit right, and then immediately the next cut is them entering, then I would want them, if they exit right… Actually, it really doesn’t matter.

**John:** You could make both things work.

**Craig:** Yeah, a new space affords you a new line of action. Certainly, if there are things in between, then nobody cares who entered right or left. If you’re doing a scene in an airplane, for instance, and somebody exits, heading towards the back of the plane, and the next time you see them they enter the front of the plane, if it’s really close, if it’s only one short scene in between, people might go, wait, she went towards the back of the plane. If you’re walking out of a restaurant and you head out left, and the next shot is you enter your house, you can enter it from any direction you want.

**John:** I was thinking about this, because I just went back and re-watched the pilot to Lost, which holds up incredibly well. In Lost they’re constantly trekking across the island. In my head, I think about them heading one direction when they’re going to the island, one direction when they’re headed back from the island. I don’t think it really matters that much. There are a lot of sequences on the plane where they’re heading up towards the cockpit or back to the back. In those cases, I think even within inter-cutting scenes, you need to keep them moving in the same direction across the frame. We establish a mental geography of where… If a character’s heading this direction, they’re going to the front, if they’re going this direction, to the back. It’s really a situational, based on the kind of thing you’re shooting.

**Craig:** I feel like if it vaguely makes sense, then it’s pretty good. I’m way more concerned about the continuity in the moment.

**John:** Great. Let’s get to some listener questions. We have a whole bunch of them backed up here. Megana, can you help us out?

**Megana:** Yes. Wynn wrote in and asked, “Podcasts are large profit centers. Your decision to remain unsponsored is admirable and appreciated. Could you please enlighten us on the details of this decision? Thank you for this wonderful resource you’ve created. I for one would not stop listening if Casper Mattresses began paying you six figures.”

**Craig:** Do the mattress people pay six figures?

**John:** I don’t think they necessarily do. A lot of podcasts have ads. Podcasts make money off ads. There’s nothing wrong with having ads in your podcast. Craig and I just didn’t want to do it, because even reading stuff on the air, that would be fine, Craig would have a fun time with it, but getting the ads, getting all the stuff together, even when you have a service that’s giving the stuff for you, it’s a hassle. Life is too short, and we just didn’t want to have the hassle. Plus, our members are paying us the five bucks a month for the Premium stuff, and that is paying for Megana and for Matthew, so we’re good. This is not a profit-making endeavor for us.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s what it comes down to for me. I just like the fact that I’m not accountable to anybody. We spend so much time in Hollywood being accountable to the people that are spending the money, paying us, paying for the production. You hope that you can find people who are responsible and nice and humane and have taste. For this podcast, we can do or say anything we want. We are beholden to no one other than each other and Megana. That’s the way I like it. I don’t want somebody from a mattress company calling me and saying that they don’t think I should be telling people to stop going to college. Not that the mattress people would care, but still.

**John:** I think the mattress-college connection is really under-explored.

**Craig:** Also, honestly, I think every podcast has ads except for us. At this point now it’s just become a matter of principle. We’re the only ones left. We’re PBS. I like it that way. John and I are fortunate enough to have careers that work. We don’t need the money, and so the hell with the mattresses.

**John:** I love it. Megana, what else do you have for us?

**Megana:** Typing While Mortified writes, “I just discovered that my manager has been sending his scripts, unsolicited, to companies I’m either currently working with or with whom I recently met to discuss other projects. When I say that he’s sending his scripts, I don’t mean his other clients’ scripts. I mean his scripts that he’s written himself and is hoping these companies will produce. To be clear, these are not connections my manager previously had. They came about through me. I had no idea he was doing this or that he even had aspirations of being a writer. I only found out because one of the companies reached out personally to let me know and asked me to get him to stop.

“The burning embarrassment I feel for myself, and to be honest, even more so for him, is probably a strong indicator that it’s time to cut this guy loose. However, being that he’s had a successful decades-long career as a manager and represents several legitimate writers, whereas I’m in the early stages of my career, I thought I’d turn to the pros for confirmation. This is absurd, right? Or at least a major conflict of interest? It doesn’t feel like there’s a way to salvage this. We’re also right in the middle of negotiating a sale. In the past he’s worked closely with my lawyer to hammer out deals. If I fire this guy, should I wait until this deal’s wrapped up, or is this a situation where no representation is better than his representation?”

**John:** Oh my god, I’m mortified for you. I think you need to get rid of this manager. I think you should let your lawyer finish this up. I also think you should talk with this manager’s other clients who are more established and just make sure that they know that this is happening, that he’s doing this, because this is just not acceptable, what he’s doing. It’s just gross and icky and wrong. Unethical, yeah, I guess, but also just icky. It just makes me feel really uncomfortable, as it makes you feel uncomfortable.

**Craig:** Managers, I swear to God. This is the kind of crap that doesn’t happen with agents, because agents don’t want to be writers. They want to be agents. It’s nice and clean. Agent represents you to try and get work, negotiates deals. Deal negotiated. Doesn’t produce your work. Doesn’t send in his or her own script like a pathetic, sweaty idiot. Your manager stinks. I don’t care who these other clients are. Their manager stinks. It’s pathetic. It’s not absurd. It’s pathetic. It would be a conflict of interest if anybody had any interest in what he’s doing, but it doesn’t sound like they do. It’s just lame. I would fire him now.

**John:** It’s lame.

**Craig:** Just get rid of him now. It’s lame. Get rid of him, because you don’t need him to hammer out the deal. Trust me, he’s not hammering out anything. The lawyer will do the details of the deal, and you don’t need to wait until the deal’s wrapped up. Furthermore, managers are not like agents where they get paid their money on commission for sale. They’re being paid money on commission to manage. There’s this concept of on the wheel, off the wheel. They are on the wheel when they are managing you. They are off the wheel when they are not. If they are not going to be managing you through the process of writing this, I don’t see why they should get 10% of it at all. I think you should fire them now. Save yourself 10%. Get an agent. Get an agent or an actual agency, and get out of this manager crap. I swear to God, more of these ding-dongs are out there just…

**John:** I agree. Get yourself an agent. I think you should have high hopes of getting an agent, because you just made a sale. Agents want people who are working, who are selling things. I think you’ll be able to get an actual proper agent. You don’t need this manager. Questionable whether you need a manager at all. You need somebody better than this person representing you, so get rid of them. Craig, I don’t think you and I have ever talked about The Player, the great Michael Tolkin movie The Player. I’m remembering a moment in The Player where Tim Robbins’s character opens a door, and you see he actually has a screenplay of his own that he’s wrote, that he’s never actually taken out any place. It got me thinking about, we haven’t discussed executives who write, because there are some of them. Some of them are okay, but it’s just a weird thing.

**Craig:** It’s rare. There are certainly executives that thought about being writers and ended up being executives. There was one executive at the erstwhile, the old version of Fox, who was infamous for inserting his own dialog into things. Pretty rare though. I’ve actually never worked with an executive that wrote. Toby Emmerich, who runs Warner Brothers, was a screenwriter, then became an executive, so he went in the other direction. I think in The Player, that’s a nice indication. I love that movie. It’s the most writer revenge movie of all time. Of course, the evil studio executive secretly wants to be a writer but can’t. That’s pretty classic.

**John:** James Schamus is probably one of the best, most acclaimed executives who also is a writer on his own.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s the one guy that does that.

**John:** Megana, who else do we have here?

**Megana:** AJ from LA writes, “Frequently when I tell someone about what I’m writing, I’ll get the response, ‘Oh, that sounds like blank.’ My issue isn’t that I am worried about being original, but that it stops a conversation dead if I’ve not seen the show or movie they’re referencing. The conversation then shifts to this thing they just saw, and I get defensive trying to identify how my script is different from a show I haven’t even seen yet. To defend against this, I’ll just default to saying the genre of the thing I’m working on. This feels like a wasted opportunity to potentially get someone interested in what I’m writing. I do live in LA with industry friends. Do you have any tips for how to talk enthusiastically about what I’m writing without making it an invitation for people to tell me what it reminds them of? Do you still have to grapple with the originality police, or is this something that is a non-issue with professional writers?”

**Craig:** That’s a really good question. I like that question.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** AJ, here’s what I would recommend. It’s okay when they say, “What are you writing?” to say, “It’s a such-and-such story, but ultimately what it’s really about is this woman and her relationship with this guy. Here’s what the story’s really about. It’s about da da da da da.” Get into character, relationship, theme, the purpose, the function, because the truth is everything sounds like something. If all you do is tell them, “It’s a story about a bank heist that takes place on the moon,” they’re going to be like, “Oh yeah, there’s 14 of those.”

“It takes place in space, and it’s set against a bank heist, but here’s what it’s really about. It’s about a man who got divorced and he’s trying to get back with his daughter,” and da da da da da and blah blah. That’s where all of your passion’s going to be anyway. If your passion’s only about the bank heist and the moon, then I think people are going to get a bit sleepy anyway. Talk about the characters. Talk about the relationship. Talk about the theme. Talk about the heart of it. Talk about the stuff that makes you excited. Don’t worry if they say it sounds like something else. You be like, “Yeah, plot-wise, probably a lot of overlap, but here’s what is original about what I’m doing.”

**John:** I completely agree. I’ll say things like, “I’m writing a thriller about trust and these two characters who can’t trust each other but are forced to deal with each other in order to solve the situation,” which sounds vague and hand-wavy, but if they’re curious then I can get into more specific details. What I try not to do is the heist on the moon or something that just feels like such an obvious type previous that they’re going to compare it to other things or it’s really clear it’s the next version of this thing. It’s Speed on a dirigible.

**Craig:** I’d watch it.

**John:** It’s called Slow. I also get, AJ, you’re working in this town, and you do have those conversations. It’s important to be able to have those conversations and bounce things off. People can sometimes be helpful. You want to be able to talk about what you’re writing, but I think Craig’s instinct is right. Talk about what it is that’s exciting to you about the thing that you’re writing, not just the trailer of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. AJ, it’s okay to agree with them. You say, for instance, you start getting defensive trying to identify your script as different. Don’t be defensive. Embrace it. Just be like, “It’s similar, except it’s completely different. Here’s how it’s completely different.” Just talk about the stuff that makes you excited. There’s no difference, by the way, between the position that you’re in and the position that John or I are in. If someone asked me what I’m working on right now, I’ll say, “Post-apocalyptic pandemic. Hang on.” I’m okay with them going, “Oh for God’s sakes, another one?” I’m like, “Hang on. That part is not what it’s about. This is what it’s about.” Then I talk to them about what it’s about to me. Then they start to lean forward. Embrace that your project is both original and not original at all. That’s the nature of what we do.

**John:** You’re making a piece of filmed entertainment that’s going to be about 100 minutes long. There’s nothing original about that at all.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** People have been making those things for 100 years.

**Craig:** Exactly. It’s got scenes in it? What? That other thing that I saw had scenes.

**John:** Is there a horse? I said no horse movies. Megana, what else do you have for us?

**Megana:** Em asks, “I’m working on a script that centers around sexual assault. Due to the subject matter, I have a problem I need to resolve. I need a trigger warning. I never show the assault, but I do include other scenes that are traumatic in its aftermath. I need to warn readers in advance. Have you ever included a trigger warning in anything you’ve written? What did it look like? Currently, I’m planning to use a statistic on the first page. Do you think that that would suffice? The statistic is below, and it’s upsetting but tonally consistent with the story I’m telling. I’m not comfortable handing the script to readers without a warning, and this is currently my best idea.”

**John:** The statistic they have listed here is that, “In a study of college age men, 84.9% said they had no intention to rape a woman. Of those same men, 17.8% said they would force a woman into sexual intercourse.” That was the statistic they’re thinking about putting. Craig, I think we’ve talked about trigger warnings before, but not in terms of on a screenplay. What’s your instinct for Em here?

**Craig:** I think it’s fair for you to just put a little page between the title page and the beginning of the script that says this script is about sexual assault and contains scenes of sexual assault. That’s it. I wouldn’t use the phrase trigger warning. I would just simply consider it a disclosure. Just disclose it. That’s all. Then leave it be. I don’t think the statistic is going to help. I think the statistic might feel more like when somebody puts a quote from Oscar Wilde on the front page to steal some drama from something. I would just be very plain and very simple, like you said. You want people to know that there are scenes that are about sexual assault. Actually, it looks like it says you don’t actually show the assault in the script. Just say the script centers around sexual assault and those themes are discussed. Anyone who doesn’t want to read a script that involves sexual assault will go, “Oh, okay,” and then move on to the next script. Other people will say, “Got it, I will now continue.” Just real simple. That’s what I would do.

**John:** We’ve talked about it on the show before. There’s been some scientific studies of are warnings helpful or are warnings triggering in and of themselves? There’s genuine debate about that. I think what Craig is proposing is probably the best answer, because it’s similar to what people are now used to in terms of if you’re watching a show that has flashing lights that could trigger epilepsy, that’s there. There’ll be an M warning for this episode contains episodes of sexual violence. I think those are reasonable steps to take and let people make smart choices about what things they’re going to consume or not consume. Putting it there after the title page, before the script starts, in a very plain way, is probably the right choice for you right now in 2022.

**Craig:** Look, we could get into a whole debate where we ask questions like, do I not mention the fact that my script has murders in it? If it’s a script where there’s a scene that takes place in war, should I put a mention there about war in case a veteran is reading it and they have PTSD. Everybody has something. Drama is constantly circling around violence and destruction, because it’s drama. It’s about our mortal selves and about pain. To the extent that drama is therapeutic, it requires difficult subjects. I guess I would just say follow your instinct. Seems like your instinct is to say something, so say it as plainly as you can say it. That’s my advice.

**John:** Absolutely. That’s why I added the in 2022. I just feel like in this moment we’re in right now, I see these kinds of things being done for this. That’s why I’m not going to put something like, “Just so everyone knows, there’s a scene of murder in this.” That just doesn’t feel natural. I would do it for something like this, just because that’s pretty common, and I think it’s considered helpful. Cool. Great. Let’s get on to our One Cool Things. It’s been a minute, and I was expecting this would be your One Cool Thing, so I did not poach it from you.

**Craig:** You sensed it that it was on the way.

**John:** It feels like a very Craig Mazin…

**Craig:** Oh my god, so Craig Mazin. I appreciate that you know me so well. My One Cool Thing this week is a game for iOS, maybe for Android, I don’t care, called Knotwords, that’s K-N-O-T, Knotwords, by I think at least one of the same guys that does Flip Flop Solitaire, Zach Gage, I believe.

**John:** Yeah, Zach Gage.

**Craig:** It’s a brilliant little concept, very easy to do at first, and then becomes extraordinarily difficult as you proceed, but very rewarding. I guess the way I can say it is that you have a little crisscross crossword, not a standard crossword where it’s one solid square, but one of those crisscrossy ones where there’s lots of gaps. What they’ve done is they’ve basically highlighted a region. That region isn’t always… In fact, it rarely is covering the entire word. It’s usually covering half of one word, a little bit of another. They’ll tell you, these are the letters that have to be in that region. You’re applying logic and word skills and solving.

I’ve gotten into the tricky ones now. They start to give you limitations, like okay, in this row there can be no more than two vowels. It starts getting really, really crunchy. I’m in the tricky version now. I’ve run into one where I’ve been working on it for a day. It’s great. I really love it. I can always go back over to the cas ones to just proceed if I’m feeling like spending some time. Strongly recommend. It is free, although I suspect that occasionally there will be more packs and things that you can buy. It’s available at the app store and Google Play and Steam, Knotwords.

**John:** Knotwords. Craig, I think you missed… One of my One Cool Things in the past was Redactle. Do you play Redactle?

**Craig:** You know what? I’ve looked at people’s Redactle reports. It just seems like a whole lot.

**John:** It can be a whole lot. It can be really fun. It can be half an hour’s worth of work, which is a little too much for a daily puzzle, but always fun to do. My One Cool Thing this week is the Arts District here in Los Angeles. I was just out last night with friends to see two galleries shows and a dinner downtown. It was great. The Arts District, for people who don’t know Los Angeles, or people who live in Los Angeles who’ve never been down there, it’s Downtown, south of Dodger Stadium, east of what you think of as the main part of Downtown. You’re east of the skyscrapers. Lots of galleries, lots of cool spaces, restaurants. I guess my closest thing I would compare it to would be Tribeca, Tribeca when it was becoming Tribeca. Really encourage people to go down there and see stuff.

I saw exhibits at Night Gallery, Hauser and Wirth. We had cocktails at Death and Company, dinner at Manueal. Just really great stuff down in that area. Los Angeles is so huge you can forget that there are just pockets of the neighborhood that you’ve never seen before. I would encourage people to get out and see more of Los Angeles, but also check out the Arts District next time they’re in that part of Los Angeles.

**Craig:** I like the LA Factory Kitchen down there. It’s a good restaurant. I don’t know if you’ve ever eaten there.

**John:** I have not. I would say now that almost all the restaurants are back open and a ton of new restaurants have opened up, it’s a really exciting time just to be going out to dinner in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** What a time to be alive.

**John:** Fantastic. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, edited by Matthew Chilleli. Our outro this week is by Owen Danoff. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. You can find the show notes from this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links with things about writing. We just hit Episode 100 of Inneresting and switched over to Substack, so there’s some good new stuff there you can check out. We have T-shirts, they’re great, and hoodies too. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on how Craig is going to live forever. Craig, so good to have you back.

**Craig:** It’s great to be back.

**John:** Hooray.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, help us out here, because I think this all comes from a listener question that was sent in to us.

**Megana:** Yes. Neil wrote in and asked, “With the longevity movement gaining speed with each new breakthrough, no doubt consequentially in our lifetime, what do you and Craig think about living forever? Is extending life ad infinitum a good thing or is the planet more of a timeshare, and we should eventually move on and make room for the next generations?”

**John:** Craig, how long do you want to live?

**Craig:** I would like to live forever. I feel like the way to live forever is not in this meat suit. I think about this all the time. If you could copy a brain, which theoretically is possible, not with the technology we have now, but let’s say eventually they’re like, “Oh my god, we’ve figured it out. We can totally copy your brain.” If they copied my brain, do I have a split consciousness? Probably not. It would just be two of me with their own consciousness, so in that case I die, so it doesn’t really work, because I’m only this one. Then I have to go to the Futurama, put my brain in a floating jar, which I would be totally fine with.

**John:** I’d be fine with that too. People are down on floating brains in jars.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** I think it’s great, love it. Ethical questions, no. What you’re describing in terms of just digitizing your brain, it’s basically the San Junipero episode of Black Mirror. Great, I’m all for it. I’m happy to live forever in a digital version of myself. It would hopefully be a pretty good version of what I can do. I’m great with that. I’m not so scared of the implications of immortality. I come from a family that tends to live a long time. My great-grandma lived to 100 and was coherent all the way through there. I’d like to live to 100 and be fully functional. I want to live long enough to hit that singularity moment where I can just be transferred into just software. That’s good.

**Craig:** It would be nice. Floating brain software, whatever it is, the thing is I just don’t want to live forever as some shriveled old… Inevitably, everybody ends up looking like a prune or a walnut. Then they get confused and then they die. I don’t want to do any of that. I’m going to. Let’s be honest. It’s going to happen. I would totally live forever. I got lots to do. I’m learning all the time. I just think life is interesting. I like what I do. I make things. It’s fun.

**John:** A related conversation though is about retirement. People are always like, “Oh, when are you going to retire?” I’m like, “I don’t intend to retire.” Craig, do you intend to retire?

**Craig:** What’s going to happen is we’re going to get retired.

**John:** That’s really what happens.

**Craig:** At some point people are like, “You’re bad, because you’re out of touch.” Everybody gets out of touch sooner or later. If you don’t get out of touch, now you’re just that creepy old guy that refuses to be out of touch and talks about liking music that he doesn’t be listening to. Everyone’s rolling their eyes and like, “Beat it, old man.” I think what’ll happen is I’ll just eventually beat it, old man. I can see myself drifting into a nice emeritus sort of thing where everybody’s like, “He’s old. We’ll just talk to him about stuff. He can give us advice. Then we’ll go and do stuff.”

**John:** Craig, you’re going to be an amazing character actor when you’re 90. That’s going to be fun.

**Craig:** I’ll be the new Carl Reiner.

**John:** That’s what you’re going to be. Megana, do you want to live forever?

**Megana:** The brain in the jar thing sounds really appealing, because I feel like even currently as writers, our bodies probably get in the way of… As an art form, we’re not really using our bodies. They’re mostly just to get the stuff from our brain onto the page, whereas, I don’t know, a dancer, an actor might have a harder time with that. I already feel like I’m just a brain in this not optimized meat sack.

**John:** Let’s talk about the brain in the jar thing, because an article I read recently, if I can find a link I’ll put it in the show notes, was talking about we think about, oh, we can stick the brain in the jar and we forget that the brain is actually just there to regulate our bodies. A brain without a body is a weird thing. Without its normal inputs it’s going to be interesting to see what we’re like if we don’t have our bodies around us. Yet it’s not hard for us to think about ourselves as being fully digital, because so much of my day I just feel like I’m interacting with people on Twitter, I’m interacting with Megana on Slack. I’m not interacting with a physical person, so interacting with a digital person doesn’t seem that strange to me. The people who work for me who I have not really seen in person, and they’re just a reputation on Zoom, that could all be faked.

**Craig:** John, all the people you’re talking about have a lot of experience working with a digital presence: you. That’s the most robot thing I’ve ever heard you… Megana’s not… She’s an avatar on Slack. Boop.

**John:** Sometimes.

**Craig:** Boop.

**Megana:** I’m constantly wanting to be in the office more. Just so we’re clear on that, I like being in John’s physical presence.

**John:** That’s so nice, and Lambert’s physical presence, an amazing dog you get to hang out with.

**Craig:** Lambert.

**Megana:** That’s true.

**John:** Lambert.

**Craig:** Lambert’s great.

**John:** Lambert’s great. I think I would miss dogs if I were to be a brain in a jar or a digital version. I’d need to have some sort of digital dog to hang out with. What would a vacation be like if you’re a brain in a jar? It does change your nature, because would it just be work all the time?

**Craig:** You’re in VR spaces where you would have a regular body, and you would have a dog that you could play with and feel and touch, because the jar fluid can interact with your brain. Obviously it’s connected somehow to something. I think it sounds great, honestly, as long as it’s not Facebook. If I’m stuck in their stupid thing, then just break the jar and smash my brain. I just can’t.

**John:** That would be the equivalent of just being an old person in a wheelchair who has to watch Fox News all day. Basically, they wheel you up to the TV, and you’re just trapped there to watch Fox TV now. No, thank you.

**Craig:** I’m stuck in a world where there’s just constantly… My third cousin is screaming nonsense at me. I just can’t. I can’t do it. I can’t do it. I just won’t, so just kill me.

**John:** What we’re describing is a crucial difference between brain in a jar versus a person in a coma or someone who’s trapped in a body, has a consciousness, but can’t actually communicate. It’s ability to get input and actually do meaningful work and communicate it outward. That’s the thing that we’re making sure we get, as long as inputs and outputs work.

**Craig:** We don’t want locked-in syndrome. If everybody is connected and we’re all… By the way, that may be where we are right now, just to be clear.

**John:** A simulation, by the way.

**Megana:** Oh, gosh.

**Craig:** We are in a simulation, no question about that, but perhaps right now we are brains in jars. Part of the deal of the brain in the jar is you just don’t remember when you weren’t. All the memories are piped in to start with. Then we are in VR space.

**John:** Really that siren you just heard outside was some sort of signal from the simulation, like there’s some disruption and now they’re fixing the disruption?

**Craig:** Or it was just that routine. It just runs every 20 minutes. Send the ambulance.

**John:** For some reason your simulation does a lot of Grand Theft Auto outside your apartment.

**Craig:** I do love Grand Theft Auto.

**John:** So good. Craig, six weeks I’ve not been able to talk to you about Elden Ring. Are you still enjoying Elden Ring? Are you playing Elden Ring anymore?

**Craig:** I turned away. I was in the mid-70s level-wise.

**John:** That’s about where I am.

**Craig:** I was getting to some cool places. Then I just realized this is it, this is all it’s ever going to be. It’s beautiful, and I’ll probably find some more beautiful places, but I still have no idea what the hell I’m really doing any of this for.

**John:** There’s fingers at the Roundtable Hold.

**Craig:** What is that? What’s happening? Why are those ladies constantly looking at my fingers? What is that?

**John:** They just love fingers.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know what those trees are about. I don’t know why there are a lot of animated teacups or jars. There are animated jars. I don’t know why.

**John:** They’re brains in jars is really what it is. It felt so good to finally kill that golden knight who’s at the very start, to finally be powerful enough to kill [crosstalk 01:02:34].

**Craig:** I killed that guy too. That was actually probably the moment where I was like, “I think I’m done.” I was like, “I killed that guy. What’s the point?” I’m basically done.

**John:** Living forever is just about playing Elden Ring until you actually solve it, until you actually discover what the meaning of Elden Ring is, and then you die.

**Craig:** What is going on there? It’s so weird. Then I got MLB: The Show and 2022 and I’ve just been playing baseball. That’s what I’ve been doing. There are some good games on the horizon. I’m excited for what’s coming. I enjoyed my time with Elden Ring. It was very satisfying. I got some good kills in there. I was killed in spectacular ways. I’ve seen enough. I’m good.

**John:** Good. Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** Thanks, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, friends.

**Craig:** See ya.

**John:** Bye.

**Megana:** Bye.

Links:

Links:

* [The Room – “Oh hi Mark” clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aekfPU0SwNw&t=68s)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 543: 20 Questions with John, Transcript](https://johnaugust.com/2022/scriptnotes-episode-543-20-questions-with-john-transcript)
* [Los Angeles Arts District](https://www.latimes.com/lifestyle/story/2019-12-28/four-hours-staying-present-in-the-arts-district): [Hauser + Wirth](https://www.hauserwirth.com/locations/10069-hauser-wirth-los-angeles/), [Night Gallery](https://www.nightgallery.ca/), [Death + Company](https://www.deathandcompany.com/dcdtla/), [Manuela](https://www.manuela-la.com/)
* [Knotwords Game](https://noodlecake.com/games/knotwords/)
* [Upstep Orthotics](https://www.upstep.com/)
* [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 Owen Danoff ([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/550standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/the-sideways-effect).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode has a few bad words from Paul Giamatti. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Episode 549 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

In Episode 547 we touched briefly on the Sideways effect. Basically, movies sometimes have a real-world impact, not just in culture but also politically and economically. We see the Black representation onscreen or depictions of nuclear power. Movies can make things seem cool or uncool or scary. As screenwriters, we want to be aware of the influence our writing can have.

The term Sideways effect comes from the 2004 film Sideways, written by Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor from the Rex Pickett. Who better to ask about the Sideways effect than the writers themselves? Luckily, someone else just did, so I don’t have to. Today’s episode comes from the amazing Slate podcast Decoder Ring, hosted by Willa Paskin. It’s been one of my One Cool Things before, but this recent episode on the sideways effect was so good, I asked Willa if I could run it as a Scriptnotes episode. She said yes and agreed to have a chat afterwards with me about sideways and other cultural mysteries she’s investigated. Stick around after her episode for our conversation. For our Premium Members, Craig and I will chat about what he’s missed these last few weeks that he’s been gone. Enjoy.

**Willa Paskin:** In October 2004, the movie Sideways was released in theaters. It’s about two guys who go on a bachelors week to Wine Country. One of them is a cad who’s about to get married. The other, played by Paul Giamatti, is Miles, a hardcore wine-lover.

****Miles Raymond:**** We’re going to drink a lot of good wine. We’re going to play some golf. We’re going to eat some great food and enjoy the scenery, and we’re going to send you off in style, mon frere.

**Willa:** Sideways is a small, mellow movie, but it got big. It grossed $110 million worldwide and received five Oscar nominations. It also upended the wine industry. Famously, it is said to have done this with one line of dialogue. It arrives about a third of the way in as the guy are preparing to meet up with two women.

**Jack Cole:** If they want to drink Merlot, we’re drinking Merlot.

**Miles Raymond:** No, if anybody orders Merlot, I’m leaving. I am not drinking any fucking Merlot!

**Willa:** At the time this line was first uttered, Merlot was a popular wine people were chugging down by the glass full. Legend has it that after this line, after, “I’m not drinking any fucking Merlot,” Merlot went ahead and tanked.

**Laura Lippman:** It’s like I’m RoboCop and that’s one of my directives now, no Merlot.

**Willa:** Laura Lippman is a crime novelist who saw Sideways when it first came out. Did you notice right away that it just put you off Merlot?

**Laura:** Yeah, right away. Right away. It was like a battle cry. I have literally tried to kind of overcome that, standing in neighborhood liquor stores and looking at what’s for sale. I can’t do it. I bet I would like Merlot. I think I did like Merlot. It’s so weird. It’s like I’m the most susceptible, suggestible person on the planet.

**Willa:** When it comes to Sideways, Merlot, and wine in general, she’s not the only one. I’m Willa Paskin and this is Decoder Ring. In the mid-2000s, the movie Sideways had an impact on the wine industry so notable that it has a name: the Sideways effect. In this episode we’re going to be looking closely at that effect and what it really is. Did a line in a movie depress Merlot sales for decades? Did a monologue jumpstart demand for a whole other varietal? Did Paul Giamatti’s sad sack character change our relationship to yet another wine, one that was barely mentioned in the film? Today on Decoder Ring, all of these questions and this one. Is it long past time to start drinking some fucking Merlot?

The Sideways effect is not just one thing. There are a number of components to it. I’m going to begin with the best known part of the phenomenon, the one I started with, the theory that Sideways shanked Merlot sales. When Sideways arrived in theaters, Merlot was the trendiest red wine in America, but America had not always had a trendiest wine. The country had been largely indifferent to wine well into the mid 20th century. California whites caught on in the 1970s when one of them won a blind taste test against world-class French wines. Then in the early ‘90s, red wine got a boost when 60 Minutes aired a segment on the so-called French Paradox. The paradox was that French people ate very fatty foods but had much lower rates of heart disease than Americans. The 60 Minutes piece came to a definitive conclusion about what was going on.

**Morley Safer:** The answer to the riddle the explanation of the paradox may lie in this inviting glass.

**Willa:** Sales of red wine spiked, and none benefited more than Merlot, which by the end of the decade would become the most popular red wine in the country.

**Tim Farrell:** Merlot is a good candidate because couple of things.

**Willa:** Tim Farrell is a wine buyer for the wine store Brooklyn Wine Exchange.

**Tim:** This is not actually too simplifying to say. It’s an easy word to pronounce. The other part is that it’s fairly fruit-forward and the tannins aren’t very strong, and the acidities are fairly low, especially when it’s made in California. It’s like a very soft, easy-drinking kind of red wine.

**Willa:** Merlot is most famously grown in Bordeaux, France, largely as a blending grape, but the American boom was centered in California, where production of Merlot quadrupled in the 1990s. Merlot is a relatively easy grape to grow, adaptable to a range of climates and soils, but that doesn’t mean it should be grown everywhere.

**Tim:** Grapes are a funny fruit because the more grape vines has to struggle to ripen, the more flavorful the fruit is.

**Willa:** California’s cool coastal areas are good for Merlot, but during the Merlot boom, it also started being planted in California’s breadbasket, the hot, fertile Central Valley.

**Tim:** That’s where Driscoll’s strawberries come from. If Merlot grows too easy in the irrigated, flat, sunny Central Valley, you’re going to have really bad grapes. That’s where the really bad Merlot grapes were coming from.

**Willa:** The mediocre grapes led to a lot of thin, too sweet Merlot, and even the better stuff was often made to be an affordable, easy sipper, the kind of inoffensive fruit-forward gateway wine offered by the glass and sold in Franzia boxes, all of which made Merlot something of a joke to wine people.

**Rex Pickett:** It was uncool to drink Merlot.

**Willa:** In the 1990s, Rex Pickett was a struggling writer living in Santa Monica.

**Rex:** I’ll try to be brief. My life was shit and I made some films and parted company with my ex-wife, whatever. I started going to wine tastings up at a little wine store. There were doctors and lawyers and snobs and whatever. It was just generally conceded that if you liked Merlot, that you were either a wine philistine or an idiot.

**Willa:** Rex regularly went up to the Santa Ynez Valley, just north of Los Angeles. As Wine Country goes, it’s nowhere near as famous as Sonoma or Napa, which are hundreds of miles north, closer to San Francisco. This region in Santa Barbara County was sleepy and underdeveloped, dotted with horse stables, golf courses, and vineyards.

**Rex:** There’s nobody up there. I’d go up midweek. I was broke. I’d go play golf for $25 on a grape course. I’d go wine tasting. It was free.

**Willa:** Rex poured these trips and his thoughts about wine into a book called Sideways. The main character, Miles, shared a lot with Rex. He was also a frustrated, divorced writer whose favorite wine was Pinot Noir, and who had the reflexive disdain for Merlot, of a 1990s oenophile. When Rex finished the book, it was rejected by dozens of publishers, but it ended up getting to Alexander Payne, the director of Election and About Schmidt.

**Alexander Payne:** I read the book actually on a flight from London to Los Angeles. When I’m reading something that I think could be a movie, I’m just praying, “Oh, please stay good until the end. Don’t come up with some gimmick or guns or violence or something. Keep it a good, sad, funny human story.”

**Willa:** When his plane landed, he called his agent and said he wanted to make Sideways into a movie. Payne is also into wine, and when he co-wrote the screenplay, he knew the no fucking Merlot line was a good one.

**Alexander:** People who knew about wine knew how much crappy Merlot there was. Then I think people who didn’t know about wine and always order Merlot were called out in an affectionate way. It had this kind of snowball effect. It was a good snowballing joke.

**Willa:** It seemed to roll right over Merlot’s reputation. What do you guys make?

**Jeff Bundschu:** We’ve been growing these Bordeaux varietals for as long as I’ve been around.

**Willa:** Jeff Bundschu is the sixth-generation owner of Gundlach Bundschu, a family vineyard in Sonoma that specializes in, among other things, Merlot.

**Jeff:** A good Merlot is pretty sexy, voluptuous, round, and intense, without the mouth-puckering tannins or austerity of an ageable cabernet.

**Willa:** Jeff agrees that in the 1990s a lot of Merlot on the market just wasn’t very good. When Sideways called this out, his Merlot, the high-quality stuff, got caught up in it.

**Jeff:** You’d have thought Spider-Man himself had swung in and tossed out Merlot.

**Willa:** Scores of newspapers chronicled Merlot’s troubles. Katie Couric, while hosting The Today Show, said she heard she wasn’t supposed to drink it anymore. People started coming into Jeff’s tasting room and saying they just did not drink Merlot. Pretty much every winemaker and seller has a similar anecdote. Steve Cuellar, a professor of economics at Sonoma State University, has heard plenty of them.

**Steve Cuellar:** It was literally just repeated over and over and over, tasting room after tasting room after tasting room, even to this day. I just figured, okay, let’s try to measure it. What is the effect?

**Willa:** In 2009, he co-authored a paper called The Sideways Effect: A Test for Changes in the Demand for Merlot and Pinot Noir Wines. It looked at wine sales in supermarkets in the four years after Sideways.

**Steve:** The movie was released in October 22, 2004. Prior to that, Merlot was experiencing a really strong growth rate. After that, sales really just collapsed. If we do a percentage growth rate, it literally goes from, I think, 13% growth rate before to almost 0 afterwards.

**Willa:** Steve was showing me a line graph as we were talking, and it’s the shape of a steep mountain that just abruptly flattens out.

**Steve:** When I first saw this, I’m like, holy cow, this is going to be a huge effect. At least I’ll be able to put some numbers on it and all that kind of good stuff.

**Willa:** First, he wanted to check Merlot’s sales against a control, to look at another wine to see what happened to its sales.

**Steve:** We figured, let’s choose something that isn’t mentioned in the movie. Let’s just avoid the red wine and we’ll choose Chardonnay. It’s got large sales. It should be equivalent to Merlot.

**Willa:** In fact, I think of Chardonnay as the Merlot of white wine.

**Steve:** Exactly. It is the big seller.

**Willa:** As big as Merlot was, Chardonnay was bigger. It was and is far and away the most popular wine in America. When Steve looked at the sales numbers for Chardonnay, he found something surprising. He pulled up the graph for me.

**Steve:** When you do that…

**Willa:** It looks the same. The graph of Chardonnay’s sales growth right after Sideways has the same shape as Merlot’s, a steep mountain that just abruptly tables off. After Sideways, in the sample he was looking at, Chardonnay sales had flat-lined too.

**Steve:** Which is just bizarre. This is really the gist of the paper. Yeah, Merlot did crash, but it probably wasn’t the result of the movie Sideways, because Chardonnay, which wasn’t featured anywhere in the movie, good or bad, really experienced the same crash.

**Willa:** Based on these findings, Steve feels strongly that we only think the Sideways effect is real and that there must be another explanation for what happened to Merlot, one that applies to Chardonnay too. In the decade-plus since this paper was published, Steve has asked dozens of people if they have such an explanation, and they don’t. There is a sense among wine insiders that Merlot sales were already cooling off, its low quality catching up with it. Nothing can stay trendy forever. There was no major event, no financial crash, no natural disaster, nothing of note to explain such a dramatic change except Sideways. What does Sideways have to do with Chardonnay? That’s not a rhetorical question. I think there’s an answer to it. Before we can get there, I want to turn to the next component of the Sideways effect. Let’s put a pin in Merlot and Chardonnay for now and talk about a wine that Paul Giamatti’s Miles actually likes.

**Miles:** Pinot’s a very thin-skinned grape that doesn’t like constant heat or humidity, very delicate.

**Willa:** If the first theory about Sideways is that it tanked Merlot sales, the second is that it boosted sales of Pinot Noir. Pinot, wine experts tell me, is a subtle wine that is exquisitely sensitive to the environment in which it is grown. Two Pinots from vineyards just a thousand yards apart can taste really different. This distinct expression is part of what geeks wine people out.

**Kathy Joseph:** Those of us in the wine world feel once you love Pinot Noir, you love Pinot Noir, and you explore Pinot Noir. It’s very sensual and it’s exciting and it’s delicious.

**Willa:** Kathy Joseph is the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars, a vineyard and winery in the Santa Ynez Valley. She makes a Sauvignon Blanc that was name-checked in the film, but she also makes a Pinot Noir, which she readily admits is tricky to grow.

**Kathy:** Probably more than any grape, Pinot Noir does demand a certain environment for it to excel. It needs a cool climate. It needs good drainage. It needs a place that isn’t too rich. What happens is that it’s all expensive.

**Willa:** All of this had made Pinot a kind of specialty grape in America, a fanatics grape, as someone put it to me, grown in small quantities and rarely offered by the glass. Then along came Sideways. See, Pinot Noir is Miles’s favorite wine. He gives a beautiful speech about it, in which it’s clear he’s not just describing a grape, he’s also describing himself.

**Miles:** It’s thin-skinned, temperamental, ripens early. It’s not a survivor like Cabernet, which can just grow anywhere and thrive even when it’s neglected. No, Pinot needs constant care and attention. Only if somebody really takes the time to understand Pinot’s potential can then coax it into its fullest expression. Oh, its flavors, they’re just the most haunting and brilliant and thrilling and subtle and ancient on the planet.

**Willa:** Upon hearing this ode to Pinot, Americans started buying it in droves.

**Kathy:** Absolutely. Yes, there was an uptick in immediate interest for Pinot Noir.

**Willa:** A Nielsen analysis found sales of Pinot spiked 16% in the months after the movie came out. Wine producers were caught off guard by Pinot’s overnight popularity, and there was a mad dash to plant more of it. In California, production of Pinot Noir has increased 75% in the years since. There was a lag at first, because it takes four to five years for a grapevine to bear usable fruit. There were other difficulties too, starting with the price. Tim Farrell, the wine buyer you heard from earlier, was working at a sports bar in Indianapolis in 2006 when a customer ordered a glass of Pinot.

**Tim:** I remember thinking, oh, we do have a Pinot Noir, and it’s $12 a glass. I thought, that’s insane. We have Bud Light for $2.50. Why would you ever want a $12 glass of wine?

**Willa:** Pinot grown correctly is expensive. It just takes a lot of care. After the movie came out, not only was there more demand for Pinot, there was more demand for Pinot from casual wine drinkers, the kind of folks who want an affordable Pinot. You start to see a version of what happened to Merlot happening to Pinot. Pinot is planted in places that it probably shouldn’t be and attended to less carefully, and that means less quality product makes it into bottles. Another paper, one from 2021, found that most of the frenzied Pinot plantings of the mid-2000s were in the Central Valley, the sunny, fertile, hot, strawberry-growing Central Valley that wasn’t even good for adaptable Merlot.

**Tim:** Then you have a flood of really bad Pinot Noir coming out by about 2008, 2009.

**Willa:** Even good Pinot Noir didn’t necessarily deliver what a casual wine drinker was looking for, like the person who ordered a $12 glass of Pinot at Tim Farrell’s sports bar.

**Tim:** They returned it. They said, “Oh, this is watery. I don’t like this at all.” I took it back. I didn’t know anything about wine at the time. The flavor profile and the texture and the body of Pinot Noir is not actually what people were expecting. They were Merlot drinkers, and so they were probably expecting a big, rich, full-bodied, powerful wine, and it’s exact opposite.

**Willa:** Wine producers needed to please these customers that wanted a Pinot that didn’t taste like a Pinot. Fortunately, there were a lot of other grapes around, because remember, growers hadn’t been expecting Pinot to be the next big thing.

**Tim:** The less scrupulous producers of Pinot Noir that just wanted to cheapen their production and make a more rich, smooth wine for this market that was sending watery glasses of Pinot Noir back at sports bars, was they started adding 25% Syrah to a lot of these wines.

**Willa:** Blending is a common and accepted practice in winemaking. Some of the very best French wines are blends. In America, the standards are a bit looser. You only need 75% of a wine to consist of the grape that’s named on the label. All of that extra Syrah, it made the Pinot go down easier.

**Tim:** They had to soften up and make Pinot Noir super accessible because real, unadulterated Pinot Noir, in addition to being very expensive, is not what the American consumer in 2006 really wanted. It even confused the market for what Pinot Noir should actually taste like.

**Willa:** I’m not saying Pinot Noirs all became phony baloney overnight, all got bad or all tasted like Syrah. In the long-term, the interest in Pinot probably did push American palates in a new direction. In the short-term and on the low end of the market, Pinot became a victim of its own success. While this made for a bunch of lousy Pinot, the irony is it made for better Merlot.

**Jeff:** What it did mean there for a minute, there was a ton of really good Merlot that was available for super cheap.

**Willa:** Jeff Bundschu, the Merlot maker at Gundlach Bundschu again.

**Jeff:** The red blends in the 10 years that came out after Sideways, that became red blends because no one would buy Merlot, were way effing better.

**Willa:** As you may have suspected, I know very little about wine. I’ve learned a bunch from working on this episode, but I can still barely tell when a wine has gone off. When someone asks me what I think about one, I often don’t know. I think the truth is that none of the wine tastes that good to me, but I feel like it could, if only I knew more, tasted more, tried harder, grew my palate. I honestly feel a little self-conscious about how little I know. I know this isn’t a universal feeling, but I don’t think it’s uncommon.

**Jeff:** Like you could ask somebody, “Do you like that movie? Do you like that peanut butter? Do you like that toothpaste?” They’re going to say, “I hate that movie. I love that peanut butter. I’m down with that toothpaste.” You ask them about a wine and they’re like, “I’m so sorry that I’m not a wine expert, but this kind of doesn’t taste very good to me.”

**Willa:** Why is just uniquely intimidating. I think that’s at least as important to the Sideways effect as whatever was in the script. It helps explain why a little movie that opened in four theaters could have such a big impact. People want guidance about wine, and we’ll take it from a waiter, a wine store clerk, a sommelier, a wine critic, or a movie character. Miles is a man who can barely affect change in his own life. He’s miserable, lonely, and a little insufferable. Listen to him.

**Miles:** Don’t be shy. Really get your nose right in there, really. A little citrus. Oh, there’s just the faintest soupcon of asparagus. There’s just a flutter of a nutty Edam cheese.

**Willa:** He is not at all what you picture when you close your eyes and imagine an influencer, and yet he influenced the heck out of us, even though we weren’t using that word then. His high-strung, forceful, informed opinions make him a compelling authority. His strongest views are about Merlot and Pinot Noir, but maybe thinking his influence stops there is underestimating him, the movie he’s in, and how much hand-holding people want about wine. Maybe it’s all bigger. Maybe it’s even big enough to extend to Chardonnay.

We’re going to get back to that Merlot Chardonnay mystery I pinned back there. You remember the economist Steve Cuellar published a paper that showed both Merlot and Chardonnay sales plateaued, in an admittedly small, regionally specific sample, right after Sideways came out in 2004. No one had really been able to make sense of this. Then I mentioned it to Kathy Joseph, the owner of Fiddlehead Cellars. Should I tell you what the economist said?

**Kathy:** Yes, I’m very interested.

**Willa:** Kathy pointed out that in the 1990s there had been a rise in sales of wine by the glass at restaurants, and those glasses were mostly full of Merlot and Chardonnay.

**Kathy:** The reason, in my opinion, is because of their accessibility and also how they were made. Chardonnay was a little bit sweet. Merlot could be a little bit sweet. They were just like almost a transition wine. They were easy. People didn’t order white wine any more by the glass. They ordered Chardonnay.

**Willa:** Once Kathy flagged this connection for me, I realized she was not the only person who had talked about it. It came up a lot, including with Alexander Payne.

**Alexander:** Those were the two wines ordered by people who didn’t really know much about wine. People who knew wine would start saying, “I’m ABC, anything but Chardonnay.”

**Willa:** Rex Pickett had noted it too.

**Rex:** The waiter would say, “Red or white?” If you said white, it was going to be some really cheap, probably Chardonnay. If it was red, it was going to be Merlot.

**Willa:** Here are these twinned wines. Then Sideways comes along and curses one of them out and ever so slightly shades the other.

**Jack:** I thought you hated Chardonnay.

**Miles:** No, no, no. I like all varietals. I just don’t generally like the way they manipulate Chardonnay in California.

**Willa:** Maybe what happened to Chardonnay is just a minor version of what happened to Merlot. Audiences picked up that Chardonnay was the other uncool wine, and they backed away from it. If that feels a little overdetermined to you, another way to think about it is that Sideways made it very clear to casual wine drinkers our basic choices had been noticed and found wanting, but it also made it clear there was a whole wide world of wine out there. Walking out of the movie, you could think, I’ve got to stay away from Merlot, I’ve got to drink Pinot Noir. You could also walk out thinking, huh, I should learn some more about wine.

Steve Cuellar’s graphs of Merlot and Chardonnay in the wake of Sideways show consumers cutting back, but the wine market didn’t collapse. We just started drinking something else. This is certainly how the winemakers I spoke with saw it. They thought Sideways encouraged people way more than it shamed them. Jeff Bundschu again.

**Jeff:** I think that what happened in Sideways is Miles, who I can’t believe I know of by first name basis, was like, “This Merlot sucks.” He sort of just gave voice to an entire world of people that had been choking down what they think they should have been choking down instead of standing up for saying, “I don’t care. This isn’t very good.”

**Willa:** Do you really think that people were trusting their own palate or they were just like, “We trust Miles.”

**Jeff:** I see it more as permission, but I guess that’s because I’m an optimist. Everybody is like total sheep, like a permission to hate wine that they don’t like.

**Willa:** Kathy Joseph use the exact same word, while being similarly optimistic.

**Kathy:** The movie gave people permission to explore beyond what they already were comfortable and familiar with.

**Willa:** This is based on her experiences in the years after Sideways, years in which the Santa Ynez Valley, where the movie was set, became a bustling tourist destination, when the wine market doubled and wine was diversified way beyond Merlot and Chardonnay. It all amounts to a third theory of the Sideways effect, that Sideways encouraged wine drinkers to branch out. As it turns out, there’s a speech in the movie that makes the case not for any one varietal, but for wine in general. It isn’t from Miles. It’s from Maya, the wine connoisseur and romantic interest played by Virginia Madsen.

**Maya Randall:** I like to think about all the people who tended and picked the grapes, and if it’s an old wine, how many of them must be dead by now. I like how wine continues to evolve. If I opened a bottle of wine today, it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive, and it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity.

**Willa:** Maya isn’t relaying rules about wine. She’s praising it for always changing. There’s a contrast between her and Miles, and the movie knows it. It’s why they make a good romantic pairing.

**Maya:** It tastes so fucking good.

**Willa:** Miles’s rigidity is set off against her flexibility, his instructions off her explorations, his acidity off her balance, two ways of appreciating wine and life.
Steve Cuellar’s paper about Merlot and Chardonnay sales only covered the four years following Sideways. Chardonnay sales bounced back. It’s still the most popular wine in America. Merlot production and prices stabilized too, but it’s now often used in America as it’s used in France, as a blending grape. The overall percentage of it, compared to all the grapes crushed in the country, has fallen.

**Jim:** A few years in, our Merlot sales were down and I’m like, “Dad, we got to get out of Merlot. We got to plant something else.” He was like, “Oh, it’s going to come back, Jim. It always come back,” for a decade, two decades. When’s it coming back? When’s it coming back?

**Willa:** This brings us to the final wrinkle in this story, that Miles, the guy that destroyed Merlot’s reputation, doesn’t even hate it.

**Maya:** What gems do you have in your collection?

**Miles:** Oh.

**Willa:** About halfway through the movie, Miles tells Maya that he’s been holding on to this one really good bottle of wine.

**Miles:** I’ve got things I’m saving, definitely. I guess the star would be a 1961 Cheval Blanc.

**Maya:** You’ve got a ’61 Cheval Blanc and it’s just sitting there?

**Miles:** Yes, I do.

**Maya:** Go get it. I’m serious, hurry.

**Willa:** A ’61 Cheval Blanc costs about $4,700. He tells Maya he’d been saving it for his 10th wedding anniversary, but is now just waiting for a special occasion.

**Maya:** The day you open a 61 Cheval Blanc, that’s the special occasion.

**Willa:** In one of the final scenes, Miles finds out his ex-wife is pregnant with her new husband, and he decides to drink that wine. He takes it to a diner, orders a burger and onion rings, and drinks it out of a Styrofoam cup. As he sips it, he lets out an appreciative, “Hm.” Even in these degraded circumstances, the wine shines through.

This shining wine, this Cheval Blanc, as Alexander Payne knew, is made mostly out of Merlot. Some viewers spotted this contradiction instantly. You can read comment threads about how this makes Miles an idiot and a hypocrite. The meaning seems plainer to me. Miles really loves wine. He really knows wine. He doesn’t hate Merlot, one of wine’s essential, noble grapes. He just hates the bad version of it. This love hate thing is right at the heart of why this little movie had such unpredictable and outsized effects. It tapped into the dualities that exist in most of us, people who hate being uncool, but who also love to try new things. We’re sheeple and we don’t want to be told what to do. We’re easily led and we’re curious. We’re Miles and we’re Maya.

When I spoke to Laura Lippman, who rejected Merlot like RoboCop at the beginning of this episode, I told her about the twists and turns of this story and my sense that Miles himself would now have it in for some other trendy wine. The next time we talked, a few weeks later, she’d just gone to the wine store.

**Laura:** There was something going on where I was like, “I should get a really good bottle of red wine.” I was like, “What if I bought Merlot?”

**Willa:** She did it. She took the bottle home, made a nice dinner, and poured herself a glass.

**Laura:** I thought it was terrific, actually. I was like, “I will do this again. I will drink Merlot again.”

**John:** I am thrilled to welcome Willa Paskin, who is the host of Decoder Ring podcast and Slate’s TV critic. Willa, congrats on another great episode of your show.
**Willa:** Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, John.

**John:** Recently we’ve been doing episodes on nuclear energy and climate change, looking at how stories we tell have an impact. The idea of the Sideways effect has come up multiple times. It was just amazing kismet that your episode this last week was on the Sideways effect. How did it come to be? How did you decide to do it for an episode for your show?

**Willa:** At the beginning of every season, I scratch around for ideas. I think I had asked on Twitter if anybody had any thoughts. It had come up. I had looked into it really perfunctorily. It seemed like the answer was really obvious. It seemed like everyone was like, “Yeah, it just tanked Merlot sales,” whatever. I was like, “That’s not interesting enough.” Then, luckily, a couple of weeks later, this other tweet started going around that was a graph of what had happened to Merlot after Sideways essentially. We just started talking about it in Slate’s internal messaging system. There was a wine guy on staff. He’s Jordan Weissmann. He writes about money and economics.

**John:** I know Jordan.

**Willa:** He’s entwined. We just started side chatting. He was my wine guy basically. He has a wine guy. His wine guy, who’s a wine seller in Brooklyn, had basically talked to him a lot about Sideways. It just suddenly became very clear, just from this brief chat on Slack, that oh no, there was enough there for it to be interesting. Had it really affected Merlot? Had maybe it actually affected Pinot? Then I started talking to people, and it turned into this nice little delectable rabbit hole, which is always super fun. I ended up, in the episode, speaking to an economist who had done a study about it.

One of the things that’s interesting and funny about something like the Sideways effect is we all know what it is and everyone talks about it, but of course, it’s not actually hard science or news, and so there have not actually been… Most people who are economists or who study stuff for a living have not actually been like, “Definitely, I need to look into the Sideways effect.” There actually haven’t been that many real papers about it. When I did speak to one of the guys who had done one of the papers about it, it ended up taking me places I was not expecting.

**John:** In the episode you frame three questions, which is did a line in a movie depress Merlot sales for decades? Where do you stand, Willa? How strong do you think the Sideways effect was for what happened to Merlot?

**Willa:** I think the consensus about Merlot is twofold. One is that it did depress both Merlot sales and Merlot plantings. There was another study that just came out very recently, actually, about the long-term effect of it, but not dramatically. It affected it some. Wine, as an agricultural product, it’s interesting in the sense that it takes years to plant a grapevine and then for it to make grapes that are good enough. You just can’t act on information as quickly as you can on like, everybody wants a strawberry or everybody wants a pair of jeans. You have to wait. While you’re waiting, you’re not making any money. No one was ripping Merlot out, basically, because that’s just-

**John:** That’s suicide. It got blended into other wines, as you talked about.

**Willa:** Over time, it did not get replanted at the rate that it had. It does seem that Pinot really did get planted at a huge rate. That’s the first thing. I would say the second thing is much, much fuzzier. Just reputationally, absolutely, it really, really hurt Merlot. That doesn’t mean that it hurt it for everybody. That doesn’t mean that all consumers were suddenly paying attention to this movie. Madmen doesn’t have to be watched by that many people to have a really big footprint or to feel like it has a really big footprint. I think something like that is very similar.

**John:** I always think about Twitter, because not very many Americans are actually on Twitter, but Twitter has a huge impact on the national conversation. People didn’t need to necessarily see the movie to know that, oh, we’re not supposed to be drinking Merlot. It just had a stink to it because of the smart people who saw the movie said, “We shouldn’t be doing this.” It had an outsized impact.

**Willa:** I think similarly to Twitter, there’s tons of people that have no idea what’s happening on Twitter, are never affected by it all, but the people that are paid attention to by the media basically did.

**John:** It was a meme, basically. Don’t drink Merlot is a meme. It just got spread in a pre-internetty kind of time.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes to… The Travis Lybbert paper that you mentioned is behind a paywall, but there’s another, Journal of Wine Economics, that shows the graph of the two things. You really see how Pinot Noir just really took off. You can also see that the prices fell for Merlot, which I think is also useful to see that supply and demand… There just wasn’t demand, and so the prices for Merlot fell.

**Willa:** I would say one of the things that was interesting from talking to wine people about it is this isn’t settled. I think if they looked into these papers, it would be, but it was not. Something happened and everyone has a ton of anecdotes, but a lot of the serious people were like, “It’s not clear that that’s really true,” which I was surprised by. I was like, “Oh, isn’t it obviously true?”

**John:** These can all be future episodes of Decoder Ring down the road if you want to. Around the office we were talking about other examples of things that are like the Sideways effect, where movies had had a weird impact in the real world. I wanted to bounce them off of you and see what your instinct is for these.

**Willa:** Is your first one Clark Gable and the undershirts?

**John:** Hey, it was my third one, but yes, let’s talk about Clark Gable and the undershirt, because it happened one night. He takes off his shirt, and he was not wearing an undershirt. Apparently, men realized, oh, I don’t have to wear an undershirt underneath a dress shirt. Snopes says it’s unclear whether that’s actually a real thing or not. What’s your ruling on Clark Gable and the undershirt?

**Willa:** I would love to believe that is true. How can we have any idea? It would be hard to follow that, track that information at the time.

**John:** If you were to do an episode on that, you’d probably need to talk to fashion historians and really figure out where we were at at that time and was the undershirt going away at that point.

**Willa:** If I was doing that, there’s a couple things. There’s immediately, I think, a number of things. One is I start to think about hats. It’s similar to-

**John:** What happened to hats?

**Willa:** What happened to hats? In a way that it’s like, you were going to do a couple stories from one episode. It’s like, what happened to hats, what happened to undershirts. I could imagine undershirts being the open. Then also undershirts, which we’re not allowed to call wife-beaters anymore, but what is the semiotics of the undershirt. I think there’s probably a bunch there.

**John:** It gets complicated.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Two other things that you actually can measure. Super Size Me. We had the documentary Super Size Me. Six weeks after the movie came out, McDonald’s dropped the term super size me from everything. They stopped using the term all together. That’s an impact.

**Willa:** Can I tell you my cocktail party chatter about Super Size Me?

**John:** I want to hear this.

**Willa:** This is truly basically the only thing I remember from Super Size Me. I remember the takeaway was McDonald’s is really bad for you. There’s in passing a graphic about how one bagel is equal to eight slices of bread. It’s a picture of the bagel. It’s a drawing. Then it equals eight slices in bread. I believe in carbs. I don’t have a problem with carbs. It has haunted me. It didn’t ruin McDonald’s. It just really gave me pause about bagels forever. That was my personal impact [inaudible 00:40:40].

**John:** That was your Super Size Me. Blackfish, the documentary about SeaWorld, the stock in SeaWorld fell 50%. That’s a pretty direct cause and effect there. I want to talk about the name Madison. What is your perception of where the name Madison came from?

**Willa:** Oh my god, I have no idea. I do just perceive it as being one of those on the top 20 girls’ names now.

**John:** It came from Splash.

**Willa:** Did it?

**John:** In the movie Splash, Tom Hanks is with Darryl Hannah. “What’s your name?” She looks at a sign for Madison Avenue, and she says, “Madison.” He says, “That’s not a name.” It wasn’t a name. It was the 216th most popular name for girls in 1990, but then it became 29th, and by 2000 it became number 3. It was not a name being used.

**Willa:** It does fit in with a ton of other name trends, which is the last name for first name trend, like Hudson. There’s a lot of names that sound like that, Lawson. It’s snugly right in there, and then also it’s upscale.

**John:** It does fit in with that trend. My very first TV show, there were these twins, a boy and girl twins. I named them Mason and Finley.

**Willa:** You nailed it.

**John:** I’d never seen anyone in the real world named Mason and Finley. I called that trend. They are now popular names.

**Willa:** I’m really impressed. That reminds in Baby Mama, the kids are named Banjo and… They didn’t call it, but they just made fun of it nicely. Those are perfect. You did it.

**John:** Finley and Mason. We also talk a lot about representation and how depictions of people on screen matter in terms of how people interact with people. Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, Sidney Poitier, hugely important, probably the face of a Black man on screen was helpful. Philadelphia, for just Tom Hanks playing a person with AIDS was important. We can have our faults with either of those movies, but they were important in their times. It’s always hard to remember what it was like before that movie came out.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Jaws and perceptions of sharks, perceptions of shark safety. We can’t go back to a time pre-Jaws.

**Willa:** No, we definitely can’t.

**John:** People weren’t worried about sharks. Now my daughter was scared to be in the pool because of sharks.

**Willa:** Sometimes when I’m just swimming out, I hear the song in my heart. You feel it. It’s coming for you. I think I talked about this in the episode pretty directly. A thing about Sideways that really tickled me and that I thought was really fun about this episode was we don’t imagine that someone like Miles would have an impact upon us. He just is not a poster child for that. That’s just not how things work. Sometimes it’s who you least expect. I like that. I like that it’s unpredictable in that way, because if it was just up to people who make decisions based on what you think is going to happen or what’s happened before, you’d never cast… You’d make Miles be totally different. You’d sand off his edges and you’d make him someone else.

**John:** We often talk on this podcast, what is the nature of a protagonist, what is a hero, what is a hero going through. Also, Miles feels like a sidekick character to somebody else, and yet he’s centered in this movie. He’s like a Shrek at the very center of this movie, who is grumpy and angry, and we learn to love him because he’s just center frame the whole time. One of the things that I really liked about your episode is that you bring up Maya, who is his antagonist, who’s this person who’s challenging all his beliefs and actually genuinely loves wine in a way that’s more approachable than maybe he does. She’s not strident. She’s embracing of like, let’s celebrate wine, rather than pit them against each other.

**Willa:** Totally.

**John:** Which is fun. I want to talk just a moment about some of your other episodes.

**Willa:** Please.

**John:** It’s been a One Cool Thing repeatedly on the show for me. You have a two-part episode on the Jane Fonda workout, which was a really fascinating deep dive in terms of it’s so strongly associated with her and yet she’s really taking this work that someone else has done and repackaging it. You broker a conversation between the two women.

**Willa:** That’s one of my top two episodes we ever did. It was totally not what I was expecting to happen. I basically had decided that the Jane Fonda workout itself was fascinating and that Jane Fonda’s story is fascinating, because it is. When I started looking into it, the woman who actually created the workout is named Leni Cazden. Jane Fonda had cited her in a couple places and in her biography, but also she’d thanked her at some awards show. She was findable, essentially. It wasn’t a secret. Then a lot of things just fell into place that I didn’t have anything to do with it. My timing just happened to be really good. I got to speak to both of them and then got to follow up with Leni. I just felt this delicious psychological long-term relationship just fell into my lap. That doesn’t happen that often. That was super fun. Then we basically did the episode that I had been imagining second. Then we did this other fun one that I hadn’t been expecting first.

**John:** A lot of them are just one-offs that are just great and fun. The history of Gillette razors, let’s go to five blades, then the razor wars was just weird and how we got into that and the history of razors. It feels like there’s some, not necessarily a movie, but there’s some version of that absurd way we got to it. It feels like a Soderbergh movie, where it’s just like how we got to five blades eventually.

**Willa:** Some corporate espionage. The thing that I always want is there to be an actual idea, that’s not just the idea that the show purports to be about. It’s not just the topic. With that one, with the five blades one, the big idea was just like, oh my god, capitalism is so silly. Why do we keep doing this? It’s cool, a single-blade razor actually works pretty well. It lent itself to that. I usually find those things as I’m looking into them, but that one was very clean in that way.

**John:** I want to talk to you about the making of the show, because unlike Scriptnotes, which is exactly what we’re doing, which is just a conversation between two people, and there’s an outline I’m looking at, you are fully scripting the whole thing. It’s starting with research, and then you’re doing your interviews. You’re figuring out what parts of those interviews you can use. Then you’re having to write every word you’re saying to get that right and make it all fit. What is the process for you? You’re figuring out your ideas for the season, but what are you actually doing on a daily basis to get this stuff written?

**Willa:** The process is, I’m like, okay, what sounds like a good episode? As I said earlier, I start to dig around about a subject, just Google around about it. The ones that are right, they feel like, you know when there’s things hollow, like there’s a trick door or something, it’s going to spring back at you? It actually feels that way. You’re like, “Oh, this has a little give. There’s stuff here that I wasn’t expecting.” Once it starts to feel that way, there’s just… I just have to have one idea about it or just a sense that there’s a layer.

Then I just start to report. I do a lot of research. I’m also having a lot of conversations as I’m doing it. It’s not like a one and then two. They’re together. Then ideally, I would do all the reporting. I now report a couple of episodes at once, just because it’s just a better use of time. Then I essentially sit with all the stuff that I have, all the actualities, all the research, all the audio, all the interviews, and I write from the beginning. I listen back to the tapes and stuff, to the tracks. I’m trying to get somewhere, usually. I’m trying to make a point or explain some history.

It feels really written. It feels sculpturally written in a different way. It’s pretty that. Then I just spend a bunch of time writing it, however long it takes. It always takes longer. It’s the part that still hurts, as writing anything does. Ideally, that doesn’t take more than two weeks, but it’s been to. In some ways, it’s hard to track it. Then it still takes a pretty long time, because basically it’s-

**John:** It’s all the post process. You had this plan going into it. Then you’re listening to this thing. These episodes are scored. They have ins and outs. You have to figure out breaks.

**Willa:** A hundred percent. It’s all those things, but it’s not even that. It’s almost like when you turn in a first draft to an editor, they change it. They tell you all these notes. They give you all these thoughts. Weirdly, putting it on tape is the same thing. Suddenly, you just hear all these things that are wrong with it. You hear all the places it’s paced wrong. You hear the information that’s in the wrong order. You hear the beats that aren’t quite working right. Because a show is trying to build and often is about ideas…

Just with the Sideways episode, for example, there was a third sections that’s about… It’s after Pinot. It’s after the Merlot section. It’s after the Pinot section and trying to resolve what happened with Chardonnay. I knew where it was going. I knew what the end was. All that stuff was written. There was something about the pacing that was making that pay… It just wasn’t working. On paper, it was working fine, but it’s not working fine when you actually hear it. That takes a long time. I think that takes longer than it probably should. I think it takes longer than other people’s process. There’s a lot of iterations basically. The music comes in later. The breaks are written in. It’s a lot about making sure the arc works. I have found that that is not… It’s supposed to be written to be heard. When you’re just writing it, it’s not in the form it’s supposed to be at. Something really changes there.

**John:** The closest I’ve done to this is I did a podcast called Launch, which was a six-episode series about the creation and printing and release of my book series. It was great, but it was such a different experience. I was not prepared for how much time it was going to take and also just what a different workflow it was. We hadn’t transcribed everything, all the interviews, but then we missed out on stuff. Are you transcribing everything you do from all these people or are you just taking these are the bits we need?

**Willa:** This is a thing that I don’t know what would’ve happened in the past, but we use basically an automated transcription program. A computer does it. You get them back fast. There’s use cases that I don’t have, where you would need it to be really precise. It’s pretty good actually. Because I’m listening back to it no matter what, the transcript lies, you still have to hear. It sounds like it’s great, but then you listen in, they’re talking in a monotone. You still have to listen back to it. We do transcribe everybody, but that’s because it’s not what it was.

**John:** Once you’re writing it, is this in Google Docs? What program are you using when you’re writing?

**Willa:** I was a faithful Microsoft Worder for all my writings, and I still am. Google Docs, it’s just if other people have to get into it, which obviously the producer and editors do at some point. Then also, just when the drafts were just changing so much, after you’re going through, we basically listen and we make changes and then retrack. It just became so much easier to just have it all just in this one place. You just need the link, not to email the document every time it changes.

**John:** That’s brutal. The episode we listened to, how many hours of work on your side was that?

**Willa:** I couldn’t…

**John:** Is it three weeks?

**Willa:** I work really hard.

**John:** It was a ton of work.

**Willa:** That one I will say, it was a lot of work, but in a different way. The writing of that one was the smoothest, cleanest writing experience I’ve had in a long time. I think it took me, not counting the day that I just went back through all the audio that I had… I also didn’t over-report that story, so that helps a lot. I wrote that piece in four days, which never happens. Then I got stuck with it at different stages once it was whatever. It’s almost like I’m almost sad it happened. I’ll be like, “I can do it in four days.”

**John:** [inaudible 00:52:42] “Maybe I can do it in three days.”

**Willa:** It hasn’t happened in a long time that I’d done it that fast, and it’s not going to happen again. It was nice. That one was just very structurally, very clear in my mind as I was doing it. That’s not always the case.

**John:** Willa, so many of your episodes are just incredible fodder for our segment How Would This Be A Movie. In a future How Would This Be A Movie, would you mind coming back and talking us through some of these things?

**Willa:** I would love to. Anytime.

**John:** Fantastic. Willa, thank you so much.

**Willa:** Thank you.

**John:** That is our show. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. You can find the show notes for this episode and all other episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 what Craig’s been up to. Now, let’s roll the credits for the original episode of Decoder Ring.

**Willa:** This is Decoder Ring. I’m Willa Paskin. Decoder Ring is written and produced by Willa Paskin. This episode was produced by Elizabeth Nakano. Derek John is senior supervising producer of Narrative Podcasts. Merritt Jacob is our technical director. Thank you to Jim Taylor, Jordan Weissmann, Peta Work [ph], Lo and Lou, Josh Levine and Travis Lybbert. The 2021 paper Travis co-authored called A Sideways Supply Response in California Wine Grapes also corroborates the Sideways effect, and we’ll link to it on our show page.

If you’re a fan of Decoder Ring, please sign up for Slate Plus. Slate Plus members get to listen to this show without any ads, and they’re supporting the work we do to make Decoder Ring. Members will also get to hear a special behind-the-scenes episode with me at the end of the season. Please go to slate.com/decoderplus to sign up now. I really appreciate your support. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig is back. Craig has been gone for weeks and weeks and weeks. Now Megana, last week I asked you, “Hey, is anybody wondering where Craig’s been?” You are the person who’s responsible for the ask@johnaugust email account. I was wondering whether people were wondering where Craig has been.

**Megana:** Yes. We had one person who wrote in, curious about where Craig has been.

**Craig:** One person was wondering where I was.

**John:** By the time this Bonus Segment is out, I guess the news will be out. Craig, you were in space. You were the first screenwriter to fly on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spaceship. I guess my real first question is, what was it like to leave the bounds of Earth? What was that experience like? They always say to send a poet, but a screenwriter is the person to send.

**Craig:** Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise a kid. In fact, it’s cold as hell. Anybody? Anyone?

**John:** I don’t know what that’s from.

**Craig:** That’s Elton John’s Rocket Man. It’s a popular song.

**John:** It’s a popular song. I’ve heard it once or twice.

**Craig:** 1970-something. God, this is just one kind of sadness upon another. One person cared, and neither one of you know Rocket Man. I think it’s going to be a long, long time until touchdown brings me around again-

**John:** That I do recognize.

**Craig:** I’m not the man they think I am at home.

**John:** You were not on Mars. You were instead in night shoots. You were in night shoots for your TV show, which is just a lot. Your schedule, which was difficult, became impossible.

**Craig:** I’ve been doing pretty well, I think, all things considered, by when you go into three weeks of nights, you’re no longer on the schedule that any other normal human being is on. It’s amazing actually how fast you can get used to it. Much easier to get out of it than to get into it. I would say that much at the very least.

**John:** While you were gone, you missed some episodes. I don’t think you had a chance to listen to the episodes. I thought we’d review what we learned and get your opinions on some things. The first episode, which I really missed you for, was on nuclear issues. We had two experts on to talk about nuclear war, nuclear arms, nuclear energy. You obviously have a background in this stuff. We were looking at what the current landscape was, and of course with the war in Ukraine, the growing escalation of possibilities of nuclear war. It was not a fun episode. I wouldn’t say it was joyful.

**Craig:** No, never joyful to talk about things like nuclear weapons. I don’t really know what the point is of talking about the possibilities. Either they will or will not occur, and if they occur, we’re all dead. That’s basically the deal.

**John:** I would say going into it, I was of the mindset that because of the reduction in number of nuclear arms that are out there in the world, nuclear war wouldn’t be as bad as what we grew up expecting. It’s still terrible.

**Craig:** Oh lord, yeah. The arms race that occurred, I’m sure you guys covered this, largely in the ‘80s, between the Soviet Union and the United States, led to a situation where both nations had this absurd surplus of nuclear warheads. We don’t need that many. We know that a single large nuclear weapon can destroy most of a city. There are only so many cities. Once you start lobbing them, the destruction that occurs is dramatic not only to the people that live there. Obviously it’s fatal. Then you have long-lasting effects around it. Economies are shredded. The environment is destroyed. It’s almost impossible to imagine a situation where one nuclear weapon is intentionally fired and set off and is not followed by a retaliatory strike. Essentially, nuclear weapons are unusable or usable all at once. It’s actually amazing that we have these here and have had them for our entire lives and they haven’t been used in our lifetime.

**John:** Let’s keep it that way.

**Craig:** That would be nice. Unfortunately, we are not in charge.

**John:** Craig, are you familiar with the story of Stanislav Petrov?

**Craig:** Was he the guy who said, “I’m not going to fire that nuclear weapon.” The Soviet said, “Fire nuclear weapon,” because they had misunderstood a test, and he was like, “No, I’m not going to do that.”

**John:** Yep, it’s that guy. That was brought up as one of the potential stories that has not really been very well dramatically told. One of the things I brought up is that I think it’s sometimes really challenging to tell a story about a thing that didn’t happen. The guy who stands in the way of a bad thing happening is a little less dramatic than the guy who does the thing.

**Craig:** There’s one movie that I think does that very well is Crimson Tide, 1994’s Crimson Tide, which I think probably drew quite a bit from the Petrov incident and is very much based on that idea that a submarine receives orders to fire a nuclear weapon and then there’s another message coming in, but the radio’s damaged. They don’t get the rest of it. It might say, “Wait, actually don’t,” but they don’t know. There is essentially a debate and mutiny over whether or not they should fire those nuclear weapons. They made it very exciting. A fine Tony Scott film.

**John:** Agreed. Other episodes you missed. Episode 546 was Limited Series. We had Liz Meriwether on the show, finally…

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** …and Liz Hannah. They both recently had limited series out there. We had a talk about what that was like. You of course did a limited series for Chernobyl. One of the things I think was so key from their descriptions of why tell this story now was that feeling that in a limited series or a dramatic series versus a documentary series, you can tell that central character’s internal POV, that you just couldn’t if it’s strict documentary. They had a chance to really explore what was inside the character, rather than what just the facts were.

**Craig:** The difference between a limited… Any kind of fictionalization, doesn’t matter whether it’s a limited series or an ongoing series or a single movie, but any dramatization affords you a wildly different palette than you would have as a documentarian.

**John:** Lastly, the episode that we are going to be putting this Bonus Segment on, was about the Sideways effect. I think we’ve talked about the Sideways effect just between you and me, or maybe on the air as well. Of course, that’s the impact of the film Sideways on Merlot and Pinot Noir in America and around the world and how one character’s rant, or he rants twice, can have a measurable impact on popular culture and economics. We talked with Willa Paskin about that.

**Craig:** It’s an interesting thing. I remember seeing Sideways. I remember that happening. I didn’t know anything about wine then. I barely know anything about wine now. I know the kinds of wines I like. Interestingly, I don’t like Pinot Noir.

**John:** I’m not a fan.

**Craig:** I don’t know about you, John. I like a huge, big, red, stupid wine. I like a dumb, big Cabernet. That’s what I like.

**John:** That’s what I say too. Whenever somebody’s coming over, “What kind of things you like?” I just say, “I like a big, dumb red.” I’m not apologizing for that. It’s just actually what my taste is.

**Craig:** I like to be hit in the face with a Cabernet bat. That’s me. That’s just what I like. Am I a cretin? Probably. I don’t care. I don’t like Pinot Noir. It’s thin. It’s like it’s not really there to me. Merlot, it’s not offensive to me. I don’t mind it. It’s fine. Actually, there are some fantastic wines that use Merlot as part of their blend.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** There are some great blended red wines out there. Sideways, I don’t know. By the way, I love that movie. It’s amazing. Why was it so obsessed with Pinot Noir? I don’t know.

**John:** Basically, Willa’s argument is that Pinot Noir was really just meant to be a stand-in for the Miles character himself, and that he’s difficult, but there’s actually something good underneath the surface, and you have to really come to appreciate what it’s trying to do and take it as what it actually is. He feels like he is a Pinot Noir that people are not appreciating properly.

**Craig:** Thus an entire industry was disrupted.

**John:** It was. Now, part of the reason we got into the Sideways effect is on Episode 547 we had Quinn… You know Quinn Emmett.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** The other folks behind Good Energy were coming on to talk about how we talk about climate change in our films and TVs and how we can put messages out there that have an impact. We talk about how sometimes things really do have an impact, but in terms of representation, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner or other films along the way have that impact in terms of showing a different way of people interacting, dramatizing situations that people may not have thought of, and certainly for LGBT representation. There’s important films along the way like Philadelphia that get people to address their prejudices.

**Craig:** I don’t know how good of a tool movies are going to be for climate change, because the thing is most people recognize that it exists, most people are concerned about it, and most people, meaning almost everyone, feels that they have no direct impact upon it, and they’re right. It’s going to take large governmental action and sweeping changes globally to prevent this situation from getting worse. I think that’s not going to happen. I think the situation will get worse. I don’t know what it is. With something like climate change, where we can see it’s there and we’re just not sure how to deal with it, it very quickly can turn into lecturing or it can be parody or satirical. We can make fun of people for being stupid and ignoring climate change.

Ultimately, I’m not sure how you’re going to do, because the problem is you don’t see the end result. Philadelphia, you see a man change. You see the way he thinks about another human being change. You see how that human being’s death changes him so that theoretically, moving forward, he will be a better person. We can identify with him because he’s Denzel Washington and he’s a great actor. That’s impossible to do with climate change, because they’re not going to see it happen.

**John:** I would debate the premise that it’s impossible for it to be done with climate change. I think it’s a question of what are you trying to do. Are you trying to make a movie that is specifically about climate change or are you trying to normalize things that you wish people would normalize in their real lives? An example would be, if you have characters who are going onto the roof of their building, are there solar panels on that roof, and normalizing that expectation. Are you seeing people do small things like take public transportation rather than be in a car? Those are some small steps. Then there are also… We’ll put a link in the show notes again to the Good Energy playbook.

There are things that don’t feel like climate stories, but of course really are climate stories. Anything about disasters have a climate element to it. One of the points they try to make is that in anything we’re doing in film or television, if you’re not addressing climate change, you’re making science fiction, because a reality of the world is climate change. To not address it is science fiction.

**Craig:** Sure, unless you’re telling a story that really doesn’t have anything to do with outside. Even if it does have something to do with outside on any given day, you’re not going to be experiencing this specific aspect of climate change. I don’t know. I don’t know about that. I love Quinn, and I get what he’s doing, and I appreciate how devoted he is to this. To me, honestly, the thing that we could do, the thing that I could do, I try to do this, is talk all the time about how positive nuclear energy is.

I feel like I have a somewhat privileged position in that regard because I made a show about a nuclear disaster. I’m saying nuclear energy is a good thing. In fact, if the United States invested heavier in nuclear energy, and I know that Quinn and I agree on this, that would matter more than anything else. That would matter more than solar panels. That would matter more than wind turbines. Just putting us back on a nuclear grid would change everything. I try and talk about that. It’s hard to put that into… Maybe I’ll have a character yammer about it in a show. I can do that, I suppose.

**John:** Talk about your show, because your show’s going to have some connection to climate change, just by necessity. There’s fewer people on this planet.

**Craig:** Climate change stops. Once we stop driving cars and pumping coal carbon into the air and burning fossil fuels like oil and gas, then climate change essentially gets reversed. I think it’s fair to say, without giving too much away, that climate change is not irrelevant to what happens. That’s as far as I’ll go.

**John:** That’s as far as you’ll go. Craig, it is wonderful to have you back on the show. Next week we’ll have you back for a full episode. Anyway, congratulations on surviving your night shoots.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I’m looking forward to having you back on the show and back in Los Angeles before too long.

**Craig:** I’m almost home.

**John:** Cool.

Links:

* [Decoder Ring](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring) and the [Sideways Effect Episode](https://slate.com/podcasts/decoder-ring/2022/05/sideways-the-movie-had-lasting-effects-on-the-wine-industry-and-casual-wine-drinkers)
* [Sideways Movie](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0375063/)
* Willa Paskin [on Slate](https://slate.com/author/willa-paskin) and [on Twitter](https://twitter.com/willapaskin)
* [A “Sideways” Supply Response in California Winegrapes](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-economics/article/abs/sideways-supply-response-in-california-winegrapes/FE14CECD927047BD0582207D77F1B09E) by Travis Lybbert for the Journal of Wine Economics
* [Snopes on Clark Gable and Undershirts](https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-shirt-off-his-back/) and [Madison Name from the Movie Splash](https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/bp/splash-joke-lead-madison-baby-name-boom-190720175.html)
* [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 Matthew Chilelli ([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

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